Then intolerable things happened to him. They impaled him through spread legs all the way up under his spine so the wooden rod touched no organs, no heart, no lungs, and did not kill him. He was kept alive gushing blood from the coccyx and the top of the spine and he was hung skewered over the river. The children who usually played by the river watched the torture and absorbed fear through their skin like frogs. All the town was silent but for his screams.

And when the terror finally ended, the bridge was built with no further resistance.

Kosmos said, Why do I tell you such terrible stories when I want to kiss you? I come from a place of endless torment and war.

I thought, Do not fall in love with him.

I said, I can see your bridge arched over a stage, actors jumping from it and lifting themselves up on pulleys. I can see lovers meeting on the stone couches.

Then I stood and pulled him up and I said, My home also is a land of many languages—Huron, Algonquin, Iroquois and Montagnais. The Europeans wrote letters back home in French and Italian and Latin. In my home too was war and torture over territory, and the destruction of peoples for land, for ideas, for religion. Why should anyone claim the freedom of another?

The pulsing blood. I had to step away from him and so I pretended to be an old explorer and I raised my hand over the Seine and said, I claim this place under the authority of the Doctrine of Discovery.

I intoned to the cathedral, You gargoyles, especially you bored one resting on your elbows, you indigenous-creatures-who-are-not-human, your land is terra nullius and I claim it.

Kosmos was laughing at me and he understood little of what I was playing at, as I had understood little of his bridges. We are each born of particular violence on this blue and green planet in a dark and lifeless universe, and rather than be here together in awe, we war with each other.

I was not thinking about any of this that first night with Kosmos. No matter how many violent stories we told each other to pass the dark hours, we were really only thinking about making love together. All that first night until dawn we talked. The truly devastating things had not yet happened.

The yellow buildings behind Notre-Dame turned golden in the early pale sun, which shone first red and then white in the sky.

I told him I had a room nearby and Kosmos said he would walk back with me. On the rue des Écoles I unlocked the tall wooden door with my heavy key. I told him to follow me up the stairs quickly because I did not want my old French landlady, whose birds I sometimes took care of, to hear us, and neither did I want to disturb Rafiq and the others on my floor who were sure to be still asleep.