What the Light Touches

1 IF HE WERE EVEN ALIVE

Surprises were better in books. She’d had enough of them in real life.

But fate, stubborn as only it can be, walks its own path. Sometimes rearing its head on a Saturday.

After climbing up five flights, loaded up like a donkey, the last thing she expected was to find someone at home. As soon as Barbara opened the door and placed the two bags with the week’s worth of shopping on the floor, careful not to squash the tomatoes, she discovered a man sleeping on her couch. She didn’t even have a chance to take off her jacket and gloves. The stranger—too old to be a boy, no longer a young man but not quite middle-aged—had untied his boots and, without slipping them off, placed his feet on a pillow, the very same throw pillow where, not long ago, Barbara’s grandmother rested her head for her usual postlunch naps. The intruder’s belly button was on full display, the waistband of his underpants peeking out over his belt buckle and his left arm splayed above his head in a sign of surrender. The other hand, with the sleeve of his black shirt rolled up, hung so that his knuckles grazed the floor. His jacket, thrown to the side, had slid down onto the tiles of the floor. Barbara didn’t understand. She’d left the house at midmorning and, two hours later, here was this person, perfectly at home and without a single care in the world, as if he’d lived here his whole damn life.

Not too long ago, Libération had published a report she’d happened upon and read, on an epidemic of squatters in the old buildings of the Latin Quarter who, in very little time, took over entire homes—and, next thing you knew, it took an army to help kick them out. And that was in the best of cases. Often the police said that nothing could be done, that justice had gone blind, and that the latest fashion in Paris was to say you were lucky if the person who’d broken into your home was in the mafia. Because, in exchange for money, another mafia would force out the mafia staying in your apartment. The cycle of business. Half victories. You pay the price of extortion, but at least the squatters leave. What more could you want?

In the time it took her to react, Barbara dismissed the idea that her tenant was part of some perverse setup—he hadn’t even grown a beard, despite appearing not to have shaved in days. He was a little too at ease in the apartment. Too calm. No amount of ruckus would have disturbed him. And it didn’t look like he’d forced the lock.

She slammed the door forcefully, hoping to scare him. And wake him up.

That is, if he were even alive.