Minding the Gap: through a hole in the Parisian sidewalk by Chris Moffett. Above photograph by Jazz Meyer, 2012.
It turns out that the car sitting on the side of the road at 2am, with a lone occupant, was an unmarked police car. His partner materialized and converged quickly but smoothly on us, from our other side, flashing an indistinct wallet, and not so much identifying himself as embarking all of us together on an unexpected new course. Or, rather, ceasing to embark. We would have been on our way, the six of us having just hurriedly popped out of a Parisian manhole, one after the other, and eager not to loiter. Our two parties no doubt surprised each other.
There’s a grey area. There’s always a grey area. The Parisian boundaries of above and below are more porous than say here in New York where I recount this. Better if the street had been completely deserted, but that’s what distinguishes the surface, even in the wee hours of the morning, from the utility tunnel that we might have absconded back down. In the moment one is always sorting out the varying grayness, the complicit mix of light and dark. You can, for example, forget to turn off your headlamp as you hustle to put some distance between you and the pitch dark you emerged from. Above ground the forgotten headlamp only marks you as out of place amidst the glaring street lights. The beam contributes nothing, so that you don’t even realize you are still sending it out, signalling yourself out to the world. But even this oversight simple points to the array of options that constantly flow one into the other, even in the intensified pressure of squeezing through a hole in the sidewalk.
“What are you doing?” the officer sensibly asked in what would be a series of questions marking the rhythm of our engagement. This rhythm was inseparable from the physical dance involving the emptying of our pockets: “What is this?” “And in this pocket?” “Do you have drugs?”
Or was it that these questions were precisely not sensible, marking instead only the appearance of sensibility, like a headlamp left on in the light that renders its useless? We all know how this dance goes, even if we are winging it, uncertain of the outcome. What we are doing is exactly what we have in common now: we are all standing over the manhole that we were just caught coming out of. We are egressing. We are being busted for egressing. We are, collectively, cops and egressors. But what are we doing? Even in the moment, when wisdom would dictate a suitably vague and contrite blend of truth and omission, it is surprisingly difficult to say. Does one answer with practicalities, introducing a whole apparatus constructed around a singular raison d’etre?
“Well, officer, we are scouting tunnels, looking for a critical passage that will take us under the Sein. If we find it, then we can set out a couple nights hence on the journey proper, a complete traversal of Paris from South to North, underground. We’re pretty confident of the Catacomb section, but are trying to work out how to get from there into the canal system and eventually into the sewers in the North. And we pretty much exhausted this utility tunnel, so we were just popping up to assess where it gets us.”
Such forthrightness seems ill advised, but largely because it would be evasive, refusing to answer the officer’s question, threatening to highlight the chasm gaping under our feet, this void beneath the surface. Where do we find common ground? Is it not simpler, less precise: we are cataphiles (the colloquial term for lovers of the catacombs) and we are exploring, and we are sorry, and recognize that you have caught us at something, and yet we are no trouble. (Is this even more true? Have we constructed the larger story as a smoke screen to ourselves? And what if this masks an even more difficult possibility, that we don’t indeed know what we are doing?)
The law prohibits things that we collectively care to consider unfathomable. But in doing so the law must articulate them in the most technical of manners. Enforcers of this technical naming of what must remain unspeakable are in some sense cataphiles, able to move across the barrier of the surface of things, comfortable below ground. What is most worrisome is when the gap is welded shut, threatening to keep you on whatever side you are currently on, backed into a corner or caught with nowhere to hide. To get caught on the side of the unspeakable is the horror, and history is replete with examples of how this becomes physically or technically brutal. (We should imagine, perhaps, not Theseus slaying the Minotaur, but a labyrinth in which we are Minotaurs to each other.) Still, for the enforcer of the law, to move with facility between these spaces is to have an implicit or explicit sense of the absurdity of the technical. It is this which allows the technical to work. We have technically been busted, but this is only the starting point. It is no doubt illegal: there is, I am brought up to speed afterwards, a fine for being in the catacombs, and here we were exiting not these vestigial spaces of Paris’ past but its working infrastructure. And yet I also am told that there is a minimum amount for a fine to follow you once you leave the country, and whether or not that is true, it points to the kinds of calculations, both technical and felt, that will determine in large part how this goes. Having grilled us and emptied our pockets, one officer clearly looks to the other with a look that asks, how shall we play this?
