28. La Tour Eiffel est trop grande

I've seen it the whole time we've been here, out our window and across the city. The Eiffel Tower. We've been here for seven months, and we're only going to be here another two, and I just need to gird my man-parts and go up in that thing. Thousands, nay, millions of people do it every year, and hardly anyone gets overcome by the urge to jump or sucked off a railing by a rogue cyclone or flung over the side by psychopathic people-off-tower flingers. It should be safe,right?

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair...

Come, let me tell you about the day I went up in the Eiffel Tower. Well, I should say tried to go up, because...oh, just read on.

I was sitting in a cafe in Trocadero with a good view of the Tower across the river. Normally I stay close to Petit Bateau in the 6^th arrondissment when I go to write, but today I'd wandered further afield for a couple reasons. To start with I wasn't doing laundry, my usual excuse to sit in a cafe and drink a beer and scribble my scribblings. And to continue with I was planning to write a thing about the Eiffel Tower and wanted some pictures that I'd taken myself.

Gustave Eiffel built the thing for the 1889 World's Fair. It was supposed to be torn down twenty years later, but by then there was this newfangled thing called radio, and it turned out that the Tower was a cool place to transmit from. Father Theodore Wulf first detected what we now call Cosmic Rays during an experiment conducted from the top. It weighs 10,000 Megagrams (I include this fact because I get to use the word Megagram).

But most importantly, the thing looks like a mech! It's like an AT-AT crossed with the SDF-1 (Macross for you purists) realized by steampunk anime enthusiasts.

Are you my mother?

From our window it's the tallest thing you see. Well, if you don't count Tron Tower. Tron Tower isn't as tall, but it's closer, so...I guess that's how perspective works. Its real name is Montparnasse Tower, but at night it's outlined in 80's sci-fi CGI blue lights, so that's my name for it.

Actually, my friend Brandon coined that title,
but I've wholeheartedly adopted it.

But Tron Tower's just a lesser skyscraper whose only claim to fame is that it stands there all by itself. The Eiffel tower is...unique. It rises like an otherworldly guardian above the city, a slender, gently curved spire that just stands there...waiting.

It's currently painted bronze (apparently there's a thing on one of the observation levels where you can vote for the next color) and it looks like nothing else anywhere nearby. The green expanse of the Champs de Mars to the south, the Seine and Trocadero to the north, old buildings of brick and stone on either side...they all fade around this thing. It's hard to believe it's actually there, like someone photoshopped it into being. It almost glows.

At night it does glow. The whole thing lights up, thousands of bulbs making it shine like amber steel (though it is in fact made of wrought iron; that's what they tell you, anyway). At the very top a spotlight sweeps ponderously over the city, like a less fiery but no less imposing Barad-Dur. Every hour on the hour it bursts into an epileptic nightmare of squillions of flashing and strobing lights.

You can also see the lights of Tron Tower warping through

 different colors, its answer to Eiffel's display.

You can go up in it, of course. This is what I was pondering as I sat in the cafe, sipping my beer. Should I? It's one of the quintessential things to do in Paris. In the fall Megan and I once walked all the way from Petit Bateau to the base of thing, but we didn't go up. It was a mad house under there, as it was today. Hundreds of tourists milling around taking pictures, lining up for the different elevators, trying to decide how high up they want to go. Dozens of people selling souvenir mini-towers slung on metal rings around their shoulders.

A popular trick a souvenir-hawker will play is to come up to you and say, “Hold out your finger!” He says it in such a combination of nice and peremptory that you obey, and he slips a loop of string around your finger and begins tying a friendship bracelet. It's cute, a little magical, and as he ties he tells you a story, about Paris or about his childhood in Senegal (this is what the guy we fell for did). And as he goes on you realize he's going to try to sell you this bracelet he's tying, and what's more, the thing is tied to your finger! You can't leave without making a scene and stealing his stuff! Crafty. So...we have a genuine Parisian souvenirist/huckster bracelet.

