Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

Chapter 35

  Prelude To Transfer

  Advocate finally comes to the Common Room where the Five have been waiting for hours at the table. He advances toward them, lopsided with a heavy clinking shopping bag. He strains it up onto the table, sluggishly rubs his hands with satisfaction and then like a magician solemnly produces six glasses, a bottle-opener and finally six bottles of beer.

  Alcohol! It’s a sudden materialization in this dusty space of a precious attribute of the world outside. Not alcohol for the sake of alcohol, but alcohol for the sake of celebration. Only one thing here deserves celebration: an end to here. Those celebrant bottles with the green label confirm, they think, Philippe’s hint that they’re on the verge of liberation. At that thought, they’re on the verge of tears.

  “I have excellent news,” says Advocate, superfluously. He really tries to force his stiff features into happiness for them. “The Administrative Board has deliberated on your cases,” he says, carefully avoiding looking at Max. He pauses to give emphasis to the great thing to come.

  “I have pled your cases with more than usual eloquence. After careful deliberation, the Administrative Board has not rejected your petition for transfer.”

  They feel like shouting with joy. Even Helen, who lets her guard down for once.

  All this suffering is behind them.

  But the letdown is atrocious when Advocate tells them that the first Administrative Board has declared its incompetence and has submitted their case to a second Administrative Board.

  A long stunned silence. Most of them are still on the verge of tears, of grief now. Not Seymour, though. He has another way out the others seem to have forgotten. Sarcastically, he asks how many Administrative Boards there are in all. Five hundred, maybe?

  When Advocate assures him that there are no more than twenty Administrative Boards the others feel like going beyond the verge of tears. Margaret does go beyond it.

  “But!” Advocate exclaims, painfully producing a joyous grimace. He opens his arthritic rubbered hands as though revealing a tiny precious gift, a five-carat diamond of consolation. But! But!! They will soon be outside, for one whole day. A compatibility test is automatically run on the Administratively Suspended once the primary Board has not rendered a negative judgment. Possibly more than one trial run if the results of the first, duly analyzed, leave room for doubt.

  Joy, a little battered and bedraggled now, returns. One whole day outside! Then an alarming thought occurs to them. What if we’re not compatible, Maître? they naturally want to know. Advocate assures them that there will be practically no pain involved in the regrettable case of incompatibility.

  He changes the focus of the discussion. They will emerge wherever they like in Paris, intra muros, of course. Good Americans, in the opening stages of the process, go back strictly to the Paris of the twenty arrondissements. They must imagine very strongly the place and they will materialize there. It is useless imagining the Riviera with its white beaches or Brittany with its bracing cold breakers or … Advocate breaks off his pathetic private enumerations.

  “I strongly recommend safe neutral things like Napoleon’s Tomb or the Eiffel Tower.”

  Also this, he says. He pauses and stares at them solemnly. His bony forefinger wags warningly. No attempt to realize a face-to-face meeting with a once familiar individual will be successful during the trial run. On the contrary, such an attempt might well have negative results, radically negative. Events in the trial run are endowed with a certain, shall we say, plasticity. Hidden fears and unavowable desires might well shape that plastic material, resulting in … But enough. I trust you grasp my meaning. A word to the wise! (A bon entendeur, salut!) He uncaps the bottles and fills the six glasses with mostly sad-looking foam.

  They tilt their glasses to get the beer beneath the foam onto their tongues and down their parched throats, prelude to out there. Max spits it back into the glass. Seymour grimaces and stares at the green label with the small print sans alcool. Of course no alcohol in it. So little to celebrate. He goes back to the teetotaler’s beer and tries hard to imagine real beer with its 6% charge of gaiety. The stuff really tastes awful, like everything else in this place.

  But he’s hours away from that real beer and (if in season) Marenne OO oysters imbedded in seaweed, and, better than all those after all trivial things, imbedded himself (O! O!) in his sweet darling precious Marie-Claude and joining in her love-cries. Already, Seymour has forgotten Advocate’s warning.

