Exchange Place

Je est un autre

You have been here before, but only when you were someone else, said Gordon. As he spoke, the green wall lamps began to pulsate and the ambient music changed to a monotonous beeping. But hark! said Gordon, theatrically, lifting an index finger, the children of the night! And then, in a more soothing voice, Relax, my dear boy, merely our early warning system for one of those tiresome police raids, we get to know they’re coming a good half hour in advance. We have our people everywhere, in all walks of life. They wear the appropriate uniform or garb, they take on the gestures and the speech of those whom they represent. Judges, bankers, art dealers, bookmakers, et cetera. The police of course. We have our friends in Quai des Orfèvres. If the world is a stage, they are consummate actors, becoming that which they are perceived to be. Only at night do they become that which they perceive themselves to be. We could talk about this all night, said Gordon, but for now, we can talk for as long as it takes us to finish our drinks. Gordon raised his glass. Kilpatrick reciprocated. As for what Gordon said thereafter, Kilpatrick, when he came to summarize it the next morning in his notebook, would have put it something like this:

Gordon said that in our walk through life we change, footstep by footstep, as irrevocably we are drawn towards our destiny and are altered by the glance of others. We glimpse a face in a crowd we think we have seen before, déjà vu or not, and we are changed by that apparition. We make our way through the crammed tunnels of the Métro brushing against or avoiding each other, and our bodies are altered by those negotiations whether we know it or not. A pickpocket sidles through the carriage and unbeknownst to you relieves you of something that was yours, and when you look for it you believe it to be lost by some inexplicable negligence on your part, or else you see in retrospect the man standing opposite you swaying sympathetically, his face buried in the pages of Le Monde, you remember how the motion of the train brought you for a split second into the most delicate of contacts, and the man pardoned himself as did you, you would never have revisited that moment had you not fumbled in a pocket and then gone through all your pockets for that which no longer was there, patting hip and breast as if conducting a body search on a person who was you. Gordon said that all our turnings cannot be otherwise than what they were, when we look at them or at what we remember of them in retrospect. With hindsight. And hindsight blinds us to all the other possibilities, which are myriad, said Gordon. And we are not one but many, we are the sum of all we are to others whether dead or living, for the dead have preceded us in our journey, and they have mapped out its territory in advance.

There was more in this vein which Kilpatrick could not remember. They drank the last of the green spirit and left by a secret staircase as the police were entering by another. They emerged on an empty street in Paris. It was dawn and a pale moon hung in the sky. The black limousine was parked some fifty paces ahead of them, engine ticking over. As he walked towards it Kilpatrick thought his footsteps made no sound as they glided over the pavement, or else Gordon’s footsteps were so perfectly synchronized with his that both sounded as one. Odilon the chauffeur stood to attention holding open the cabin door of the vehicle. Kilpatrick boarded and Gordon followed him into the interior. Hôtel Chopin, said Gordon, Monsieur Kilpatrick will be tired after his long day. Had Kilpatrick told Gordon that he was staying at Hôtel Chopin? He could not remember. He sank into the long leather bench. Gordon? he said. Yes? said Gordon. You were about to tell me about John Bourne, said Kilpatrick. You are tired after your long day, said Gordon, we’ll do something better than that. I’ll bring you to see him tomorrow night. Would that suit your purpose? said Gordon. I regret I have another appointment tomorrow, said Kilpatrick. Ah yes, said Gordon, one of those unexpected invitations one sometimes receives when abroad. Surprise is one of the pleasures of travelling, is it not? But the night after tomorrow will be fine. Odilon will come to your hotel at seven o’clock and we’ll proceed from there. Would that suit? Kilpatrick nodded. Suddenly he felt very tired and he fell asleep to the swish of the limousine tyres along an empty boulevard.

As he remembered it, he dreamed he was sitting in the front row of a picture house, waiting for the picture to begin. The auditorium was empty but for him. He was wearing a dress suit, opera cape and top hat. As the art deco wall lamps along the red plush walls began to dim he realized that not only could he see with the eyes under the brim of his top hat, but with another, disembodied eye that had no definite location; rather, it seemed the interior of the auditorium was all eye, or all camera, and he could view himself as he would a character in a motion picture. The proscenium curtains were still drawn when the picture began, superimposed on the red velvet pleats for a few seconds before they rippled open with a swish that was audible over the soundtrack, the same eerie music he had heard in Les Caves des Changes. He was watching a documentary entitled Les Structures Sonores. The commentary was in French and he could follow most of it with the help of the subtitles, his eye flickering in rapid movements as it registered the text. Les Structures Sonores was the collective name of the two composers, the brothers … Kilpatrick could not remember their names when he woke but he knew from somewhere that Jean Cocteau had used Les Structures Sonores in his film Le Testament d’Orphée, or was it Orphée? In 1952 they reveal a new acoustic principle. They manage to amplify the internal vibration of metal and crystal. They make acoustic for a plurality of public. It is an ensemble of varying geometry. The sounds do not have the very precise frequency. For this reason, their combination is not organized according to their height but rather according to juxtaposition of tones. The rods, plates and strings are built on the amplification cones and rubbed, percussed or slided according to the non-verbal parameters. The elision and recurrence is another deliberation of technique. The structures are in many harmonies as you see in origami of metal. Kilpatrick saw on the screen a multitude of convoluted, multicoloured tubes and overlapping metal plates, shifting and swaying kaleidoscopically, somehow taking on the appearance of a tropical landscape in which the sound of rainfall on leaves and of waterfalls plunging into chasms mingled with the music, and he realized, when he came to write it down, that there were colours and shapes and sounds for which there is no language. He found himself in another terrain. He was struggling up a steep mountain path, carrying a heavy briefcase. He was out of breath and he wondered if he had forgotten to take his medication that morning. He stopped to rest. He took out his watch and looked at it. He rested for one minute as timed on his watch. He opened the briefcase and took out a passport and a pair of spectacles. He put the spectacles on and looked at the passport, and realized he was the man in the picture. A gunshot rang out.