Nikolai is the last to come down the rusty rebar ladder. He turns to me and says, “Well now it is the four of us.” He wipes slimy hands on my hoodie so I wipe my hand on his jacket and he shies away.
Etienne is gone, he went to a hospital in the back of an ambulance. Nikolai and Viktor were issued citations for going into the Catacombs and as far as the cops were concerned Guute Mao was a passerby doing a good deed by stopping to help. I spent the last forty-five minutes wandering in the underground silence of the Waiting Room of the Catacombs.
Viktor says, “Let's get into the catacombs” and everyone agrees. Nikolai leads us along a cement tunnel and the walls are covered in electrical wires and rebars and tags too. The floor is a white powdery clay and occasionally there are shallow pools that we must walk through. The water stains our shoes white. After five-hundred meters of this Nikolai stops abruptly. A spattering of French is spoken and Guate Mao turns to me with a twinkle in his eyes and says, “We are here”.
The hallway is dark save for our headlamps but to me the spot doesn't look any different than the rest of the hallway. Victor pulls a rock from the wall and drops it but I don't hear it land. Viktor says, “It will be a wet adventure tonight!”
Viktor stoops and then crawls head-first into a hole at the bottom of the wall. The hole is barely larger than his shoulders and I wonder if I’ll fit. Guate Mao turns to me and says, “I have never gone to the Catacobms this way but I have heard about it. We will crawl on our bellies like snakes.”
Guate Mao squeezes through the hole, feet-first and his head disappears with a grin. Nikolai tells me, “Now you go. If I go first you will be chicken-shit and wander away and get lost for years.”
I blow him off and get onto my knees. The ground is damp and cold but the white dust feels like Greek Island beach sand at midnight. I slide into the hole feet-first, my backpack clutched in my left hand and my stencil case in the right. My shoulders barely fit through the hole; once inside I’m sandwiched between two colossal pieces of cement with about twenty-four inches of space between them. Everyone is slithering on their bellies but I’m on my back. I torque my neck and can see Guate Mao’s head as he rocks his body back and forth to scoot in the direction that Viktor has gone. I scoot after them but as Nikolai enters the tunnel I notice that the space between the slabs is getting tighter. Guate Mao says, “Bro! This is crazy, it is getting small in here. Can you make it?”
My chest scrapes the roof so that dust showers onto my face; my back is sleek with Catacombs mud but I seem to have hit some sort of geyser that pushes me downwards more quickly. I answer, “I’m in the water now and it seems to make me fit better.” After a few meters the roof backs off a few inches and I start sliding towards a hole along the far wall. I see Guate Mao’s face in the hole and he shines his headlamp towards me so that I can see the floor—a veil of water rushing over white mud—so I slide myself to him and squeeze through the hole.
Nikolai pops through the hole like champagne cork popping off and shouts, “Voila!”
Guate Mao wipes the mud from my back while I clean off our stencil cases and make sure that no water breached the casing.
The air is crisp and stale and nary the whiff of a breeze rustles it. We are in a round room with a high ceiling; the stone walls are covered in ornate carvings and graffiti and some offerings to the dead, lodged into the eye sockets of skulls carved into the wall. Viktor looks at me and says, “Welcome to the Catacombs SMiLE.”
I give a single stern nod of appreciation and Nikolai shouts, “We are not here to mourn the dead...but to celebrate them! And Paris has some of the best dead people on the planet.”
Viktor shouts, “Jim Morrsion! Mallarme! Oscar Wilde!”
Nikolai pulls a bottle of whiskey out of his backpack and they all commence French verbal calisthenics while the bottle makes its way around the circle. Guate Mao rolls a quick spliff and sparks it up so here we are, the four of us sitting on a limestone bench carved into the wall and getting wasted five-feet from our entrance into the Catacombs.
Viktor straps a BOSE speaker to his backpack and bluetooths some tunes from his phone; the air in this crypt finally moves as the music pulses. We stand, gather ourselves and set off on our journey into the heart of the Catacombs to paint in the room where the French Resistance in WWII was organized.