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In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

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Bateau Mouche moments before. A black barge, heavy with coal,<br />

groaned upstream. At its back, a sail of white laundry flapped in the<br />

wind under the gloomy sky. Outside the cozy lace curtained windows a<br />

row of scarlet geraniums lit up the river, and Penny almost forgot what<br />

she was doing there.<br />

Penny's worst suspicions were confirmed. Someone had<br />

sneaked a camera into her place and was spying on her, using night<br />

fucking vision! Had to be Ula and that little shit, no coh! She kicked an<br />

empty Fanta can out of her way and echoing into the urine steeped<br />

shadow of the Pont Neuf. The spires of La Sainte Chapelle and Notre<br />

Dame shot up over the bridge. She would go to the cathedral and<br />

collect her thoughts. She walked up the stairs and crossed to the prow<br />

of the Isle de la Cité and down past the police buildings of the Quai des<br />

Orfèvres. She toyed with the idea of walking in there, but nobody<br />

would have believed her anyway.<br />

Penny suddenly found herself on the wide square leading up to<br />

the cathedral. <strong>In</strong>side the church, there was no music, so far, just voices<br />

and shuffling feet. She joined the stream of tourists down the side aisles<br />

and around the apse and thought back to the way the sound distorted<br />

the Bach the night before. Of course! The convolution of sound within<br />

a space would only enhance its effects! Xenakis had exploited this in his<br />

Polytopes at the Abbeye of Cluny in '72 and '73. There was that early<br />

project on inharmonics. By recording the precise calibrations of simple<br />

sound spikes traveling within a given real space, transposing the data<br />

into a virtual space, then directing and augmenting an inharmonic series<br />

of sounds towards a specific field, you could produce performances of<br />

unimaginable acoustic proportions.<br />

At that moment a priest stepped on the altar and shouted in<br />

four languages, "Please be quiet, this is a place of worship."<br />

The hubbub simmered down for about thirty seconds. Penny<br />

looked up at the windows where light filtered through blue, red and<br />

gold into this vaulted cave. She had forgotten the stories, his stories last<br />

night as he walked with his arm in hers, but not the history of the place,<br />

how it was a sanctuary, not just for praying, but from the darkness of<br />

the world, and that the light came through to save us from the darkness<br />

of the spirit. Easier to feel this without this vociferous crowd, whose<br />

primary concerns were sore feet and an empty stomach.<br />

This time she took the creaky elevator up, and Alessandro<br />

opened the door before she could even knock. <strong>In</strong>side, Maia was<br />

sprawled on the futon, dressed in a suspiciously familiar black unitard,<br />

81

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