Paris Twilight by Russ Rymer

actually, and maybe only those very few who were fated to such perceptions anyway, who already knew how death inhabits life. We could spot the signs when the patients came around—a hollowness in the eye, a metallic blankness haunting the gaze in the aftermath of surgery—and then, usually a couple days later, the delirium set in. For these few, the awareness lingered of how, in the course of outrunning pain, they’d traveled to the border of mortality.
    Rarely did the sensation become permanent, though there were those occasional witnesses for whom the stupor and the haunted eye never fully lifted, and we had a name for those people, gleaned from a paper in a German academic journal that was the only piece I ever read that addressed the syndrome, likening it to the mindset of survivors of historic trauma and referring to its exemplars as
die Wiedergänger
: the revenants, returners from places that could not be described. Generally, though, the condition persisted some several hours, a day or two at most, and finally was gone, and the hollowness and the blankness abated into ordinary cheer.
    Then, for some reason, as I was sitting on the bench, looking out at the templed island and the Suicide Bridge and the promenade along the lakeshore, and thinking about all these things and Maasterlich, a horrible realization sprang into my mind, as motivating as a bee sting, that I’d left the window open.

V
    I DON’T REALLY KNOW where my frenzy came from—was I alarmed that too much light might leak in and stain the gloom of that dank box?—but I got myself to Sèvres-Babylone as quickly as I could. I was irritated, predictably. As I drew nearer I became aware of another and insurgent emotion. My irritation felt like a cover for something more perverse, less admissible, and as I walked down the impasse, pushed through the entry into the
cour
, climbed the precipitous stairs, and turned the key in the lock, I put a name to it: anticipation. My destination had been transfigured by its status in my mind: what had been, on my first visit, an enigma, something unknown that the world had withheld from me, had become my secret knowledge, something private I was withholding from the world. Could anything be more precious?
    The apartment itself was exactly as small and shabby as before. It was brighter, at least, and the odor had fled through the neglected window—had the poison cloud done a pirouette around the yard, I wondered, before winging off over the city? I found a sponge and mopped up the puddle of rainwater under the sill, and then I retrieved ammonia and a bucket from beneath the bathroom sink and a broom from behind the bathroom door and kept on going. The cleaning ritual mollified me, dispersed the remnants of my disturbing brunch. But if it was Willem I fled, I was drawn by something—by someone—else, and as I knelt on his floor and encountered his world inch by inch, I felt I was getting my first vague glimpse of the face of Byron Saxe.
    The thing I saw there initially was desperation, a derangement that culminated in the grim silhouette, that ghastly snow angel carved in the floor wax by the excoriating kerosene. Its implication was confirmed to me some days later by the excoriating housekeeper, Céleste, who described with undisguised delectation how Saxe had passed out in the fumes from the overturned stove and then spent two days unconscious (due to either a concussion from his fall or
sa
marinage
in gas fumes before he was found). His brain never really recovered.
    Smaller signs gave me greater pause. Maybe the weather stripping that sealed the door tight against the hallway light could, along with the blackout curtains over the window, be explained by the bottles of film-developing chemicals stashed near the sink beside a Japanese camera—had this chamber also served Saxe as a darkroom? But how was one to explain the peephole hidden by a sliding cover positioned a meter off