Breathe Freely, Costs Nothing
Fiction by Cate Sercombe
Last night he’d booked a ride from BlaBlaCar with an early pickup time allowing for traffic on the way to Paris-Charles de Gaulle for his direct flight to Vancouver. Zafar’s fear rose in waves and then subsided. Fear baked into everything, always when there was change. He breathed, ten inhalations and exhalations and the oxygen molecules were drawn into his lungs and the fear in his mind receded.
He sat outside on the curb with his duffel, his tiny house locked behind him. His cat was fine. She lived as an indoor cat. His mother would move in tomorrow to house-sit, now that she was in between contracts and wanting to take her time looking for an apartment. The wrens and the sparrows living in the plane tree and the linden tree outside would be fine. Zafar slowly ticked off the beings who mattered, his mother and his friend Koosha, and maybe the woman he’d met recently.
His breathing replaced fear with mild anticipation, a lighter excited feeling reminding him of days he’d spent as a child with his mother at Versailles, going on the train from Paris with sandwiches and a bottle of water in a cloth bag on the seat between them. Then they would walk from the station, across the cobblestones, and around the palace to the gardens and the forest. Their routine was always the same.
“I’ll read my book by the fountain while you explore,” she’d say. The fountain was a large basin and from the water the god Apollo drove a chariot drawn by four galloping horses, statues made of gilded lead. “Find something to do. Invent an imaginary friend. Or make a slingshot and hunt rabbits.” His mother’s ideas of who he was depended on whatever novel she had been reading.
He’d wander in the park past the Petit Canal to the nursery gardens and then along the streams watching the foxes hunt. “I don’t have anything to do,” he’d say when he returned to find her still reading, her skirt pulled up to let the sun tan her legs. “Walk down the path to the edge of the forest,” she’d say. “And back along the canal. Then we’ll eat lunch.” She didn’t mean to sound severe but Zafar saw the pulse in the hollow of her throat above the neckline of her blouse and left her with her book.
These days spent as tourists at Versailles ended when they took the train back to Paris, lulled by the slide and clank past familiar windows framing men washing potatoes and women browning onions in butter, the predictable pattern language of their day as they rattle-clanked slowly through the countryside back into Paris.
When he told Koosha about these Versailles day trips with his mother, they’d been discussing phenomenology in a bar and they began talking about the etymology of tourism and of travel and what it meant in so far as Zafar going to the west coast of Canada.
“Since tourism comes from the Latin tornare, to turn on a lathe and travel comes from travail which has its roots in work — well, that has to mean something,” Koosha said. Zafar stood up from the curb to stretch his legs. He walked to the corner of Rue des Vignes and back by the front of his house. A grey Japanese electric car pulled up. The driver also looked Japanese and rolled down the window.
“Are you Zafar? For the airport?” And then, “This is Mark.”
‘Corporate’ and ‘middle-aged’ were Zafar’s impressions of Mark who sat in front. The driver signaled and pulled into a gap in the traffic. The feeling persisted for some minutes of a comfortable silence between the three of them in the car, as they reached the Peripherique and the car accelerated around Paris heading for the exit towards Saint-Denis and the airport. Then Mark cleared his throat.
“I had a bit of a crisis this morning,” he said.
Zafar and the driver became alert.
“I was just doing a last email check before I left my hotel,” Mark continued. “And some- one had sent me a link.”
He paused. The driver flicked his eyes at Zafar in the rear-view mirror.
“I’m an economist,” Mark said. “With a fairly high profile. And I’ve been appointed recently to the United Nations as Special Envoy on Climate Change and Finance. I’ve been here in Paris for meetings in my new role and now I have a meeting in Vancouver, to discuss tourism and climate change.”
“Yes,” The driver said. “We are all going to Vancouver. That’s why BlaBlaCar put us together to share my car. Because I am going to Vancouver and will be leaving my car at the airport for a week.”
“But now I don’t know…” Mark’s voice wavered. “Maybe I shouldn’t go and use all that jet fuel. I had my doubts already but the link this morning was to an academic paper. It was traumatic reading.”
Now the driver’s eyes in the mirror signalled ‘what?’ Then he looked back to the pavement unfurling beneath his wheels.
“What was the title of the paper?” The driver was buying us time or delaying some inevitable existential crisis that seemed poised to happen.
“Deep Adaptation,” Mark said. He sounded doleful. “The subtitle was A Map for Navi- gating Climate Tragedy. I’ve spent most of my life in meetings. Maybe two percent of my time has been in nature. And I thought ‘what was the point?’ What was the fucking point of all those meetings? Then I thought, ‘Finally I’ve been appointed to something where I think I can truly do some good and it’s just more fucking meetings.’”