  Louis and Seymour and Helen stare at each another as the idea simultaneously occurs to them. It will be no trial run, whatever Advocate says. At the risk of punitive void, once out there they will stay out there. No punishment could be greater than return here. Margaret, like them, has no intention to return but she’d determined to do it in a legalistic way. She intends to materialize in a celebrated church to pray to God for permission to be a permanent resident in the real world and devote herself to good deeds there.

  They feel sorry for poor Max. Advocate had privately informed them that Max would not be participating in the trial run. There can be no return to a place one has never been, he explains. So they’re leaving him behind forever, for their determination never to return has strengthened.

  Max doesn’t know that, of course. As it is, he takes what he thinks is short-time solitude very badly. The flics have to overpower him and lock him up. He bangs on the door for hours and yells that he wants to go with them. Then, slumped exhausted on the floor, he whispers through the door-crack with what’s left of his voice: hey, you’ll all be coming back soon, won’t you? I don’t mean in a week. Tomorrow, I mean. I don’t wanna be alone here a week.

  They hypocritically comfort him by saying they’ll be back soon. If not tomorrow the day after maybe. It’s just a trial run. Then they’ll try the key way out, the cleaning girl’s key to the tunnel in Room 147. Max calms down at that. He asks them to bring back a map of the Paris area so he can locate the airport, also a case of cold beer, real beer with kick to it, and ten pizzas, mushroom, cheese and anchovy, real Italian pizzas, not fancy phony French ones.

  They promise, guiltily. The flics unlock him. Helen almost spoils things by kissing Max on the cheek violently, her face screwed up against tears, and telling him to take care of himself.

  When Max leaves the Common Room (to explore new rooms for maps and a functioning compass and maybe to weep unobserved), Margaret, basically a sentimental person, suggests that they should all meet the next day at 10:00 pm at the Arc de Triomphe or some other well-known place like that and tell each other how it had gone for them.

  Helen reminds her that they wouldn’t be in the same Paris. Decades would separate them.

  “I’ll never see you again? Ever?” says Margaret in a weak voice, her plural “you” actually singular and aimed at Louis as they all realize except for Louis himself. She sees Louis as he was and soon will be again, young and marvelously muscled.

  “Louis, we’ll never see each other again?” says Margaret in a tiny voice, coming out with it.

  Louis mumbles something non-committal. By this time there’s no room for anybody else in his mind except Louise in her flower shop.

  Seymour looks around for more consolation for Margaret. “Maybe he’ll catch up with you,” he says, but it’s no consolation. By 1937, if he gets that far, Louis will be sixty-two years old.

  Anyhow, Seymour has it all wrong. By the time (thirty-seven years) he gets to the Paris of 1937, Margaret, also sixty-two, will be in the Paris of 1974.

  Now Seymour remembers that he won’t be alone in his Paris of 1951. More out of politeness than real desire for it he says to Helen: “We could maybe make an appointment somewhere tomorrow or, say, the week after.”

  “We might,” says Helen indifferently.

  Seymour realizes that there’s no room for anybody else in her mind except Richard. Just as, basically, there’s no room in his own mind for anybody else except Marie-Claude. Still, he can’
t help feeling a little offended that Helen didn’t conceal it as he, out of elementary politeness, had.

  Early next morning Sadie claps her hands and barks out their numbers, all but Max’s zero. He goes on snoring, so the omission doesn’t matter to him yet. She orders them out into the corridor where Advocate, Turnkey and Sub-Prefect Marchini are waiting. Sub-Prefect Marchini’s gunmetal features are cast in the familiar expression of imperious pride despite (or perhaps to offset it) the further dilapidation of his uniform. Only two brass buttons are left now and they dangle badly.

  They start a long march. Nobody speaks. Turning into another corridor they see at the end of it, facing them, Gentille. She’s on her knees alongside her pail, scrubbing fiercely. She must have heard Turnkey’s clump-jangle, clump-jangle long before he loped into sight. She lunges forward again and again with her brush. The movement flattens her down to the floor into what seem to be groveling kowtows to the advancing figures of authority. The group goes past her. Seymour lags behind. He turns around.

  As though she’d expected him to turn around to her, she’d turned around herself, no longer kowtowing but erect on her knees, somehow triumphant, with her left fist held high like a demonstrating militant, her right forefinger pointing to her fist, to what her fist contains.

