You'll Never Believe What Happened in Paris: Rue de Charonne
At 4 am, a witchy hour, a young woman finds herself consoling a stranger when her bike malfunctions.
One late night, riding home on my bike, my hands barely gripped the handles. The summer breeze cooled my damp forehead, I felt it glisten as I passed underneath the lamplights' hazy yellow glow.
Terrace after terrace stripped down to their cigarette buds, cutesy boutiques tucked behind metal grates, not even a light from a yonder apartment window broke. My feet dangling, I slowed down, “what’s wrong with you now bike?” I came to a rickety halt. I rested my old friend against a lamppost and knelt beside it. "Fucking chain..." I mumbled. My ears perked up. Soft footsteps ticked down the street at an excruciatingly slow speed, almost like the metronome I used when I first learned to play the oboe. I stretched my swan neck to check out the scene.
The sky was wrapped tightly around the far-from-luxurious milky white facades that night, as if helping the old timers lean a little forward to take a closer look. This street, if we can trust anything we read anymore, was one of the oldest in Paris.
An older man turned the corner in silhouette walking my way. Just another drifter, I thought. Probably stumbling home from a dinner at a friend's house. Maybe watched a game. I went back to my bike. The footsteps hesitated to stop.
"What time is it?"
I turned around.
The man looked like he needed water. His eyes. They were like two big windows that opened onto a vast and empty landscape. Riverbeds dry from drought, fields burnt golden from the heat, this man suffered some cruelty of nature. My phone was in my pocket.
"4 am.”
"Oh...I just left the office. Or at least I thought I did. I..." Lost, confused, he turned around to retrace his steps on an abandoned block. He was a big man, built like a football player. His broad shoulders started buckling over like a willow tree. "I thought they were my friends..."
"What happened...?"
I never heard my voice come out like that before.
His mouth struggled to form the shape of his words that his eyes clawed off the pavement. I've never seen a popped collar look so heartbreaking before. The tip of one side was sluggish.
"...I've been working at my job for 20 years, we've all been working together for so long... I found out today at work that my mom died. And all day, no one said anything. I didn't understand. No one said anything to me. Not a word. I just found out my mom died." He repeated that. My mom.
He started to cry. My arms reacted before I did, encompassing him and bringing him upon my shoulder; my hands like leaves settled upon his back. His arms hung heavy like the heads of the defeated. His heart beat down my arms to my womb. I stroked him as he sobbed. I had never held a man like that before.
His arms began to rise trepidatiously. The weight in my feet shifted as his arms crossed over my shoulder blades. He grabbed onto my arms. I dug my feet into the cement like anchors and tightened my grip around him. There was no space left between our bodies. Our hearts were beating against the other. Who knew someone so big could feel so small, and who knew someone so vertically challenged as I had such a circumference? He cried and cried, and I held on, breathing calmly until he was able to breathe with me. Like gentle raindrops, his fingers began to knead my triceps. He pulled himself up. My arms hovered there. His eyes were wet and shining. He was holding his own hand.
He turned towards my bike, awkwardly, as if he didn’t know how he got here. He took it and leaned it toward me as if he wanted to give me something in return. I put my hand on his hand that was resting on the seat. I lifted it like a feather and gave it back to him. We stayed there still a moment with each other. He stepped back. I got back on my bike, and we parted. I glided this time to the beat of his footsteps as if to make music with which to gently pull us apart.
As his footsteps ascended into the silence, like prodigal hands lifting off a piano after the final note, the wind came into my nose, my mouth, my ears. My heart began picking up the pace, taking in more and more air, his heart beating in my mind like a drum. I pedaled and pedaled, the bike chain clicking round and round. My heart raced—I was racing. The faster and faster I glided, the more music I heard, my hands tight and turning over the handlebars like an instrument, and tears streaming down my face.
*Maybe this will be the last story in this short collection. I can’t find a couple of them.