Outside, I touched my cheeks and felt the paint smudge. When I pulled my hand away, there was white on my fingertips. I was sweating beneath my mask and robe. Jean-Paul broke into a light run, still holding my hand, his bells jingling, my sandals slapping the ground like Frankenstein feet.
“Where do you want to go?” Jean-Paul asked. We were running down a street lit by globular lamps.
I remembered the first thing I took an interest in when studying a map of Paris on the plane. I read about its history in the guidebook and charted its path on the map with my fingertip.
“To the river!” I said.
By the time we reached the Seine, we had given up on running. We knew better than to feign being young and carefree for very long. The paint was making my face itch. I scratched the side of my nose. I had lost my sash and my robe billowed open. When I looked down at my sundress, it seemed unfamiliar, a stranger’s clothes. The Seine stretched out before us, dark and endless. We took a small set of stairs down to the concrete sidewalk that lined one side of the river. The path was lit by goldish hanging lights. We walked along the river, underneath one of the bridges and past an empty bench. Jean-Paul smoked a cigarette and gave me drags. The concrete wall beside us insulated us from city sounds. For a long time, the bells were the only noise I heard.
“You forgot your case,” I said when I realized he wasn’t carrying it.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “One of the others will take it.”
“How did you learn acrobatics?”
“I went to an acrobatics school in Normandy,” he said. “I was taught by the same man who taught my father.”
“It seems like it would get tiring, all that performing.”
“I like having a job where I get to wear a mask all day.”
When he asked what I did, I tried my best to explain my job as a forensic accountant. I worked in the offices of a divorce lawyer in Hartford and spent my days examining bank statements and stock portfolios, trying to figure out what really belonged to whom, where money had been hidden or lost or spent. I hoped the office would be understanding when I called to tell them I was extending my vacation.
“Once our office had a case where the wife had been grinding up tiny amounts of glass and mixing it into her husband’s food for the last year of their marriage,” I said.
“Maybe it’s best your husband left when he did.”
“Maybe so.”
A riverboat, the bottom exploding with blue phosphorescent light, drifted past us; music and voices rolled across the water. When the quiet returned, I stopped walking. Jean-Paul faced me. I touched his shoulder, right where the silk rose into a little peak, with my paint-smudged fingers.
“Take off your mask,” I said.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s against the code.”
I wondered what the mask was hiding, if he was elaborately scarred. “I’ll take off my mask if you take off yours.”
He smiled. “But I already know what you look like.”
“You don’t know my name. I never told any of you my name.”
“I’ve already made one up for you,” he said. “I do that when I meet people.”
“And?”
“It’s Sabine. What do you think?”
“Not even close.”
I took off my mask and let my bathrobe fall onto the concrete, the black silk pooling at my feet, and undid the straps on my sandals. It looked as though a wizard had evaporated, leaving behind everything but the body. I took one sweeping step toward the edge of the path and jumped into the water cannonball style, knees clutched to my chest like a terrified child.
I plunged beneath the water. I didn’t open my eyes. I considered what might be resting under me: dead bodies with gnawed fingers and peeling skin, bottles, disposed-of murder weapons, coins, disintegrating love letters. I felt the gentle pressure of the current, the fabric of my dress sticking to my skin.
After I surfaced, I opened my eyes and slicked back my hair. I wiped my face and looked at the white paint bleeding across my hands. Jean-Paul was standing on the bank in his underwear and mask, his red jumpsuit and ballet slippers heaped on the concrete. He slipped into the river tentatively, as though the water was causing him pain.
When he reached me, he put his hand on the back of my head. I looked at his lips and nose and ears. His mask had slipped to the side and I saw one of his eyes. Whiteness had collected in the corner of it. I rubbed the remaining paint from his face with my fingertips. His mask and black hair made me think again of Zorro. I traced a Z on his bare stomach. I hoped another riverboat didn’t pass through.
“Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Zorro?”
“What is Zorro?”
“It’s not important.”
“Do you have a place to stay tonight?”
“I want to take a train south. To the beaches. I want to see things.” The idea of traveling south had come out of nowhere, but I liked the way the words sounded, the way they felt, as they left my mouth.
“But you’ll need a place to dry off, change clothes, get some sleep.”
“I could do that anywhere.”
Jean-Paul gripped my waist and hoisted me out of the water. I made a V with my arms and he spun me around, his hands moving over my stomach and the small of my back. I saw the gray walls of the Seine and the cars and a person crossing a bridge. All the lit-up windows and the glowing peak of the Eiffel Tower. I tipped my head back and saw the red blink of a plane in the sky. And then he brought me back down.
ANTARCTICA
In Antarctica, there was nothing to identify because there was nothing left. The Brazilian station at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula had burned to the ground. All that remained of my brother was a stainless steel watch. It was returned to me in a sealed plastic bag, the inside smudged with soot. The rescue crew had also uncovered an unidentified tibia, which might or might not have belonged to him. This was explained in a cold, windowless room at Belgrano II, the Argentinean station that had taken in the survivors of the explosion. Luiz Cardoso, the head researcher at the Brazilian base, had touched my shoulder as he spoke about the bone, as though this was information intended to bring comfort.
Other explanations followed, less about the explosion and more about the land itself. Antarctica was a desert. There was little snowfall or rain. Much of it was still unexplored. There were no cities. The continent was ruled by no one; rather, it was an international research zone. My brother had been visiting from McMurdo, an American base on Ross Island, but since it was a Brazilian station that had exploded, the situation would be investigated according to their laws.
“Where is the bone now? The tibia?” I’d lost track of how long it had been since I’d slept, or what time zone I was in. It felt very strange to not know where I was in time.
“In Brazil.” His English was accented, but clear. It had been less than a week since the explosion. “It’s not as though you could have recognized it.”
We stood next to an aluminum table and two chairs. The space reminded me of an interrogation room. I hadn’t wanted to sit down. I had never been to South America before, and as Luiz spoke, I pictured steamy Amazonian rivers and graveyards with huge stone crosses. It was hard to imagine their laws having sway over all this ice. It was equally hard to believe a place this big — an entire fucking continent, after all — had no ruler. I felt certain that it would only be a matter of time before there was a war over Antarctica.