By the time Nathan had finally drained the cold bathwater and dressed in fresh clothes, the light from the kitchen window had the gray weakness of twilight, even though it was still only late afternoon. He brought his gym bag to the kitchen, switched on the tea kettle and dropped two slices of bread into the toaster.
At the table, he pulled out the block of paper and crayons he’d bought after training and sat down with his phone. He still saw the black sludge at the edge of his vision, but it didn’t seem at risk of engulfing him. He could smell the bread turning to toast, and his stomach rumbled with hunger. It wasn’t yet four in the afternoon and he already felt deeply tired. He pulled up an online English-French translator, typed in a short sentence and tapped a button. He had no way to judge the accuracy of the translation, but didn’t want to ask anyone to check it for him.
With a crayon he transcribed the translated text in large, careful letters onto sheet after sheet of paper. In the background he heard the kettle click off when the water reached a rolling boil, but he forgot it nearly as soon as it registered in the background.
He had no doubt that putting up notices without permission would be frowned on, possibly illegal. In university, he and some friends had done a prank, posting a whole pile of posters that mimicked an anti-cheating campaign he’d taken issue with. Their posters immitated the text, but took it to its reductio ad absurdum end. He had even covertly scanned in the student services stamp required for all posted documents, giving them that last detail of authority. The city of Geneva probably did not require any official stamp for vetted posters, but there were rules for everything – probably there were rules about what and where a thing could be posted. But he was an outsider he would play the foolish foreigner if he had to.
At one point he had the urge to abandon the project and walk into the bedroom where he could fall onto the mattress and pull the covers up over his head. He craved the amnesia of sleep. But he knew that short of drugging himself, he would not be able to turn off his head. So instead he focused on the letters and the smooth whisper of crayon on paper.
Nathan had to wait for dark to put up the posters, for the same reason he wouldn’t have anyone check his French. When he finished writing the text, he opened his computer, turned on his VPN, and registered a new ProtonMail email account. He hand-copied it to the bottom of each poster. It was long but easy for people to remember. à la recherche d'un monstre @ protonmail.com, no spaces or accents. In search of a monster.
Helene had spent the afternoon in meetings downtown, and was again scheduled for a late shift at one of the hospitals. They had planned on meeting for dinner in between, but she texted just as he was finishing the posters. “Getting dinner near Cornivan with a couple colleagues. Would love if you came and joined–”.
Nathan realized how much he’d needed those two hours with her before she had to run off to work again. His throat swelled in pain as he read the message. He needed her but couldn’t bring himself to tell her.
“Have a nice dinner,” he texted back. “I’m still working on a thing I need to finish. See you in the morning.”
Nathan remembered the now dry bread in the toaster but didn’t have the stomach for it. He stood up and looked at his work on the table, stacked in slightly messy piles.
Instead of eating, he went to the living room and sat in the center of the couch. For a moment he looked straight ahead at the black of the television screen, and then he let his spine relax and his head drop against the low ‘70’s back of the sofa. In his mind he carefully walked every step he was going to cover. He pictured every move he’d make, down to which direction he was going to turn his head and how he was going to move his hands. He pictured the shadows and the skeletal winter trees. The darkness at the edge of his vision threatened to rise, but when it wavered, he stopped and recentered. He knew he had no control of when the sludge might come again, and if next time it would suffocate his consciousness completely, but when the darkness wavered, he stopped and waited for it to sink again.
Nathan didn’t move from the couch till after 3am, long after the windows of even the night owls had gone dark. He was unsure if he’d slept, but he all of a sudden knew the time was right. He stood and slipped on his coat and a dark knit cap that he pulled down low over his ears. Dressing warmly at 3am would be the norm, but he made a point of wearing dark clothing, including a scarf that wound over his mouth and much of his face.
In just a few minutes, he was standing not far from where the police cordon had been the previous morning. It felt like eons ago. Nathan stood, gloved hands jammed in his pockets, and looked out from the crime scene toward the side of the great square where the tram went by, a few dozen yards away. Plainpalais was nearly diamond shaped with large one-way roads going up both sides. At the head of the diamond, pointing northward, was Café Remor, where he had met the inspector. On the eastern side, flanked by banks of office buildings, was a tram line with a stop at the widest point, a subway entrance, and one street over, the McDonald’s where Yingying had purchased William’s last meal.
Nathan turned to face the far side of the diamond with its apartment buildings, many with a shop or cafe on the ground floor, but they were too far away to be much help. He would focus his attention on this side of the street.
