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bar shut down, she offered to take me for a spin in her car. We took a fast, rain-slicked drive up the rue de Seine , onto Vaugirard, and alongside the Luxembourg gardens. For those of you who have never tried it, it’s a hell of a lot of fun to whiz along Parisian rain-driven streets at high-speed with a French broad stripped of the usual moral scruples, and not a clue where you’re headed. Type of thing that can make you forget you’ve been up for thirty-six hours. We raced the wrong way up Soufflot , higher than kites, thanks to some ecstacy she had stashed in her purse, then did a few 360s around the Pantheon. Not a soul to be seen. The pillars of the austere law faculty staring down at us. The Pantheon, and a slew of famous men’s graves — Voltaire, Montaigne and Pascal, the foolish experimenter and conjecturer — Foucault’s pendulum, Ste-Geneviève du Mont . We were higher than the philosophers, macrocosmic. Nobody could touch us. We had been sprayed with human repellent.
    It’s prett y difficult to describe your state of mind when you find yourself in these regions. From the outside, it definitely looks like insanity. It’s not, though. It’s just not caring anymore. Outside of ever ything else, Sheba had provided me with the perfect excuse to write off humanity once and for all. That’s how I felt when we jumped out of the car and entered a bar on Mouffetard . “Bartender, for those in attendance who are interested, one round of cranberry vodka martinis or Black
    Bush coolers or other poison of their choice.”
    I must have said something like that as we took our seats. If Western Union had walked through the door just behind us, in that hole in the wall on Mouffetard to announce that America had been destroyed by nuclear holocaust, I would have turned my back and ordered another round of cranberry vodka martinis for the house. To celebrate the event. Or more precisely, to get on with it . Or just to keep the chaser rinsing my vocal chords between the lines of coke we snorted. Or to underline my core belief that all life had now magically been compressed inside the bodies floating within my spongiform cerebral universe. But more than anything because Sheba had become magnetic North, and the sound of that siren voice cooing in my direction just sent me right off whatever was left of my head. But, it was voluntary. Consensual synallagmatic every step of the way.
    And not a single redeeming feature to her. Unless you call a cunt like a pocket warmer a redeeming feature. Or a superhuman ability to perform fellatio better than a piccolo player in the Orchestre Nationale de France a redeeming feature. Or an assassin’s smile, and an attitude to match a redeeming feature. Lucifer’s daughter was perched in my lap and I felt the date was long overdue.
    â€œSheba, you know what I am thinking?”
    She was sizing me up, basically as prey, not because she was immoral, or evil or any of those things. It was just in her nature. She was obeying the voice, or as the new - agers would put it, just following her bliss.
    â€œWhat are you thinking, Franck?”
    â€œI’m thinking I’m Faust, and you’re Beelzebub.”
    â€œNo, it’s far better than that, Franck. You see, I can be anything you want me to be. Anything, Franck.”
    The next day, Sheba took me for a spin down the
    Quai Jemmapes , which runs alongside the Canal St-Mar tin. We were more or less drifting, passing a cigarette back and forth between us. She was looking out the car window driver side towards the water slapping against the side of the locks, monitoring something, smiling at some private joke. The soundtrack from Lift to the Scaffold was playing on FIP FM, 105.7. I could see Sheba was happy. There was something else, too. But there was happiness. I was already learning to separate it from whatever the other part was.
    The cit y had crawled to its usual Sunday morning halt.