We Threw Her in the Seine

My limbs were feather-light, hands and feet buoyant, and my Sharpie-drawn makeup refused to budge. I was made to drown. Toilet paper rolls supported my joints, newspapers filled my chest cavity, breasts made with packing tape.

The video showed my friend, Yasna, sitting on the Pont des Arts with her new friends, whose names I recognised from the stories she shared of nights spent drinking too much wine. They sat me down on a bench, one leg crossed over the other, popped champagne and said a toast. Tourists snapped photos. Who could blame them? 

It took months to build me, or the doll version of me. A life-sized effigy made with love, but mostly made with free newspapers that Yasna collected off the streets of Paris, where I no longer lived. I was in the suburbs of New England, eating shitty bread, and watching the exploits from my childhood bedroom. She dressed me in a thrifted red plaid skirt and lavender knit shirt, accurately mismatched. Balloons were tied to each appendage so I could swim. My head was also a balloon, artfully drawn with red lips, lined eyes, and cropped hair: a snapshot of how I’d looked the year before. My pixie cut, which I had chopped before moving to Paris to resemble Jean Seberg, was now an overgrown shag. I never wanted to leave, couldn’t legally stay, so my body and my heart lived in separate countries. But my soul was fixed to that doll as they paraded me around subway stations, the banks of the Seine, and the pedestrian bridge. I knew what was coming after the champagne toast. I had been looking forward to it.

When we roamed the streets of Paris together, after early morning French classes at the Sorbonne, we looked for free things to do at 10 a.m., and museums were our first choice. Every week was something new: Louise Bourgeois at Centre Pompidou, Patti Smith at Fondation Cartier, Loris Gréaud’s takeover of Palais de Tokyo. But the artist we couldn’t stop talking about was André Cadere, who created round wooden sticks of varying bright colours, and took his art from the gallery to the streets of Paris, walking with the sticks slung over his shoulder, as oblivious people went about their day. This was art. Art was performative, spontaneous, and embodied. The park across the street from where I lived had benches that murmured phrases of love whenever anyone walked by. Sound was art. Life was art. 

We drank coffee at a café that’s now closed. It was never that good, and the grumpy waiter was always mean to us, but we didn’t know any better. The two iconic Montparnasse cafés were a block away. But no, it was more honest this way. We smoked Gauloises at first as a joke because that’s what chic older Parisians did, and then out of habit. Our lips were purpled with wine. Our eyes were lined with traditional kohl, which most likely contained lead, which we wore with clothing thrifted from the Marais. Of course, we read Hemingway. Our diet, because by this time we were essentially roommates, was cheese and bread or boiled broccoli because I didn’t know how to cook. I was definitely anaemic, though I’d never felt more alive.

When I was three, I loved water so much that I almost drowned. I ripped off my floaties and jumped into my friend’s pool. My mother, distracted for a second, turned back around and saw two big brown eyes submerged. I have a faint memory of the experience, of opening my eyes underwater for the first time and seeing layers of aquamarine. I don’t remember being scared, which seems unfair, because my mother still looks haunted whenever she tells the story. It wasn’t that I was trying to escape from the world. I was trying to get closer to it, to see inside of it, although I’ve since learned that chasing desire rarely ends well.

Before I left Paris, we found a mannequin leg, the kind used to model stockings in window displays, abandoned in my dorm’s trash. We plucked it out, carried it over our shoulders Cadere-style with a group of friends, and had the leg, which we named Lola, join us on a picnic at the Pont des Arts. A year later, the doll version of me would relive the experience.

I no longer have the video, so I don’t remember who threw me into the water. I don’t remember if I looked afraid, if I resembled my mother. My body floated, the balloon head and extremities did their job. I remember seeing myself splayed in a degree of flexibility I’m incapable of — legs in a full split, arms in severe angles. The water was brown, I’ll never forget that. The camera zoomed in on my helpless, flailing body, then zoomed out, as I floated away and grew smaller and smaller. Further away, like my connection to the city. Like the version of myself that believed everything was art. Distant but not forgotten.

When I think about Paris, I think about the doll. Is it rotting away? Did it contribute to the toxic sludge that caused the Olympians to vomit? By now, the newsprint has dissolved, the clothing degraded, but I like to think that my two plastic tape breasts are still buried deep in the bottom of the Seine, and between them, a piece of my heart.