He spent the better part of the next hour walking along the edge of the square, putting up posters on every lamppost and parking sign he could find. Then he crossed the empty street and put posters up next to doorbells and on trees, staying on high alert. Windows were mostly dark, but one never knew who might have gotten up for a drink of water, glancing out the kitchen window with the lights off, and see him.
When he had canvassed the area to such a degree that one wouldn’t be able to pass within 500 feet of where William had been attacked without seeing at least five signs, he crossed the dark middle of the diamond and put a few signs up on the other side.
A wave of relief flooded Nathan’s system as he fumbled the key into the apartment’s lobby door. He was delirious from exhaustion, but it was still hours before the winter sun would break above Geneva’s Georgian apartment buildings and he’d probably be able to sleep before the sun shone too bright. But the relief evaporated as he quietly climbed the worn wood steps to Helenes flat, and the anxiety from his earlier episode in the park started to return. All night he’d been on high alert, prepared to run or hide if anyone approached him during his mischievous task. But now, nearly to safety, he started to feel the sludge rising. He quickened his pace, the tide of black oil nipping at his heals. Like a child afraid of monsters in the dark, he started to run, sprinting the last few steps to Helene’s door. He knew objectively that the door wouldn’t hold back the darkness if it were coming. And yet the relief was tangibly real when the key pushed back the latch and he slipped inside, closing the door with an unfortunately loud thud behind him. The feeling was reinforced and fed by the sight of Helene’s shoes lying akimbo on the mat in front of him, her bag and coat thrown over the kitchen chair. Nathan turned the deadbolt on the door and immediately started shedding his coat, and hat and scarf. His fingers fumbled with the buttons of his shirt as he walked the few steps to the bedroom door. She had told him the shift ended at 6, and he hadn’t expected her for a while after that. But for whatever god-granted mercy, she was home early.
Helene murmured something as he slipped into bed behind her curved body, matching her form like a magnet. She was a side sleeper, especially when he wasn’t there, and usually brought one leg up to a wrestlers sprawl. “Hm?” he asked, his own leg mirroring hers and locking her in next to him.
“Where have you been?” she repeated, dragging out the last vowel.
“I couldn't sleep–went for a walk.”
She didn’t question him, but nuzzled into his arms, her breathing returning to it’s sleep rhythm.
For the first night in weeks, he fell into a deep and restful sleep. That night, Beijing remained a city on the other side of the planet, rather than a haunting mirage in his dreams.
*
“Religion makes people do evil things,'' Monsieur Clerval said the next morning, offering his thoughts on the murder and its suspects as they sat on their bench, not 200 meters from the crime scene at Plainpalais. It was Saturday, mere hours after Nathan had dropped onto his bed, but he was more rested than he had been in weeks. The plaza was palpably more relaxed, the usual weekday commuter flurry replaced by fathers leisurely walking with small children to the park and young couples stridin arm in arm with nowhere in particular to go.
“If the nanny was offering sacrifices to her ancestors, it’s only a small next step to also killing the boy,” Clerval concluded.
Nathan hadn’t told him the details of the interview he’d attended the day before, but one of the local gossip newspapers had somehow gotten information ‘from a source near the family’, and published a speculative front page spread about the strangulation of the child and described the nanny’s highly suspect ancestor worship, making it out as only one step away from pagan sacrificial rites. There was no mention of a monster.
“Evil is a religious construct in itself,” Nathan said, sipping his quickly cooling coffee.
“So much the better. Judge the practice by its own inventions.”
Nathan didn’t attend church regularly, but he’d grown up going to Sunday school and learning Bible stories. He didn’t have a deep relationship with religion, but he’d had enough exposure to know it was more complex than just an old man in the sky pandering to people with high guilt sensitivities, and not mere abuse of the ignorant. Painting all religious practice with the same judgmental brush seemed as accurate as assuming all Asians were good at math and all French were snobs.
“Every major war and act of subjugation has been in the name of religion, or had religious motivations somewhere tied up with it,” Clerval continued. “Get rid of religion and we’d solve most of the world’s problems.”
“Religious peoples have also been oppressed by the secular hand of government,” Nathan countered. “You can hardly blame the Jews for their victimization at the hand of Nazi Germany. You can’t blame religion for antisemitism, especially as the Nazi’s had no inclination to let secular Jews off.”
“Would people be antisemitic if there was no Jewish religion?” the old Swiss asked.
“People are groupish. Tribal. Othering. Difference of any kind is the source of most human conflicts. Shall we also get rid of race? What about political differences? Even if you tie Europe’s hatred of the Jews to religious history, Stalin was famously atheist, and his Gulag’s killed far more than Hitler’s camps.” Nathan stretched his legs straight out from the bench, flexing his feet.
