Vélibs of Death will create new opportunities for souvenir makers.
In Marianne’s kitchen, Karine and I, Marianne and Dominique were discussing under what circumstances we would choose to leave the whips, scorns and fardels here-below for the Big D, that undiscovered bourn.
Marianne said, “I’ll be ready when I realize I can’t ride a bike any more.”
Marianne has many faults, but lack of sense is not one of them. Her bicycle death-moment benchmark – mixing in equal measure the loss both of physical pleasure and of real autonomy – is yet another proof of her innate and solid wisdom.
You will feel this yourself, perhaps, when you understand that my own death-moment benchmark was “when I could could no longer bless l’être cher with an orgasm.”
“In such case,” I had declaimed, “The être must stab me dead without further ado. Quick killing, they say, is the best kind.”
Karine’s long, considering stare, which scares me, then finds my satiric eye.
Quelled, I conclude abruptly, a weak nod to an unreadable Dominique “Maybe there’s a market for the daggers. Surely there is, an untapped market…”
No matter how ticklish the situation, Marianne always knows when it’s best to quit. As if waiting half her life for the moment, she makes her own commonsensical bike benchmark.
The bike benchmark is the better bet. It would be the better investment, when set against daggers for stabbing for non-orgasm. For one thing, death by bike is easier to explain to a wider public –
I can see myself huffing and puffing up rue de Ménilmontant.
Suddenly, rationally, sanely, I realize that it is just no good, I won’t make it.
I realize I don’t even want to. It’s the river for me.
I turn the bike around and let it roll effortlessly downhill, feel a breeze picking up around my ears as my speed gets up.
Down, down the celebrated hill, racing dangerously down through the jumbled intersection of the north boulevard, rolling toward République, then suddenly jerking right and up to rue des Couronnes, sailing like a dervish past the Sufi bookshop then down into avenue Parmentier, flailing, a grosse patate, waving an unsteady and final salute to my Zumba girlfriends as I flit past the dance studio… Onto the rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, I smile a rakish smile at my adopted son – a bartender at a café squeezed between the up and down of that street – I zigzag through the clogged streets of the Marais, zipping between the 96 bus and the eternal delivery van on the rue des Filles de Calvaire.
The city can pay for Vélibs of Death without a significant contribution by upping replacement costs for used Vélibs, maxxing out user credit cards and pursuit of survivors.
Finally, I flash across the rue de Rivoli, clattering heavily onto rue François Miron and then slide down into that little street with the Catholic auberge and the monastery shop, the one behind the back porch of the big damp-looking church – Saint Gervais?
There, in plain view of the café terrace gorged with lunching tourists and taking on a bit of élan de fin de vie, I jerk the bike up into a soaring wheely, tumbling high over the traffic on the Quai Louis Philippe to plunge helpless toward the churning waters of the Seine.
I open my eyes wide in puzzled dismay as the door to the bourn se découvre. Then I smack a passing barge, snapping my neck, lose all sensibility.
It’s all over. A quick kill.
The best death for this, the best of lives.
But don’t let it be said that even the best death fantasy can stop a spiritual son of Ralph Kramden from seeing a hare-brained business opportunity.
First, I prove I’m smart. There’s a public-private partnership angle in the bike benchmark, see.
You use Vélibs, Paris’ rent-as-you-need bicycles, as the method of choice in cheap, quasi-legal, assisted suicide for those who can’t afford to go to Switzerland. Vélibs of Death, we can call them.
Then I show that I’ve thoroughly studied the question.
Tourists seeking the undiscovered bourn get their bikes down in the flats, in the Champs Elysées, for instance. Trained Evaluators or gypsy kids with time on their hands, can, against a generous tip, give an expert opinion on the death candidate’s cycling capacity. Or just help him or her walk the machine up to Montmartre or in the heights of Belleville or Ménilmontant or another suitably high Paris hill. As needed.
Marketing. With a little breath of a discrete push from Zuckerberg’s guys, we can get the idea going viral.
Future prospects.
New types of skilled employment could take root as the Vélibs of Death become more popular.
Once up high, candidates might choose to reflect on their situation by a sit down on the steps of a cathedral, becoming ideal customers for itinerant recreational drink and drug sellers. Or they might choose to do updates of documents such as wills, or decide to inscribe their own tombstones with telling souvenir inscriptions such as Born in Podunk/Dead in Paris/Yahoo! with space for personalized information
Death candidates might not always be completely broken out of the wheel of life by the collision with Sequana’s celebrated waters. They might need a finishing blow. Private guards with solid coshes can patrol the banks of the river, collecting credit cards and cash, stunning those who may have survived and pushing them back into deeper water for the river patrol.
The development of high-value and labor-intensive gourmet restaurants specializing in last meals, last-gasp cafés, bars and smoking parlors all go without saying.
Bottom line, hard-headed realism.
Costs accrued by the city as well as profit and working capital needs can easily be met by raising replacement costs on Vélibs used as Vélibs of Death, maxxing out candidate credit cards and collecting interest on insurance policies frozen for investigation, as well as, of course, aggressively going after surviving relatives.
Then, as Mick Jagger sings, my investment opportunity power point is “Shaaaattteeeerrrred!” by Karine.
She is telling me that some fresh-faced boy has inveigled her into signing us both up to be in a TV audience. Just us. Neither Dominique nor Marianne have to go.
Being in a television studio audience is even more tiresome than television itself. The experience is proof, if proof were ever needed for anything, that one should also thank one’s lucky stars for all that one has not experienced.
The content of the TV program is – Synchronicity! – “Assisted Suicide.”