But there I was, sitting across the river, trying to decide if I was going to cross the Seine, stand in line, and pay about nine euros to ride up to the first and second observation levels. It's fourteen if I want to go all the way to the top. And going to the top would be the whole point, wouldn't it? But I don't like the heights, ladies and gentlemen. I turned green when my family went up in the Saint Louis Arch when I was a teenager. I get really uncomfortable when people stand near the railings on balconies. So the prospect of going up 80 stories and looking down wasn't appealing to me.

On the other hand, I want this blog to be interesting. When I had my kidney stones back in October I remember thinking, “This is going to be great blog material!” Well, that's what I thought after they'd put the drugs in me and I could think about anything other than the pain. I have even once or twice considered getting in trouble with the law just so I could blog about the experience.

Thinking these things, I finished my beer. I finished writing this sentence in my notebook and stood up. I had paid for my drink as soon as it was brought; I've found that if you don't pay immediately there's no telling how long it'll be before the server pays attention to you again. I don't understand that.

The Tower....towering, as I headed to the cafe earlier.

I made my way down the hill and set out across the Pont d'Iena, the bridge that crosses the Seine and connects Trocadero to the Eiffel Tower. The sidewalk on the bridge was lined with the usual collection of folding tables and people running shell games and Three Card Monte. Small crowds always surround these tables, and even when you factor in the three or four plants in the crowd who keep telling the poor mark that he's wining so he'll up his bet, there's still maybe a half dozen people there just to watch someone lose their money.

I neared one table where this had just happened. A middle-aged German man was arguing with the table runner. I don't know German, but his tone and his gestures made it sound like, “How could I have lost? This guy,” Gesturing at a guy next to him, “Said I was winning!” The runner just shook his head and smiled apologetically. The money had already disappeared.

The German took a step forward. He was thicker and taller than the guy running the table. But immediately three more guys-- one of them the guy who had been telling him he was winning-- stepped out of the crowd and shoved between the German and the table, facing him, smiles gone. A woman next to the German, about his age, took his arm and said something insistent. As I moved past the table and on towards the Tower his face was darkening in frustrated, embarrassed rage.

Thunder detonated overhead, impossibly loud. I ducked involuntarily; half the people on the bridge with me did the same. I was almost to the other side. A couple hundred yards ahead of me, across the street and under the massive iron feet of the Eiffel Tower, a short sharp roar briefly rose as dozens of people in the milling throng beneath the thing cried out in shock.

I looked up. The sky was cloudy, the kind that might spit a few raindrops down half-heartedly, but not the kind that made thunder. But then I saw the Eggs.

Well, over here they're calling them les Oeufs, of course. I don't know if you've seen one yet, but they're not exactly egg-shaped. More like the ship in that movie Flight of the Navigator, but smooth all over, and the mirror sheen keeps rippling through colors like gasoline on water.

Not exactly like this, but more that than an actual egg.

I only saw one at first, hovering over the Seine to my left. Then I saw two more further away over the Champs de Mars. I don't know how big they were; maybe a bus? Hard to tell with them way up in the air.

Another crack of thunder, and a fourth Egg plummeted out of the sky like the Millenium Falcon coming out of hyperspace. It jerked to a stop above and to my right, over the Seine. Together the four of them bracketed the Tower, narrow ends pointed toward it.

The people on the observation levels must have seen the things hanging in the air, pointing at the Tower; screams, high and thin, floated down from above. I craned my neck to look up at the Tower. At first I thought I was having trouble focusing, but then I realized that the Tower actually did look fuzzy around its edges. But the fuzziness didn't stay; it started to drift down, tiny little particles of...what?

Paint. The paint on the Tower was flaking off in blizzards. The people underneath were streaming out, filling the air with a low roar. The people on the observation levels were screaming nonstop now, and it wasn't in shock or surprise. It was horror, pain. Between each Egg and the Tower I saw a thin line, twisted and distorted, like heat shimmer.

The Tower groaned. It sounded like every bridge and metal edifice does in the movies, just before it buckles and collapses. I thought that maybe I should turn around, maybe go back the way I came, get away from it. I tilted my head to take one last look and froze.

