Chapter Text
January 19th, 1989, 9PM. A baby boy is born to the Wesninski family: 7 pounds and 7 ounces, with bright auburn hair. For a moment, everything is perfect – Mary smiles at Nathan, who bears no grimace for once and looks at their child with a thrilled glimmer in his eye. She's transported back to the first time they had caught each other's eyes, the way his eyes would shine and sparkle like fine gems. It's too early to tell, but she hopes that the baby will have the same sky blue.
The baby, their son, Nathaniel –
"He's perfect," they say in unison.
9 years later
Nathaniel is a curious kid. Curious is a word his favourite teacher taught him, and he doesn't figure it's a bad thing until his mother screamed at him for knocking over a lamp in an attempt to sit on the windowsill and watch the streets below their apartment. In school, questions are good. At home, questions are bad. A lot of things are opposite between the two, he ponders.
He knows his father hates questions with absolute certainty – he comes home at lunch and in the evening from work, and doesn't say a word to Nathaniel or acknowledge his existence. In fact, Nathaniel eats dinner early in front of the television while his mother checks his homework and scolds him, and he amuses himself by imagining the words pouring out of her mouth like the speech bubbles in the cartoons he sees in the newspaper.
But once a month, he gets a chance at his father’s affection. His father is a doctor, a very severe man. The way he often looks at his son is comparable to the way Nathaniel looks at dinner when it's meatloaf – disappointed, maybe a little put off by its existence too. But, despite everything, he still provides Nathaniel a monthly health check-up. It's his one, single chance to hold his father's hand and feel his warmth so that he knows he's real, not an illusion.
"Nathaniel!" his father barks, and his heart skips in excitement. "Come inside."
The office is empty right now, courtesy of the 'closed' sign up already. He left his mother outside, smoking a cigarette with her hair falling out of her hat and a small, wry smile on her face as she told him to quickly go inside before his father gets upset. Wiping his hands on his shorts, he pushes the door open, and cranes his head up at his father towering over him.
There's a whole routine that Nathaniel knows the ins and outs of. First he gets weighed, eyes flitting back and forth between the scales and the hands adjusting them, and his father's stern eyes. Then, his height is noted. He has to keep his shoulders pressed against the cold wall for that one, and he always shivers. Both are okay, his father says, but a little on the small side. Nathaniel grins, but unlike his mother, his father doesn't make a joke about how he's not eating his vegetables.
He runs ahead to clamber onto the table without his father's help, wanting to show him how strong he's gotten. With his hands tucked under his thighs, he swings his legs back and forth and waits for the flashlight in his eyes, the weird stick on his tongue to check his mouth, and the hammer for his knees. He looks at his knee in wonder when it swings without his permission. And finally, his dad gets his stethoscope out – a word he struggles to even imagine.
"What on earth –” his father says, pulling back in shock.
He turns around and yells for his mother, then impatiently walks outside to call her again, leaving the boy on the table to swing his legs and wonder what could possibly have happened. What did he hear in his heart? Did he hear how much love Nathaniel had in it for his father?
"–ry concerning, I'm afraid the boy's heart cannot handle any stimulation at all."
Mary has her hand over her mouth, looking at Nathaniel in worry and turning her eyes up to the ceiling.
"He should be homeschooled and kept without any excitement, Mary, if he is to be stable at all. He's already in some daydream world of his. This will be good for him."
They both turn to stare at him, and Nathaniel's heart sinks.
***
He's bored. He's so bored, he almost falls asleep. His mother's voice drones on and on while he stares at his only classmate now, his fish. He's a gold little fish, swimming around in a bowl that was surely too small for him. He must be bored too. If they were lucky and things worked out, Nathaniel would find a plastic castle for his fishbowl, and then a big aquarium. Probably a giant one up to the ceiling.
His mother snaps her stick against the chalkboard. "Pay attention, Nathaniel."
He props his head up on his hand, running his finger over the glass bowl to let Kevin – what he'd just named his fish – chase it. They're best friends now, obviously, since he has no other classmates. In his opinion, they both get along swimmingly. Kevin is incredibly attentive to his finger, and makes bubbles with his mouth every now and then that make Nathaniel smile. He likes the game, and wonders how many more he can think of to play with him. Meanwhile, on the board is something called Zeno's paradox, and a poor drawing of a boat.
