At the final whistle, Heillange erupted. An endless procession of cars immediately jammed the streets, honking randomly. Flags appeared at windows. People waved flags on long, flexible poles, creating an undulating curtain that suggested floor exercises in gymnastics. Faces were painted blue, white, and red. Young people ran around whistling and lighting firecrackers. On the sidewalks, people toasted each other with big cans of beer. A few punks hopped onto car hoods and made their way through the traffic jam by jumping from one to the next. The cops watched this with indulgent indifference, especially as passersby kept stopping to hug and kiss them. The town hadn’t realized it had so much strength and energy. It was rediscovering itself after three decades of bad luck, with victory sweeping away the crisis. At City Hall, they’d broken out the champagne. On the town square, a local reporter was gathering people’s first impressions. The next day’s newspaper would be full of soothing commentary. One pronoun was in every mouth. We won, we are in the final, we are the champions. A few Algerian flags ventured out into the streets as well. A downtown body shop owner named Aubertin had even hung a banner on his store a few days earlier that read, “Zidane for President.” The local National Front office had run down its iron shutter for the time being.
Around midnight or one o’clock, Anthony and Hacine found themselves out on the sidewalk in front of L’Usine. By then, all you heard were sporadic explosions and a few car horns. The bars were closing, sending their cargoes of drunken meat home. Anthony was staggering so much, he had to lean against the wall to light a cigarette. All evening, he’d talked and drank with a lot of people, especially Rudi, who was so loaded he wound up stretched out under a table, where kids smeared his face with burnt cork. Anthony and Hacine had done their utmost to avoid each other. It took the late hour, liquor, victory, and the powerful mood of amnesty in the air for one of them to dare say a word to the other. Hacine walked up, hands in his pockets. He was the one to speak.
“That was something, wasn’t it?” he said.
“Yeah.”
The illuminated carcass of the blast furnace stood next to them. They didn’t know quite what to say to each other. Hacine jumped in.
“You work around here?”
“Yeah. At Gordon.”
“Ah, that’s good.”
“No, it isn’t.”
The answer amused Hacine, who said:
“It’s the same all over.”
“Where are you?”
“At Darty, in Lameck.”
“Funny, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“Us meeting like this.”
“Yeah.”
A few more seconds passed before Anthony spoke again.
“My dad died. Exactly two years ago.”
He looked to see if this had an effect on Hacine’s face. He could’ve saved his breath. At least that settled a lot of things. It was finished. All that belonged to the past.
“What happened to him?”
“He drowned.”
“In the lake?”
“Yeah.”
Anthony puffed thoughtfully on his cigarette. Hacine remembered.
Truth to tell, his own father wasn’t doing that great either. Pulmonary insufficiency. He refused to return to France to be treated, and now went everywhere with an oxygen bottle on rollers. Hacine had gone to visit him and didn’t like what he saw. The old man lived as if he were made of porcelain. He no longer went out, stayed in the shadows, counted his movements, isolated, forever sitting in front of his TV. For some reason, they were smearing his face and hands with a kind of lotion that made his pale skin shiny. He looked like some animal living deep in a cave, far from the sun, blind and soft. Not to mention the smell.
“I bought a motorcycle.”
“No shit?” said Anthony, whose face suddenly lit up like a child’s. “That’s pretty funny.”
“Yeah. It’s funny.”
“So what is it?”
“A Suzuki DR 125.”
Anthony burst out laughing. All that stuff, just for this. Life was funny when you came right down to it. The thought cheered him.
“Will you let me try her out?”
“No, I don’ think so.”
“I’ll get on the back. We’ll take a spin.”
“Nah, we’re good.”
“Come on, don’ be an asshole.”
In an apartment overhead someone started singing “La Marseillaise.” It was a woman’s voice. She sang on key but must not have known the lyrics well, because the song ended right after Let an impure blood water our furrows!