A grieving widower on a raised platform tells us how a quite run-of-the-mill surgical intervention on his late wife’s big toe wound up causing the woman several years, and several worlds, of unbearable, unquenchable, ceaseless pain.
Such was her misery, he said, and such became his compassion, he recounted, that he finally agreed to take her to Switzerland so she could put herself out of her misery.
This guy’s story seemed the worst kind of preternatural bad luck to me, but I wanted a professional assessment, so I turned to Karine and whispered what my thought.
She coolly tells me that this sort of spontaneous, monstrous, excruciating, bottomless pain happens more often than I might imagine. Her day job has made her an expert in human misery, so her remarks make me shudder with horror.
She squints at me.
She wonders aloud why the couple hadn’t gone to see a rebouteur, a healer? Did someone not tell them to try?
Not possible. Everybody with even half a brain, she whispers, realizes that nobody really knows anything at all. When you’re in a real, live pickle, she says, the instinct to survive pushes you to give new things a try, pushes you into the arms of the quacks even – but then what is a quack when nobody has answers?
“It never comes to your dumb little brain, mon cher, that maybe there is nothing undiscovered at all!” She points an accusing finger at the Opéra Garnier up ahead, then sweeps around a full 360° on her heel, hugging Heaven, Earth & Horizon to her.
“Your usual rip-it-out-and-sew-it-up medicine can’t do anything much about a lot of things, even most things. Even medical people know that,” she says.
“Did the couple refuse to consider alternatives? A healer’s a pretty no-lose bet, after all. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work and nobody’s worse off.”
She turns away and gives the grieving widower one of her long, considering stares, comes back to me to add, “I really wish I knew what’s going on there.”
She takes her hand out of mine and turns away again, listening intently to the back and forth of the guy and other guests and the presenter.
I stop paying attention, just clapping at prompted moments and continue to shudder over this new potential for misery that Karine has revealed to me.
We were walking up toward the Opéra station when we next spoke.
This type of pain from small pain, Karine says, seems to her to be a karmic thing.
“That’s why I wonder why,” she continues, “If they went through so much to get a special dispensation for pain drugs and all that, they didn’t go see a healer, too. Maybe they did and it didn’t help? But if the monsieur really wanted to justify himself, you’d think he’d say so if he had. T’es d’accord, hein?”
– I think it would be OK to kill yourself if you were in pain, I said. If I were that woman, I would have done it, would have begged for it.
“Even without going to see the rebouteur?”
– No, of course not. Bébé. I’d’ve had everything to gain and nothing to lose from doing everything I could possibly think of to solve my problem. But I wouldn’t hesitate to do me like she did if nothing else had worked.
But she isn’t listening to me. She says, “Isn’t it odd that some people don’t try to help themselves, mon Tracy? I mean, isn’t it odd to stick so much to your own way of seeing yourself that you won’t try another way, even if you pay for it with your life? Doesn’t it make you think there must be a reason for it? Honestly, it’s what makes me think there’s karma.”
– What makes you think it’s ‘karma’? How does that make sense? They just did what they thought was right, best. What else do you want? I say, ‘If a fool persist in his folly, he becomes wise, so let him.’
She grabs hold of my arm and stops us in the street.
“Not so,” she wags a finger in my face, “Karine Pleinsens, moi, je te dit, ‘If a wise man tries on the folly of another, just on the off chance, he will never be so stupid as if he had not done it.”
– What?
“You have said you shall ride your dumb bicycle into the Seine the day you realize you can’t ride it, mon Tracy.”
Tiny tears jump into her eyes. I had no idea.
“Besides having not thought of how much that might cost moi, Tracy, you do not, cannot, even know that there is your dumb undiscovered bourn out and beyond your last très, très dumb breath.”
The French adjective “époustouflé” pops into my head. The sound of it makes me think of surprise, hard rushing wind, hair standing on end, thyroid eyes, drawn cat claws…
“And what is your bet that it is not ‘karma’, mon Tracy? I shall tell you. Your bet is on your undiscovered bourn, like you dumb Hamlet, whom I despise, moi, him. What a milquetoast that man is, was! Acchh. Hamlet!”
She pauses and looks angrily around, as if someone has just told her work up a report on Hamlet for tomorrow morning, before continuing. “It never comes to your dumb little brain, mon cher, that maybe there is nothing undiscovered at all!”
She points an accusing finger at the Opéra Garnier up ahead, then sweeps around a full 360° on her heel, hugging Heaven, Earth & Horizon to her.
“Life goes on,” she says solemnly, “And goes on.”
In the mood for fat Japanese noodles. Mmmmm!
She puts a hand on my shoulder. “Go on, you, and ride your bicycle into the dumb Great Salt Sea if you want. Avoid your slings and your arrows and your scorns and your contumely and your fardels! But if you do, mon Tracy, I tell you right now, I think you will have to come back, you, and you will have to try again to bear them all and try again and try again until all your dumb fardels and all your dumb scorns are pretty sick and tired of you!”
– D’you think so? Do you really think so? I’ll have to come back and do it all again, even the math and metaphysics?
“All I can say is,” she replies, pulling me forward with little plucks to the shirt collar, “That my bet’s on being here and now, now and forever. And if karma is not true but all false, if death is truly all undiscovered as you stupidly believe and not just what we have left unfelt and unexplored, I believe, moi, So, what if it is? So what? So what? If it is, so what?”
She stomps her feet, one then the other, hard, smiles at me, says, “Call me Pascale! Hahaha! Au feminin! We gain so much by being here & now and together, through thick and thin, feeling and exploring! How can we really lose?”
She rubs her hands gleefully, “Are you in the mood for those fat Japanese noodles? Mmmm!”