Going to Paris

Going to Paris(Anthony Lawrence) “Going to Paris”
A short story
By Anthony Lawrence


“Happy Birthday, sweetie,” said the fingers of his mother’s right hand as she brought in the cake while holding it with her left. It was his favorite, chocolate fudge inside with butter pecan frosting. Michael was ten years old today and he felt kind of grown up. It was summer, the air was sweet and vacation was just around the corner. He was home with his parents and his best friend, Jerry, was also here to celebrate his birthday. He felt good but he didn’t feel safe.

He should have felt safe, but he didn’t. He was living in the “safest town in America.” The motto was all over their happy little community, on the sign that welcomed you to “Safety”, on the facade of the city hall, on just about every storefront, including Mr. Becker’s hardware store. They had re-named the town five years ago because of its unique and wonderful safety record. He couldn’t even remember the old name. But then, he was only five when it was changed, and when they had passed the new law that every man, woman and child over the age of ten must openly carry their weopons.

Since that time, everybody had been very proud of the town’s record. There was no corruption, no street crime, and no bullying in the schools. People felt safe in their homes, in their offices, in the stores and on the street. People all smiled as they met or passed each other walking along the sidewalks of the beautiful small town. They all openly carried their own personal weapon in holsters just like people did in the old west. It should have been a good place for Michael to live. So why didn’t he feel good? Why didn’t he feel safe? Why did he feel so scared all the time?

Maybe, Michael sometimes thought, people just pretended that they felt safe. Maybe down deep, they were all just afraid like him. After all, people never had claws or fangs or any kind of protection from the wild beasts that roamed the earth from the beginning of time. The only thing they had was a brain that made them smarter than all the animals. They used their brains to invent things, and guns and bullets were just something they invented to protect their lives and make them feel safe.

“Here you go, boy,” said the fingers of his father’s right hand as he passed a neatly wrapped present with his left. Michael reached out slowly for the gift. He knew what it was. He had known for a long time what would be coming. It was his tenth birthday, and this kind of gift had become part of the town’s tradition for as long as Michael could remember. Jerry had turned ten last year and he had gotten the same kind of gift. In fact, every boy and girl in the town received basically the same kind of gift when they reached their tenth birthday. But Michael’s smile was forced as he took the gift from his father’s hands. He saw the look of pride and anticipation on his father’s face and Michael was trying hard to seem happy and appreciative. But he could barely disguise his apprehension and his fear.

“Open it!” yelled Jerry’s fingers.

His mother and father eagerly joined in, expressing their approval through their grins and sign language. Michael tried to cover the slight trembling of his own fingers as he began to unwrap the somewhat heavy package. The knotted blue ribbon came off first, then the gift paper covered with colorful pastoral scenes of hunting dogs chasing a fox. Michael crumpled the paper and tore some of it, finally managed to expose the dark leather-covered box beneath, then slowly clicked a tiny lock and lifted the lid. For the moment, he hoped that he was wrong, and that inside the box would be a book that he could read, or a puzzle he could play with for the rest of the day.

But the gift was not any of those. It was a small but very real Rainbow Titanium P238 handgun with Michael’s name engraved into the baked-on finish above the stock. There was a box of.380 Ammo nearby, as well as a hand-stitched leather holster and child-size weapons belt. The handgun snuggled in its shaped red velour casing so seemingly benign, but Michael knew well its violent potential. He was not unfamiliar with guns. He had been taught to shoot by his father from the time he was five. He was quite a good shot too. His father was very proud of how well he did in the local gun club.

But despite his knowledge and ability with weapons, Michael was still very uncomfortable with them. Despite his father’s desire for him to enjoy shooting and the security of handling and owning weapons, Michael still felt fearful and uncertain in their presence. He simply concealed those feelings in order to please his father and to avoid the man’s wrath should Michael exhibit any signs of weakness ascribed to those who rejected guns as being necessary to personal and public security.
But his father was beaming as the boy stared down at the gun and tried to look and sound pleased. His father’s fingers couldn’t quite communicate everything to Michael, so he ended up speaking aloud right along with the sign language.

