Zero History

ut just as many seemed to be the ones where everyone looked something like the girl in
the tea shop, slender and big-eyed. Still, a bookstore. He had a powerful urge to burrow.
Work his way back into the stacks. Pull a few piles over behind him and hope never to be
found.
He sighed and hurried on.
When Git-le-Coeur ended, he found a pedestrian light and crossed the heavy traffic of
what he now remembered was the Quai des Grands Augustins, then hurried down a tall
steep flight of stone steps. Which he also remembered. A sunny day, years before.
There was a narrow walkway directly beside the river. Once on this, one could only be
seen from above by someone craning over. He looked up, waiting, anticipating the
appearance of a helmet, head, or heads.
He became aware of an engine, on the water. He turned. A dark wooden sailboat with
green trim was passing, its mast horizontal, piloted by a woman in shorts, a yellow
slicker, and sunglasses, looking very alert at the wheel.
He looked back up at the balustrade. Nothing. The stairs were still vacant as well.
Noticing a shallow recess, he sheltered there from the increasingly insistent rain.
And then a longer, wider boat emerged, from an archway beneath a bridge whose name
he no longer remembered. Like the boats that carried tourists, for Parisian children to spit
on from the bridges, but this one equipped with a long plasma screen, running almost its
full length, and perhaps a dozen feet high. And on this screen, as it passed, he saw the
agreeably simian-looking young man Hollis had been talking with at the Salon Du
Vintage, his features unmistakable, playing an organ or piano, his deep-set eyes
shadowed in stage lighting, part of a band. There was no sound, other than the quiet
drumming of the boat’s engine, and then the pixels spasmed, collapsing the image, then
unfolding it again, to reveal those two tedious Icelandic blondes, the twins Bigend
sometimes mysteriously appeared with. The Dottirs, contorting in sequined sheathes on
the rain-wet screen, mouths open as in silent screams.
He set his bag down, carefully, on the paving beneath the archway, and stretched his
aching shoulder, watching the Dottirs pass, mysteriously, on the dark water.
When the rain stopped, and still no one had appeared, he shifted the bag to his other
shoulder and walked on, toward the bridge. He trudged up a different but equally long
stone stair, then recrossed the busy Grands Augustins and reentered the Latin Quarter,
headed in the approximate direction he had come.
The cobbles were slick and shining, the street furniture semi-unfamiliar, evening
settling rapidly in. And it was here, nearing another randomly angled intersection, that he
had the experience.
In a setting, as they had said, of clear reality.
He had always been repulsed by the idea of hallucinogens, psychedelics, deliriants. His
idea of a desirable drug had been a one that made things more familiar, more immediately
recognizable.