Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

  Chapter 32

  Four Now

  The day Advocate staggered into their half-lives the shop windows outside had been full of tinsel. So his coming, like a besotted mage, had been the greatest of Christmas presents. Good or bad, a foreseeable end to Administrative Suspension.

  “The decision-making process is, as you see, under way,” he’d said.

  Even a negative decision, they’d ended by convincing themselves, would be better than a continuation of the unbearable wait. Most of them assume the decision will be reached in a matter of days, a week at the most, if Helen’s refusal to cooperate hadn’t jeopardized things.

  Days go by, then weeks, never so slowly.

  They glare at Helen and hardly talk to her.

  “When are things going to start happening here?” the men say endlessly.

  Now they’re into seasons of waiting, frustrated bored spectators of what they’ve witnessed over thirty times already from the wrong side of the glass.

  For Max the same timeless empty streets.

  For the others, the same old year, 1900, 1937, 1951, being celebrated as new by the same imbecilic drunken crowd. Monomaniac trees breaking into green again. Same summer lovers, made faithful by repetition, strolling alongside the Seine. Same Bastille Day fireworks (what’s to celebrate?) with their colored arabesques known by heart.

  Everything known by heart, like the shape of the puddle of blood the dead girl is lying in and even the license-plate of the Citroën Traction that killed her (HL48275) or the crowds scanned down to the last face and never the right face, so why go on scanning?

  Can’t stand it, can’t stand it anymore. Can’t stand you either anymore, or you or you or you. Mutual, mutual, returned with interest, compounded quarterly. They’d forced themselves to tolerate each other during that long wait. But now within sight of an end to it one way or the other they can’t control their hostility.

  Max’s snores and farts keep Seymour awake. He’s lived with it for decades but now it becomes intolerable and one night he heaves shoes at it. Max heaves shoes back and catches Louis on the side of the head with one of them. It degenerates into a free-for-all.

  Helen tries to intervene as usual. The three men stop grappling and turn on her. It’s all your fault, they yell. Helen doesn’t answer. She returns to her room where Margaret yells that it’s all her fault. Helen doesn’t answer. She returns to bed, presses the wax plugs in her ears and turns to the wall. Margaret’s sobs get through to her anyhow, for hours.

  Religion (or lack of it) becomes an explosive issue here as out there. Max calls Seymour a Jew bastard at the slightest pretext. Louis tries to convert Seymour to fundamentalist Christianity. Seymour ends by shouting that he’s fed up with religion, any religion, all religion, coming out of his ears. Louis knocks him down and looks aghast at the unchristian thing he’s done. They wait for Helen to reestablish peace. But by this time Helen has given up intervening. The men resent her new indifference and let her know it.

  Religion again when Louis and Max and Margaret find another reason for blaming Helen. Pray, pray, for God’s sake and for our sake. She refuses to get down on her knees. Atheist, they cry, an atheist like you doesn’t deserve transfer. Why you who don’t pray and not us who do?

  Time creeps on ponderously like a glacier.

  Each time they awake, the three men say, more and more dully: “When are things going to start happening here?”

  Suddenly things start happening, but not the way they’d hoped. One night deep concussions wake them up. They rush out into the windy corridor, scantily clad, even Margaret. Her pajama-blouse is unbuttoned and a tremendous gust unveils the splendor of her breasts, last seen by Louis on the day of resurrection so long ago, no such splendor seen in this place since. For a dazzled second, till her hands eclipse that splendor, he forgets what’s brought him out into the midnight corridor.

  Nothing more happens and they return to bed. Louis can’t sleep.

  In the morning they see a long fine crack in the wall opposite their rooms and they remember the collapsed floors they’d seen way below long ago. Will Advocate come before their own floor disintegrates?

  One day no meals are served. The next day, Gentille shows up tearfully with her trays. Something went wrong in the kitchens, she can’t remember what.

  Then the toilets in their WC back up. Impossible to negotiate their corridor, almost impossible to breathe. Finally a team of cleaning women and two plumbers lift the stinky siege.

  A day later the bulbs start expiring. It’s not the familiar death-bed gasps of a solitary bulb, but all of the bulbs in the Living Quarters and the corridors, mass demise, gasping for current and then out and the Five stand in absolute darkness.

  For the first second, Margaret takes it for private definitive darkness, exit, the Administrative Review Board has met and decided. Terrorized, she appeals, not to God but to the Prefect, for a stay of execution, she’ll dance for and with him and even more, anything for light.

  Seconds later, light returns.

  She thinks her promise has been heard. She’s deeply grateful. Grateful and can’t help thinking of greater subjects for gratitude: real light, sunlight on her face. But she’s frightened now at the price and steps back from it when she realizes the blackout had been collective and reversible.

  Again, Gentille doesn’t show up with their meals, this time two straight days. They feel giddy. They’d never imagined they could long for soggy grated cat-puke carrots.

  Finally they hear the familiar squeal of Gentille’s food cart in the corridor. The girl, as close to tears as she can get, stammers a confused story of total confusion in the kitchens. Four of the Five throw themselves at the food and almost come to blows over whose tray is whose. “Aren’t you going to eat?” they ask Helen between mouthfuls. She says she’s not hungry. They stop chewing and gulping for a second. They’re offended at this additional proof of her superiority. Then they go back to chewing and gulping.

