La
Plage—the Beach—a vast series of connecting galleries and caverns
with sand-packed floors, from which I gathered the area had gotten
its name. Almost every inch of available wall space was covered
with the omnipresent graffiti, but also impressive murals. They
depicted everything from Egyptian gods to magic mushrooms to
surrealist Max Ernst-like portraits. One large rectangular support
pillar had been transformed into SpongeBob SquarePants. Some of the
paint smelled fresh.
We wandered from room to room, no one saying
much, our headlamps sweeping the way before us. In the ghostly
silence I saw countless cigarette butts, makeshift chandeliers
sitting on rock-cum-tables, crushed beer cans, and strange metal
rods and hooks protruding from the ceiling. These, I imagined, had
at one time accommodated power cables.
My eyes kept returning to the murals. They
were multigenerational, built up over decades, the new painted over
the old in an ongoing cycle. The sheer amount, the variety, was
incredible.
I stopped in front of an especially striking
painting of a six-foot-tall naked woman that reminded me of the
Statue of Liberty. It was clearly old, one of the few works of art
that had stood the test of time without being vandalized or
replaced.
Rob appeared next to me. “Nice tits,” he
said approvingly.
Danièle joined us and said, “She is famous
for cataphiles because—how should I say this? She represents all of
us. Can you understand, Will?”
“Not really.”
“It is like what I told you before. In the
catacombs, the above world no longer matters. I do not care if you
are a janitor or a company president. Here, there are no bosses, no
masters. We are all free. We are all naked.”
“And cataphiles just like to get naked,” Rob
told me with a nudge and wink. “You should hear about some of the
mad orgies they have. Sick fucks, they are.”
“We are not sick,” Danièle said. “You are
sick.”
“You know, Danny,” Rob said, “I don’t know
if it’s a language thing, but I’ve heard better comebacks from
preschoolers.”
Danièle brushed past him and went to the
next room.
“Seriously,” Rob said to Pascal and me. “You
guys don’t agree? I keep waiting for her to bust out, ‘I don’t shut
up I grow up and when I look at you I throw up!’”
“And your mother, she lick it up,” Pascal
said.
Rob grinned. “Right on, bro! But it sounds
sort of gay with your accent.”
Pascal shoved him. “ Ta mere suce des
queues devant le prisu .”
“And yours sucks bears in the forest.”
Leaving them to swap mother barbs, I went
looking for Danièle. At first I had no idea which way she went,
then I spotted the afterglow of her light around a corner.
I joined her in the largest room yet—and
came to an abrupt halt. Three of the four walls were covered by a
massive, continuous mural, a reproduction of The Great Wave ,
one of the most famous works of Japanese art in the world. It
depicted an enormous white-capped wave roaring against a pink sky,
seemingly about to swallow Mt. Fuji whole.
Bridgette and I used to have a print of it.
She had picked it up at a garage sale, along with a number of old
black-and-white Hawaii photos: a surfer standing next to a redwood
board in the 1890s, the luxury ocean liner Mariposa at
Honolulu Harbor, six-year-old Shirley Temple singing “The Good Ship
Lollipop” on Waikiki Beach, the China Clipper landing at
Pearl Harbor. We had framed all of these and hung them in a
horizontal line above the sofa in the living room.
Danièle interpreted my stunned reaction as
awe and said, “It is amazing, right?”
I nodded, but I wasn’t really listening.
Bridgette was inside my head, and I couldn’t get her out. She’d
been wearing a yellow cotton dress with a fat black belt that day
of the garage sale. I remember because I’d teased her by calling
her “Bumblebee.” Along with the print and the photos, she had two
bags of groceries from the Asian supermarket down
Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain