Chicago on the Seine

I used to tell myself stories on the job, to make it feel exciting—spy stories, exfiltration stories, war stories. I used to come up with poignant little details that turned the repatriation cases I worked on into “Saving Private Ryan,” into “Johnny Got His Gun.” Repatriation—there’s such a ring to it, such drama. I imagined maimed bodies in dirty tents, nurses changing brown, bloodied gauze, bending over beds to tell the wounded, “The call came in—you’re going home.” Yet I worked in Special Consular Services at our Embassy in Paris. The Americans I helped repatriate mostly broke legs in Pigalle or crashed rental cars in Normandy. Miracles didn’t happen for them in Lourdes—people don’t talk about it, but those for whom miracles don’t happen in Lourdes tend to leave France in worse shape than they arrived in.

Occasionally, I had to send a body home. What I’d noticed was that death abroad was more common on package tours. It appeared that, contrary to popular belief, the group didn’t lift you up but in fact granted you permission to go soft and fall ill. A group needed a weakest link, demanded it, and there was always a chance that you would be that link.

Eva Glasper exemplified this. She’d died the night before, collapsing after a three-course dinner on the Right Bank. She’d been in Paris for an engineering conference, not on vacation, but the idea was the same: for three days, she’d been part of a group, followed the group’s every move, and she’d died in a foreign land, alone among strangers.

I’d talked to her daughter Lisa twice already. Lisa wanted the repatriation process started right away, her mother’s body back in Boston ASAP. I skipped lunch to make arrangements with the shipping-and-receiving funeral homes, with de Gaulle and Logan airports, and, when I called Lisa again to let her know that her mother would be on a cargo plane to Boston first thing in the morning, I expected gratitude for my fast and efficient work. She was, however, disappointed. She’d hoped repatriation would happen that day.

“I don’t like the idea of Mom spending another night alone at the morgue,” she said. “So far away from home.”

“I know it’s difficult,” I said.

“Is there someone you can recommend to keep watch over her?”

I knew what she meant, I believe, but still I played dumb. I asked if she meant a priest.

“Not a priest,” she said. “Someone who could stay with Mom all night, someone nice, preferably, who will explain to her what happened.”

“Right,” I said.

“I’m not crazy,” Lisa said, before telling me that the hours after death were critical: bodies should not be left alone and uncared for. If the dead were alone for too long before burial, they could be driven to disquiet, volatility, and eternal roaming. She used the phrase “spectral invasion.”

“My mother wasn’t ill,” she went on. “She wasn’t preparing for this to happen, so her spirit is probably very confused right now. Confused and angry. That’s the worst combination. That’s a recipe for spectral invasion.”

I perceived no hint of shame in her voice as she admitted to believing in ghosts.

The TV was on in front of me, covering Hurricane Jared’s progress toward Florida, four thousand miles away. U.S. news played in the background non-stop at the Embassy now. We used to watch it only during political crises and human catastrophes, but I guess someone had failed to turn it off at some point, weeks or months before, and we’d all tacitly agreed to wait for the next disaster to come to us live.

“We can’t let my mother become a ghost,” Lisa said. Then she added that I sounded like a nice guy, that maybe I could go sit with her mother’s corpse. She would pay me for my troubles, she said. I didn’t want to spend the night with a dead body, but I was curious to hear how much she’d pay, so I pretended to think about it. I let a little bit of silence take hold. I looked around our open space, then up at the TV again—silent images of planes grounded in Tampa, men nailing plywood to windows in Naples, women praying in Fort Myers.

“Mr. White? Are you still there?”

I Googled Eva Glasper while her daughter spoke. I’d seen her passport photo in her file, but a person never looks less herself than in a passport photo. I wanted to see snapshots from real life. I wanted to see whether Eva Glasper had the makings of a ghost, whether she’d been handed a raw deal and might feel cheated, justified in her “eternal roaming,” in her anger and her demands. If I believed what movies said about ghosts (and movies were, as far as the topic went, all I had to go on), something all of them had in common was that they wanted reparation. According to her posts on Facebook, though, Eva Glasper seemed to have had a happy life, to have lacked for nothing. No rants, only gratitude for her family and for her colleagues at M.I.T., appreciation posts for her favorite TV show, “For All Mankind,” despite most of the science in it being “off.” When it came to fiction, I knew that some people were able to engage only with material they had the capacity to correct. My mother had been that way. As a nurse, she’d loved to spot all the errors in “E.R.,” but it was still her favorite show. She said that the writers had got something right about the E.R. that made you look past all the fuckups.