He began to cry. He didn’t take out a tissue or a handkerchief, he just cried into his hands cupped around his face. The driver did not glance at me in the mirror again. His hands tensed on the steering wheel.
“OK, Mark, you have to get a grip here. We’re on our way to the airport. We’re all booked on the 9:00 a.m. Air France flight direct to Vancouver. We can’t turn around or pull over to the side of the road. You need to get on that flight because it’s going to fly to Vancouver anyway and the 150,000 litres of jet fuel are going to get burned up anyway. But you can get there and go for a walk around Stanley Park and hang out with the geese and the squirrels and maybe a few coyotes if you go early in the morning and think about what to do. If there’s anything to do.”
“Or maybe I should go straight to the Lion’s Gate Bridge and threaten to jump off,” Mark said. “Then maybe I’d be using this new position and my profile to get people’s attention. Otherwise they’ll just keep buying crap on Amazon. And keep playing video games, each one of which runs on a server that takes as much energy to run annually as a town of 100,000 people. Can you believe that?”
Zafar noticed that he felt fearful again, the feeling had crept up on him as things seemed to be unravelling in the front seat of the car. He wanted to go back to the happy adventurous feeling he felt sitting on the curb so he began to breathe again and to look outside the car at the grassy meadows and trees going by. He knew about climate change but he wanted to go to Vancouver. It would probably be the one transatlantic flight of his lifetime and he desperately wanted to see the wilderness as he imagined it out there on the west coast of Canada.
The driver and Mark were quiet in the front seat and there was twenty minutes left on the road to the airport so Zafar decided to breathe slowly and go back to the memory of Versailles with his mother and how the visits had changed their lives in many ways. His mother had become obsessed by the interior ceiling paintings in the palace.
The eventual outcome for Zafar’s mother of their visits to Versailles was her work as an archivist, which she loved. But for Zafar it was the gardens and the park, the forest especially, which had deeply affected him over time. Each time they visited he made a transition from the city to the forest.
Whereas his mother was fascinated by the ceiling paintings with their vivid renderings of sky and clouds and by botanical details in the background of wall paintings behind a foreground of men on horseback or women painted more vividly than a photograph would have represented them.
“After all,” she said. “What is real? Are the pixels of a photograph more real than the strokes of a paintbrush?”
She had a point. But for Zafar the effect of all the time they’d spent at Versailles was different. He’d spent most of his time in the forest, on the paths, and with the creatures who inhabited the woods so his perspective was different. He felt very small compared to the forest and its beings, to their collective being. While the palace was more than two thousand rooms of art crafted out of natural materials, the trees (for example) in the paintings were tiny in scale compared to a human being and the horses and dogs and deer were tiny. Of course, the humans in the paintings were also mostly small except when they’d been rendered life-size or bigger but in general, they were to scale with the horses and the trees.
“I like feeling small under the trees,” he’d said when his mother asked why he spent most of his time in the woods. By now he was a teenager. “I like the proportion of who I am there. I’m about the same size as a small deer. Larger than a badger and much larger than any of the insects. We’ve been learning in school about the mycelium of fungi so when I’m in the woods I think about the layers of entangled roots and about the aerosol signals they send to each other and to the animals. I wonder if there was a time long ago when I might have understood those signals.”
“You mean long ago in your own life?” she said. “Or long ago in human time?”
He had to think about the answer.
“What do you do, Zafar?” Mark asked and looked back over his shoulder. He seemed calmer.
“I’ve been studying philosophy and biology at university. Not sure what’s next.”
“What are you doing in Vancouver?” The driver made eye contact in the mirror. “Tourism or just travel?”
“Exploring.” Zafar skirted the question. “Just taking time off, I’ve been working part-time plus my school work so it’s been intense.”
“I’d move to Canada in a heartbeat,” the driver said. “But my brother’s in Guantanamo so I’d never get through immigration. I own a small studio apartment on Rue Charles V in Le Marais, on the ground floor in an enclosed courtyard. Last year a Canadian tourist asked me for directions and we got talking about what kind of business I could run. He told me about a bookseller in Vancouver with a robust business model, like a mini-version of those big online-order sites but with a personal touch. The tourist said I reminded him of the bookseller, kind of quirky. He said my studio would be a good bookstore space where people could chat. I’m going to Vancouver to see for myself. I love books.”
“Are you allowed to run a retail business from your studio?” Mark asked.
“Well, it wouldn’t be a storefront because it’s hidden behind one of those huge blue front doors onto a private courtyard. I think it’s fine.”
“And rats might be a problem with your inventory. Rats are everywhere in cities now.” Mark still seemed shaky from his episode about climate change.