“Listen, kid, I’m an old fart. Blue, stainless, Parkerizing, I can get behind. But this baby just isn’t me. Then, I thought, hey, it might be perfect for Michael on his tenth. That .380 Ammo should be enough to give it a thorough wringing-out. It’s hard to come by these days, but fortunately I know a guy who works in the test-fire bay of the manufacturer. Now, go on out back and get a feel for how it shoots, okay?
Like most houses in the town, their house was set against the base of a large hillside. It allowed for a small shooting range in the backyard. The sound of gunfire in many other towns might be a cause for some concern, but here in “Safety”, it was simply reassuring. It was just somebody’s neighbor “wringing-out” their own personal weapon.

“Let me try it!” Jerry signed excitedly. But Michael knew it would not be prudent for his father to come out and see Jerry blasting away with the new birthday gift. Michael quickly loaded his heavy SIG pistol with .380 rounds, leveled it at the backyard target and, suppressing his deep anxiety, fired the automatic with accuracy quite extraordinary for a deaf ten-year-old boy who feared guns.

But then, it wasn’t really the gun itself that Michael feared the most. It was actually the Ammo, those smooth metal golden bullets that were the real cause of so much damage to whatever target the mind, the eye and the finger decided was their destiny. Michael had seen some of that damage up close and personal. Not just in the backyard or gun club targets, but in the deep forests where his father had shot deer and bear and the numerous small animals that had come innocently into view. He had also seen the results of those slender golden rounds when his father had dispatched an intruder whom he had encountered at night inside their house.

Michael had seen the blood and damage on all those occasions and, even though his father had reassured him that the killings were justified and a natural part of life, Michael could only wonder one thing. What happened to life when it was interrupted so swiftly by the flight of a golden bullet? Was it like when he went to sleep at night and dreamed? Or was it like what his mother, the eternal optimist, told him when he was just five-years-old, that whoever or whatever died went to someplace far across the sea, like London or Paris. Michael never forgot that, even later when others talked about heaven, he continued to think that heaven was Paris.

He had read about those places in school and at home. He was a very bright little boy, an obsessive reader, and he loved stories and books about Buckingham Palace where kings and queens lived, about the watery curtain called the Thames, and the seedy, dingy, dangerous shadow lands where Dickens killed off evil Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist. But then, where did Bill Sykes go after he was killed? Perhaps Bill went from London to Paris, Michael had thought, when he was staring down at the bloody corpse of that intruder the night his father had sent that man on his long and final journey. Perhaps he had gone where Bill Sykes had gone. Perhaps he had gone to Paris.

That must be a wonderful place, he had thought for quite a long time after that night. The “City of Lights” with its glistening Eiffel Tower finger pointing up at the sky. He had tried to forget about the intruder’s rendered flesh and the rivers of blood on the floor of their house by reading everything he could about Paris and the clear blue river called the Seine, about the museums and churches, the sculptures and the fountains. It seemed like a lovely place to go when one died, even if you were an animal or an intruder. And from the books that Michael read, it was clear that one could go there in time as well as in place.

It was the older Paris of Victor Hugo that he loved so intensely, the time and place of Quasimodo, the deaf and deformed bell-ringer of Notre Dame. Like Michael, the hunchback could hear nothing, not the bells or thunder in the sky, not footsteps or gunfire, or the laughter of the people when he was crowned as the Pope of Fools. Michael really didn’t know who Victor Hugo was, nor did he care that Esmeralda, the beautiful Gypsy with the kind and generous heart, was just part of a story. Michael only knew that he loved and thought a great deal about her and was thrilled that Quasimodo had saved her from death by hanging.

