Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

Chapter 29

  Hero On His Knees

  When they finally turn into their home corridor, Louis emerges from mute despair long enough to command Max and Seymour to quit blubbering and to go into the WC. They can’t let the women see and smell them the way they are.

  They wash themselves over a bunghole. They wash and wash and wash. The white of their hair proves to be plaster dust, not old age. Then they stagger barefoot into the men’s room, clutching a towel about their loins as they’d done that first time in their distant youth following resurrection. They cram old food down their throats and collapse on their beds and sleep for days.

  Seymour wakes up with a splitting headache and a confused memory of dreams of tunnels and giant spider webs and (probably not a dream) the cleaning girl called Stupid noisily bringing in trays and clean clothing and looking down at him with unbearable pity till he escaped from it by returning to the dream refuge of tunnels and giant spider webs.

  The other two men are still in bed, Max snoring painfully, Louis staring up at the ceiling and mumbling what sounds like prayers. Seymour gets up, dresses and goes into the women’s room where he finds Helen in her usual position, seated on her bed staring down at a book of statistics. She must know the details of coal imports for the decade 1880-1890 by heart by now, he thinks.

  She looks up and greets him as though he’d been absent an hour instead of days or weeks. She doesn’t even ask him how things had gone all that time in the depths, as if there was no point asking. Seymour tells her anyhow.

  “So it was nothing,” he concludes. “Except for the book. I found a real book with ‘Shakespeare’ on the spine. I thought of you. I tried to bring it back. It was like a booby trap. As soon as I touched it the roof caved in. It must be under tons of rubble now. I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter. If you’d brought it back the pages would have been blank or printed in Serbo-Croat.”

  “Serbo-Croat?”

  “Or Eskimo. Any language I can’t read.”

  “I’m beginning to think you were right all along. We’re being played with. They treat us like pieces … Like garbage they treat us.”

  “Didn’t you know that? I’ve always known that, from the beginning, here and back then.”

  “What can we do about it?”

  “Not try to do anything about it. Not give them that satisfaction.”

  Seymour tries her formula. He gives up the underground quest. He’s willing to admit that there may be a tunnel to the real world but if so it’s behind one of those thick steel doors with intricate impregnable locks. If he jogs down nearby corridors now it’s purely for exercise. He opens no more doors. He sometimes convinces Max to join him.

  Once, they hear Margaret’s tragic voice somewhere in the maze. She’s still trying to do something about it. “Oh sir, please let me dance for you. Let me dance for you and then let me go out.” The men don’t know what she means, who she’s talking to. She repeats the imploration over and over, each time fainter as she moves away from the men but no closer to the Prefect.

  Louis spends most of the time prostrate in bed, praying to the ceiling. He’s abdicated leadership. He’s a general who’s deserted, leaving his troops to their own devices. Their devices are feeble. Max and Seymour feel like paralytics suddenly deprived of braces. Their pillar of strength is broken. They don’t recognize the hero of San Juan Hill, the bridger of chasms, the fearless explorer of dark corridors in that limp recumbent figure begging the cracked ceiling for forgiveness.

  When Helen tries to coax him out of bed he lies motionless and repeats, as though to someone else: “I betrayed. It would of been the outside not the toilets if I hadn’t of bashed that there white wall, if I’d of returned to the women.” Did Louis say ‘women’ or ‘woman’?

  “I don’t feel betrayed,” says Helen. “Not by you, anyhow.”

  Max and Seymour do their best to provoke Louis into reasserting generalship. They urinate in the washbasin, first at night and then in broad bulb light. He doesn’t react. They both try profanity in his presence, wildly taking the Name of the Lord in vain. In vain. He doesn’t react. They tell Louis that he badly needs exercise, that mental health depends on physical health. They beg him to get up and do deep-knee bends with them.

  Finally Louis does get up. But the only deep knee-bend he consents to is alongside Margaret, begging the Lord for forgiveness and transfer. He tells the others that collective prayer is more effective than individual prayer, that a bundle of reeds is stronger than a single reed, that Max and Helen, frail reeds, should join them and raise their voices in simultaneous prayer to the Lord.

  Helen says no. Seymour can’t say no because he hasn’t been asked. He doesn’t count, apparently. Max says maybe and looks at Helen for a cue. She says that of course he can do whatever he likes. Finally Max joins the others on their knees. The prayer sessions are held in the women’s room, at all hours.

  One night Helen is able to return to Richard in the honeymoon hotel room with the pictures of soaring birds on the pale blue walls. His mouth wanders over her body and then he’s on the point of entering her when a fervent pious cry jerks her out of the dream. She turns her back on the praying trio, and faces the wall. She succeeds in not weeping at her posthumous state. Her hand is no substitute for Richard. She hopes that when she falls asleep she’ll be able to go back and welcome him. She doesn’t fall asleep.

  The next day, poking about in another storeroom, with little hope, for more varied reading material, Helen comes across a candle. She instantly understands to what precious intimate use she can put it.

  Margaret and then Louis and then Max beg Helen to pray with them for transfer. “For me, won’t you?” says Margaret. Helen says no.

  Even Seymour suggests that she might have a try at it. He’s willing to join the praying group himself, he says untruthfully, but he hasn’t been invited out of his ghetto. Not that he really believes in the efficacy of prayer, solitary or collective, he tells her, but you never can tell. Even one chance in a million, it’s worth trying. “Maybe you could put in a good word for me if it works.”