“But that’s simple,” Zafar said feeling the spirit of adventure, the driver going all the way to Vancouver to see about an idea. “He’d just need to get a cat.”
Mark said he wasn’t sure a cat would help.
“No, it would,” Zafar said, remembering his biology professor whose specialty was urban rats. “Rats are born with an innate hard-wired fear of felines, so any scent of cats creates a terror reaction.”
The multi-storey car park at the airport was grey and cool and rat-less, well-lit smooth walls with no holes or rubble. The driver parked his car at a charging station.
“Here’s where we part company,” the driver said and made a severing motion with his hand. “It’s always awkward when I drive people who’re on the same flight. You know, the entanglement. We’ve been together, we’ve chatted, then it’s hard to know where to draw the lines. So, I just draw the line.” He made the severing motion again. “Right here. Nice to have met you. Mark. Zafar. Have a nice flight.”
“But…” Mark said.
“You’re fine now, Mark. You’re all good. You’ll be flying Business Class I’m sure. You’ve had your therapy session with us and unless you plan to blow up your whole life and what you’ve worked for and tell your family you’re spazzing out, you’ll just take a breath and move ahead.”
Hitching his duffle over one shoulder, Zafar followed other travellers towards the walkways which led into translucent tubes where passengers moved up and down. He felt gently purposeful, the floors and tiled walls, the security booths, the rows of joined-up seats all spoke in a comforting way to his departure.
Zafar’s fascination with Canada began in his last year of biology. The university brought in visiting Canadian scientists and lecturers for a seminar — The Ontology of the Photograph. An older white man from Edmonton spoke about caribou and polar bears, happy with his collaring of large mammals. A woman working on salmon genomics, nuanced her data alongside complex ecosystems. A science journalist’s photos (suspended on an illuminated screen) of grizzly bears and sea wolves roaming the coast of the Pacific had Zafar dreaming of lithe dog-like creatures running by the ocean.
Just now embarking on the plane he hears the muted water-like voices of passengers moving forward to find their seats. Early in the morning before departing, Zafar had woken up submerged in nameless dread, hearing voices again. He’d begun doing yoga to help with anxiety and his fears of the modern world, so now his one body and his one mind could go somewhat blindly into a day, taking on as much reality as he could endure.
Zafar takes out the book he’ll read on the flight. Koosha’s gift, a new collection by Palestinian poets exiled from the occupied territories. The man beside him across the aisle sorts papers and re-sorts them, saying a word now and then under his breath. Maybe a technical word, Zafar can’t quite hear. The man’s absorbed in his sorting. Zafar feels downwind of him in a psychic way, watching his nimbus of red hair shimmer in the low sunlight through the airplane window.
He thinks about the man across the aisle, the driver who brought him to the airport, and Mark the economist now sitting in Business Class. He needs to pee. Zafar closes the book of poems and gets up. Better to go to the bathroom before the plane takes off. The toilet cubicle smells from the many flights, sanitized with an overlay of perfumed bleach. All the interior panels of the air-plane are made of the bodies of plants and animals decomposed for centuries into oil, then polymerized into plastic. The cubicle surfaces are saturated in the smell of human waste and disinfectant. Zafar squints at the wall beside him, it has a speckled texture and he wonders if he can make out a fragment of leaf or bone or feather. He knows the absurdity but he and Koosha discuss objects endlessly. “Can there be small objects such as plastics which add up to a larger hyper-object?” Zafar asked. Koosha had said, “Maybe. We need to think viscosity.”
In the cubicle, Zafar looks down and there on the wall rests a moth. Not a moth made into oil and then plastic, but a real moth, speckled and about an inch across. What a journey already! The moth can fly, unlike a human. But the moth cannot fly across the ocean and has come onto the plane to travel from Paris to Vancouver.
Zafar can’t wrap his mind around what will happen then for the moth. Do these thoughts surface because he’s nervous about his adventure? It’s a bit unnerving going off to explore the wilderness. Though it seems the right way to go. Both Koosha and his mother have reassured him.
A voice on the intercom instructs passengers to return to their seats. Zafar leaves the toilet. The engines begin to hum and then roar in their big Rolls-Royce voices. Zafar thinks of the speckled moth. He’s sure one of its antennae had twitched. The moth was meant to fly. Man, not so much; but man insisted on flying and persevered and look what’s happened. Now man wants to go to Mars.
Zafar wonders if he’ll ever come back from Vancouver. Not for a while if he’s to find himself, to see the wild animals, go up the coast to find some work and see what that means. He won’t find himself by indulging in tourism, that’s for sure. The only way is to go and not to stay at home, to persevere and travel on into the shimmering anxiety of anticipation. »