Even the orchid is deteriorating. No cocktail of water, sunlight, fertilizer, French or English word has been successful in reviving it. What the plants might require now beyond supplementary nutrients and his desperate praise is the presence of other living things.
A chance is taken on a particularly afflicted plant. The fiddle leaf is taken to the balcony for rescue. Julian drags over next to it the bird bath, one which a neighbor had abandoned in the hallway. He wipes down the sides of the ceramic now with his shirt sleeve in hopes of better attracting nearby fowl. He imagines birds arriving in droves to bathe, drink, and preen. Their small beating bodies crowding this vanity he has made, sounds of their reverie like the soft plinks of coins dropped in fountains.
As he wipes the bath again, storm clouds gather unnoticed until the sudden burst of rain.
***
A mass is stretched over him. Eulalie’s blonde hair sprouts from his elbow, while her legs appear as an unnatural appendage between his own. He is aware of sleeping much later than intended, and that the temperature behind his eyes is too hot.
“I think I have a fever,” he says, frowning.
“I know,” she says, stirring.
Julian collects himself to stand. He wanders to the threshold of the bathroom and hovers there, feeling his fluids thundering and sugar perking and now this furtive little heat blasting his limbs, these vertiginous pulses looping their familiar faulty circuits, feeding to and from his faithful heart. But he is not particularly concerned, since fever had never been a feature indicative of his true illness worsening. He only spent too long in yesterday’s rainstorm.
After shutting himself in the bathroom, he runs the tap while sending a message to Pavard. Sick, won’t make it to the lab. The sound of the front door opening and closing now. If Eulalie’s leaving, she won’t return for hours. With tremendous care not to strain his midsection, he hoists up the bathroom plants in the bathtub by their terra cotta collars. After settling these on the balcony next to the mottling fiddle leaf, he notices the surface of water in the bird bath remains undisturbed.
***
That evening, he is grateful for time alone. Eulalie likely does not want to catch his fever, but there is, he knows, also the possibility of her visiting someone else. Days before, they had argued in a way which was a first for them.
That day, she had been her usual self when he came home from the lab and asked her to bake cardamom bread again. While she retrieved ingredients from his cabinets, he followed alongside with his hands cupped, drawing flour down from the insides of her arms. While the dough rose, she pulled him closer. He kissed her neck and asked if she would run across the street for tonic water; he would keep an eye on the bread.
When she had gone, he brushed his palms of flour and increased the oven heat setting. The loaf would do fine for a few minutes—even alchemize better, perhaps—outside its standard incubation. A few minutes more. The dial on maximum, just a few minutes more.
“The bread is ready,” he had announced when she returned. The loaf now plated and cooling, its top had visibly thickened and blackened considerably. Eulalie had stood there for a moment, looking upon that scene, a trepidation about her as she then spoke to the rapidly hardening shell.
“What happened?”
“We can still eat it, it’s fine. I just wanted to see something.”
“Last week. That was you, wasn’t it?”
“No, not that time.”
“You are simply crazy.”
“Come, look at this, we can still eat—”
“You eat it,” she had said, turning on her heel with the paper bag of water.
When she was gone, he had laid a finger atop the bread where cracks had formed. A push downwards upon one such depression and the loaf crumbled easily. As he ate, he thought he had been right—the bread tasted fine. That had been days before, and though she has yet to materialize for the evening, perhaps all was forgiven.
***
When the birds fail to resuscitate his keep in the coming days, he tries bees. The natural pollinators, their humming bodies kissing those open faces, might spur another sort of virility.
A selection is made carefully. Only plants that might be successful in attracting bees are introduced to the balcony. The bird bath had been foolish, in hindsight. It collected dust easily and though it was a miniature among its make, the stone fixture was heavier than expected. It now sits next to the fridge. Once the storage there fills up, surplus radishes, herbs, and other small produce items are deposited in the basin of the bath. The only person who had seen the bird bath full of vegetables in the kitchen and questioned this mélange was Eulalie, but they had otherwise been having a good week since her return. All was certainly forgiven, yes, but come Sunday Julian offers anyway to accompany Eulalie to the week’s church service.
