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Ren Ebel
I’m standing at the entrance of the Square des Missions-Étrangères, facing the bust of Chateaubriand. Michèle Bernstein, in a 1955 issue of Potlatch, once compared the statue to the god Terminus, protector of boundaries. A vertical black streak appears burned across Chateaubriand’s face, as if it were recently run over by a motorcycle. His eyes drift dreamily skyward. To my right, the “sheer wall” described by Bernstein as “black” and “ten meters high.” It has evidently undergone renovations since 1955. No longer black, it’s decorated with an enormous mural done in soft chalks or charcoal. The mural depicts a giant park bench identical to the real park bench below it. In the mural, the park bench is surrounded by trees, at the cusp of an endless empty field of gently swaying grass. It’s the Square des Missions-Étrangères as Heaven. This Heaven is empty.
Facing the playground is a covered concrete bunker, with a long wrap-around bench and little windows made of glass brick. Bernstein also noted this structure, describing it as, “a kiosk of great dignity.” Seated here, you have an unobstructed view of the playground and are comfortably shielded from the sun or rain. The playground was built to look like a giant sailboat. I’m sitting here in the bunker, facing the boat. I remember reading Chateaubriand’s father had once been the captain of a slave ship. It’s like I’ve crawled inside Chateaubriand’s head and am now looking out onto the relics of his abandoned childhood memories. A pale boy with a blond bowl cut and wearing a navy pea coat drowsily eyes his mother from the ship’s crow’s nest. His mother is seated next to me in the bunker, her nose in a thick book. Further down the bench from us, at the corner of the bunker, sit two men dressed as teenagers in grey puffers and too-tight sweatpants, drinking Tourtel Twists and laughing loudly at a music video playing from a scuffed up android phone. Suddenly they stop laughing, their expressions turning pained and serious. They leave in a hurry.
I pass a basketball game in progress and exit the square via Rue de la Planche. Pleasantly colored bollards stick up out of the ground like huge enamel children’s toys. A short dead-end street faces an impressive, gated private garden. Within it, an enormous tangle of vines reminds me of a creature lifting itself up from the earth. A golden placard in front of me reads “AVOCAT.” The street is pleasant: quiet and cloistered. I head in the direction of, I think, the Seine (my phone is dead), and hit an unpleasantly crowded street that turns out to be Raspail. I cross quickly to a smaller, drabber street with jackhammered sidewalks and boutique shop windows sampling that exquisitely bad taste only found in Paris. A left on Rue de la Chaise. Blank, sand-colored walls. Quiet. Only a few cyclists. The rain lets up a little. Turning the corner, the subdued ugliness of a Paul Simon display inserts itself into view. The shop’s insides are draped in teal suede, evoking a Midwest funeral parlor.
Like an insect to filth, I’m drawn to an art bookstore across the street. I browse the window for a sign of something that’s meant for me, anything that might re-affirm some of the life choices I’ve made. A brown baseball cap and matching notebook decorated with ambiguous, vaguely anti-AI slogans: “Think outside the bot,” “I’ve been upgraded to artist.” A 10,000-piece puzzle of a map of Milan. Ceramics. A coffee table book of queer photography. The only remotely appealing item is a bottle of walnut-colored Amaro Tonico that was distilled, according to the label, by Tuscan monks. The next block is mostly empty, everywhere an air of bleak affluence. A shattered looking woman with short grey hair clutching a Louis Vuitton purse ushers her adult daughter and sleeping infant grandchild out of an apartment and into a pristine forest-green Jaguar. A young Russian couple, dressed as if modeling for a perfume ad, pose in front of a Saint Laurent store.