I told Lisa I would find someone to sit by her mother.

Minutes after I hung up, Marianne came over to my desk for a chat. I wondered if it was something she felt obliged to do now that we’d broken up, to prove to herself that we were over each other, that there was nothing left there. Maybe she thought she was being nice. She reminded me that today was my father’s birthday.

“You don’t have to do this anymore,” I said. “Remind me of things.”

“Have you talked to him yet?”

“It’s still early in Chicago.”

“When you do, tell him I said hi. And happy birthday.”

I hadn’t told my dad about the breakup yet. Not that it would’ve pained him, or caused him to worry; we just didn’t talk about these things. My father and I mostly talked about movies, to be honest. Sometimes TV. But mostly movies. Marianne had found it sad when we visited him in Chicago the previous summer. Our dynamic. She’d said that I should let my father in on the details of my days, that, if I never had a conversation with him about my life, I would regret it when he was gone. “Movies are part of my life,” I’d told her. “I watch them.”

“How are you otherwise?” she asked now.

I told her about my phone call with Lisa Glasper, her request that I keep her mother’s body company at the morgue so that she wouldn’t become a ghost.

“How much money did she offer?”

“Five hundred dollars,” I said.

“I can’t tell if that’s stingy or not. Five hundred? To sit with her mom’s dead body all night?”

“And lead her spirit into the good place,” I said.

“Are you going to do it?”

I couldn’t accept the money, of course, Marianne and I both knew it, but it was still fun to consider it, to turn that sum at different angles against the light and ponder its meaning.

“I wonder what she heard in your voice that made her think you’d be a good fit for the job,” Marianne added. “You could be a total creep, for all she knows.”

“I told her my mother was also from Boston,” I said. “I think that created a bond.”

“But your mother wasn’t from Boston,” Marianne said.

“When you’re dealing with bereaved families, you have to establish trust,” I said. “A bond. The veracity of the bond is irrelevant.”

“You establish trust by lying to them?”

“It’s not like I’m dating this girl,” I said. I studied Marianne’s reaction to the word “dating.” Something was bothering her, but it wasn’t the idea that I could (and would, in all likelihood) date another woman in the future.

“I can’t believe you told this stranger anything about your mother,” she said.

“I didn’t. You said so yourself—my mother wasn’t actually from Boston.”

“You know what I mean. You never talked to me about your mother.”

There it was. Marianne was jealous, but not romantically so. She’d always wanted me to talk more, to open up to her. For the past two years, she’d tried to get to the bottom of my childhood trauma (my mother’s death when I was ten), to understand how it had shaped my world view, and I’d resisted, valiantly, assuring her that my world view was not to linger on the past.

“Do you want me to tell you something about my mother?” I asked. Now that we wouldn’t grow old together, it didn’t seem so appalling to let her know more about myself.

“Of course!” Marianne said. “What was she like?”

“She believed in ghosts, actually. My mother. Just like Lisa Glasper.”

“Really?”

Marianne’s “Really?” made me doubt myself. That was the problem with talking about the dead. Even when you were pretty sure you were telling the truth, you could never feel a hundred per cent like you were. How could you be sure the person hadn’t changed her mind before dying, or wouldn’t have, if given a little more information, a little more time? You had too much power, when speaking of the dead. They had the double disadvantage of not being able to fight you if you said something false about them, and of not having had access to any of the new knowledge the world had amassed since they’d died. I often thought that that was the worst thing about dying: that all your last positions and opinions became fixed forever, that you couldn’t change your mind anymore. It made you look stupid.

I didn’t know whether my mother really believed in ghosts. She might’ve been serious when she’d said it, she might’ve been joking. What I knew for sure was that I’d grown up afraid of everything—the dark, gusts of wind, falling ice. My mother had started showing me horror movies and ghost movies way too early, as an attempt, I believe, to make me less of a wimp. I admired those guys who went down unlit basement stairs after hearing strange sounds in the middle of the night, but her efforts didn’t really work, no matter how many times she told me that ghosts were scary, yes, but ultimately harmless. “Like Dad,” she once said. “A little gruff on the outside, but truly kindhearted. They just want our help!” I didn’t tell her that the idea that my father could need our help was the scariest thing of all. We kept watching ghost movies. We spent a lot of Sundays discussing what we would do if we became ghosts ourselves, who we would mess with. She told me that, if she ever died, she would come haunt me, but not in a scary way, just to hang out, to watch ghost movies with me on Sundays and explain what the movies had got right and wrong about the afterlife. It had sounded fun, the idea of watching ghost movies with a ghost, but then my mother got ill, and, on top of fearing that she’d die, I became scared that she’d die and follow up on her haunting plans. I spent the last weeks of her life wanting to ask her not to come back after her death, but not asking for fear of hurting her feelings. What ten-year-old didn’t want his mother to come back from the dead to watch movies with him on Sundays?

On the TV, over Marianne’s shoulder, the same weatherman I’d been glancing at since the morning was gesturing over an animation of Hurricane Jared, like he was trying to wipe it. I wondered if he actually knew anything about meteorology, or if he was just an actor saying his lines. Behind his hand movements, the hurricane was all the colors of the rainbow, like a pinwheel, a swirl lollipop.

“Do you know anything about the color code?” I asked Marianne.

“What? Are we still talking about your mother?”

“No. Do you know anything about the color code in hurricane graphics?”

“I think it has to do with wind speeds,” Marianne said, without turning around to look. “Different colors for different wind speeds.”

I said I didn’t understand how there could be different wind speeds within the same hurricane and the hurricane could still move along as one, at one single speed.

My father called me at work around 4 p.m. It was only 9 a.m. in Chicago, but I knew he’d already been up for hours, scanning national and local news for things to get furious about.

“Did you see about the horses?” he said.

Two horses had died on a movie set in California. My father couldn’t bear the thought of animals being used for entertainment.

“Happy birthday!”

“There’d better be consequences,” my father said, about the horses.

I imagined the apartment around him, our too-thick-and-too-long curtains, all that extra fabric at the bottom bunched up on the floor like dirty laundry. As a kid, I’d had fantasies about chopping it off.

“Any special plans for the day?”

“Define ‘special,’ ” my dad said.

I said, “Lunch, maybe? Bowling? A beer with a friend?”

“Barra’s coming over later,” he said. “We’re watching ‘The Hustler’ tonight. Maybe we’ll have a beer.”

My father had this friend he watched movies with once a week. Another widower, not especially bright. When I’d first met Barra, as a teen, I’d been embarrassed that my dad had made friends with such a dimwit, but then Barra had had us over for dinner, and, seeing how clean and bright his apartment was, meeting his own son and being introduced to his DVD collection, I’d become embarrassed about us, our apartment with the curtains, the grime on the laminated counters, the ugly VHS shelf. My father had resisted DVDs for way too long. He still had our tapes, in fact, the ones with real titles that he’d bought and the blank ones we’d recorded a million movies over, the labels on their spines a geological record of my childhood, movie and show titles crossed out every time we taped new movies and new shows over them, layers upon layers:

Miami Vice Churchill documentary Quantum Leap

Duel/Night Court Blade Runner DO NOT ERASE

Either we reached that “Blade Runner” stage—something worth keeping forever—or we kept going, erasing and erasing until we couldn’t, in all conscience, ask more of the tape, until random split seconds from “Knight Rider” emerged in the middle of “Stand by Me,” until it looked like the ghosts of previously recorded movies had come to haunt the new ones. Sometimes I pictured the tape thinning and thinning, scenes pressing on other scenes, fighting for space. At some point, we retired the tape. It always felt bad retiring a tape on an insignificant note, a just-O.K. movie, but it was better, I thought, than insisting on finding the tape’s ideal content and risking having the strip snap.