They set out to walk the considerable distance from his flat to the church. When he points out a new boulangerie along the way, Eulalie pulls him by the elbow to remove him from the path of a cyclist. The bruise will last over a month (her none the wiser, when she sees it on him later she’ll ask him to be more careful at work in the lab). They continue on, soon after passing a plant shop Julian had not realized was so close by. In the window is a bird-of-paradise. Its aristocratic arrangement, that assured wing and the astonishing orange, its familiarity yet his dispossession—it all inspires a shock of grief so intense he nearly doubles back, but they continue, Eulalie (none the wiser) telling him just a few minutes more now, a few minutes more to the church, and so they go like that for a while, continuing on.
When they arrive, he sees the church is a behemoth structure. He resists looking up at the spires. There is that wariness, the discomfort he had once felt seeing Sacré-Coeur through his window when he was newly arrived in Paris.
Inside, the church is at capacity. The sermon is about a sound heart being the impenetrable foundation of one’s soul. Eulalie appears inattentive, but when they rise from the pews and she turns to him, he sees her eyes are dewed.
“Foolish,” she says in English. But she has never before spoken an English word, so he asks her to repeat herself.
“Handkerchief.” A terse French now. “Give me your handkerchief.”
“Of course,” he says, but as he moves his hand to his pocket, remembers he had left it as a tie for the frond.
They exit out to the church steps, Julian offering his arm to Eulalie as they descend. He risks a glance at her face. It is returned now to the face he knows from his flat, her demeanor comfortingly stolid once more.
“Are you religious?” Eulalie asks as they reach the bottom of the steps. She had never asked him anything of the like, though he had seen her off for service once before, the week of their first meeting many months ago.
He remembers now, the few times he had gone as a child with his mother to church for Christmas and Easter. His mother, instead of listening to the sermon or choir, would seat them in the front row and watch with rapture the organist’s feet sliding at the pedals, appearing disaffected even by Julian’s fidgeting and the bellowing pipes overhead.
“I prayed for you,” Eulalie says suddenly, before he can answer. Her hand tightens on his arm.
“Why?”
“Does there need to be a reason?”
“I guess not, no.”
“I prayed for you because you’re sick. You’re very sick.”
Again, the strange grief from when he saw her hairs in the dust bin after sweeping the balcony, when he saw the bird-of-paradise in the window. Although she should have known, she hadn’t recognized his fever had lifted days ago.
***
Close-by the church grounds, a circle of people are gathering. Their large signs force the missionaries fundraising for a trip to Cambodia to the side. At first, Julian thinks they are protestors. His second idea is that they are mourners, but Eulalie informs him they are celebrating: the anniversary of the conviction of a Lyon church leader, imprisoned for his harassment of a church member. As they move past the circle, Julian reads their signs: CULT IS NO RELIGION.
“Do you know anything about this?” she asks, nodding her head in their direction.
“About cults?”
“About this case. I didn’t know anything about this church until my cousin started telling me about her husband. He’s the guy,” she says, gesturing at the posters.
“Your cousin’s husband is in prison?” Julian glances again at the man’s photo on one poster, the church leader’s face crossed out with red marks.
“No, he’s the other guy,” she says. “Poor fool.”
Eulalie explains matter-of-factly then about her cousin’s husband. The fool, the devotee, the ill-fated soul. The church member fixated upon by the church leader, the latter’s attentions ultimately transforming the other to unrecognizable form.
***
It had begun with Eulalie’s cousin becoming skeptical of her husband’s whereabouts. She suspected an affair because of his erratic behavior and disappearances. She had called Eulalie frequently throughout this period, trapped in this idea like a fly against glass, but ultimately arrived each time on her own to acceptance, with Eulalie not having to do much on the other end of the line except transmit the soothing clangor of domestic routine. She washed dishes and applied makeup while her cousin wailed about the children and the injustice of it all—an affair was no extraordinary thing, but why should it happen to her?—until her cousin managed to console herself by the satisfaction that can only come from anointing oneself as a martyr.
The truth, arriving on a Tuesday morning, was not so simple. Her husband sat her down, intending to make himself clear about his behavior. She believed his explanation straightaway, she told Eulalie, because it was so perplexing and because, far from the liveliness imparted from an affair, he too appeared genuinely extinguished. A proper martyrdom.