Rue de Sèvres becomes Rue du Four and intersects with four other one-way streets. It’s a mad scene of honking, shouting, scooters weaving through taxis, delivery trucks and hesitant pedestrians attempting to cross. Presiding over this chaos is a positively psychotic looking bronze sculpture of a centaur. It’s done in that recognizable junkyard style favored, I’ve noticed, by a lot of European public sculpture made around the 80s and early 90s for some reason. The centaur’s body parts are represented by welded-together bits of scrap metal and miscellaneous objects: machine parts, broom handles, kitchen utensils, etc. A placard beneath the sculpture reads, simply, “Cèsar. ‘Centaur.’ 1988.” Standing beneath the intimidatingly raised man-hoof, I’m surprised by the artist’s decision to give his creature two sets of genitalia. The first, made from what looks like two antique weight balls and the caster-wheel leg of a cocktail trolley, hangs modestly between the front two (human) legs, while, beneath the hind (horse) half of the centaur, a much larger, bionic cock fashioned from interlocking metal apertures points ominously at the viewer like a high-voltage security device.
I’m slipping away down Rue Cherche-Midi with the growing sense I’m going the wrong way. There’s a frame shop, its broad windows decorated with New Yorker-style cartoons done in ink and watercolor. Across the street, passing in the opposite direction, a bald man in a tattered trench coat carries a neon-orange Nerf rifle. He smiles at me maniacally, winking as if to say he knows my secret. He cocks the gun, points it at his own head and, with a sickening spring-and-plastic click, pulls the trigger.
A chocolatier, a few more boutiques (closed on Sundays), a Compagnie du Lit. I cross another busy street which I have the suspicion is Raspail again, in which case I’ve made a tight circle and am now walking back toward where I began. An upscale mochi shop (open but empty), a florist, a fruit seller. The street becomes crowded with tourists. A bustling bar (Cafe Le Rousseau). A real estate office advertising charming, cramped apartments for one million, two million, three million euros. The next block is mostly little shops: doomed new boutiques, and otherwise empty or abandoned storefronts. A garage door has been painted in patches of beige and white, over which someone has graffitied a dung pile swarming with flies. It’s kind of a beautiful composition, taken all together.
Rue Cherche-Midi unravels its relentless corridor of Hausmannian facades, curving off to the left before revealing yet another identical block. I’ve lost all sense of direction now. I turn a corner and then, like a bolt from the blue, the tip of the Eiffel Tower pierces the rooftops straight ahead. Relieved, I now know where I am. I’ve drifted far from the Seine and have been walking, unknowingly, homeward. Down the street, on the opposite side, I recognize the waffle-like glass paneling of Necker Children’s Hospital. I was in this very same spot about a week ago, meeting a stranger from Leboncoin. I bought his Magic Bullet for 15 euros, having talked him down from 20.
Saint-Sulpice → Rennes
Leaving Mabillon, I pass a woman who looks exactly like a college professor I had years ago in San Diego. A dark-haired photographer from New York who taught a mostly aimless, yet ultimately formative, intro video art class embarrassingly called “Media Sketchbook.” Could it have been her?
I reach Rue Saint-Sulpice and realize with frustration that I urgently need to pee. The street spills out onto the Place Saint-Sulpice and my eyes narrow like a hawk’s as I scan the square for one of those shiny, emerald public toilettes that sometimes appear like a magical mirage just when needed. I’m fooled by decoys: a newspaper kiosk (closed), a green generator box, an elevator entrance to an underground parking lot. I’m overjoyed when I spot two plastic portable toilets set up near the steps of the church. But when I reach them, I find they are both padlocked shut. “Monsieur s’il vous plaît.” An irritated voice comes from behind as two workers push past me. Before my eyes, they hoist the toilets on to an oversized handcart and wheel it over to a mini flatbed truck loaded with an assortment of portable toilets and urinals, each padlocked and strapped down to the truck bed. My bladder throbs.
I remember seeing a bathroom through the window of a boulangerie back by the metro station. I cut my losses and begin looping back around the church toward Mabillon. The boulangerie is crowded. There’s a slow line at the register and everywhere a confused scattering of metallic tables and chairs which seem too small to accommodate the clambering, complaining tourists still wearing their oversized winter coats and hats. I slink through the chaos to the bathroom. The door opens onto a tiny chamber with a dripping sink and a second door which is locked. I stand awkwardly in this damp closet until I hear the toilet flush and a woman — coincidentally the same woman I saw on the street just moments ago — emerges, startled to find me looming over the toilet door. She is not my former professor from San Diego.
Back on the street, with a café allongé to go, I restart my walk from the beginning. Having relieved myself, I notice my field of vision has changed, relaxed into something more Zen, egalitarian. I regret buying this horrible coffee. I did it just to be nice. No one cares.
Alongside the church, someone has dumped what appears to be the broken scenery and stage dressing of a religious school play. Raymond Pettibone-like black and white illustrations (a cloud, an angel, a sword) printed on large pieces of foamcore. Several massive rolls of bright orange fabric lean against the wall. At my feet, a section from a larger portrait showing just a lower jaw, a tip of a nose, the edge of a smile, the name “Carlos” printed beneath.
I walk toward the fountain. It must have rained during the brief time I was in the boulangerie. Everything’s wet and the air is frigid. I pass the Café de la Mairie, where Georges Perec sat in 1974, scanning the square and logging every detail in An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. I look around me at the depleted square. If not Perec, it appears someone has successfully exhausted it.
Aside from some rainwater gathered at the bottom of its lower basin, the fountain is dry. Two smaller basins sit stacked within the larger, out of which rises a rectangular structure with a domed roof, each of its carved sides depicting a seated male figure. The four giants sit like resigned gods, their heads and shoulders given passively over to the two or three hundred roosting pigeons which seem to rule the Place Saint-Sulpice. The fountain’s other decorative carvings (four prone lions, Grecian urns with enraged human faces that vomit dead ivy) are eroded, caked in mossy dirt. Occasionally one pigeon dives down among the wires and rusted spotlights of the lower basin to drink from the green pool of stagnant water. A few crows hop along the middle of the fountain, glancing conspiratorially at the pigeons.
Near me on the pavement, a slumped-over pigeon’s carcass is being pecked apart by an oily crow twice its size. A woman in a blue wool coat stops at the fountain to pose for a photo taken by her stocky, bearded husband in aviator sunglasses. They head inside the church. I inch toward the dead bird to get a load of the carnage. A second couple walk slowly backwards across the square. The man is a slim, clean-cut South American tourist in a leather jacket. He points his phone up at Saint-Sulpice. As they attempt to fit the entire church into his camera frame, the man and his girlfriend, who clings to him, shivering in glamorous heels and a thin transparent raincoat, back slowly in the direction of the fountain. I see immediately that they are on a collision course with the dead pigeon. Should I warn them? What should I say? In which language? It’s too late. I turn away in time to hear the woman shriek, and the two scramble off toward the Café de la Mairie to find something with which to wipe bird gore from a stiletto. Alone again, I get a closer look at the bird. In all the action, the pigeon’s neck and head have flopped over to one side, revealing the sinister work of the crow: a perfect hole bored clean through a tiny, brainless skull.
The square is now empty again. Beyond the fountain toward the church, two dog walkers — an older man in a black overcoat and a middle-aged woman in running shoes cross paths and stop, entangled in each other’s leashes. Between them I count five Bichon Frises (two dressed in miniature raincoats) and an overexcited labradoodle with a bandaged front paw. The labradoodle barks savagely at a passing English bulldog, which pays it no attention in return. A boy, five or six years old, wheels his scooter up beside me, drawn in, like me and, it seems, everyone who passes through the square, by the gravitational pull of the dead pigeon. “Mathieu!” His mother calls him sharply. He wheels away, eager to tell her what he's just seen.