"In ancient Greece, the philosopher Zeno posited that no two objects could ever touch, because, to reach a point one must always reach a halfway point, and from there the next halfway point, so there will always be a halfway point –"
His mother is crazy, he realises with a dreadful sigh. His parents are craaazy . Nathaniel yawns, and then laughs when Kevin makes another bubble, like he yawned too. They were both such a matching set.
"Nathaniel!" his mother screeches.
He flinches so hard he almost sends the fishbowl careening off the table. She's furious, scowling down at him with disgust, a terrifying expression scrunching up her face. She reaches for the fishbowl like she's going to take it, but he snatches it away and runs to the door. He can't open it, since both his hands are full, so he turns around and hugs the cool glass to his chest, the water lapping at the edge of the bowl and splashing his shirt.
"Mama! Please, no!"
"Come back here you horrib-"
The door lurches, sending Nathaniel falling forward. The bowl flies out of his hands, and he has all of 3 seconds to mournfully scream Kevin's name before everything shatters on the kitchen floor and Kevin flip-flops around, desperately looking for water.
Behind him, his father walks into bedlam and his mother screaming at him to get the fish. Nathaniel stares at the bizarre sight of his mother filling a jug and his father slipping around on the floor to catch Kevin. Even when he's caught the fish, grasping it in his cold hand and dropping it into the jug, Nathaniel knows Kevin is gone. His only best friend. He curls up, knees to his chest, and cries.
***
Standing before a canal outside of their street, he says his final goodbyes to Kevin.
"Goodbye, best friend. Now you have the world's biggest fishbowl to enjoy. Have a safe journey."
His mother hands him a tissue from her coat pocket to blow his nose on, and then they get on a train to Paris. Even though her lessons are heinously boring, his mother always knows what's best for him. Of course going to Paris would help. The train station amazes him, and he loves the way his mother clutches him tighter to her so he doesn't get snatched. He never gets to hold her hand anymore otherwise.
In Paris, they go to an enormous cathedral. It's a chilly Sunday morning, but the inside of the cathedral is stuffy and smells funny. There's little to no religion in his house; his father is an atheist, and his mother is a Catholic who never prays.
"Let's just try this praying thing," she whispers to him. "We'll come every Sunday, who knows, maybe it will start working."
She prays beside him, asking the Lord for another son. He doesn’t quite know who he’s talking to, but he decides to pray too. Like a good boy, he clasps his hands together and squeezes his eyes shut, asking for a little brother to play with. Beside him, his mother sniffles and mutters that there's something wrong with the first one, and she is not as strong as she looks. He pats her shoulder, feeling sympathetic. He’s used to this. His father says similar things, stuff he overhears with a cup to the living room door when they think he's asleep.
"A firstborn son. I like him in theory, but not in practice."
Nathaniel sighs with relief when they're outside again in the glaring, early spring sunshine. His mother pulls out a smooth fiver from her pink wallet with the charm on the zip, rubbing her warm hands over his small, chilly ones as she rolls it into his grasp and pats him off to the other side of the street where a warm, golden bakery is just beginning to fill with customers. He goes inside and takes in the enticing, homely scent of the coffee eclairs just coming out of the back room, and that is his last memory of his mother.
Standing hunched in her typical twitchy, nervous fashion across the street, she dies. Crushed to death by a huge, drunken tourist who had fallen off a high balcony in an "I heart Paris" shirt. He's so big that they couldn't even see her small frame underneath him, and Nathaniel turns his face away as they lift the big man, holding a police officer's hand. His father picks him up later, stoic and silent, and Nathaniel smells coffee eclairs the entire way home on the metro.
***
"What is this?" Nathaniel asks a few days later, when he walks in on his father wheeling in a hideous contraption.
"It's to memorialise your mother," he says stiffly.
He barely glances at Nathaniel anymore, even more cold without his mother to buffer them.
"It's a gnome. Your mother hated these. Everytime I see one... I think of her."
"Oh," he says numbly.
He silently walks to his room, closing the door softly, and takes out a calendar and a piece of paper.
"How long until I can move out?" he asks, talking to thin air.
3825 days.
***
Neil steps outside the metro station with his bags, and into a new future with a new name. Although he doesn’t have much, he’s not focused on that. What’s more interesting is what lies ahead, and his mind swirls and turns itself upside-down and over imagining all the different things he could have, everywhere he could go now. Paris is a dream within a dream, holding his fantasies and wishes together. He would erase the pain that happened here with something better, and he would leave his old life behind for good.