“Marianne says hi,” I said.

“O.K.,” my dad said.

I considered telling him about the breakup, or about Eva Glasper, but he wanted to talk about the dead horses in Hollywood.

“I don’t buy that they died of food poisoning,” he said. “I think someone poisoned them deliberately.”

Our unit’s secretary came to my desk and handed me a padded envelope.

“A courier left this for you at reception,” she said, and I was glad to have my father on the phone as she said it. He probably got a kick out of hearing that line—he probably imagined himself involved in glamorous international intrigue simply for overhearing it. A courier left this for you at reception. He loved spy movies. I think that he (like I once had) still wanted to daydream, or perhaps actually believe, that my work at the Embassy was cover for something better.

“You have to go?” he said to me on the phone. “Sounds important.”

I had no idea what my father imagined about my life. Did he think my work was risky? Did he think I was a brave man, fighting evil in the shadows?

“It’s nothing,” I said, before deciding to give him a little thrill, to play along with his fantasy. It was his birthday, after all. “I just need to help get someone out of the country.”

“Someone important?”

“You know I can’t disclose that kind of information.”

The padded envelope contained Eva Glasper’s personal items, found at the restaurant where her heart had stopped. Her packed suitcase, and everything she’d had at the hotel, had been sent straight to de Gaulle for her transport the next day, and what she’d had on her person at the hospital was now with her at the morgue, but the restaurant hadn’t known where to send the thin notebook she’d put by her plate, along with the complimentary pen she’d received from the Paris Aerospace Conference. I leafed through the notebook. She’d taken a lot of notes, sketched many cryptic diagrams, made a handful of quick yet precise technical drawings. This notebook was the kind of object a prop master would’ve wanted for a movie about industrial espionage, either to cut to quickly in a mad-scientist scene (scientist up all night, surrounded by her notes and open textbooks) or to place at the center of the plot (a notebook with calculations holding the answer to global warming, the key to humanity’s survival). I’d always wondered who made these things, the crazy notebooks in movies—if one guy in Hollywood was known for them and filled three or four a year with equations, drawings, and maps, and whether his work was led by scientific truth or by aesthetics. I knew that Eva Glasper’s notebook was real, that it contained real science, but it still looked fake to me.

“I’ll let you go, then,” my father said, and did.

Eva Glasper’s body was on the Left Bank. I took a bus there, and as it crossed the Seine my brain glitched for a second. Instead of registering the Eiffel Tower ahead, it supplied a Chicago insert, the Whirlpool building. This had happened to me before on buses over rivers. Crossing a bridge on foot never did it, but something about the specific speed of a bus got my brain reaching for old images, giving me temporary access to a non-updated version of me. The former version of me had taken the LaSalle bus every week, to see an allergist downtown. After the bridge was the Whirlpool building, and, since then, that was apparently what my lizard brain expected and prepared my eyes for when I crossed a bridge on a bus. The same thing had happened in my previous postings, at our Embassy in Cairo and at our consulate in Sevilla. The Whirlpool building over every river. Chicago on the Nile, Chicago on the Guadalquivir.

The morgue used to be a public place in Paris. Back in the nineteenth century, I’d read, you could just go in to see who’d been stabbed the night before, who’d jumped into the river. People showed up every day for entertainment. Thousands of them. I guessed some also went in fear, because their husbands hadn’t come home, or their children were missing, but for the most part Parisians went there for fun. Access to the morgue is of course restricted nowadays, but a diplomatic I.D. gets you in almost anywhere, and I was prepared to show mine at reception. There was no one at reception, though. No reception to speak of, really—the door to the small stone building simply opened onto a hallway, off of which branched other hallways. I didn’t want to accidentally stumble on a dead body—I’d come to see Eva Glasper’s, to make sure Eva Glasper’s ghost didn’t leave Eva Glasper’s body, and seeing any other body would’ve felt wrong, like stealing—so I kept my eyes down as I walked the hallways. After a minute I heard something, other footfalls, and followed the sound.

“May I help you?”

I assumed she was a mortician. She wore scrubs and purple Crocs.

I said I was looking for Mrs. Glasper.

“Are you family?”