A muscular man in a heather grey Star Wars sweater climbs up onto the ledge of the fountain, instructing his girlfriend to get a low angle shot of him with the church in the background. He spreads out his arms in a king of the world-style pose. The church’s two mismatched towers — and in fact the whole façade — give off an eerie hollowness, the receding colonnade like the mise en abyme created between mirrors. The man howls and leaps down from the fountain, his foot just barely grazing (I can’t believe it) the dead pigeon.
It begins to rain lightly. Feeling chilly, I head inside the church. Within the first chapel, to the left of the entrance, two replicas of the shroud of Turin are displayed in polished, heavy oak frames. Unlike the linen and rust-stain color seen in photos, these shrouds have been reproduced as a sort of negative of the original: a black background with cloudy white blotches. At the center of each glows the ghostly impression of a cartoon Christ standing bashfully amid the Rorschach-like forms. These monochrome, tie-dye tapestries might’ve been made by Paul Thek in the 60s. They’re trippy, beautiful, funny, scary. Great art, in other words.
The sound of shushing echoes around the cavernous nave. I pass the confessional booth. Through the slitted window I see a priest wearing a purple sash. A chin-doubling grin spreads across his face, his cheeks bright red. He nods encouragingly to the person seated across from him. Outside the booth, in a waiting area lined with uncomfortable-looking wooden chairs, a blonde woman sits tapping her foot and twirling her frizzy hair with a finger, casting nervous glances at the slow-moving stream of tourists who regard her as if she were a dummy in a museum diorama.
A speaker plays pre-recorded prayers from on high. Some people stand at alters or light votives. Others take photos. Back at the entrance, a heavily-cologned Italian man in ripped, acid wash jeans kneels, giving the sign of the cross before walking toward the confessional. A Chinese tourist behind me whispers, “Da Vinci Code.” I leave the church.
I make a left down Rue Palatine. The dim light from within the church casts shadows of the various saints onto the large windows above. They’re like giant frozen mannequins. Across the street is a church boutique of some kind. In the window hangs a hand-painted sign made to look like a scroll of parchment. Written at the top, in calligraphy: “666 Mark of the Beast.” Right on Rue Servandoni, an extremely pleasing street with a narrow, winding stone path. Silhouettes appear in every window: crooked venetian blinds, a tilted yucca plant pressing its limp blades against glass. I pass under some scaffolding. To my right, the Museum of Languages.
Two elderly American couples walk down the center of the street toward the church. The wives walk together ahead of the husbands, who trail behind. “It reminds me of Venice, the little roads,” says one of the women. As the men pass, I hear one utter to the other, his voice trembling between each word: “The – Civil – Liberties – Union.”
I reach the edge of the Jardin de Luxembourg just as the streetlights blink on. I walk along the park behind a young, chic couple dressed in black. They hold hands while bickering with each other as they walk. Suddenly angered by something, the woman pulls her hand away, slapping the back of his hand hard before taking it again in her own. He whines in pain. She pulls his hand to her mouth and kisses it gently. Two gendarmerie pass, clutching submachine guns.
I reach a gate, but the garden is closed. Beyond the gate, an infinite corridor of trees dissolving into amber mist. I head in the direction, I think, of the 10, passing a warmly lit bookstore on the corner of Rue Guynemer and Rue de Fleurs. Inside, a well-dressed clerk stands at the center of the shop, his face covered by the cardboard box he’s holding. Around him, the shelves are strangely empty of books. I pass a daycare. Beyond the foggy glass I can see a small wooden pen filled with infants, some standing, some slumped on the rug. A tired young woman attempts to lead the children in a song. She rests her head on her hands, miming “sleep.”
On Rue de Fleurs, I’m surrounded by roving gangs of identically-dressed ten-year-old boys on scooters. A hotel is lit up for the evening. There are a few closed bakeries. A modern hipster café called Judy. A chef stands outside a swanky restaurant, on his break. He smokes as a delivery truck pulls up beside a taxi, honking manically. I pass the taxi and see a fat, elderly man in the backseat in a heated discussion with the driver. A line of people are waiting for the 83 bus. A right on Rue d’Assas. A medical center. A hearing aid store. A lice removal boutique called the Institute of Lice. Crossing Rue de Vaugirard, turning to my left, the empty avenue before me dematerializes into something totally without character. A cardboard prototype of Paris.
