The Princess and the Trashman

February 2056

MARIE Aurore walked the Quai de Valmy along the Canal Saint-Martin in the grey-blue light before the cafes opened. The plane trees were bare and black against the zinc rooftops, and the canal water sat flat and green-grey between its stone banks, and the cold was the kind of cold that did not bite but settled into clothing and stayed. Her breath came in small clouds that dissolved before they reached the iron railing at the water’s edge. She wore a black double-breasted coat with brass buttons over white tights and black boots, and she held her red-and-white candy cane walking stick in a gloved hand. The coat had a designer cut she had not thought about when she put it on, but which made her look like she was mocking the fluttering red-star and bonnet rouge flags hanging off the building faces.

She was heading toward a cafe on one of the side streets off the canal— her local, a place where the owner had stopped staring after the first week and now simply put her coffee down without comment. The chairs were still being set out. A pigeon sat on the footbridge railing and watched her with the ancient indifference of Parisian pigeons toward all human affairs, revolutionary or otherwise.

Ahead of her, an older man in blue swept the quay in long practiced strokes, working eastward. He was craggy-faced and lean, with a shock of dark grey hair over black roots and the kind of posture that Aurore remembered from the old men in Moulins-la-Marche who had lived their whole lives as menial laborers. The pavement between the canal railing and the cafe fronts was narrow, and as Aurore neared him, neither could easily avoid the other.

The two made eye contact. The man’s face fell cold, and then he stepped aside and bowed with exaggerated vigor.

She paused.

She spoke with a voice as delicate as a snowflake. “Oh, all apologies, good sir. You needn’t worry with that anymore.”

He stood up and made the kind of smile Aurore remembered on the faces of some of the men in the Doll Room. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty.”

And Aurore chuckled nervously and said, “Again, you really mustn’t. That world’s behind me now. I mean I appreciate the gesture, but I’m no princess.”

He leaned on his broom with both of his hands on the top end, pushing himself closer to Aurore as he did. “You look like a princess to me, Your Majesty. I remember seeing you on television and all the screens. Remember? With the big white bow and your candy cane walking stick?” His eyes flicked down. “Look, you still have it, and you want to tell me you’re not a princess?” He lightly kicked her red-and-white-wrapped cane.

Aurore looked down to hide her wide and bright smile and thought to herself, This is embarrassing! and said out loud, “Thank you, yes, that is true. I was a princess. You’re correct. I’m sorry.”

After the man said nothing and instead seemed to gawk at her, she nodded and stepped forward to walk on, but he interrupted her.

“Why, Your Majesty! Surely you would be so kind as to remark upon my efforts to clean your kingdom!”

Aurore again laughed nervously. “It’s beyond my scope, honestly. I mean… I certainly remember Rotten February.”

Two years ago this same month, these same quays had been buried under weeks of refuse. 

“Right? And did you enjoy our efforts?”

All at once Aurore recognized what he was getting at and clasped her hands together. “I hold no harsh feelings whatsoever over that. You did what was necessary to un-chain yourselves.”

And the man smacked his lips and patted her shoulder with a heaviness that buckled her. She caught herself on the cane, her weight shifting onto it, and felt the cold of the iron canal railing through her glove as she steadied against it. “So you say you enjoyed the filth then? I suppose that makes sense for you people! I remember this post saying that you were completely unbothered by the strike and refused to follow your family to Sun City. I guess filth is more befitting your temperament.”

“Leave the lady alone, man.” Another man came out from one of the cafe doorways with a cup of coffee in one hand and pushed the first away from Aurore with the other. Once he set it down, he went for his own cleaning tool. This one was a Maghreb with a heavy face and a wiry mop of hair, wearing the same sort of uniform as the first man. “And stop upsetting Pixel.” He turned to the dog, which sat and looked up at the trio.

The first man shook his head and walked off with a gait that made Aurore wonder if, at any moment, he’d stop and punch a light pole. She watched him go along the quay until he passed under the footbridge and disappeared around the bend of the canal.

Aurore bowed to the second man and said, “Thank you, sir.”

“It’s nothing. You’re welcome. Oh god, you’re Princess Marie Aurore?!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh wow. Oh wow! No wonder. Oliver’s deep into Antikap.”

“Ah, I see.” Aurore kept her hands clasped. Antikapitalistische Aktion was, far and away, the rowdiest of the revolutionary groups, though had been smaller and often compared unfavorably to its older and less radical brother, Antifascistische Aktion. “I wasn’t terribly bothered.” Then she extended her hand and said, “Marie Aurore, as you know.”

