The Comedo of Paris (3)

This is third and final part of my short story.

In the grounds around the former centre of the world my cousin led me. Two inappropriately dressed women walking in step under the lone eye of a cream umbrella. The rain poured down, beating away even the most committed tourists and obscuring everything more than a hands distance away. Then above the black roar was a small noise and my cousin pulled out a phone that I did not know she had and said in a truly matter of fact manner ‘He’s just arrived. He should be under the trees’.

I hope you will forgive that I do not provide a detailed description of the older man my cousin had lured out from the pantry of perverts that is the internet. While his injuries will likely allow connection to this story once his body is found, I don’t want to incriminate myself more than I need to while I am still within the potential grasp of the French police. Though I should like to state again that any criminal actions were not committed by me and even my role as witness was under duress.

In the act itself, my participation was minimal, and I was essentially incapacitated with shock at each turn of events as they were introduced by my cousin. I do remember that I held up his long shirt which obscured his penis that she was trying to rouse from torpidity. Though even that action was at her sharp insistence.

I remember that what held my attention was the look of surprise on the man’s face as my cousin reached down and with a single movement cut the tendons at the back of both of his ankles. The look of surprise lasted as he fell back on muddy grass, and was only beginning to be replaced with something else when she had pulled herself up his drenched body and pushed the fish knife through his Adam’s apple and the spinal cord behind it.

In the few seconds that this took place across I do not believe the man made a sound. Or perhaps I simply did not register any screams above the thundering of the rain and my own horror. No one approached, and police sirens that I felt must be moments away did not materialise then or at any point while, at my cousin’s irrefutable and bloody orders, we dragged the still partially erect corpse out from the treeline.

I was aware that The Observatoire de Paris is built across the Paris Meridian, having learnt this and many other things about the city’s rich history from the benevolent family friend that had funded my sojourn. I did not, perhaps due to the relentless rain, realise how close we had been to the line of stones that marked its passage through the grounds and cartographically, the rest of the world. At my cousin’s demand, we pulled the man’s body so that his navel was directly over the meridian.

I saw that his raw looking belly had become fully exposed as we had dragged him feet first. His shirt had rucked up under his armpits to be soaked by the rain, mud and the torrent of blood that had continued for a surprisingly long time to pump from his open neck, from his mouth, and from his nose. Above the Paris meridian his navel had filled with rain. It was into the umbilical demitasse that my cousin once again plunged the fish knife.

In the task of cutting the man in half my cousin never hesitated or seemed unsure of technique or order of action. I did not want to look. I wanted to separate myself from this crime, to run and never look back, but she demanded my attention with every grain of her formidable being. With the small curved knife designed for cutting neat fillets from whitefish, she worked carefully down through the layers of the man’s body.

I will be unable to forget the look of satisfaction when she decided she had finished. Despite its efforts, the rain had not managed to wash the blood from her bare arms. With hair plastered to her face, kneeling in churned mud become red and oily, she looked up at me still holding the knife and I feared we were the same.

In all of the time since my cousin had received the message on her phone she had not spoken a single word. My direction had been entirely non-verbal. As it was when she made me take hold of the man’s extremities opposite her and pull so that everything within him, those steaming strings and balls, were laid out. Into this mess I was made to approach. My cousin’s authority, taut, resonate and unbreakable.

I knelt with her in the hot contents of the man, and I did everything that she bade me. On the very centre of the world I worked my body at her direction and in concert with hers. Fingers entwined, hesitant at first and then with a passion that I must stress I performed only to maintain my safety if not my sanity. Rivulets of bloody rainbows poured out around our knees. The shining blues and purples and terrifying whites. Organs pulled from the furniture of bone to expel steam against the stream of rain. We wordlessly audited the many vessels of the body which could be repurposed. I ceased to recognise what was around us as being a man, but instead saw only a medium, and my mind dwelt upon this as my body dwelt within the many shared interiors. A medium…

In the sense of a vehicle for expression. In the sense of the human body made into a conduit between one plane and another. Allowing language, sensation, even love to pass through what is otherwise as impassable as the line between life and death. To separate and rejoin and separate again in coming closer than law would allow. Pushing through the drunk folds and webs and veils and nets thick with a strange catch. Crest upon crest ever higher and richer with a life that could not be sated and would never know decay. Until a cold white peak was passed and I felt myself slip back down.

I felt my cousin’s vertigo chase my own and dug in to delay our fall, grasping and squeezing at what remained of the man. We tried to wring out all that was left before it was gone, desperate in our laboured pinching and pulling. I was chasing something that in my heart I knew could never be caught. Then in my hand was once again my cousin’s hand and with it the coldness of the wet dark Parisian afternoon and we were kneeling within our stinking shame that had only magnified in the period when we had briefly left it. It was then that I made the decision to escape.

In all, maybe three hours passed between us leaving for The Observatoire de Paris and once again arriving back outside the hotel, and during this time the rain did not let up its black stormy intensity. We stood together on the street busy with traffic and thin with pedestrians, sheltered close and drenched under the single umbrella.

I knew that my cousin would be my downfall and my end, and so when a fat grey car churned its way down the street I pushed her under its wheels and walked towards the train station without looking back.