Lost again, I spend time wandering around Rue de Rennes. I stop at a flower shop that is closing for the night. I browse the wooden rack of bouquets on sale at half price. I take two (white and peach-colored daisies) and get in line. I regret this decision when I see the two burnt-out clerks rushing to fill a complicated order. I wait. A little Bluetooth speaker on a plastic shelf nearby plays a familiar song from the early 2000s: Ooh, I like it like that. She workin' that back. I don't know how to act. Slow motion for me, slow motion for me, slow motion for me…
Petite Palais → Place Vendôme
I chat outside the Petite Palais with an American friend who’s in town for Art Basel. He and I were once closer than brothers, but we’ve become estranged over the years. He still lives in LA, making, by the looks of it, good money in real estate. I left six years ago and am still about as broke as I was in California. We both have children now.
My friend’s wife is across the street at the fair, showing work with a gallery. She’s been making abstract paintings that resemble computer processors or alien tombs — a Gigeresque, techno-goth aesthetic that’s become popular. I last saw the two of them in Paris a couple years ago when she was showing work at an artist-run space in the Marais. The show had ended in disaster with the organizers pulling the plug just two days after the opening. According to my friend, there had been a disagreement about the biblical references his wife wanted to include in her press release, followed by a drunken confrontation with some Russians who showed up at the opening. The last time I saw my friend, he was plotting his revenge on the gallery. He’d asked me if I knew any art lawyers in Paris. I told him I didn’t.
My friend and I met here to see a show of paintings by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. A decade ago, when he and I were a pair of self-righteous undergraduate stoners, a beloved art professor once gave a series of feverish lectures on Greuze: the tender portraits of solemn children, the subterranean scenes of screeching family psychodrama, the girls mourning their dead pet birds. As we walk the dim galleries, my friend asks me if I’ve heard about the Fourth Turning. He tells me about meeting Curtis Yarvin (he was unimpressed). I’m not eager to talk politics, and now everything is politics. Thankfully, the paintings are here. One particularly deranged tableau of maternal shame involving a basket of broken eggs, leaves me dumbstruck. Contemporary art is always so anxious to remind us that adults are really children. Greuze claims the opposite, and it feels truer. I’ll admit, though, I’m curious to see Alex Da Corte’s giant inflatable Kermit the Frog which is apparently floating over the Place Vendôme.
As my friend and I say our goodbyes, he tells me that he has a second child on the way. A warm feeling. I touch his shoulder, we laugh, and he separates from me, weaving through the food trucks and throngs of fashionable art people gathered by the Grand Palais for the fair. I head north.
The art crowd thins out near the entrance to the Jardin des Champs-Élysées. I find the park surprisingly empty. A slim gay guy in leather boots, chaps and a cowboy hat treads in small circles across the lawn, his phone pressed to his ear, an incredulous look on his face. I follow a deserted walkway, turning the corner. Two Japanese women in anime costumes come strutting down the shaded path as a man in an oversized hoodie follows closely behind, crouching low, filming them with an iPhone mounted to a handheld gimbal.
I leave the park and make a right on Avenue Gabriel, passing the Palais de l’Élysée. Armed guards stand motionless inside cramped black booths spaced about a block apart along the avenue. I pass the U.S. embassy and the Hôtel de Crillon where several paparazzi stand waiting near the heavily guarded doors. I watch the clientele coming and going. Many are, predictably, the elderly rich, decrepit, half-mummified in their gaudy vestiges, faces wilting with dissatisfaction. Others milling around inside appear to be drably dressed tourists. How, I wonder, were they allowed in?
