enchanté par les enchanters (CONTINUE)

The music streamed out into the street, along with tense hilarity in the form of lights flashing in silhouettes like some theatre staging. Omar's heart rang and he knew for some reason that this place and time were of some import. He approached with caution, not afraid but aware that strange nights like these can bring strangeness of any sort. The door was open, and when he walked into the forechamber a young man with long blonde hair asked in French why he was here. "Is there somewhere else I should be?" came from Omars lips, a strange and true answer -- a question.

The blonde man smiled and waved Omar through the curtains into the room with lights and smoke. The music was loud and the people seemed in conspiracy to freeze him out, like they were expecting him and he was a guest of some sort of strange ritual role. It felt, in a way, that he would be the subject of some sort of cosmic joke. Young women swept along the hall, shadows and shapes of legs and waists, eyes and hair to contend with, their chests ample reminders that they can, by nature, be loving.

This was Paris, and he was far from the sea. He felt like a child among lesser men, and a boy in lust of women far too much for him to handle. In truth he was naive, if not innocent, to the trades and courtship of hearts and sex in the Light City Paname. The main room had a stage where the singers and speakers of whisps of stone and columns of cloud, the dreamers and the music makers, the enchanters and the enchantresses. It was a wild and careening night and the air itself became material. A dark man approached Omar and asked him if he had any mud. He meant opium.

"Who would need it, then?" Omar answered. "Come with me," and so Omar followed the man. The man passed along the hall of caryatids, more lustreous than before, and Omar entered a larger room with a lower ceiling where there were quiet sofas and calm whispers. "Is it him?" a wild young girl was hoping with eyes that hid nothing. She wanted Omar to be him more than anyone else. She was dreamlike in her beauty, like a vision of some eternal being, a god or angel in clouds of opium vapour. The course of Omar's life was changing, and as none of us are, he was in no way able to hand the helm or trim the sails. She smiled at him and their deal was set.