Entanglement

The Order Matters

There are things that arrive before they arrive. The smell of a particular tobacco, for instance. The knowledge that somewhere a young man is being led from a street in Alytus into a police vehicle, that this has been coming for two years, though nobody knew it was Alytus, or him, or the man from Lagos with a contract and a kit number and not much else.

**

I smell the smoke before I see the woman. A burnt silver that cuts through the smell of damp Easter pavement. Drum tobacco. I know it the way you know a voice from another room; before the words, before the face. I used to roll my own. Three years ago, I stopped. The well ran dry. The smell remains.

Little Café sits on the corner of Rue du Bourg-Tibourg and Rue du Roi de Sicile.

The “King of Sicily Street” is my favourite street name in Paris because it takes its name from Charles of Anjou, brother of Saint Louis, made King of Naples and Sicily in 1266.

He lost Sicily in the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, a massacre at evening prayer outside Palermo that stripped him of the island overnight.

Peter III of Aragon took it. Charles spent the rest of his life trying to get it back. He died, having failed.

All that remains here is this street, which translated into plain English, sounds like our one hit song, Little King of Broken Hearts.

Little King of Broken Hearts was a reverse blues; not a man living pain but causing it, which is a different instrument entirely.

The café on the corner is called “Little”.

Not “Le Petit”, not anything that acknowledges it is standing in the Marais on Easter Sunday surrounded by every nationality except French. Just “Little”. In English.

The covered terrace holds maybe a dozen people. The pavement still damp from the night before.

She is at a table of four, lighting one cigarette off the end of another. To her left a man with a Belmondo face and a John Waters moustache. A man who was once something and has decided to be something else. The upper lip is his manifesto.

I will call her Yersinia. She doesn’t know this. Nobody at her table knows this. She is in her early forties, a Touraine Sauvignon in front of her, constructing the next cigarette already while the current one still burns. Spider-webbing through the subconscious existentialism of an Easter Sunday bank holiday weekend.

I want the smoke. Not her, the smoke. She won’t know.

Belmondo-Waters reads off his phone in a voice dragging the chains of self-abuse noisily behind him. He has the look of a man who enjoys delivering catastrophe to a table. Shake the spare change loose. He finds tidbits on the internet the way a certain pig finds truffles.

He reads his offering with pride, as if he’d made up the story himself:

“A stabbing in Alytus,” he says. “Lithuania. A Nigerian footballer. A kid from the local high school had been planning it for two years.” He repeats this for the table. “Two years.”

Yersinia lights the new cigarette off the dying end of the last one and says nothing. The Touraine sits untouched for a moment.

I return to my Gubernija Tamsusis. The velvet tongue twister.

**

The young man in Alytus had been planning a serious violent crime for approximately two years, prosecutors said. His victim appears to have been chosen at random. Which means he planned everything except the target. The weapon, the moment, the long interior preparation: all of it arranged in advance. The victim was a variable left blank until the last second, filled in by whoever happened to be there. This is not planning. This is steeping. Marinating in intention until the intention became unbearable and anyone would do.

Alytus is a city in southern Lithuania, on a long loop of the Nemunas river, surrounded by pine forests that hold their silence the way forests do when they have seen too much. It was a medieval fortress town, then a commercial center. The Soviets turned it into an industrial hub, filling it with factories producing cement, chemical fibers, furniture, refrigerators.

In 1991 the factories closed. A third of the population left. Unemployment hit seventeen percent. The forests remained, holding their silence.

In the forests outside Alytus there are mass graves. Vidzgiris forest, thousands of bodies. The Alytus forest, thousands more. Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, people who were in the wrong place when the wrong army arrived. Nearby there is a place called Grūtas Park, known informally as Stalin World, where Soviet-era statues have been collected and displayed as attractions. History as a theme park. Trauma with an entry fee. The forests do not charge admission.

The Nigerian footballer came to Alytus because a Lithuanian club sent scouts to Abuja and found him cheaper than a local player.

This is the satellite model: sign a prospect in Lagos, send him to a small town to get minutes, move him up when he’s ready. He had a contract and a kit number and a city that had no place for him. He was visibly, unmistakably the only one of himself in Alytus, which is not a city where difference has tended to go well. He was there because a spreadsheet said so. He was the variable the student finally filled in.

**

I am already inside the story, fresh from a museum, observing Géricault’s shaved head: productive self-mutilation, rendering himself socially unpresentable by design. Painting the dead before the living.

He locks himself away to finish the work.
The dead first, then the living.
The long preparation before the act.

The order matters.

**

Scientists at the Australian National University have reported the first confirmed observation of atoms engaged in one of the most perplexing behaviors known to modern physics: the apparent ability to exist in two entirely separate places at once. The phenomenon is known as entanglement. No individual particle can be described independently from the state of others. The researchers did not mention Alytus. They did not mention a covered terrace on Rue du Bourg-Tibourg. They did not mention Drum tobacco or a Touraine Sauvignon or a man with a John Waters moustache reading catastrophe off his phone on Easter Sunday. Nevertheless.

Belmondo-Waters puts his phone down. Two years, he says again, shaking his head with the satisfaction of a man who has successfully introduced darkness into a Sunday morning. Yersinia exhales. The smoke goes up. I watch it go and think about a city on the Nemunas where the forests hold their silence and a young man has finally stopped waiting and a footballer from Lagos is in a hospital or a police statement or both at the same time, and none of them chose their coordinates. All of it was always going to be exactly this.