A left on Rue Saint-Florentine, a right on Rue Saint-Honoré. A teenager on a moped nearly plows into a crowd of jaywalking Germans. Confused shouting. The fortified storefront windows are filled with watches, purses, shoes. Clouds of cigarette smoke float along the sidewalk. In the window of a Fendi store, a 25,000 euro handbag designed to look like a teddy bear.
A wet wind picks up and I’m caught in the thrust of heavy foot traffic down Rue Saint-Honoré. I’ve discovered the opposite of wandering now. The avenue pulls me along it, like those thousands of underground sewers beneath Paris, each built on an incline. Gravity does the work.
I arrive at Place Vendôme. The giant Kermit has been mostly deflated, likely due to the bad weather. Its limp limbs have been folded into the balloon-like abdomen, which is still partially inflated and tethered by various cables and straps to heavy cinder blocks on the ground. On the other side, Kermit’s twisted eyes peak out like bent antennae. Several armed men stand around, Lilliputians guarding their mutilated captive. They scowl at me from beyond a low metal fence while I take pictures with my phone.
Bois de Boulogne → Charles Michel → Bois de Boulogne
Mabillon → Le Trou des Halles
Inexplicable ad above the doors of the metro: an aerial photo of a Formula 1 racer, a portrait of a smiling athlete, the words “cyber-attack.” The accordionist at the end of the crowded train glances at me as he plays. He flashes me a grateful look because I’m the only one watching or because he expects I will give him some change. I pinch two 20-cent coins together at the bottom of my pocket. But when the train stops, about a dozen passengers flood his side, forcing me off on mine. In the station, a worker on a ladder pastes over an old advertisement, covering a golden tumbler of whiskey with the slogan “0%, €0.”
On the street outside Café Huguette, a life-size animatronic polar bear waves meekly from behind a crop of fake Christmas trees. A slim, well-dressed businessman leaving a Carrefour is suddenly called back inside (his card declined, a problem with the machine). Two American expats in their mid-forties, likely New Yorkers, are chatting on the street. One of the women, wearing a headscarf and pushing a green Vélib, says to the other: “I’ve been to the osteopath four times now. This thing is getting fucking expensive.”
On my left is rue Jacob, a long, crooked street that extends appealingly into the distance toward the 7th arrondissement. On the corner near me is a bust of Canadian astrophysicist Hubert Reeves, eyes floating in galaxies of etched bronze wrinkles. Several pharmacies surround me with their blinking green signs. I pass a small gallery specializing in aboriginal art. Another gallery with tastefully framed impressionist sketches. Another gallery dedicated to African traditional sculpture. Another gallery filled with Eurotrash pop (on the wall, shiny skateboards; in the window, a huge lenticular photo portrait of David Bowie, whose face changes expressions as you walk by). A few more galleries of the kind not worth mentioning.
A right at La Palette and I head toward La Monnaie. My eye catches another gallery and I realize the show is by an LA artist whose work I generally like. I go in, but the show is disappointing. The drawings are almost exclusively caricatures of the president and his cronies — a perverse obsession with Trump’s appearance that grips the imagination of certain older liberals in ways I don’t fully understand. The one piece I do like is the least explicit: a sketch of a hand yanking a rabbit from a magician’s hat.
Rue Guénégaud empties onto the Seine and I make a right toward Pont Neuf. The enormous Saint Laurent ad towering over the intersection depicts a woman in a dark leather jacket and sunglasses, posed gawking with hand on hip, as theatrically mean as the rich villain in a high school romcom. A cold wind blows over the bridge. The muddy water of the Seine ripples pleasantly below. Couples sit along the riverside, braving the cold in thick parkas, defiantly romantic. I’m almost sideswiped by a bus while crossing the street, and for a split second come face-to-face with a glowering, curly-haired teen wielding a magic knife on the bus ad for a new Percy Jackson movie. A group of Irish tourists pass, remarking on the trompe-l’œil scrim which covers some nearby scaffolding and reproduces, in full-scale photograph, the façade of the boutique it is blocking. One of the men pulls at the scrim’s elastic, causing the boutique windows to droop slightly like in a cartoon. The man’s wife shouts, “Stop it Liam!” At the end of the bridge, I look out toward Pont Marie. It is now bitterly cold. Below me a group of retirees, each wearing a VR headset and standing hands-on-shoulders in conga line formation, are being led slowly underneath the bridge by a gum-chewing tour guide in a baseball cap.