“If we could eliminate race, it would fix racism, wouldn’t it? Of course you can’t help the divergence of evolutionary communities. But if people stopped practicing religion, we’d at least fix a large set of the worlds problems,” Clerval countered. “Many of the Nazis were churchgoing Catholics and Lutherans. The Pope played no small part in helping the state roundup the Jews. Clearly there was a religious element on that side as well. Maybe if the Nazis hadn’t been religious, they wouldn’t have been so easily manipulated by such dogma.”
“You must feel lucky being Swiss,” Nathan said, hoping to adjust the dial on the charged tone of the conversation. “You were able to bow out of WWII with the upper hand of neutrality.”
The old man grunted. “Neutrality is a convenient political tool to serve one’s own purposes. Not choosing is also a choice.” Clerval swirled his nearly empty coffee cup in his veiny-blue fingers, and downed the last few drops of cold coffee. “Many economists say that a neutral Switzerland served the Germans much better than if they had chosen sides. If they had joined the Axis, there would have been embargoes from the Allied powers and Germany wouldn’t have been able to use Swiss Banks for trading. If they had joined the Allies, they would have ended economic ties with Germany, their biggest trade partner. By declaring themselves neutral, Swiss bankers could help the Germans by converting German Marks into tradable gold. They can claim no moral high ground for their so-called neutrality.”
“They? I thought you were Swiss.”
“I am. I’m also ethnically Jewish. My father was sent by his parents to Portugal because they were concerned for his safety, even in Switzerland. But that is neither here nor there. Switzerland didn’t make any better moral choice than the monsters around them, acting in the name of religion. And if religion doesn’t make you moral, what bloody good is it? If that Chinese girl was offering sacrifices and worshiping her ancestral gods, she deserves the consequences of her actions.”
Nathan took a deep breath, but held the sigh in his lungs, pinching his lips between his teeth. It was one thing to talk about morality in the abstract, and another to condemn an individual you had never met because you didn’t understand her cultural practices. The younger man shook his empty cappuccino cup and stood up. “I’m meeting Helene,” he said, standing up. “I should be off.”
Clerval tipped his fedora’d head, but remained on the bench.
I really wanted to post the next chapter, but it feels like it’s already getting long. Or? I can’t tell anymore. I suppose this week will fly by for a lot of us, given the big holiday at the end, so … Monday will be here again in no time.
I realize the chapter heading is a little misleading. Helene only just shows up with a one-liner while half asleep. Sorry about that. I feel like I’ve been waiting forever for her to dane to show her face, and I wrote the book!
This week is Thanksgiving, in America at least. I’m always a little jealous that Canada was smart about scheduling their holiday, and put it at the end of October. By the time it rolls around for Americans, for that last Thursday of the last full week in November, the charm of fall is gone and we’re mostly just in a holding pattern for Winter . I guess the purgatory of post-fall-pre-winter needs something to spruce it up too.
Thursday will be the second time I’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving since moving back to the states. Last year I’d only just moved two months prior, and wasn’t yet in my own place (renovations were exhaustive, for this place). I was joining my sisters friends and our family for the big party, and although I felt happy to be home, it wasn’t really my life. I was still helping out. Now, a year on, we’re still joining forces for a big thanksgiving cookoff-bakeoff, but it’s also my life. I’m not just tagging along.
So I think that’s one of the things I’m thankful for this year. Moving and setting up a new life is hard in the best of times — but moving on your own, to a new continent and culture, with two little guys who prefer a different language, and trying to hack being the primary bread winner… It’s a lot. And although it was huge to have family and my sister here when I arrived, it’s been a very different experience to navigate that new sort of life. I basically moved out when I was 16, and this is the first time I’ve lived near family since.
But last week I hosted my own Thanksgiving cocktail party, and my flat (the one I’d renovated to within an inch of it’s life) was packed to bursting with friends. My friends. Not just people my sister had introduced me to, but people who have become my own friends, as well as people I’d brought into the circle myself. My life is modest, but deeply rich.
The last year before I moved home my brother flew to Munich and helped me put on a Thanksgiving shindig for the ages. We baked a monster turkey, cooked up all the sides, whipped up a couple delicious pumpkin pies worthy of the title, and invited the whole town. At least it felt like it. That party made it hard to think about moving away from Germany. But now, a year on, I feel blessed with a life rich in friends and family, and excited for the things that I’m working on and the way life is headed.
*The turkey that almost didn’t fit in my small European oven.
So if I can just get this writing gig really off the ground next year, we’ll be set.
I know ‘friends and family’ are the big thing everyone is grateful for, every year. But it is especially evident after moving. What small things are sparking joy in your life these days? I’d love to hear.