Things work out, because the magic of Paris works. The apartment he had circled the address of in a newspaper is free, the wizened old man who owned the place handing him a set of brass keys for it once the paperwork was signed. There was a job he got that same day from a cafe a few streets over, the Cafe des 2 Moulins. The metro was a mere half mile away from him, a distance Neil could easily walk in his sleep, and the station was practically a gate into unravelling the labyrinth of Paris.
He has an entire sprawling street to look at every night, when the lights come on in the windows and shadows pass behind curtains, or the braver people simply walk by without drawing them closed. He watches with his handheld telescope all the things that go on, a whole theatre stretching from the sky to the apartments in front of him, to all the buildings he can see beyond them. Lives he can never know or have, but finds himself drawn to, hoping to never catch an eye.
It's beautiful.
And then 5 years pass, and time simply becomes a circle. Dan, his boss, pulls him aside at the end of his shift.
"Neil, do you have plans? Somewhere else you want to go with your life?" she asks, stern at first but then softening (a perfect metaphor for Dan in general). Her eyeshadow glitters as she considers him.
"Are you firing me?" he asks, bewildered.
"No, my darling," she reassures, leaning across the table. "But you're in the prime of your life, I thought you would have thought of moving on already. You're free to stay right here, dear, but it's not clear to me at all why you haven't gone on to bigger and better things. Look at you, bright young man. Isn’t the world your oyster?”
Neil is thrown by the suggestion, and he hesitates. He hates surprises, and he also hates the constant pressure to move or to fall behind. Sometimes he wonders if he came without some secret life manual that everyone else came onto this earth with, because he was not with the racing and the competition at all.
Neil is happy. He's fine. He tells everyone as much, but they insist he doesn't know. What is a handsome young man like him doing, spending every night in Paris alone, they ask? What is he doing, simply working in a cafe? Neil knows there's so much else out there, but – this is fine. He is happy, and has been since he came here. Why can't they see it?
His silence stumbles on long enough. Dan reads something final from his lack of answer, the way he looks down at the chequered tablecloth, lost.
"It's alright, dear. I know it's not my place to say, but just look around you. A cafe like this is no place to settle down."
The words don't offer much comfort for the confusion they helped kickstart. She presses her weight into his shoulder and uses him for support to get up, offering a bright smile as she slowly leans on her bad leg. People were fickle, and he wonders if her patience with him has a limit, but he still doesn't wonder if she's right. He can't imagine anything other than living in Paris and spending his time staring out his apartment window with his old handheld telescope, watching the lives of people in windows play out and turning his face to the star-studded night, hoping to see even farther than before. Maybe there was something missing. He had spent his whole childhood with bits and pieces missing, so there was no way to know, but he was living fine without it.
That night, he pours some wine and sways around the apartment with his telescope in hand, wearing only his boxers. He feels that missing piece without meaning to now, thudding to an offbeat with his heart. He swirls and steps, does a figure-eight and pads around the living room. The kitchen is silent, and the wooden table in there brings a lump to his throat, bringing him back to the days of his mother being his homeschool teacher and days of simply sitting there with his imagination, trying to figure out what was beyond the window, beyond the door he wasn’t allowed past, out in the world he couldn’t see. He steps again, then missteps and trips over his cat, King Fluffkins, and the telescope traces an arc in the air far to the other side of the living room, right to the corner.
The clang it makes is louder than expected. He picks himself off the floor and crawls over there, and his previous train of thoughts all cease with his new discovery. There, right on the second board from the wall, a tiny latch. A scuffed edge that sticks up, and the hollow sound of the telescope hitting it.
Underneath the trapdoor is a box. It’s a rusty tin with peeled remnants of maroon paint, bearing dust and years of abandonment. He picks it up and hears a rattle inside that makes him jump, heart pounding. It could be nothing but...
"No lock..." he says, and opens it. "Fluffkins, look."
Inside he finds a cat's-eye glass marble, a pocket knife, an old chocolate bar, a watch that was waiting to be wound, an unopened letter, and more random knick-knacks. It's carefully arranged, a box made and used with love. It's the imprint of a person, a trail of breadcrumbs to a life. He sits back against the wall, staring at the treasure, picturing the person it once belonged to. The person who put it away and left it behind.
He’s suddenly hit with the epiphany – he doesn't need to imagine. Someone lived here before him, and someone might be missing their stuff. He wants to see that look on their face, the shock and awe as they go through the tokens of their naive, childhood past. He hasn't touched anyone's life like that ever before, but he wants to. His parents hadn't done enough for him nor for each other, trapped in their own little miserable routines. They were different kinds of cold, and Neil was done with shivering.