Way up at the top, where the spotlights are, a bright light had appeared. It was only about three-thirty in the afternoon, so the spotlights shouldn't have been on, nor would they have been visible if they were. But something was glowing at the Tower's apex. Then, the very top of the thing exploded.

There's a thick forest of radio antennae at the pinnacle, all sitting on top of the giant...lighthouse, I guess you could say. All of that burst outwards and disappeared from view because of the small blue-white star that bloomed above the highest observation level. Thunder cracked again, but this time it was from a blinding indigo arc that briefly connected the boiling ball of light at the top of the Tower to one of the Eggs hovering over the Champs de Mars.

The Egg skittered to the side, staggered drunkenly, then dropped-- much like a regular egg might if you stop holding it-- and disappeared behind a line of buildings.

The other three Eggs began moving off to the west, sliding through the air, narrow ends still pointed at the Tower. The thickened air at one's tip solidified, gained an orange tinge, and a corner of the Tower, right above the second observation level, flouresced and melted.

All these things made sounds: the Tesla-coil snap-and-thunder of the beam at the Tower's top; the liquid hum of the Eggs as they hovered in the air; the bacon-ey sizzle as part of the Tower fried away. But they were hard to hear over the Superbowl-level screaming going on all around me. People streamed by me, running across the bridge toward Trocadero. I saw them tearing off in either direction down the Quai Branly, the street that runs by the Tower. But even all of that was drowned out as a shriek like steel fingernails running down a chalkboard the size of Texas blasted out from its base.

I fell on my ass from the force of the sound. Luckily most everyone had already run past me or I would have been trampled. But my new angle let me see the thing writhe just perceptibly. The shedding paint flakes become a storm. I couldn't see any of the people still up there through the cloud coming off of it. And then, with the sound of a mountain collapsing in reverse, one of the Eiffel Tower's feet tore free of the ground.

I don't know why none of what had happened so far had flipped the flight switch in my brain (there was certainly no chance of a fight response in this situation). The silvery floating things, people screaming, and what looked like a ray gun battle of some kind were too...entrancing to run away from, to miss. But seeing the Eiffel Tower lift one of its feet out of the ground, waist-thick spears of metal poking out and hunks of concrete the size of cars clinging to it, is what did it. Too much.

I crab-walked backward as fast as I could until I could stumble to my feet and run. The ground shook as the free foot came back down, and I heard cars crunch and screams stop. The Pont d'Iena shuddered and a thick crack shot through it ahead of me. That terrible ripping sound, followed by a jarring subsonic thud, happened again and again, and again as it pulled its remaining three legs out of the ground.

I reached the end of the bridge and kept going up the hill. My lungs hurt; I am not a runner. When I finally glanced back over my shoulder the Tower was smashing its way west, presumably going after the Eggs. It screamed like it was in torment with every step, wrought iron-- if it actually is made of wrought iron, a fact I now seriously doubt-- flexing and twisting. Thunder cracked each time that glowing ball on top pulsed and a blinding arc shot out. The Eggs were weaving in and around each other now, and the blasts from the Tower usually missed them and landed somewhere else, blasting a building or a park apart.

I made it home, back to Petit Bateau. I risked the metro, like an idiot, but knowing I would get back in twenty minutes instead of three hours; my stop, and all of line six were to the east and south, out of the Tower's path. The metro was running, and before long I was surrounded by people who hadn't seen what had happened. Maybe there was something on the news, maybe the people were talking about it, but I didn't understand them, and I couldn't warn them. I couldn't tell them their cultural landmark had come to life because it was under attack from flying silver eggs. I know. Crazy, right? But I was there. I saw it, only...in all the excitement I forgot to take any pictures.

But I can tell you. I can warn you. Watch out, folks. He probably didn't do it alone. I don't know who or what helped him, or contributed to its construction, but don't forget what else Gustave Eiffel built: The Statue of Liberty.

This, but with maybe laser eyes or ionized
plasma streaming from the torch. More screaming.