I nodded, thinking it through. “So if Noor can make Mona 3D, then nobody can erase her, right?”
“Exactly,” she said. We texted Noor, and she replied after a minute with a heart and a link to a guy who made huge animal installations out of scavenged trash. She thought she could do something similar, although finding discarded stuff might be a problem.
Me:I love you, but I’m not dumpster diving lol
Martine:Flea market?
Noor:
Martine told her we could swing by les puces de Montreuil for her right now if she sent a list of things she wanted. She said just to get lots of whatever was really cheap and had interesting shapes. So we swept through the market, finding tons of usable castoffs, including dead electronics, broken costume jewelry, worn-out hand tools, and formerly fashionable scarves. Since it was almost closing time, several vendors were happy to offload their unsellables to us for super cheap. We spent less than twenty euros for a sizable haul of interesting-looking junk. I plunked down a few additional euros on things I thought would be good for collagraphs. Noor was thrilled when she saw what we’d bought. “These shapes are perfect. I need to work out how to assemble it all, but I think I can put it up this week—maybe Wednesday afternoon.”
“You’d skip school?” I asked. She really was serious about her art.
She shook her head. “We have the afternoon off on Wednesdays.” Probably to recover so they could make it to the end of the week if their classes were anything like mine. And I didn’t have to go all day, just the mornings.
“Do you want help?” I asked. “We could carry stuff for you.”
“Yes, I would love to have some help. We should ask the boys, too. Perhaps Youssef would film it.”
“He would like that,” Martine said, her thumbs moving over her phone, alerting him that he was now the official videographer of Team Noor.
Noor was poking around in one of the bags. “Oh, this is so good. This will be wonderful. If I make a plan of where everything goes and then paste it up on the wall, will you help me glue these things into place?”
“A plan—like a list?” I wasn’t sure how that would work.
“No. Like a map. I will make the composition and put outlines for every object. So if I want to use this flower for her eye”—she held up a silk daisy in front of her left eye—“Iwould put an outline of the flower where her eye should be, and you would glue the flower there.”
“Oh,” I breathed, starting to understand how it would take shape. “Yeah, I see.” I looked at Martine. “We can totally do that, right?”
She said, “Of course we can,” like helping execute a street-art installation was something she did all the time. Noor picked up the bag with my collagraph stuff. “Oh—that’s mine,” I said. “I found some junk that’ll make interesting prints.”
“When are you going to show us how to do this?” she asked.
“After we do Noor’s piece?” We agreed that Saturdayafternoon would work and turned our attention back to planning Noor’s installation. Tuesday, she and Youssef went out reconnoitering and chose a site that combined visibility with what Youssef called “Excellent environmental framing.” It was also his idea for us to all wear the ubiquitous workers’ blue coveralls and block off the area with portable metal barricades, which one of his cataphile buddies cheerfully delivered from an Électricité de France van on Wednesday just as we arrived to do the installation. Noor pasted up a poster with outlines of where every piece of junk went and handed us each a tube of industrial-strength glue. We got into position with our bags of junk and started attaching items while Youssef filmed. When a section was in place, Noor painted it, working with a can in each hand. I loved how her paint brought Mona to life, how the broken pencils resolved into fingers as she modeled them with her spray cans, how the padlock, along with the watch face glued to the center of a silk daisy, turned into amused-looking eyes under the magic of her art.La Jocondemorphed into something that was almost alive as we worked. Even though it was Noor’s piece, I felt the rush of helping to create something, of breathing life into a mundane assemblage of castoffs. When we finished and stood back to look at what we’d done, I fizzed with happy energy. I’d helped my friend make that beautiful thing. I’d helped her make a mark on the city. We helped the faux EDF guy load the barricades back into his van. Youssef had filmed the whole thing, and he promised he’d have the editing done by the weekend. People were already stopping to stare. One guy asked his friend whyLa Jocondewas wearing a headscarf, and Noor nodded like,That’s what I mean. WhenI got home, I was so amped up from having committed art in public that I wanted to tell Dad and Madame Dupuy all about it. I wasn’t sure, though, whether they’d think it was art or vandalism, so I didn’t say anything. It was hard to keep it to myself. The feeling of working together with my friends to create something beautiful and important illuminated me. I wanted more of it.
I was still glowing when I met Nick in our lobby at midnight on Friday for my first trip to the catacombs. As we made our way to a tired-looking, ill-lit neighborhood of grubby apartment buildings with ground-floor businesses jostling next to each other, my euphoria started to fade. There’d been an attack by the vampire two nights ago. Whoever this guy was, the night was his kingdom, and I felt exposed and vulnerable. Nick broke into my anxieties, telling me to turn right, and I saw Noor, Martine, and Youssef waiting for us outside a shuttered shoe-repair shop at the far end of the street. As we greeted each other with bisous, Nick said, “Le Bec isn’t here yet?”