The holiday window display at Louis Vuitton is surprisingly tasteful. Armed guards stand at the door. I cross Rivoli toward les Halles. At the foot of the entrance to Forum des Halles stands a red storage unit decorated with colorful images of African wildcats. Behind it, the faded wrought-iron gate is designed to look like tallgrass blowing in the breeze. An urban savannah. I overhear a young boy ask his father how long a grenade takes to explode after you’ve pulled out the pin. “Four or five seconds,” he replies without hesitation.
I head toward the Bourse de Commerce. At this point I likely won’t ever see the Minimalism show that’s been up for a month. I guess I won’t be missing much. A police car cruises very slowly along the pedestrian walkway. The car is crammed with cops, and they appear to be searching for someone. I duck under some low-hanging branches at the edge of the empty playground. I discover a short Indian man hidden there, kneeling among the dead leaves, on a video call with his wife. The playground is empty. The sign on the gate reads, “Le Terrain d’Aventures. Sessions of 55 minutes. Children only, parents not admitted.” Inside, several pod-like structures rise from the padded rubber ground, encircled by long, curving metal slides. There is a rainbow bridge and a cave made of false rock. The playground resembles the ape enclosure of an abandoned zoo. Strangely, there is a small office within the locked perimeter of the playground. The lights are on inside, and through a small window I glimpse a woman seated alone at a desk, a desk lamp, an old telephone.
Evening falls. The spotlights on Saint-Eustache illuminate the menacing flying buttresses of its gothic façade. All this black doom and terror looms over the church’s warm little entryway, which glows like an ember in the dark. It is an architectural philosophy in stark contrast to that of the Westfield Forum des Halles to the right. The mall’s undulating canopy is weightless, horizontal, a fold of alien kelp hovering innocuously over the big pit.
The pit extends underground beneath my feet. This hollow plateau was once the outdoor market of Les Halles, paradigmatic laboratory of the Situationist dérive, where Abdelhafid Khatib, in the pages of Internationale Situationniste no. 2, once envisioned a future of “perpetually changing labyrinths,” “liberated collective life” and “a theme park for the ludic education of workers,” before he was arrested, mid-essay, for loitering. In the 70s, the market was demolished and replaced by the pit, Le Trou des Halles. This concrete inferno now contains a shopping mall, two movie theaters, a swimming pool and the largest intermodal transit hub in Europe. I want to throw myself into it. Be swallowed by it. But first, the Lego store.
Amid shiny stanchions and velvet rope stands a line of people waiting to enter the new Krispy Kreme donut shop. I note with disappointment that the long down escalator is out of order. Rather than be lowered into the pit — cinematically, elegiacally — I will have to stumble clumsily down into it when it’s time to go home. For now, I circle the mezzanine to the other side and enter the Lego store. It’s bright, crowded with tourists and holiday shoppers. I check my phone for the photos of the Legos my daughter wants. I see none of them here. I settle on a Lego Friends “Soirée Cinema” set and a Hermione Granger minifigure keychain and I take my place in the line. At the register, the English-speaking cashier asks me to fill out an online survey about my experience at the Lego store. She says to please mention her name, which she writes on the back of my receipt in bubbly cursive. She has short blond hair, freckles, pale skin, glasses. She’s in her mid-twenties maybe. Her name is Gaëlle. She looks at me, her face kind and pleading, and says: “If enough people do it, I get a free Lego for Christmas.”
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