The Search

Streetlights buzzed at midnight. Sirens shrieked as they tore down main streets. A ripped up newspaper, replete with footprints and skid marks, drifted across the empty avenue. The Boomtown Rats billowed out of windows alongside cheap cigarette smoke and the smell of stale urine and day old Italian food. Warm subway air gushed out of grates on the sidewalk.

I stepped out of my apartment and pulled my jacket closer against the cold cut of the Paris wind. A few people milled about the little square outside, a woman smoking and talking quickly into the microphone of her headphones, an elderly man sitting at a cafe with his Pomeranian sitting lazily in his lap, two boys lounging atop the Velib bikes with McDonalds on the ground beside them, eating double cheeseburgers and sipping a coke without an ounce of determination to actually ride the bike. My route lay up to the left, towards Republique.

It was a back way I'd discovered a few weeks into my stay, a couple of days after I'd met Chloe and she'd introduced me to her potdealer Maxime who, according to people who knew, "could get you Amsterdam-grade stuff." He lived around the corner on Passage du Jeu de Boules and usually set up shop in the Ethiopian restaurant Sheger (he'd gone to school with the owner Kofi's daughter). But as I turned the corner, head low from the cold, I ran headlong into two of his friends leaning against the stucco wall, Abel and Jacques, both skinny enough for jeans and tee-shirts to hang off them, both smoking cigarettes and talking in a jocular, muted French. They tossed French in my direction, knowing full well I spoke nothing (I'd smoked with them a dozen times since I'd moved to Paris), then nodded at the door into the restaurant. I hesitated. They never paid me any mind when I came to pick up, and according to Maxime, it was a part of the operation: only talk when trying to intimidate.

"Skinny boys are scrappy," Maxime had said in his accented French.

"I wouldn't know," I said.

"You've never fought?"

"I boxed in college. Had a stint in ROTC, but they--you know." I made a motion with my hand like I was breaking a candy bar in two.

"Bookman, that's you. You'll break the world with books," he said, pointing to my glasses, then passed the blunt to me. "Abel and Jacques only intimidate. They'll never touch you. Hell, they'll never talk to you." I took a drag and he grabbed it from me. He inhaled to the point of breaking. Smoke wisped around him as he spoke, giving him a dark and villainous air: "Beware if they do."

And so it is understandable that I hesitated outside the restaurant, standing awkward in the yellow glow of the streetlight, their smoke heavy in my face, so heavy I could taste it. Abel opened the door for me and pointed inside with the attitude of a man who'd answered the same question a thousand times before and would continue to answer it.

The darkness inside was a creamy, chocolatey type. The restaurant wouldn't open for another hour and so none of the lights inside had been turned on. Kofi would be in the kitchen about now, going over the menu with the chef. On a normal night he would bring samples out to Maxime and me if I was there, but the restaurant felt tight. No music, no lights, just an inky darkness that swallowed any hope my meager mind attempted to formulate.

Maxime had texted me a harried phrase: Now at Sheger. He wasn't one for brevity. Many of the high-induced texts I received from him contained quotes from Proust or hackneyed Hollywood quips he'd learned from watching poorly dubbed American films, nothing so short and to the point. I could understand the twists and turns of his logic when he wrote sentence after sentence, but not this short burst of authority. I'd texted Chloe to find out if everything was all right but I had yet to hear from her.

"Maxime," I said. "What's up?"

He sat near the window, haloed in the gross yellow light from the streets, eating something that resembled stew. He asked if I wanted anything, then motioned to the seat and told me in French to sit down (that much I could understand).

"Tell me, Pierre--"the French name he'd given me--"do you believe in God?"

"What? I don't really understand why--"

"It's a simple question: do you or do you not believe in God?" His tone remained even. Not a sprig of animosity.

"I suppose I don't not believe there's something," I said.

Maxime leaned forward. His breath smelled of stale cigarettes and beef. "Do--you--believe--in--God?"

"Yeah," I said. "I guess so."

He sat back and crossed his arms, a smug James Dean smile hanging about the edges of his lips just expanding his already cool demeanor.

"What's this got to do with me?"

"I think I've seen God."

I couldn't help but laugh. "Maxime, how much have you smoked today?"