“I’m from the American Embassy. I talked to your colleague on the phone earlier.”

She asked for identification and led me to the body.

“I was just finishing working on her,” she said. “I haven’t seen anything suspicious so far.”

“Why would you have?”

She figured that, if the Embassy had sent me, it meant Eva Glasper had been more than a simple engineer, or that we suspected some kind of foul play.

“I’ve just come to pay my respects,” I said.

I didn’t think she believed me.

She offered to leave me alone with the body, but once she left the room it became hard to remember why I’d come. Was I supposed to talk to Eva Glasper? Her daughter had wished for someone to explain the “situation” to her, but could I communicate it telepathically, or did I have to utter actual words? I dragged a stool closer and sat for a while. What was the situation? I wondered. What remained unclear to Eva Glasper’s soul or spirit or ghost, if it was still floating somewhere over us in the room?

“There’s been an accident,” I said. “You died.”

And then: “I brought you your notebook.”

After a minute, it didn’t feel as uncomfortable as I’d thought it would, sitting there talking to her. It did feel like she was still with us in some way, in some unthreatening way. Maybe her daughter was right, maybe something of the deceased did linger in the hours following death, and you had to guide it somehow, or let it know you were there while it figured out where to go.

I told Eva Glasper about the horses in California, which had died almost exactly when she had. She might meet their spirits where she was headed, perhaps even ride them all the way there. It sounded corny, but it was freeing to be corny, to let out clichés and comforting words. I knew they had no truth, but for generations they’d made death bearable. At least for a little while. I remembered reading somewhere that death was easy to understand at first, that it was only the amount of time it lasted that was incomprehensible.

After about twenty minutes, I heard a sound, like someone clicking a pen through a loudspeaker. I asked Eva Glasper what she thought it was, and immediately regretted doing so. You could always pretend that the dead were good listeners, but asking them a question broke the spell. I assumed that Eva Glasper’s ghost had ideas about what the sound had been (something to do with the cooling system, most likely), but, because she couldn’t voice responses anymore, my asking her a question might have been humiliating. Maybe Eva Glasper was angry right now, which was the exact situation her daughter had feared, an angry ghost refusing her new quarters. I imagined her ghost exploding in silent rage above my head, a breach in the fabric of life, a reversal, spectral invasion. I imagined Eva Glasper trading places with me, taking over my life while I took her spot in the cargo plane tomorrow, the grave in Boston. A change in narration—Eva Glasper narrating my life from now on, starting right now, this very evening. Would I even notice? Would she have to be me, or would she bring herself and all her knowledge about aeronautical engineering into my body with her? Would she love the same people I loved, or dismiss them and pick new ones, men and women I had never noticed? We heard the clicking sound again.

I’ve always wanted to try, came a thought (mine or hers?)

a different body.

I picked up the notebook I’d left by her side, worried but also oddly thrilled by the possibility that its contents might suddenly make sense to me. Because I had become her, or she had become me. But it was all still gibberish.

The mortician knocked, and let me know she’d soon have to put Eva Glasper’s body back in the cold. She saw the notebook in my hands and said, “I read to them sometimes, too.”

She was holding a magazine in her right hand and gave it a shake, as if to prove her assertion.

“I wasn’t reading to her, I—” I looked down at the notebook and closed it. “Here, will you add this to her personal items?”

The mortician came closer, but didn’t grab the notebook. She looked like she’d been crying.

“I can’t add anything,” she said. “All her stuff is in a sealed bag. I can’t mess with it. You’ll have to send it to the family yourself.”

Perhaps she was still crying.

“Or keep it,” she added. “She’s not going to need it.”

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She said she could give me five more minutes, and I assumed she would leave the room again, but she sat across from me, on the other side of Eva Glasper, and started reading her magazine. The way she’d folded it, I could make out that she was reading an article about Thomas Pesquet, the French astronaut. The famous photograph of Pesquet reading “The Little Prince” in the International Space Station illustrated it. He was going to space again in a few weeks. The mortician sniffled softly.

“I hate Thomas Pesquet,” I said, trying to cheer her up. “He’s smart and good-looking, and, what, he gets to leave Earth whenever he wants, too? How lucky can a person get?”

