Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die
Page 29
Chapter 28
The Other Side Of The Wall
By Louis’ calculations, they’re into the fourth day of exploration when the aspect of the tunnel starts changing.
Thigh-thick shoulder-high pipes run into the tunnel and accompany them on both sides. They begin to stumble over broken brick and chunks of mortar. Progress to freedom slows down. Soon they have to pick their way through ankle-deep debris, then clamber over knee-deep rubble. Sometimes they have to wield the shovel and crowbar to work their way forward. Yet the tunnel is largely intact. They guess that stretches of vault ahead must have caved in under the pressure of collapsed floors above and that their predecessors had carted the debris here.
Evil-smelling pools accumulate beneath the pipes, now covered with rust. The smell becomes unbearable.
“We’re in a goddam fucking sewer,” Max pants, jogging alongside Seymour.
Seymour jogs on. A few seconds later he stops in his tracks. He yells: “Towards a sewer, you mean! Not in a sewer! Not yet!”
A chorus of joyous Seymours babbles fragments of the sudden insight. This is no sewer, not yet, but an outlet to a sewer, no fucking sewer but the most glorious of sewers, the sewer system of Paris, the real Paris, object of their longing for decades. The tunnel has meaning and destination now. True, he’d dreamed of emerging from the space of half-life to green trees and blue sky. Instead, the passage to freedom will be to another tunnel, much bigger and even stinkier than this one, with a dark malodorous river like the Styx running sluggishly in the middle of it.
But in that giant tunnel to come (perhaps minutes away) there are iron rungs cemented in the walls, rungs which rise to that blue sky and those green trees. Confusing the city of his death and the city of his rebirth, Seymour sees himself pushing up a heavy manhole cover and emerging, two-time Lazarus, from the depths of the street where he’d fallen long ago.
The enigma of the final wall with the gaping hole is solved. There is no wall, no need for one. No chance that anyone would wander into the stinking mouth of this tunnel.
In the spaces free of rubble muck squishes underfoot. Sometimes they’re ankle-deep in it. The stink is so ferocious that they have to breathe shallow through their mouths. Their oxygen-starved muscles hardly respond to commands. They stumble forward.
“Up shit creek, for real,” says Max.
An hour or so later Louis halts. “Look.”
His badly trembling beam circles another chalked slogan: WORK ON INDEPENDENCE DAY!
His beam shifts and lights up the work ahead. The tunnel had caved in completely at this spot. Their predecessors had worked valiantly for independence. They’d excavated a miniature tunnel in the ruins of the greater one.
The three men stoop and enter.
They advance slowly in a crouch. Every five yards or so extemporized mine props bearing horizontal planks or legless tables stave off cave-in. Sometimes the prop is an up-ended iron cot. More often, piled-up volumes of economic statistics and parliamentary debates. They’re careful not to brush against them. They try to keep clear of the jagged walls. They keep their heads low beneath the vault with its wedged chunks of rubble in perilous suspension.
Even so, their floundering passage forward sets off miniature landslides. Off balance, they fling out their hands against the jagged walls for support. The sharp-edged rubble lacerates their palms. They bleed gray. They struggle for breath in the choking dust. The muck underfoot tugs at their shoes with each squelching step. They slip and sprawl in it. The stench is even worse in this confined area.
From time to time they hear a long rumble and debris dribbles down on them. They bend double and shield their heads with their arms and pray that the collapsing floors above will spare their tunnel.
At one point, strength abandons them simultaneously. They sink to a squat on islets of rubble rising out of the muck. They feel puffy and dizzy. Their vision of the props ahead is blurred. Is it the toxic effects of the sewer stench? Or the effect of famine? They’ve long since forced the last of the elephant balls down their throats.
Or is it something much worse? The symptoms are familiar. Haven’t they been clobbered by old age?
“It’s like that other time,” Max finds enough strength to whisper. “We’re gonna croak here.”
They fall asleep. When they wake up, maybe an hour, maybe a day later, strength has ebbed back. After a while they rise and stumble forward again.
Sometimes the tunnel is almost blocked by later cave-ins. Max and Louis open up hands-and-knees passages with the crowbar and the pickaxe. Seymour has less brawn. His job is to light the work area with the flashlight. It’s perilous inch-by-inch excavation of a tunnel within a tunnel within a tunnel.
Emerging from one of those burrows, Seymour exclaims: “Look!” His beam picks out a ring lying on broken brick and half covered by muck. It’s gray but they guess at original gold. Surely a wedding ring. How had she (he?) lost it? Trudging down the tunnel so long without food that she’d lost the flesh that kept it on her finger? Seymour reaches down but Louis jostles him and gets to it first. Seymour protests. “Finders keepers, losers weepers,” says Louis and pockets the ring.
Much later, emerging close to collapse from another burrow, Seymour directs his weak circle of light on a prop, a lopsided column of books. On the spine of a fat volume he makes out, beneath the dust and grime, the letters SHAK…EAR. He wonders if it’s SHAKESPEARE. After all these years of deadly statistics and parliamentary debates, Shakespeare.
But it doesn’t matter now. Where he’s going there are hundreds of bookstores, thousands of copies of Shakespeare, maybe just minutes away now. Because no matter what Louis said, Seymour is determined not to retrace his steps in the rubble and muck of the tunnel, confront the giant spider web spun over void, repeat those miles of ruined staircases and corridors to return to the women and tell them about the discovery of the way out. Somehow, he’ll elude Louis’ vigilance and run for it at the first sight of the Paris sewer.
He thinks of Helen, guiltily. Not returning to tell her the way out wouldn’t matter to her. She wouldn’t care about the way out. But not telling her about the location of Shakespeare is betrayal, he knows. This book would have lighted up her face. She’d once confessed that she’d always preferred books to reality. He’d never once seen her face light up.