  He shakes his head and turns his back on her and her key, needless now. Then he remembers, turns around again and throws his own key at her. It looks like a mock lapidation but he means it as a consolation present of a one-dimensional black-and-white sea. He joins the others.

  They go down the long corridors in silence for another mile or so. They halt at one of the steel doors. Turnkey unlocks a panel and presses a button. A distant clatter starts up, grows in intensity and then grinds to a halt behind the steel door. Turnkey locks the panel, chooses another key on his great ring and unlocks the door. It opens on a dusty rusty ruin of an elevator that looks like Elisha Otis’ first experimental model. The Four are segregated in one corner of it.

  Turnkey locks the steel door from inside. Like a vertical navigator, he moves the brass floor-selector switch. A distant whine. The elevator jolts down with a screech. The single feeble overhead bulb expires, plunging them into total darkness. The cabin sways, creaks, groans, bucks, accelerates alarmingly. Then it stops so abruptly that they are almost flung to their knees.

  “Unpardonable neglect,” mutters Advocate in the dark.

  “Elevator maintenance, like so much else, lies outside my area of competence,” retorts Sub-Prefect Marchini with his hair-trigger Corsican touchiness.

  Advocate placates him. “Of course, of course, here and in so many other areas, alas.”

  They file out of the elevator, still in strict segregation. Turnkey locks the door behind them. They trudge a mile until they reach another steel door bearing the warning Entry Strictly Forbidden For All But Authorized Personnel! Turnkey unlocks a long sliding panel on one side of the door. He pushes it open slowly on a panoramic view of a huge disorderly workshop. Seymour guesses at a trick peep-through mirror of the sort featured in classy Parisian bordellos. Two small fitted loudspeakers, obviously wired to hidden mikes, provide sound.

  Sadie utters a scandalized gasp at the sight of four cement-faced men in overalls seated around a table playing cards. Self-rolled cigarettes are wedged in the corners of their hard-bitten mouths. Glasses and two bottles of wine stand on the table. One of the men slaps down his hand triumphantly and takes a long swallow of wine on the other side of the cigarette. His partner looks triumphant too. The other pair protest violently. It’s about to degenerate into a drunken brawl when a voice yells out from another room with a half-open door: “Hey, can it out there! I already told you I need a Number 6 wrench. Move your ass, one of you.”

  The four men start arguing who should do it. Finally one of them gets up and lurches across the room, kicking out of the way nuts and bolts and scraps of metal and empty wine bottles. He stops before a wall covered with hundreds of tools and makes a fast grab for a wrench. His elbow unhooks other tools, which clatter to the floor. He ignores them and stumbles over to the half-opened door.

  “Catch!” he mumbles and tosses the wrench inside. There’s an instant smash and a muffled curse.

  “Dumb bastard (espèce de connard). You took out the XL3 condenser. No more spares either. And with a transfer coming up.”

  The Four look at one another in disbelief. Sadie gives another of her sharp scandalized gasps as though an elbow has been jammed into her solar plexus.

  “My God,” says Margaret, weepily.

  “Another farce,” says Helen.

  “It has come to this,” murmurs Advocate, shaking his white head.

  “Transfer too lies beyond my area of competence,” says Sub-Prefect Marchini.

  “As well I know,” says Advocate. “Alas, alas.”

  The enraged voice inside resumes.

  “And, hey, this ain’t a Number 6 wrench like I said. It’s a number 9 wrench. You do everything upside down, shit-head.”

  “Wait a second,” says Louis. “These here lushes are the ones supposed to transfer us? That the idea?”

  “Transfer proceedings will be undertaken only after the technicians have returned to a reasonably normal state,” says Advocate.

  Her eyes bulging with outrage, Sadie obtains from Sub-Prefect Marchini permission to intervene and establish order. The secret spectators behind glass see her storm into the room and halt, arms akimbo, before the four men at the table.

  “What are you doing! Cease immediately! Drinking and smoking are strictly forbidden, as you well know. You will be reported.”