  A few minutes later on her bed Helen can hear them squabbling over her tray of food.

  That night Helen wakes up suddenly. She doesn’t hear Margaret’s heavy breathing. Maybe that’s what woke her. She calls. Getting no answer she switches on the light. Margaret’s cot is empty. She steps outside and sees Margaret turning at the far end of the corridor. Helen follows her down a tangle of corridors. Margaret has the rigid gait and the outstretched arms of the sleepwalker. She halts at the frontier of a dark zone of dead bulbs.

  Drawing closer Helen hears Margaret’s imploring voice and thinks she can make out in the unlighted zone a shadowy figure darker than the surrounding shadows.

  As Margaret advances into the darkness, Helen catches up and places her hand on her arm.

  “Margaret, wake up.”

  The shadowy figure has disappeared, if it had really been there in the first place. Margaret stares at Helen with furious widening eyes, breaks free and pushes Helen violently away. Helen staggers back. Her head bangs against the wall.

  When she picks herself up she sees Margaret, past the zone of darkness now, running down the corridor and shouting, “Come back! I will, I will!” and arousing the babbling echoes, “…ill …ill …ill …”

  Helen touches her head. Her fingers are gray with blood. She returns to her room.

  From the other side of the partition she hears Louis tossing in his cot and mumbling contrition.

  Max starts howling his death howl.

  Seymour yells at Max to stop howling for holy Christ’s sake.

  Louis shouts that this is the last time Stein will ever take the name of the Lord in vain.

  Sounds of a scuffle, breakage, cries.

  Thumps like a throat-wielded head systematically banged against the floor.

  Helen removes the top sheet from her bed and ties it into a sling, which she passes over her head onto her shoulder. She fills the sling with her toilet affairs, clothes, bottles of water, a volume of parliamentary deb
ates, February-May 1903. She would have taken food but her tray is in the brawling men’s room and anyhow they’d probably devoured everything by now.

  She rolls the blanket and the bottom sheet in the thin mattress. She embraces the mattress in her thin arms, clutching the pillow in her left hand. Out in the corridor now, she can hear Seymour’s strangled voice between bangs crying her name for help. She moves away from the Living Quarters.

  Hours later Margaret returns to the women’s room. She stares at Helen’s cot and then goes behind the toilet screen. She hammers on the partition and cries to the men to come, quick.

  Badly battered, Max and Seymour and Louis burst into the room. Margaret points dramatically at the bare cot with the sagging metal mesh. She wails that it’s not just the bed-clothes, her toothbrush and her comb and her towel and the book she was reading, they’re all gone too, all her stuff is gone, she’s gone too and for good. Oh God, I’m alone now. She’s been transferred. She let herself be transferred and didn’t even s-say g-goodbye to me.

  She stumbles out into the corridor and shouts: “Helen! Helen! Come back sweetheart!”

  As though, Seymour reflects, if it were true that she’d been transferred and that she could hear Margaret’s ghostly voice from that unimaginable distance she’d allow herself to be distracted from the real things out there.

  Margaret goes on shouting “Helen! Helen!” The echo, as usual, gives her “Hell…In … Hell… In…Hell …” At that Margaret breaks down, throws herself into Louis’ arms and sobs, “H-Hell for us, not for Helen, she’s been transferred out there and she never even p-prayed, it’s unfair, unfair …”

  Louis feels her firm breasts heaving against the region of his solar plexus. He shamefully reacts to it but how can he reject her? She’s so badly in need of consolation.

  Seymour consoles her too. He strokes her head and her long wild marvelous hair, adding calming words to the effect that if Helen had been transferred she wouldn’t have taken keepsakes like a piss-stained mattress with her. If she took it and all her things it was to set up in another room far from them because … because they’d all behaved like bastards to her, me the worst of all.

  None of them protest. For a few seconds tacit acknowledge-ment of their collective guilt reconciles the men who had just been battering one another.

  “My God, she hasn’t eaten for three days now,” Margaret cries. “We’ve got to find her and bring her food.”

  “What food?” says Seymour. “We ate all of the food, including her food.”

  Louis breaks free of Margaret and they all start quarreling about whose idea it had been in the first place to eat Helen’s food.

  Finally Seymour says: “Let’s stop fighting. Helen wouldn’t have liked us to fight like this.”

  At Seymour’s mortuary tense, Margaret bursts into tears again. “She’s going to starve to death. Maybe she’s dead already.”

  “No, wait, listen,” says Seymour, trying to sound convinced by his argument. “She must have made an arrangement for Gentille to bring her food. So Gentille knows the room she’s in. We’ll go there tomorrow and apologize.”

  The others pretend to be convinced and they go to bed.

  Hours later, Gentille rolls her food-cart into the women’s room, awakening Margaret. The girl sees the bare cot and exclaims “O! O!” in shocked surprise. She goes on exclaiming “O! O!” in the men’s room.

  So the Four know they’ll have to find Helen on their own if they want to be Five again.

  They mold their food into elephant balls, put new batteries in their flashlights and set out in different directions.