  Helen says no to Seymour. She says no to them all and goes back to export statistics.

  The trio goes on praying day and night. Seymour flees it. He visits his secret room with his darling’s street as often as he can. He’d neglected this mental escape route during the long search for a real way out. The others don’t invite him to kneel with them in imploration for transfer and he doesn’t want to, but here in his sanctuary he does kneel, facing the wall, head bowed, sketching in low-placed details in his street, transferred there a little in his head thanks to the power of memory and creation.

  Occasionally, communing with his darling, he hears stealthy footsteps in the corridor outside and is brutally pulled back into this half-world. He knows it’s ex-Gentille. He now thinks of and refers to her as “Stupide” even if he never calls her by that name since he never speaks to her at all now, hasn’t for years. The doorknob turns spookily, very slowly, millimeter by millimeter. Even more slowly the door pushes against the shot bolt. She never persists. The doorknob turns back millimeter by millimeter and he hears her shuffling steps whispering away into silence. After, he’s unable to return to the street.

  Doesn’t she sneak in when he isn’t there? There’s no outside lock on the door. The thought of her violating his sanctuary is upsetting. His suspicions strengthen when he starts finding faint black smudges on his sketch of the sea. He suspects that she adds things in charcoal and then inexpertly rubs them out.

  He rummages in Louis’ do-it-yourself hoard and comes up with a stout padlock, the key to it, a hasp and nails. He secures the door against her incursions.

  But he frequently misplaces the key and is locked out himself for a week. He’s sure Stupid comes across the key during her weekly cleaning job on the Living Quarters, uses it for a week to violate his sanctuary and then puts it back where he finally finds it, under a cot or deep in a d
rawer. When he lets himself into his room he finds new charcoal smudges on the sea, proving the point.

  Finally he wears the key permanently around his neck like a religious insignia. There are no more smudges on the sea after that.

  Once, he thinks he hears the feeble whisper of her footsteps, then nothing. He eases the door open a crack.

  She’s seated against the wall opposite his sanctuary, slumped forward, head bowed. Her stringy hair hangs in front of her face like a mop. He thinks he can make out her eyes, white with inward focus. He retreats back into his room. For a long while he can’t work. He feels besieged.

  He’s about to go back to his street and sketch a remembered geranium on a third-story window-sill when he hears a sound he hasn’t heard in years. He drops the pencil in fright at the sudden clump-jangle, clump-jangle, not faint and a long way off, giving you warning, but sudden and loud, clump-jangle clump-jangle, as though the pitching and tossing Turnkey had materialized in that corridor.

  The clump-jangle clump-jangle stops in front of his door. Nothing escapes those drab eyes set deep in that skull-like head. He’s sure to see the open padlock on the door. Any moment now his bony fist will try the doorknob and then hammer on the door, hammer and hammer till the rusty bolt is wrenched off and the door flies open and the drab eyes will stare at the wall and Seymour be exited for willful deterioration of State property. And worse, his precious creation – recreation – of the lost street be censored by administrative tar.

  Seymour grabs the knife he uses to sharpen his pencils and stands before the street in a crouch, ready to defend it at all costs.

  But Turnkey’s rusty voice addresses, it can only be, the girl outside. His words aren’t distinct. The girl’s stammering reply isn’t distinct. Distinct now, Turnkey’s: “Shirking again.” Indistinct the girl’s imploring words. Very distinct, Turnkey’s: “You have been warned. Come.”

  Now a wail, faint but unbearable. Clump-jangle, clump-jangle, moving away from the door with the padlock. The unbearable wail fades away. The sound of the orthopedic shoe and the keys fades away.

  Seymour lets himself down in the chair and sits there till his heart calms down.

  He’s about to try to force himself back to the projected geranium when the wail comes back, much louder, expressing all the desolation and despair of two worlds, it seems to him. “It’s the wind,” he mutters. Finally he gets up and slowly pulls back the bolt. He slowly opens the door a crack, then wider. The corridor is empty.

  As he’d suspected, it’s the wind, a powerful gale sweeping past and pulling wails out of her abandoned pail opposite his door. At the end of the corridor a ghostly column of dust rotates wildly.

  He picks up her dangerously situated pail. A functionary might very well return for it and notice his door.

  He abandons the pail in a distant corridor. By then the wind has dropped and it’s stopped wailing.

  For a long time – months it must be – a bitter-mouthed middle-aged female functionary brings them their meals. She doesn’t answer their questions concerning the former cleaning girl. The new female functionary doesn’t say anything, not even hello or goodbye. Seymour can’t help thinking that she does a better cleaning job than her predecessor.

  One day, Gentille is back, pushing the creaking cart with their trays. She seems shriveled. Her lips are compressed to a thin line as though invisible catgut has sewn them shut. She doesn’t say hello or goodbye either. When they address her she seems to shrivel even more. She doesn’t look at them. Her eyes are downcast, concentrating on her task. She does a better job cleaning up now, even sweeps out under the cots.

  It sounds cruel, Helen says to the others, but it would actually be an act of kindness on their part not to try to talk to her or even notice her. It frightens her when they do.

  So they don’t any more. Soon the Five assimilate the girl they’d once called Gentille to the drab furniture she incompetently dusts.

  ***

 

  Part Three

  Advocate