***
"Figs, they're the best fruit. People hate them so much, but think about it, they're juicy and sweet. And they want to be my lunch so bad."
Matthew, the employee at the fruit stand of the supermarket, seems more interested in chatting than working. He’s brimming with so much energy you could collect it in a cup as it pours off of him, and he gets these sad puppy-dog eyes whenever someone doesn't play along. Neil just wants his figs already.
"Matthew! Enough chatting, give the gentleman his figs," berates a grumpy, frowning man in his fifties. Mr Augustin.
"Oh," Neil says. "Wait! I came for you. You lived in my apartment, apartment 2B. Do you know who lived there before you?"
The man pauses to think, "Well no, no I don't. I'm afraid I can't answer that."
"This is important," Neil insists. "I need to find someone."
"Alright, alright," he huffs, blowing his cheeks out. "You can ask my parents. They would know. Let me write this down for you."
Matthew looks between the two, then smiles when he catches Neil's eye again. He scrapes the bottom of the basket and puts the last few figs left into his bag, and Neil knows it's overfilled.
Matthew whistles. "Phew. That's done. Now what's a guy like me to do when there are no figs left to put on his plate?"
Mr Augustin clears his throat and hands over the piece of paper with their telephone numbers and address. "Well, they're a little senile. Good luck."
"Thank you," Neil smiles, then turns to leave.
"Not so fast. That is 2 euro, mister. That's right, hand it over. Put the money in the till, Matthew, come on, come on. Okay. Good bye now."
Neil edges away slowly this time, but before he leaves he turns back to Matthew and says, "Find yourself a date."
He's at the door when he hears him finally erupt with laughter, the joke sinking in.
***
It turns out, Mr Augustin's parents do know who lived there before, though it was somewhat difficult to understand through all their bickering and accusations of being senile. Bredoteau. Bredotot? Something about it was off to Neil, and he churned the name over and over on his walk back to the metro, clutching the tin in his hands. Bredoteau... Bread or toast.
He's so lost in thought that he almost trips flat on his face over a man in the metro station.
"Hey!" the man yells, and Neil's feet stop in their tracks before he walks over him, his heart pounding.
Their eyes meet and – hazel, intent, looking at him with a curious glimmer that makes him feel a little hot for some reason. The man has a well-structured face framed by blond hair, and an annoyed look despite his nicer eyes. It's embarrassing, for some reason, he suddenly feels picked apart by this man and the way he looks so expectant for an explanation. His eyes immediately drop to the rusty box in Neil's hands, while Neil's gaze goes to the thick, large book on the floor beside him, right next to the photobooth.
"Why are you on the ground?" Neil asks. He worries he might sound a little breathless.
He gets no answer, just a silent stare. The man looks like he's about to say something eventually, sitting up and opening his mouth, but a flash of movement in their periphery stops him, and he seems to forget all about Neil.
"Hey! Stop!" he yells at a tall man in a hat who is crossing the station to the stairs. He leaps up and runs to follow him, leaving Neil at a standstill right there, next to the photobooth, wondering what was going on.
***
He almost forgets the name with the chaos from the metro. He repeats it out loud, trying to force it to make sense as he passes the hall for the first floor apartments of the east wing. Right then, one of the doors of the apartments on the courtyard side swings open.
"Bretodeau."
"Excuse me?" Neil says, stopping.
"T, not d. It's Bretodeau." There stands an elderly man wrapped in a large puff jacket, a hat, and mitts, leaning precariously on a wooden cane. He smiles and says, "I'd shake your hand, but mine would break. Which is why I wear these gloves."
Neil is lost for words after the day he's had, so he simply steps closer so the man doesn't have to yell. The elderly man notices, and his eyes crinkle warmly as he continues talking, voice full of mirth.
"I never leave my apartment, but everything is still padded, you can see," he gestures, and Neil sees that it is – around the door and the handle there's extra thick padding, and inside there must be more.
"Well," he says, continuing without a response from Neil. He rummages in his pocket and whips out a handheld telescope, stretching it out and putting it to his eye. He turns towards Neil with it, and then puts it down a little. "You can see my apartment from yours, can't you?"
Neil stares down the end of the telescope pointed at him, and if he was any more of a regular person, perhaps he'd blush. Instead he bites back a sheepish half-smile, and the elderly man chuckles.