For some reason, this made the mortician cry harder. Her name was Romy.

“I’m sure he worked very hard to get where he is,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not sure exactly what I was apologizing for. “You’re right.”

I looked at Eva Glasper’s face, the eyes so still under their lids. She’d had an opinion on Thomas Pesquet, I assumed, just yesterday. An opinion on the whole space program. Now fixed. Now unchangeable.

“It must be hard, working here,” I said to Romy, who’d got up from her chair to blow her nose. “It must get lonely.”

Romy said she loved being alone. Her boyfriend had just broken up with her, and that was hard on her ego, of course, that was why she was fragile right now, but really the idea of being on her own again was alluring, badass, even, she said—she used the English word.

“I’m sorry you had to see this, though,” she added. “I don’t usually cry in front of strangers.”

“No need to apologize.”

“I like to think I’m prepared for the bad stuff,” she said. “I mean, I work here. I’ve seen it all. But, you know, life can still surprise you. I guess that’s a good thing?”

She said she’d seen many people come here over the years, to see family members one last time, and that most of them didn’t talk to her, but that some did, and either said things like I always knew something like this would happen or I didn’t even know anything like this could happen, and it was hard to know who was better off, those who’d always known and to some extent prepared for the bad thing to happen, or the unprepared.

“The bad thing happens regardless,” she said.

She put her magazine down and offered me a KitKat bar.

“I think the unprepared are better off,” I said, declining the KitKat.

“All that tells me about you is that you’re the preparing kind.”

She chewed her KitKat for a while. I admired people who chewed their food extensively; I found them patient and serious. I often swallowed things whole. I’d scratched my throat on pointy bread crumbs many times—my pharynx had to be all scar tissue. I wondered if Romy would ever work on someone she knew, a friend’s body, an acquaintance. Perhaps she’d work on me when I died, if I died in Paris.

“You said you read,” I said, “but do you ever talk to them?”

“The bodies? Of course I do. I talked to her all afternoon.”

She put a hand on Eva Glasper’s hair.

“Do you ever take photos of them?”

It was something I’d wanted to do when my mother had died. I’d had the thought that it would help me down the line, to remember that she was truly gone, but I’d known not to ask my father.

“Sometimes I have to, for legal,” Romy said. “But mostly no. I don’t do weird shit. I don’t even tell them jokes. You have to act as if someone’s always watching.”

“Like God?”

“More like cameras,” she said.

“Are there? Cameras?”

I must’ve looked alarmed, because she burst out laughing and said, “I knew it! I knew you were going to do some weird shit. You left something on her body, didn’t you? Did you hide some state secret? A microchip in her mouth?”

On my way home, I passed a movie theatre that occasionally went all night on Fridays, for Horror Night, New Hollywood Night, Rom-Com Night, whatever they had on hand. For eighteen euros, they played three or four films back to back and served you breakfast in the morning. Today, because it was late September and the universities were again in session, the theme was “Back to School,” a triple feature for students and the nostalgia-ridden: “The Graduate,” “Wonder Boys,” and “The Social Network.” I went in. There were short breaks between the movies, for people to go to the bathroom or step out for a cigarette, but I stayed in my seat. I wanted the movies to blend together.

I didn’t stay for breakfast. I didn’t want to discuss the movies with strangers. I’d discussed them all with my father already, long ago. My opinions of them hadn’t changed. I went to a nearby café, sat on the terrace. Reading the Times on my phone, I learned that, at some point while I was watching “Wonder Boys,” Hurricane Jared had made landfall in Florida. They were starting to tally the cost of the damage.

An American couple and their daughter sat a few tables away, and I listened to their conversation. They were loud enough for that. They’d been in Paris for two days, they knew how to order coffee now—she wanted a grand crème and he an allongé. They’d seen the Rodin Museum and the Orsay. They would shop across the street at Le Bon Marché after breakfast and take a cruise on the Seine in the afternoon. It sounded nice to be in Paris on vacation.