That morning to his wife, the man confessed his burden at last: he had become undone by the church. Their leader in Lyon had pressured him into increasingly expensive and invasive purification treatments including, in the least, extensive sauna sessions, flexural whole-body exercises, episodic bloodletting and cryochamber visits, appointments with a fanatical supervisor meant to supervise a peculiar and regimented diet strictly low in sugar and very high in vitamin content…all this being the reason for her husband returning flushed each evening, for sleeping so restlessly. It was almost as if, she told Eulalie on the phone, he was the other woman. Devoted beyond rationality, beautifying himself endlessly. She wished that it had been an affair, another woman would have been less confounding. Certainly less expensive. That was the first moment, she told Eulalie, that she could not understand her husband’s motivations. He was an ordinary man. She expected a man’s ordinary vices. If it wasn’t a woman, how could he have been so fooled? He had seldom ever mentioned the church, had never even gambled. She would never have thought him a man to be duped or compelled. He bargained smartly with hawkers during vacations abroad in Istanbul, fluidly navigated Parisian street grifters and corporate overhead alike. His faith, if anything, had been in the virtue of a reasonable life. His profession as a legal accountant, his steady preference for flan as dessert. When had he become able to be kept like this, in a cage he deliberately walked into? And what an unusual set of circumstances—where even was there pleasure to be found?
Despite her husband’s panicked attempts–after realizing he had spent their entire savings fund and incurred a tremendous debt–to reassume his own bearings, the man, to put it simply, had become almost entirely dismembered in his spirit, as that relentless force upon his head, surely the insurmountable hand of God himself, would not release him. In the end, a case was formally closed, with “psychological torture” as the term used to describe the church leader’s actions.
“I should call my cousin,” Eulalie says suddenly. “The anniversary date of the conviction slipped my mind.”
“That’s not why you wanted to come here today?” Julian says with confusion, remembering how she had cried in the pews.
“I come to church every Sunday, remember? Remind me later. To phone my cousin and ask how she’s doing.”
***
After they return to his flat, he wraps a plastic bag over the head of the fiddle leaf. He will deal with its remains come morning.
Julian then offers to bake eggs. Eulalie gathers tomatoes and basil from the bird bath. They dip crusts of bread in the yolk and eat in bed. The eggs accompany the leftover lamb shoulder nicely, which, when reheated, fills the flat with its meaty smell. After eating, he traces lines down Eulalie’s arms until they both fall asleep.
Upon waking in the late afternoon, she rises and announces she must be going.
“Where are you going?”
“To my language class, remember? I’m going to be late.”
“What language class?”
“My English language class. I need my dictionary back, by the way.”
“I didn’t know you were learning English.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“What difference does it make?” she says, stretching her mouth into a blithe little line.
He offers to grocery shop for them later. Maybe a few more cucumbers, a few more eggs, but before he finishes speaking she is gone, the door closing softly shut behind her.
The remainder of the evening is spent reading on the internet about the Lyon church. To Julian’s relief, he decides he doesn’t agree with their beliefs. The welcome posted on their welcome page appears disingenuous. Further internet prowling produces no photos of Eulalie’s cousin, but he imagines the likeness of the two, down to their blonde hair. The internet, however, has a surfeit of information about the husband who had been involved with the leader of the church and had tried, through a series of increasingly concerning methods, to cleanse himself.
He reads the detailed reporting now. Mandated purification treatments and vitamins. A large debt owed to the church. Expert witness testimony that at such high levels, the vitamins would have affected his kidneys, liver, and brain. The disciple poisons himself with his own waste products, he reads. “Psychological torture,” is the term used, just as Eulalie had said. But the spasming and hardening and disintegration of this man’s organs, he thinks, might have compounded more rapidly, before his mind yet perceived some measure of its own imprisonment. Or could it have been that his body had fallen to the central influence of his mind, so that in time his consciousness was further devastated by the organ? A distinction between the two, Julian determines, is impossible.
Online, even the populist verdict is that the church leader was guilty, deserving of no absolution. The burden imposed upon the church member had been too great. “Total disease,” says one anonymous commenter. “Warfare,” the same commenter has updated a few hours later. And according to the internet, something Eulalie had not told him: the man’s wife reported that as time went on, her husband devolved into hyperventilations and madness, uttering over and over that there was only one solution. And the next morning, from his children’s bedroom where his children watched, the man walked to the balcony of their twelfth-floor flat and stepped off.