But as clearly as our group’s immediate fate rests on one side of this calculation, and as much as that look was not meant for us, it also indicates the extent to which we are all in it together. How this night goes is up for grabs for all of us. And if clearly we were doing something that is in some small way unspeakable—is this not what drew us to it each in our own fashion?—it is also this which has for a moment brought us together. In this sense we have more in common with each other than with the pedestrian who will walk by, taking in the scene but not breaking stride.
Stride breakers. It’s a kind of litmus test: how much can you see in another by the way they choose to move down the street, or stoop to pass down a limestone tunnel deep underneath the street? Stooped over in such a tunnel, and finding a headlamp bobbing down the tunnel from the other direction, you may not know much about what this encounter will look like, but you do know that you will find someone else who also finds him or herself stooping down a tunnel. This is the strange camaraderie of the catacombs, or the catacombed camaraderie of strangers. It turns out, in fact, that the catacombs are crawling with people. While I have climbed down alone in the evening only to emerge late the next day having been company only to myself the entire time, it is just as likely that one will run into a whole panoply of people. On the weekend, one can run into old friends in an underground party, cross path with single file expeditions, trade some “cata-knowledge,” or exchange email addresses. Or you might, for example, find yourself part of a loose six person team of New Yorkers and an Australian, coming together for a strange task. You might even find yourself in the candlelight sitting across from the mysterious Lazar—unofficial and evasive spokesperson for the infamous group UX—who may have just embraced your comrades as long lost friends. Somehow going underground is a teeming, complicit affair, full of life.
Bradley L. Garrett in his dissertation on Urban Exploration, stemming from his participation in the legendary crew London Team B, writes:
Urban explorers, in the hacking tradition, hack or exploit fractures in physical architecture and social expectations in an effort to find deeper meanings and different readings in places even as they preference process over results. This practice, rather than being strictly oppositional, is actually quite celebratory; it is a method of affecting desire through unencumbered play that creates a meld between body and city, representations and practice, explorers and place and, of course, between fellow trespassers.
Can we trace it back the other way, back across the threshold of the sidewalk? The two officers were now unwittingly interwoven into our story, becoming part of the direction and telling of the story we were creating both in words and space. And we, no doubt, were not so surprising to them, tucking neatly enough into their narrative. For the most part, we each kept our stories to ourselves, as if mindful of the gap, the difficult space between what we preferred to imagine of the other and the other themselves. We stayed closer to a kind of ritualized enactment, a tactful standoff. In response to the one guard’s raised eyebrow, asking his partner how this should resolve, the other shrugs. We are off the hook. “Next time we’ll bring you in.” And then one last odd gesture. He points to the sky and says, “It’s going to rain. Very dangerous.” What are we to make of this gesture? A parting shot to suggest who has the last word, the appropriate knowledge, justifying all of this drama, since we had skirted every other concern? Or was it a show of concern, either out of actual concern, or as a way of bridging the gap, collapsing the power differential, as if to say, “we know, we know, but still…” What would it take to imagine this encounter not as not “strictly oppositional” but “actually quite celebratory”? What desire are we playing out together?
We did not stick around to mull it over. But the encounter would keep beat with other similar situations, either actual or potential. Two of our crew find themselves similarly caught in the act of emerging after leaving a food drop for our later attempt at a full traversal. These become somehow familiar to us, but part of what I think we felt is the way in which they skirt the surface of things, glancing off. They form a kind of virtual texture to the journey, an odd contrapuntal possibility that was so clearly interwoven, and yet foreign, absurd even.
Some days later, after over forty hours walking and crawling the underside of the city from one end to the other, we finally emerge out of manhole in the sewer system (where, in contrast to the utility tunnel we had been in previously, rain was indeed a terrifying concern, despite our precautions). It is lunch time, and our exit is just feet from the sidewalk tables of a cafe, forcing pedestrians to squeeze by or wait for us to emerge one after the other, six troglodytes caked in grime. We make haste, sliding the cover back into position, before hoofing down the street to leave the scene. Nobody stops us this time. We make it to a small Parisian park, where we collapse on the grass, exhausted. After some time, a police officer approaches our prone crew. I prepare myself as best I can with what little energy I can muster.
“You can’t be on the grass,” he says. “Pardon,” I say over and over in reply to his insistent gestures, but I can’t help but smile a bit.