I watched a plane fly a few thousand feet above us and pondered this discrepancy, that there was little in life more stressful than being on an airplane, and little so soothing as watching one at cruising altitude from below—the possibilities! The miracle of human engineering! Where could the plane be going? It was too early for it to be the one that carried Eva Glasper’s body.

The café was relatively empty, and the waiter, perhaps envisioning an American tip, asked the family if they were enjoying Paris so far. The father said he was learning a lot. The Arenas of Lutetia had left quite an impression on him. To think that the Roman Empire had spread all the way up here, that maybe he’d been walking the same ground as Julius Caesar . . . how wild, he said. It now made sense to him that Europeans and Americans should be so different, have such different approaches to life and time. How could they not?

It used to embarrass me when Americans in Europe said out loud what everyone else had noticed or thought about before but deemed too obvious to share. I thought Europeans were already convinced we were idiots—there was no need to give them more ammunition. Over time, though, I’d realized that it wasn’t so much that Europeans thought we were idiots as that they understood us to be simply less ashamed than they were, and, in the end, I’ve concluded they’re jealous of our confidence. Our belief that, maybe, we were the first to have thought of something, that we might ever say something new. The confidence could play against us, too. It grated on people. Bar fights could erupt in the Latin Quarter because an American had talked too much. (I’d repatriated many victims of bar fights over the years.) I hoped the American family would keep enjoying their Paris trip and nothing would happen to them. Perhaps it was to make sure of that that, after they’d settled the bill, I waited a few minutes and followed them into Le Bon Marché. I kept my distance, but I followed.

I followed them first to the toy section, which looked more like an art installation, plush toys hanging from the ceiling, exploded Lego structures under glass cases. The daughter was afraid to touch anything.

“Do they actually sell sets here?” I heard the father say.

The for-sale Lego boxes were indeed quite concealed, piled deep under the display tables.

“It’s like they’re ashamed to admit they want our money,” the mother said.

I followed them through the shoe section after that, through purses, through cosmetics. I heard the lady at the Chanel counter ask the mother, in English, if she and her daughter would like to have their makeup done. The mother looked hurt to have been recognized as so obviously American, but she said, “Yes, why not?” The Chanel lady sat the girl and her mother in high chairs, and started working on their faces simultaneously, like a chess grandmaster.

The father, knowing he was in for a twenty-minute wait at least, started looking around for ways to pass the time. He noticed me. “You were next to us at the café!” he said. He didn’t seem to find that odd. Not for a second did he think that a stranger could’ve followed his family around. It was all a fun coincidence to him, probably meaningful. I felt guilty for following them. If he asked what I was doing in Paris, I was ready to answer that I was here for the aerospace conference, to show him Eva Glasper’s pen and notebook as proof, but instead he asked what I was doing in the department store. I was shopping for my own wife and daughter, I told him. I was going home tomorrow, had been here on business—the girls would want something from France. He asked how old my daughter was. With all the lies I’d told so far, it’s hard to explain why this one gave me a hard time, but I froze. I couldn’t come up with a made-up age for my invented daughter. The man seemed to understand reasons for my silence that I couldn’t possibly have hinted at, and he patted me on the shoulder. We worried so much about our girls, he said, that we simply forgot to watch them grow. My daughter was probably two years older than I thought she was, he joked, before taking me around the jewelry section. I shouldn’t try to be too creative, according to him, I should just get her a simple necklace, a gold chain with a charm, the first letter of her name, perhaps? A timeless piece. I got out of Le Bon Marché five hundred euros lighter—just a touch more than what Lisa Glasper would’ve paid me had I accepted her money. A necklace for my daughter, a leather clutch for my wife.

I parted ways with the Americans on the sidewalk. The lady at the Chanel counter had made the girl look much older and her mother years younger, enhancing a feeling I’d had before, after staying too long in department stores, that these places were like busted time portals, that time moved differently there. Only the father had come out unchanged. We shook hands and wished each other a safe trip home, tomorrow for me, next Wednesday for his family. They should enjoy their time in Paris, I said, and he didn’t seem to have any doubt that they would. Nothing bad would happen to them, and they wouldn’t do anything stupid, either—nothing they wouldn’t be able to fix. I waited until they disappeared into the Métro to return my purchases. ♦