“C’mon, man,” Anthony insisted. “Besides, my cousin bailed on me. I’m facin’ a three-mile walk to get home.”
Hacine eventually gave in. Besides, he was feeling pretty proud.
When they got to the bike, he asked:
“How old was your old man?”
“I don’t know, actually.”
Anthony clung to the cargo rack as Hacine zigzagged around the debris left on the roadway. Heillange was a small city, and the explosion of joy at eleven o’clock had quickly given way to a sinister after-party calm. Left in the streets were scraps of greasy paper, crushed cans, firecracker scorch marks, and a few lurching stragglers. Hacine drove fast, nervously, jerkily: accelerator, brake, accelerator. Behind him Anthony was enjoying the night and his surroundings. The wind on his face felt like a caress. The smell of exhaust and the little motor’s adolescent noise brought back old memories. He wanted to drive. When they stopped at a red light, he asked again.
“Seriously, let me try her. I’ll be careful.”
“Sorry, man. No way.”
“We can stop in a parkin’ lot. I’ll just do one run, up and back. Quick and easy. Just to try her. I can drive with my eyes closed, man.”
“Sorry, but no.”
Anthony kept pestering him. So much so that they finally headed over to the new des Montets enterprise zone. The place was still a construction site, one of the city’s big economic renewal projects. A few warehouses stood here and there, a Halle aux Vêtements department store, a Connexion outlet, and some recently built offices that looked like stacked containers. Each was a functional building, with walls erected in two days, raised passageways, stairs, and a general look of fragility, as if the first gust of wind could knock everything down. It would house an accounting office, doctors, all sorts of activities and open spaces, with computers, coffee makers, and copy machines. The future. Already there were parking lots, as vast as prairies, divided by concrete abutments and dotted with streetlights. At night, it looked like the sea, an ocean of empty spaces.
Hacine put his foot down at the west entrance of the lot. From there, the scene was completely empty. Five hundred yards stretched straight in front of the boys. Anthony climbed down from the bike. Hacine switched it off, put it up on its stand. He hesitated. After all, they were in no hurry.
“You have any cigarettes?”
Anthony held his pack out to him. He was getting jumpy. He rode so much better than Hacine, it seemed unthinkable that he would refuse to lend him the Suzuki for a spin. More and more, he felt Hacine owed him this.
Hacine went to sit on the edge of a flower bed. He was very calm, smoking with his forearms draped over his knees. Still standing, Anthony looked at him. It was weird, having so little to say to each other. After all, they had grown up in the same town, been bored at the same jobs, gone to the same schools, and dropped out of them too soon. Their fathers had both worked at Metalor. They had run into each other a hundred times. And yet those points in common meant nothing. A thickness hung between them. Anthony was starting to get impatient. The need to drive was burning him, like the need to take a piss.
“C’mon, man,” he repeated.
Hacine looked up. The mood between them was changing fast. Anthony came over and stretched out his hand.
“C’mon…”
Hacine felt in his pockets, tossed him the key.
“You go to the end, then you come back.”
“Okay.”
“There and back, basta.”
Anthony pursed his lips. Hacine’s insistence was annoying him.
“No problem,” he said, but with something mocking in his gaze.
“Seriously, guy…” Hacine said.
This time, it was a threat.
Anthony turned his back to him, climbed on the Suzuki, and pressed the starter. In the summer night’s ideal calm, the motor chattered cruelly. Anthony gave it gas and felt the 125’s special vibration rise through his thighs and crotch to his chest. It felt good, a Cossack kind of pleasure. Broad-chested men like him, young and crude, had been riding and destroying since forever. Their heavy thighs gripping smelly mounts, they had come in waves, sometimes defeating empires. All it took was not caring about anything except moving forward. Anthony accelerated, and the bike leaped in response. He shot straight ahead, drinking it in, filling the night with the concentrated noise of metal driven by fire.