“Karim.” He shook it and glanced back toward the footbridge where Oliver had disappeared. “Don’t take it personal. He’s like that with everyone since— well, he’s been like that.”

“It’s fine.”

“He’s in his sixties now. You wouldn’t know it to look at him but he used to be, I don’t know the word, aisé? Comfortable? Had some position with one of those firms your dad’s people liked to hand contracts to. Then the regime didn’t need him anymore and—” Karim made a gesture with his hand, a thing dropping. “Thirty years ago, maybe. He’s been out here ever since. So when he sees you with the cane and the buttons, it’s…” He trailed off.

Aurore looked down at her coat and its brass buttons as if seeing them for the first time. “I understand.”

“He’s not a bad man. Just angry at the wrong person.”

“Or the right person for the wrong reasons.”

Karim made a face like he wanted to argue but didn’t have the sentence ready, and instead said, “You’re out early. You live around here?”

“Down the canal a bit. Ferron arranged it.”

“Ferron? Like the General Secretary Jean-Paul Ferron?” He blew his cheeks and said, “Goddamn! I guess all the important people get that sort of privilege.”

Aurore retracted and grinned under her hands, even more embarrassed, until she mustered the ability to say, “He’s particular about where I go. I wanted the 18th but apparently I’m too—” she searched for the word and gave up, “—conspicuous.”

Karim laughed, a real one this time. “Yeah. Yeah, the 18th would eat you alive. No offense.”

“None taken. I’ve been told. I’m a bit too much of a bleeding heart to let that go. Get it?”

Karim’s brow furrowed as he looked at her. She nudged him and winked and mouthed, “The gunshots?”

He then rubbed his head and went, “Oh. I thought that was going to be a sore subject for you.”

“It is! In 12 spots, actually,” and she laughed.

Karim tried to laugh. It was that hollow laugh where she knew the man was suffering the task of still feeling out the mood and was not yet sure whether joining in with the joke would bring offense or shared amusement.

Aurore felt one of the wounds pull beneath the coat, sharper in the cold, and tensed up lest it sharpen into something worse, as if God warned her to stop speaking.

So she said, “I’ve actually wondered if it was at all possible to get a job as a street cleaner.”

And Karim looked at her with this incredulous twist on his face, as if she had just accidentally spoken a slur, and he said, “Really? You go from being the Grand Princess and now you want to be a garbagewoman?”

Aurore shrugged. “Since last year, actually. Something more productive than not.”

He shook his head and said, “Didn’t you get, like, ten million euros back from the state? You could just retire overseas.”

Aurore blushed. “I’d rather stay here. And I’m letting others distribute that money as they see fit. There’s this collective group over in Montmartre— you’ve heard of the River Red group? They were working with Comrade Sauveterre until recently, I don’t know all the details on that, but we were all working out something so that the River Red would have control of where that goes.”

“Okay. Okay, but why a garbageman? Like…” He trailed off and flicked his nose as he fell into this blank look Aurore recognized as the kind of face one made when they forced a memory they didn’t like to the surface, and he spoke again, “My son, right? He was in school doing this project about parents? And he was embarrassed. He didn’t like being the son of a garbageman. That’s not the kind of thing I’d expect a princess to want to do.”

Aurore, having felt how heavy their conversation had grown so quickly, sighed and leaned against the canal railing. The iron was very cold through her gloves. Below her the water moved without urgency. Pixel sat at her feet between her and the canal and looked up at both of them and wagged its silver alloy tail.

“I guess you just want to feel like you’re actually contributing to society?”

Aurore said, “Yes.”

“Well, it’s a dirty job. I don’t even mind it getting automated more, as long as the Maquis Rouge are good with their word about all that compensation and stuff.”

Aurore looked at him and he was looking at the quay, at all the cafes setting out their chairs, the city coming awake in the thin February light, all of it clean, all of it… she couldn’t place the word, actually, she didn’t know what to describe it, other than the warm feeling it brought unto her.