He reaches out in the hope that it’s not Shakespeare and so be delivered of the burden of guilt. Gently, gently, with the whorls of his fingertip he begins brushing the dust away on the obscured part of the title.
The reaction to the displacement of maybe a dozen motes of dust is wildly disproportionate. The pillar of books trembles, quakes, disintegrates. The legless tabletop pressing against the roof splits and falls. Bricks rain down. Behind them, other props yield, the books spilling to the ground. They hear a faint pulsating roar behind them. Whole flights, they’re sure, are crashing down on the tunnel. The roar strengthens. They start floundering forward away from the pursuit of chaos.
A stinking wind raises clouds of dust. The roar covers their cries. A jagged torrent of debris sweeps them off their feet, moving them forward in pulsating surges as though powered by contractions of the tunnel walls. Their arms flail wildly as the rhythm of the surges accelerates.
Suddenly they are spewed out into free space, first Louis and then Max and then Seymour, still clutching his flashlight. The roar and stinking wind stop. The silence is broken only by their groans.
All three of them find themselves ejected headfirst and belly down into the original intact tunnel, sprawled out in deep muck in an attitude of oriental prostration before what rises impeccable above them a dozen yards away: a white wall ending the tunnel.
No sewer after all, no iron-rungs to negotiate or manhole cover to heave aside, Seymour thinks. Behind that white wall lies direct access to blue sky and green trees.
They struggle to their feet and in silence totter closer. In the strengthening light of the three flashl
ights the wall gains in whiteness, an incredible pure white as they’d never seen white in this dingy second life, the white of what doesn’t exist here: snow-drops, plum blossoms, snowy peaks, bridal-gowns, wedding roses, honeymoon clouds.
Max drops the flashlight and clutches the sledgehammer. Seymour picks up the crowbar. Louis turns to them.
“You just hand over that there sledgehammer, Pilsudski, no more monkey business. And you give me that there crowbar, Stein.”
They don’t react. They probably don’t hear the command. They keep on staring at the pure white wall. Louis pushes them back and wrenches the tools out of their hands.
“We’re goin’ back to the women first, like I said.”
Max and Seymour don’t hear him. They’re staring at the wall, sure of what lies immediately on the other side of it. For Seymour, a certain street in the 6th arrondissement with a great golden horse head and a massive door. For Max, an airport with a waiting Boeing.
Now Louis too stares at the wall.
Stares and imagines on the other side of it the elegant flower-shop where for months he’d pretended to admire seasonal flowers in the display window: first daffodils like gay yellow telephones and then tulips, red like her cheeks when she caught his gaze on her and now, this June day on the other side of the pure white wall, he’ll push the door open on the three aproned girls twittering in French and Louise will smile shyly and in lovely fragmented English counsel his bouquet and this time he’ll know she’s jealous of the girl she thinks the bouquet’s for but it’s for her as she’ll discover an hour later at closing time when she comes out and finds him there (the past corrected by hindsight into a new future) with the flowers and also with the gold ring cleaned of muck, earned by a lifetime of suffering here, waiting for her, her honey hair and shy smile.
Louis drops the crowbar, lifts the sledgehammer and puts all his power behind the blow, face screwed up against the expected glare of sunny blue sky. The wall explodes, leaving a big jagged opening like a star, but not Max’s dead black star at the start of the tunnel. This one is a blinding dazzle of a star.
Weeping, they stumble through the intense star. They grope about blindly for long seconds.
Suddenly their eyes are able to cope with the light on the other side of the wall and their minds have to cope with what they see there.
They see overhead, not limitless blue sky but familiar cracked ceiling. Instead of the promised sun, banks of mercury lights glaring down on the familiar dingy white tile walls, the squat-toilets with soiled bungholes, the ranked urinals, the rows of chipped washbasins.
And above the washbasins, tarnished mirrors in which they see three gaunt swaying men gaping at them out of feverish eyes, bent arthritically from the long crouch. They see their tattered beshitted clothes, their muck-caked feet, their bleeding hands, the blood still gray, not the promised red. They see their white tangled hair and white growth of beard and wonder if the white comes from old age or plaster dust.
The men stand motionless and speechless for a minute, staring at their images.
Seymour drags himself over to the urinals. When he finishes and buttons up he finally breaks the silence.
“All that work just for a piss.”
“Where’s the airport?” says Max.
Impassive, Louis slowly circumnavigates the WC, knocking methodically, inch by inch, on the walls for a hollow sound that doesn’t come.
“Where’s the airport?” says Max.
After a while Louis returns to his starting point. He says in a heavy dead voice: “It’s punishment. Divine punishment for betraying the women.” (Did Louis say ‘women’ or ‘woman’?) “I was tempted by the devil and yielded. Now I pay the price for sinning.”
“We’re being played with,” says Seymour. “We’re pieces of shit to them.”
“The lights were on here,” Louis says.
“Expecting company,” says Seymour. “Played with all along. Pieces of shit.”
They drag themselves out of the WC by the conventional route. On the opposite wall of the corridor they see the big scrawled admonition: OUT IS A DOUBLE-CROSS!
They turn a corner and see the spiral iron staircase that leads back to their starting point.
The WC that climaxed the tunnel must have been one of the very first rooms they’d explored long ago, knocking and knocking everywhere on the walls and, strangely, getting no hollow response. But even if they had, the revealed tunnel would have led them, at the price of great suffering, not to Paris but to a room sarcastically numbered 1776, that year of independence for Good Americans.
Seymour and Louis start pulling themselves up the spiral staircase.
Max stands at the foot of the staircase, looking up at them.
“Where’s the airport?” he says.