He slowed at the end of the parking lot, turned around, and put a foot down. At the other end, Hacine was on his feet. He waved his hand. Anthony started up again, faster this time, doing a wheelie, thundering along, still drunk, scarily skillful. When his front wheel came down to the asphalt, he sped up even more. It was frightening, roaring toward Hacine at nearly sixty miles an hour. Hacine spun in place as Anthony circled him precisely, coming within an inch before roaring off again, full throttle, ripping the thin fabric of the night. Hacine started running after him.
“Come back, goddammit!”
Anthony defied him some more, for fun, roaring off only to come back faster. It was a kind of harrowing bullfight. Hacine ran around sweating, waving his arms, looking ridiculous. Anthony was becoming totally familiar with his machine. He easily dodged Hacine, in no danger.
Finally, he rode away. Without even thinking, he took the road to Steph’s place. His heart was pounding harder than the motorcycle’s. He was going faster than its speed.
The bike slowed to a stop in front of the Chaussoy house with a graceful swaying of its shocks. It was a big, beautiful building, with an upper story and gables, and a balcony under the projecting eaves. Having never dared come so close before, Anthony looked it over. Hewn stones decorated the corners of the walls. Steps led to a heavy door bearing a cast-iron knocker. The lawn featured circular flower beds that looked very much like the ones on the roundabout in front of City Hall. There were also two willows, a silver birch, and bougainvillea. A BMW Series 7 and an old Golf convertible were parked on the gravel driveway.
There was no light, and not a sound. Anthony wiped his hands on his jeans. The neighboring houses were likewise nestled in their settings of lawn and thuja trees. How could he tell if Steph was home? He shouldn’t have come; it was obviously a stupid thing to do. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to leave. It was a special night. A glance at the sky was all it took. The stars pricked your heart.
Anthony put the bike on its stand and walked toward the tall, imposing house. It wasn’t one of those old-fashioned bourgeois homes he sometimes saw when he trimmed hedges with his father. This one had been built more recently. He tried to imagine the interior. When he was younger and dealing hashish, he’d visited a fair number of rich kids, and saw how those families lived. He had envied their American refrigerators, the deep carpets that muffled your footsteps, the heavy coffee tables with five-hundred-franc art books, the paintings on the walls. The parents were never home. Often there wasn’t even a TV in the living room. He imagined Steph’s place to be more of a cocooning bric-a-brac, with a Stressless armchair next to the Roche Bobois sofa, and a sauna rigged up in the garage. He took another hesitant step, hands in his pockets. He was still drunk, but becoming less so. As he moved a little sideways, light suddenly blinded him.
“Shit…”
A row of fifty-watt spotlights mounted under the roof held him in their white glare. He raised a hand to shield his eyes, didn’t dare move. Eventually the light went out.
He stood there for a few moments without budging. Then, as an experiment, he waved his hand. The light immediately came on again, as harsh as before. A prison pallor. He gave a small sigh of amusement. It was one of those motion-detection things that freaked out cats and burglars. Good to know. He figured he’d better go home. After a few seconds the light went out. When he turned back to the motorcycle, it was like broad daylight again.
“Hey there!”
Someone was calling to him from the top of the steps.
“What are you doing here?”
It was Steph. Even backlit, he recognized her right away.
“Hi,” he said.
“Wait a minute.”
She fiddled with something inside, then closed the door and joined him. This time the light went out for good.
Barefoot in jeans and a blouse, she skipped down the stairs two at a time. Her hair wasn’t as long as it used to be.
“You’re lucky my parents aren’t here.”
“Where are they?”
“Out.”
Anthony tried to see her face but couldn’t. The only light available was the paleness of the sky and the dull glow of streetlights from the road. It was very inadequate.
“So?”
“Nothin’. I was just passin’ by.”
“Do you realize what time it is?”
“We’re in the final.”
“Yeah, right…”
They were standing close, blue against the darkness. Around them, the patient summer was making its soft grass sound. He looked down. She began to get impatient.
“Is that all?”