"Nothing, zip," he said, then added: "Zilch." I'd taught him zilch one day when in a high-induced trance we both ended up in the street, inches from a pool of urine, staring at a starless sky. Maxime lit a cigarette. "I was at my supplier's house, down in the fourth. He was agitated. His grandmother was dying in the room next to us. I asked if I could see her. He was too high to stop me so I opened the door just a bit and there was his grandmother, staring at the ceiling. Everything was still but one thing. Do you know what?"

Confusion turned to agitation at being summoned so that Maxime could meander through a story. I almost asked him to roll one for me. Instead, I shook my head.

"She had a rosary in her left hand, just dangling there off the bed. Every couple of moments, her thumb would feel for the next bead and her mouth would start quivering. I don't know what it was but I got all teary eyed watching her. A woman on the edge of death playing with some beads."

"You've never seen an old lady pray?"

He continued as if he hadn't heard me. "It came to me, hit me like a brick, like you Americans say. The world is shit, man. We can agree on that. It's why we drink till our stomachs bleed, why we smoke till our heads are touching the sky. I've taken acid and the trip is like heaven. The world cracks open like an egg and the yolk falls onto the ground and it's so hot it bubbles and cooks. That's what I'm looking for. But you know what I never feel? Happiness."

"That's a lie," I said.

"I've been elated. I've had my days lifted off my shoulders. I've seen you smile like a dunce. I've seen you kiss Chloe like it was your first time and all you two could do was giggle like schoolgirls. Hell, I've kissed Chloe like that." (I hadn't wanted to know that.) "It was all great, but afterwards we fall onto our backs and the mind fizzles out and we reach for water or coffee or something stronger if my girlfriend's gone and the world is back, if not in a lesser way."

"Your English is better than I thought," I said, grabbing his box of cigarettes and lighting one.

"I like to date British women," he said and shrugged.

"So we're searching for God when we do drugs?"

"For meaning, for goodness, for God, for something."

"And you saw it in this old woman praying the Rosary. This is amazing," I said. "If you'd grown up religious you'd know how gold this is right now."

"If I'd grown up religious I'm not sure what I would know."

"Right."

Someone knocked on the door, a young tourist-looking couple. Abel was attempting to intimidate them but the man answered back with crisp French, which shut Abel down quickly. The man looked into the door, at me, and motioned to us.

"Kofi!"

There was a scramble in the back and Kofi appeared. He was a short man with a bald head and had on red trousers with a blue and white striped shirt which he wore with the top three buttons undone. He nodded and flipped a switch on the wall. Lights and music filled the room.

"Looks like our conversation's getting cut short," Maxime said, putting out his cigarette. He looked distracted, thrown off from his usual game.

"And I was looking forward to hearing about your conversion moment," I said and immediately regretted it. There was something in his eyes that betrayed a disillusionment that had heretofore been hidden. He looked like a man who'd won a game show only to find out he'd have to pay property tax on the yacht and Ferrari or he could take a check for a hundred dollars and never play again.

"Chloe said she'd be at the cafe, if you were looking for her."

"Thanks," I said and stood. "You coming along?"

"I've got some business coming in tonight. I'll see you later."

As I walked down the dark streets I couldn't help wondering what had shaken him to the core so much. Everyone has seen the old grandmas praying as if their life depended on it. Why now? Was it the proximity? I remembered some research I'd read about on the internet that made some extravagant claim that physical closeness to death was one factor in changing our philosophical, if not religious, outlook. At least for awhile. But as I turned the corner and joined Chloe at the cafe, I couldn't get the image of Maxime sitting in that light, like some sort of fallen angel, imagining, possibly for the first time, what it would be like to taste a deep happiness that far exceeds any physical conduits of happiness. It bothered me the question had been posed to me. Chloe kissed me on the cheek and asked what was wrong, why the text about Maxime?

"Oh nothing. Maxime was just acting a little strange, that's it." But that wasn't it and she could tell but she didn't push the subject. I was overreacting. Of course I was overreacting. But my distance from him, and the memory that had begun to form, had sown a seed of doubt that was already taking root in my head.

Or rather, instead of a seed, it had become a mole and the question, blind and ignorant, was beginning to burrow deeper into my mind. Soon I'd be seeing God, or at the very least (which is how it ultimately happened) I'd be posing the same question to Chloe, watching with amazement her lips form the most beautiful denial the world had ever seen.