Paris at the End of the World

Let’s never wake up from this dream

I wanted to sleep, but I went walking instead.

Down through Gobelins, through streets of dusky doorways and wrought iron railings, finding at last the domed roof of the Pantheon that rises out under hard points of stars with floodlights that drown the moon.

How do you not go walking in Paris?

Especially on a night like this. Some fading hollow of summer where brown leaves crunch underfoot even as sweat makes its breathless way down your spine.

Tonight needs nothing. It already has everything. The old churches and palaces throwing back the night. The tiny attic rooms underneath uniform grey rooftops, each one a cell for some artist mad with beauty, a bee in a honey-walled cell. The couples kissing under the street lights like no one ever did this before, wrapped with majesty that moves through them the way it moves through everyone who came before them.

Every time is the first time. For them, for Paris, and for me.

Almost everyone whose work ever mattered spent some time here. That shouldn’t matter, but it does. The hands on the dripping sides of The Cave. The scribbled notes stuffed into the gaps in the walls. The streets named for people the city hated until it didn’t, the mad and the starved, the drunk and the poor.

They’re part of the magic now too. Because what a city like this does, maybe better than anything else, is assimilate. It turns everything into itself. It feeds on us while we feed on it, laughing under bright rows of clinking glasses, thinking midnight in the bistro will never end.

It fucks some people up. Not everyone can handle it. The Japanese embassy had to set up a helpline for people who came to Paris and were ruined by it. The dream can’t match the reality.

Because this is a real, modern, living, filthy city.

The bins leak and stink

I step over dark tendrils on the pavement like the arms of the jellyfish I spend all summer avoiding, the slow-drying shadows of the urine of strange men.

Drug addicts do unspeakable things behind the locked gates of the parks, and the homeless gather damp cardboard to bed down on metal grates where the unwholesome warmth of the subway and the sewers and the catacombs reaches the cooler street.

For some, it’s a dream. But underneath the dream, there’s the reality.

And underneath that? Something even more real.

Down by the river, it’s all light and noise. Even at midnight, the tour boats drag their bright reflections over the water, under the bridges, past the burned-up church toward the wrought iron tower.

It, too, is looking for something. Its restless spotlight circles forever, chasing the stars away.

Everyone snatches at a little piece to tear it off for themselves and take it home. Few of them ever get to learn that this is how the dream grows. It’s the art of subtraction, of diminishment, of loss, of fracture and respawning and rebirth.

The parks are closed now. The museums and galleries are empty. The bouquinistes’ stalls along the Seine are locked up tight, hugging the low wall above the sunken river and already covered with a scatter of fallen leaves.

But the bars and cafes and restaurants are packed, the tables on the pavement set up to face the street like the audience before the stage. Sleek and glossy rats work the alleys while triple shadows follow tourists under the street lights.

They call it a hot hand. They mean a run of luck, when the right cards keep falling at the right time and the stack in front of you keeps growing. They don’t mean the weird heat across my knuckles from where I slammed it in the heavy door of the hotel on my way out into the night.

But how long can it go on?

Lit up at night, the baths, almost the last building standing from Roman Paris, say not much longer. A civilization rots from the inside out, collapsing under its own contradictions. Brought down by the same force that gave it life.

But the crowd of students gathered outside the Pantheon at midnight say, forever.

While the grand hommes sleep, the kids stay up all night. They don’t look at the sky. Under the lights, you can’t see the stars anyway.

They don’t look up at the ancient buildings, the way fish don’t look at water. They look at each other, and the old city shines in the rods and cones of brand-new eyes, and the dream starts all over again.

Let’s stay out until the bars finally close. Let’s walk along the river until the fashion models and financiers have all done their last long line and slouched into bed. Let’s stay out past starfall, until the streets shine with wastewater and the markets sprout like mushrooms after rain.

Let’s never go to sleep. And if we do, let’s hope we get to dream this same strange dream of Paris on a perfect night.