“It’s a shame your son was embarrassed, honestly. Think about it. What exactly was I giving the world? I’d look cute for the screen and the memes, while everyone else worked themselves to death to keep me innocent and happy. Then I’d grow up, spread my legs, and spew more parasites to keep that cycle going. You know, a princess is the most worthless sort of person. We’re literally only there to look pretty and be some ‘inspiration,’ and that’s it, we’ll take all your food and adoration and your pretty things in return. Meanwhile, what do YOU do? You actually keep this world clean and safe to walk, and you do it thanklessly, and then my lot decide to punish you for it.” She scoffed. If she had a cigarette, this would have been the moment she pulled it from her lips and blew smoke, trying too hard to look cool and deep. “And look at the results. A princess gets removed, and what happens to society? Nothing much. If anything, it improved. Now one less parasite to support. It’s been nearly two years since the Revolution, and nothing has gotten worse without me. Meanwhile, the garbagemen decide to leave, and what happens?”

She swept her hand along the quay— the canal, the trees, the clean pavement Oliver had just swept, the whole of it. “Society fell apart within a week.”

And all Karim could say was, “Yeah,” still with that unsure timbre.

Again, Aurore felt embarrassed for unsettling the man, but Pixel stood up and rubbed against his leg, and that seemed to settle Karim enough to say, “The little people kept the big people up on the pyramid.”

“Eeexactly,” Aurore said with a snapping point.

Relieved that he had spoken, she went on, “Gomen ne. All apologies for dumping all of this on you, Karim. Just…”

“No, I get it. Trust me, I get it,” and he laughed heartily.

“Oliver’s not wrong to feel hostile. If anything, even your kindness feels undeserved.”

“Well, I mean, I’m not going to, like, hold it against you for what your family was doing. You’re still a kid even now. I’m not going to be all like, ‘Your family was evil, so I’m going to hate you too.'”

Aurore rubbed her arms against the cold and said, “See, that’s the thing though. That’s what always happens. A thousand years of class rage, all these centuries of being bled dry by people like my family, and then the revolution comes and the workingman kicks down the palace door and finds some cowering teenage girl and goes—” she fluttered her eyelashes and clasped her hands beneath her chin, “‘Oh but she’s so cuuute! We can’t do anything to her!’ And just like that, a millennium of righteous anger, poof.” She popped her fingers open. “Dissolved. Because the pigger had nice eyes.”

Karim scratched the back of his neck. “I mean…”

By this point, Aurore was so animated that she had lost her delicate voice and now spoke in the genki tone she had more enjoyed, saying, “Oh, there was a boy I met at my— at the place I was staying. He hated everything about me. The Ordre de Saint-Michel goons, they tortured him to get his father to cease writing his radical blog, years ago, when the boy was only 12 years old, you see? And his sister, the Ordre fabricated deepfakes of her, to accuse their father of being a pedo-cretin. All the while they lived in abject poverty in Perche. His family had suffered enormously under mine. Oh, there was no reason for this boy to feel anything other than 10,000° vitriol towards every Séville, every Bourbon, every rotten official in the state and corpo-apparatus!” She had swooned dramatically, overperforming, until she halted by grabbing the railing again and looking over the edge into the canal waters. 

“And I watched it happen in real time, this rage just…” She made a fist and then slowly opened it. “He couldn’t sustain it. I hadn’t even convinced him of anything, you know! Just because I was small and I was polite and I had big eyes. It’s obscene when you think about it.”

“You’re kind of making Oliver’s case for him,” Karim said, and blew into his hands against the cold.

“I know! That’s what I’m saying. He’s right. He was probably even going easy on me.”

“Oh, for sure. If you were your brother he’d have swung the broom.”

Aurore laughed — a sharp, surprised one that echoed off the canal water. “Good!”

Karim shook his head. There were many ways he expected this to go, but the bullet-ridden ex-grand princess monologing about the historical necessity of her fall from grace wasn’t in the top thousand. “You’re a strange girl, Your Highness.”

“Aurore,” she said as she un-hooked her walking stick from the railing.

“You’re a strange girl, Aurore. You’re not normal.”

She made a sound like ‘Eh’ and said, “I am normal. Just not your normal.”

Both laughed.

“Or maybe I’m too old-school then. If I was in your position, I wouldn’t even let myself sleep under a roof. Then again, that’s why I have no political ambitions. Otherwise, all these ci-devants, I’d say ‘be Biblical. Do unto us what we have done to you!’ And then televise it and laugh at the bastards who cry out for mercy.”

Karim snorted trying to stop a laugh and said, “Ay, you know, Oliver said something just like that. He got that from Meki!” And patted her shoulder with a lightness that felt like friendship.

Aurore also laughed.