“You feel like goin’ for a spin?”
“What kind of spin?”
“Motorcycle.”
“To go where?”
“Nowhere. Jus’ for fun.”
“You stink of liquor.”
He didn’t have much of an answer for that. He would have liked to ask her a couple of questions. To know what she was doing, where she was living, if she had a boyfriend. But he didn’t have the heart. Still, he tried again.
“You sure you don’ wanna go for a spin? Ten minutes. I’ll bring you right back.”
“No.”
He touched his left eyelid with his hand. An old reflex. He wouldn’t have any more chances. The words bumped into each other.
“I’m sorry,” said Steph. “That’s all over.”
Anthony stuck his hands in his rear pants pockets and took a deep breath. It was tomorrow already. The situation was slipping between his fingers. He would’ve liked to take her hand or something. He just said:
“I think about you all the time.”
In silhouette, Steph jerked, stiffening.
“You’re dreaming,” she said. “I’m going inside now. I have to get up early tomorrow.”
Steph turned her back on him and went into the house. In a few days, she would be taking a plane to Canada. Her boyfriend was waiting for her there. He had just finished his journalism degree and landed an internship with a local paper in Ottawa. She was supposed to stay only three weeks, but secretly planned to enroll at the university when she got there. She would work as a waitress on the side. People were said to be generous with tips, and you could live just fine that way. A vast, brand-new country. She felt she was on her way, transatlantic; nothing to do with Heillange made any sense to her. She climbed the stairs two at a time. Anthony hadn’t even seen her face.
“So long,” he said.
Steph raised her hand in farewell. It had lasted so long, been growing inside him. For a lifetime, pretty much. Once again, he saw her ponytail on a July day. He saw her silhouette one last time, framed by the door, which then closed. He would never touch her breasts again.
Before starting the motorcycle, he carefully rolled it away from the house. Then he pressed the starter, and the motor obeyed. Mechanisms were reliable, at least. Each element performed a precise function, of majestic simplicity. A spark lit the gas-air mixture. The combustion powered the piston, which rose and fell, and in turn organized intake, combustion, and exhaust. Fresh gases drove out the burned ones. The movement repeated, faster, stronger, tireless. A perfect cycle. Provided the mechanism ran and the gasoline flowed, you could produce nonstop energy this way, and speed, and forgetfulness, to infinity.
Anthony rode around in the Heillange night for a while. Then he decided to stash the bike in the garage at his place. As he closed the metal door, he thought he should swing by his cousin’s before going to work, to retrieve the Clio. A pain in the ass. Unless he went there by motorcycle. He would see.
Then he went up to his apartment. He found the bottle of Label 5, poured himself a big glass, took two ice cubes from the freezer tray and swirled them around. Everything was quiet. The ice cubes tinkled. In the living room, light from the outside cast pale lozenges on the leather sofa. He looked out. Cars with a few years on them were parked in the comfort of the streetlights. The building was full of its inhabitants’ sleep. They were waiting for the alarm clock to ring. Anthony turned on the hi-fi. On the radio, a woman was wondering what her life would have been like if she had been a captain. The whiskey was lousy, he poured himself another one. The pain had something delectable about it. He felt detached. In the middle of things. His mouth narrowed to a bitter slit. He looked at his watch. He would be starting work in three hours. He was due to have dinner with his mother. Gordon was closing completely between July 14 and August 15. He had no plans for the vacation, nothing he wanted to do. “It’s over,” he told himself. He felt relieved of any obligation.
Anthony walked into the bathroom to take a shower. Once undressed, he looked at his reflection in the big mirror above the sink. Then he ran the water, very hot. He shook himself under the scalding jet, opening his mouth, running his fingers through his thick black hair. He stood there for a long time, until the water ran warm, then cool. Steph left a physical void. He could feel it in his chest, in his belly. Life would go on. That was the hardest part. Life would go on.
He went to bed still wet and immediately fell asleep.