Michael wasn’t ugly and deformed like the famous hunchback, but he was deaf, barely verbal, and his father often reminded him of Frollo, the Archdeacon of Notre Dame. Like Frollo, Michael’s father was a deeply religious man who insisted that his son attend church every Sunday, and he seemed to be lusting after a pretty young woman named Mary Piper who worked in Mr. Becker’s hardware store. Michael wasn’t quite sure what “lust” meant, but it certainly seemed to be what Frollo was feeling for that Gypsy girl named Esmeralda.

But it was Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities that seemed to fascinate Michael the most. The story of Charles Darnay, a virtuous man who falls victim to the indiscriminate wrath of the revolution seemed to remind Michael of things Reverend Harker had said in church about Jesus. There were some things that even this very intelligent boy of ten couldn’t quite understand in the book, but he became extremely interested and inspired in the way a young lawyer named Sidney Carton was resurrected in spirit at the novel’s end. Death and resurrection appeared often in the novel, so it seemed to Michael that Paris was indeed the place where living creatures go after they die.

But there were also things that even his mother did not know about going to Paris. According to Dickens, it was possible to be “Recalled to Life” if only in spirit. Sidney Carton had given up his physical being as a sacrifice to save another. He even found God during his last days in Christ’s soothing words, “I am the resurrection and the life.” So if Sidney Carton had found God in Paris, then that must actually be where God lives.

Lying in his bed that night, Michael found it very difficult to sleep. So many things were swimming around in his mind. He felt so much like those characters from Dickens and Victor Hugo, struggling to survive and to understand the meaning of life. His own world wasn’t anything like that of those he read about. He had always been comfortable, with plenty of food to eat and parents who seemed to love him. But somehow, he still felt like Oliver struggling to survive his deep fears, or Pip haunted by dreams of old Mrs. Haversham burning alive, or David Copperfield trying to be the hero of his life and not a victim.

It was one thing to worry about what might happen to you if you didn’t carry a weapon and some intruder might try to kill you. But there were other things that happened in the town, secret things he had heard about but no one seemed to want to discuss. Intruders certainly seemed to stay away for the most part. They knew what might happen to them if they tried to steal or kill in this town. But why did the baker, Mr. Robbins, have to go to Paris? He seemed like such a nice man. He had given Jerry and Michael thick heavy rolls with swirls of hot sweet cinnamon that ran down their fingers. He must have gone to Paris because he liked to drink in Barry’s Bar and got into an argument with Mr. Jenkins who wore a hard hat and worked at the foundry.

Then, there was Mrs. Post who went to Paris one night when the moon was full and her husband, Mr. Post, didn’t like the way she talked back to him. There were a number of stories like those that made Michael wonder about the real safety of people who lived in the town. It wasn’t only intruders who felt those violent golden bullets and went to Paris in the middle of the night.

But as he lie there in his bed thinking those disturbing thoughts, Michael began to think about Jerry, his best friend, who was going to go to Paris without the help of any gun or bullet. He knew Jerry was dying because he had understood what his parents were saying even though they hadn’t signed the words. Michael, long ago, had learned to read lips but had never revealed that secret to them or to anyone. He knew that if he had told his parents, they would be careful not to say things that Michael wanted to know.

Jerry was going to go to Paris because his liver was bad. That’s why Jerry’s skin was slightly yellow and he would get very tired if he played for long. Michael didn’t actually know what a liver was or exactly where it was, but he knew it was someplace in the body not far from the stomach, and if it went bad, you would soon be going to Paris unless they found a new liver to replace the bad one. It seemed that Jerry’s chances of getting a new liver were getting less and less each day, and Michael certainly didn’t want to see his friend go on that long trip across the sea. Something needed to be done and very soon if his best friend was going to survive.

Michael didn’t know if Jerry was aware that he was going to die. It seemed Jerry was always looking forward to his future. He wanted to be a professional soccer player, and when he wasn’t shooting his pistol on the club range, he was almost always to be seen kicking a ball of paper everywhere he went, guiding it swiftly from one foot to the other and around obstacles. Despite his fatigue and the yellowing of his skin, he was right in there with the other players trying to win those weekend games for his team. Michael didn’t know anybody who seemed as determined to go on living as his best friend. It just didn’t seem fair.

If anyone was going to go to Paris, it seemed only logical that it should be Michael himself. After all, he knew the secrets of the “City of Lights”, that it was heaven, where God lived, and that if you went there knowing its secrets, it was possible to be “recalled to life.” He also knew that since time and space stood still in Paris, it must be possible to stand in the tower of Notre Dame and actually “hear” Quasimodo ringing the giant bells, and to see Esmeralda dancing in the streets far below. He would have many new friends there, Oliver, Pip, David Copperfield and Sidney Carton would all be there to greet him and show him the shining Eiffel tower, the great cascading fountains and the marble sculptures. Maybe they could even take him on a boat down the blue watery curtain of the Seine to where the golden meadows of Iris and sunflowers embraced the city.

Michael slowly got out of bed and walked to his small writing desk. He sat down, took out a piece of blank paper and picked up his favorite ballpoint pen with his right hand. He stared down at the hand for a moment and felt the discomfort he always felt when trying to write with the hand that seemed to be so awkward and un-natural for him. He always had tried to do what his father and mother wanted him to do, but using his right hand when the left always felt so much more comfortable, was still difficult for him.

His parents had agreed with Reverend Harker that right-handedness had certain implications that came from the Bible. They felt it began with Eve whom God formed from a rib of Adam’s left side, and that since Creation the left has carried the suggestions of a female symbol, while the right has been identified with masculinity. His mother and father wanted him to be masculine so they had always insisted Michael use his right hand, when writing or eating or firing a gun.

They were always saying that the right hand had positive values, while the negative were attributed to the left. They constantly quoted from the Bible, things like, “If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” Or that quote from Proverbs, “Length of days is in her right hand and in her left hand riches and honors.” They said they wanted him to grow up strong, manly and righteous. They were convinced the right way always signified the road to righteousness, the left the one to sin and crime. Thinking that must be a good thing, Michael obediently tried to comply. But now, he thought, maybe it wouldn’t really matter anymore.

He shifted the ballpoint pen to his left hand, smiled to himself at the comfort he now felt as he began to write.
“Dear Mom and Dad, I don’t know how to write a will, but I hope you understand that this is what I want. My best friend, Jerry, needs a liver so that he can grow up and be a pro soccer player. I want him to have my liver. It’s a perfectly good liver only ten years old, and I won’t need it where I’m going. Please see to it that the doctors give it to him.
Thank you for all you have done for me.
Your son, Michael Travis.”

Michael studied the words for a moment, then put down the ballpoint pen and folded the paper. He placed it in an envelope and wrote “Mom and Dad” on the outside. He propped the envelope on the desk, then removed his birthday gift from the closet. He placed the box on his bed, opened it and stared down at the P238 handgun tucked in its red velour casing. Then, he slowly raised his left hand and regarded it contemplatively, turning it over and over, thinking about the legend of Alexander the Great that his grandfather, Amos, had related just before he died that winter night so long ago. It seemed that Alexander had found a country where all the people were left-handed; they shook hands with their left, thinking it a greater honor because it was nearer the heart.

Michael slowly reached down with his left hand and plucked the handgun from its casing. He held it comfortably in his left hand while he thought for a moment about the sacrifice that Sidney Carton had made for his dear friend in A Tale of Two Cities.

He had impersonated the innocent and virtuous Charles Darnay and went to the guillotine in his place. As Michael raised the shiny handgun engraved with his name slowly toward his head, he smiled and recalled those last words of Sidney Carton, “’Tis a far, far better thing I do today than I have ever done before...” Michael never heard the sound, but it didn’t matter. He had felt no fear for the first time. He was going to Paris to meet all his friends and to meet God.