Martine shook her head. “Of course not.” We had to wait another fifteen minutes before he strolled up. He embraced everyone, and I swung my backpack in front of me so that he couldn’t pull me too close. He gave me an annoyed look. Then he took a can of WD-40 out of his backpack and sprayed the rollers of the metal security grating that covered the front of the store so they wouldn’t squeak. He produced a small black case from which he chose two long, thin pieces of metal. He stuck the L-shaped one into the lock, held it with one hand, and inserted the other piece, scrubbing it in and out until there was a click. He rolled the grating up slowly and silently.
“Picking locks,” I murmured to myself. “That’s a good skill to have.”
Martine, who was standing next to me, gestured to herself and then Noor. “We can teach you how to do it,” she whispered.
“Really?” I whispered back. “Yeah, I’d love to learn how.”
Le Bec raised the grating halfway, ducked under it, and spent a long five minutes with his picks on the front-door lock. I kept my eyes on the street, looking for shadowy figures. Finally, he motioned us in. He rolled the grating down as silently as he’d raised it and followed, directing us to the back room. Unlike the dim front, where a little light filtered in from the street, it was completely dark. He flicked on his headlamp. Battered wooden cubbies filled with shoes covered one wall. A large wood worktable, its top scored and stained, stood in the center, with brown and black leather remnants piled on one end. The room smelled sharply of leather, mingled with the solvent smell of shoe polish and a whiff of old wood and dust.
“There is our access,” he said, pointing to a tiny wrought iron spiral staircase lurking in the far corner, near an immense vintage sewing machine. We followed him down the child-sized stairs, whose steps were so narrow my feet barely fit on them. The boys, with their bigger feet, had to descend sideways. At the bottom, our headlamps lit up a medieval wooden door set in a vaulted doorway on the far wall. A heavy iron ring served as its knob. Le Bec grasped it with both hands and, grunting, pulled it open. Inside, pillars made of roughly cut stones supported the arched vaults. The stone floor was uneven, worn down into pathways. Shadowslurked and quivered, and it smelled sour, like clothes left too long in the washer. He made for the darkest corner, and we followed. In the beam of his light, I saw a hole in the floor and rungs disappearing into gloom. “We go down here,” he said.
Nick pulled me close. “I’ll go ahead of you,” he said, his lips next to my ear, his breath warm and reassuring on my skin. “That way I can help if you need it.” I nodded, thinking,Or at least break my fall a little, closing my eyes as he kissed my ear, then my cheek, then my lips. Le Bec went first, followed by Youssef, Martine, Noor, and Nick. As the light from everyone’s headlamps drained into darkness, the shadows flowed closer, until there was just my small light keeping them at bay. The nearer the dark got, the bigger the sounds became. Boots on metal rungs thudded like heartbeats.
When I couldn’t see Nick’s light any longer, I lowered myself into the shaft, climbing down and down, concentrating on setting each foot firmly onto the metal rungs. If I slipped and fell, I’d take my friends down with me. The farther I descended, the more gravity seemed to pull on me—out, away from the rungs, into nothing. Fortunately, the shaft was only a meter or so in diameter. When I felt like gravity’s heavy hand would pull me off the ladder, I’d stop and lean back until my pack rested against the wall behind me. Then, reassured, I’d keep descending. After a while I saw things that couldn’t really be there—halos in the gloom, glowing shapes and moving squiggles of neon lurking at the very edges of my sight. My ears felt muffled; I could hardly hear Nick when he called up to me, “We’re almost there. The landing isn’t big, so we’re doing it one at a time. There’s a tunnel just opposite theladder; you’ll have to crawl through it for a few meters; then you can stand up. Take your pack off and push it ahead of you. If you need me, just call, and I’ll come help you.”
“Got it,” I called down.
Light washed up from below, and Nick said, “You can stop there. I’ll tell you when to start again.” I hung, my feet cramping on the thin rungs, until I heard Nick’s “Okay.” The ground surprised me when I felt it, reassuringly firm and flat under my feet. I turned, and my headlamp illuminated the tunnel opening scooped out of limestone and about half my height. I took off my pack, got down on my hands and knees, and pushed it in ahead of me. My headlamp threw jerky shadows on the walls and floor, making me seasick, so I switched it off and crawled forward, feeling for obstacles as I went. In the dark, I had a sensation of floating that I recognized from the flight to Paris: the feeling of being suspended between worlds. Finally I saw a pale glow. I emerged into a room hewn out of the rock, about the size of the lobby in our apartment building. The ceiling hung right above Nick’s head, and drifts of rubble ringed the perimeter, interrupted by five dark passageways. I smiled at him, then scanned the room, looking for landmarks, starting to build a mental map, like I did with any new trail. “What’s next?”
He frowned and motioned at my headlamp. “Did your batteries die?”