"Some tea? Or how about wine?" he offers, and Neil is just having the strangest day already, so he nods and follows him inside the warmly lit apartment.
There are canvases stacked and littered everywhere, though most are covered with a heavy cloth. The bright, painted ends still peek out however, their subjects demanding a closer look and attention. There's also padding around the entire room, and Neil sees most of the furniture is pushed closer to the walls.
"Yes, padding, padding, padding everywhere. It’s because I suffer from a rare bone disease. They call me 'the glass man', the residents here." He steps back and lets Neil take it all in, and then bows as much as he can with his cane and fragile frame. "Stuart Elijah Hatford. Pleased to make your acquaintance."
"Monsieur Hatford, I am –"
"Neil. Yes, I know. Why is it that someone so young and so full of life spends every night alone at his window? Unless, of course, all your friends are dwarves and I simply cannot see them."
For that, Neil doesn't have an answer that is good enough. Instead, he turns to the paintings spread around the room.
"Are you a painter?" he asks.
Mr Hatford chuckles. "Every night I stand before a canvas with a brush and my paint in hand, and ask myself the same question."
Neil tugs at one of the heavy hangings covering a few paintings. "May I?"
"Of course."
Underneath he finds canvases full of people at gatherings. Watching a ballerina perform, sitting in a parlour, at a park, in old clothes and huge dresses. As he makes his way around the room of paintings, he sees some of them are unfinished, and when he finally makes his way to the centre of the far side of the room, he sees that many of them are the same painting, with the same spot unfinished in each. Right in the middle, a white space.
"Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party. I've been painting this for years. I paint and paint and I do it again, and each time, it always comes down to her," Mr Hatford says, finger finding the girl in a copy of the painting that is not his own. "I've captured all the conversation and the touches, every embrace, except her. The girl with the glass."
Neil traces it with his own finger too, something in her gaze reaching his depths.
"See, so full of life, everyone. And this boy beside her. They laugh, and they talk and try to catch each other's eye, but the girl with the glass always looks away . I wonder what she sees, while she’s looking out at me. She’s a young girl that doesn't belong to any place, or anyone."
"I don't know," Neil demurs, catching her dark, shining eyes. "She looks happy to me."
Mr Hatford sighs. "I sat there with a brush in my hand, then years passed in the blink of an eye, and I'm still trying to figure out what is wrong with this girl with the glass."
"Maybe she's just different," Neil says, now tracing the gaze of the young man beside her, just the side of his face visible to him. When Mr Hatford asks him to elaborate, he shrugs. "I don't know. Maybe when she was little, she didn't get to play with other kids."
"Well, isn't it about time she starts?" Mr Hatford asks, sounding rueful.
And Neil just smiles with a shrug.
***
Finding Bretodeau was not difficult. David Vincent Wymack-Bretodeau, an unforgettable name and the only Bretodeau to have lived in this building, so people remembered him, and then tracing him across Paris was a simpler task than expected. Now Neil just has to let the plan unfold.
It's 6AM, and he hopes Mr Wymack-Bretodeau is about to come outside to start going to work. There's an empty phone booth across the street where he left the tin with a note, and he waits inside another phone booth to call. When the man emerges from his house, Neil dials, and the phone in the empty phone booth rings. The man, middle aged with a slightly uneven gait, stops and peers inside.
"Hello?"
"Look down," Neil whispers.
"What? Speak up."
"Look down ," he says, louder but still a whisper. He hangs up, holding his breath until Mr Wymack-Bretodeau emerges from the booth holding the tin before him, his face unreadable from this distance. Neil quietly emerges from his own telephone booth far away, going unnoticed by the man, and walks down the street towards him, hoping to just pass.
The man is muttering something repeatedly, and Neil can see him smiling as he takes out the watch. He jumps back inside the phone booth, door ajar, and as Neil gets closer he can see the man in tears as he speaks.
"I know it's been so long, I'm sorry. I know – can I come see you? And our son? I – yes, I can come right now, I'll take work off. Thank you. Thank you, my goodness."
It was supposed to be a sweet and simple gesture. Neil was unprepared for the way it would stir up so much in this man, enough to compel him to phone someone he had clearly not spoken to in a while. He walks by in awe, not aware he's even grinning till he walks into work with a smile he can't get rid of. He spends most of the day behind the glass door with the menu after that, avoiding his coworkers. Allison would probably ask him if he's had some mindless sex to make him so happy, and Kevin would immediately begin talking about germs and illness again, so he sticks to cleaning up the tables and polishing the glasses.