  Choosing a card from the pack and without looking at her, one of the men says without passion: “Go fuck yourself, you old sow. (Eh, va te faire foutre, vieille connasse.) You report us and we’ll go on strike. Who else knows how to handle the transfers? You, maybe?”

  “It is true,” murmurs the Sub-Prefect in a strangely triumphant voice. “No technicians have been formed to replace these. Criminal negligence.”

  Sadie cries: “ZTV3! ZTV3!” It appears to be the supreme punishment.

  Another card-player blows smoke at her. “Go away.”

  She cries “ZTV3! ZTV3!” again, leaves the room and joins the others, rigid with fury.

  Advocate and Turnkey lead the Four to two nearby rooms. As Louis and Seymour enter theirs, they can hear Helen’s protests. She wants to return to the Living Quarters and her books. Her lack of faith in the forthcoming operation disheartens the two men that much more.

  The shabby room principally contains a stony-faced rubber-gloved old nurse, four medical-style wheeled couches and the banner Welcome to Paris! tacked to a wall. The nurse takes command. Her first command involves a shower. The cubicle is raw concrete, the water rusty, niggardly and lukewarm, the hospital-style soap harsh, but it’s their first real shower in this lifetime.

  After, they’re issued a freshly ironed change of clothes, a passport and a wallet. Turnkey drones out the contents of the wallets and they must sign the checklist for each item. For Seymour it’s a carnet of yellow second-class metro tickets, violet bus tickets, 40,000 inflated francs (about $110 at the 1951 exchange rate), a temporary resident carte de séjour, three packs of Belgian condoms of the brand Le Costaud, three to a pack, so nine in all, flattering for a twenty-four hour sojourn.

  The nurse makes them drink a foaming liquid that looks like Advocate’s beer. It doesn’t taste any worse. She commands them to lie down on one of the medical-style couches. “The women now,” she says and leaves.

  Advocate sits alongside Seymour’s couch. The setup reminds him of his $40-an-hour visits to his first analyst in New York with Weinberg, pencil poised over his pad, waiting for a recital of diffused anguish. Except that now his anguish is keenly focused.

  “Listen, Maître, I’m scared stiff. Those drunk technicians of yours. I want to land up in Paris, France not in Paris, Texas or on the moon, almost as bad.”

  “I ass
ure you that, assuming compatibility, all will go smoothly. Sub-Prefect Marchini himself is overlooking the operation although this lies beyond his sphere of competence and could have grave consequences for him. He has your best interests at heart.”

  “Why don’t you get rid of those rummies?”

  “Only Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque exercises authority, direct and undelegated, over the transfer technicians.”

  “Okay, so why doesn’t the Prefect get rid of them?”

  A long silence. Seymour is beginning to feel drowsy. The medicine? The contagion of Louis’ snores from the other couch? Finally Advocate replies. “A pertinent question, Mr Forster …”

  “Mr Stein,” Seymour mumbles. Really drowsy.

  “To be sure. A pertinent question, Mr Stein, one of many asked by many, but under their breath. I am but quoting their questions now. Questions such as: why are the very foundations of the Préfecture allowed to collapse? Why are so many glaring errors of transfer allowed to happen? Why are whole roomfuls of vital files allowed to disappear? Why – but the catalogue is endless.”

  “Okay, so why don’t you get rid of the Prefect?”

  “Only the Supreme Echelon is empowered to do that, empowers Himself to do that, I should say.”

  Seymour suppresses a yawn. “Okay, so why doesn’t he? I mean, why doesn’t He?”

  Advocate darts fearful glances right and left and up. He leans toward Seymour and whispers: “Ah, do not question all the uncorrected irregularities and seeming injustices of the world, lest you be questioned yourself by the Voice out of the Whirlwind or worse, much worse, befall you.”

  Seymour can’t suppress a long jaw-cracking yawn. He excuses himself and asks why they don’t contact the Supreme Echelon and tell Him that the Prefect’s doing a lousy job.

  “To do so would be to short-circuit the hierarchal chain of command. The sanction for that can be terrifying. Only the Prefect himself is empowered to establish direct contact with the Supreme Echelon.”

  “That’s a … a … crazy setup. He won’t … denounce himself and … and … the Supreme Echelon … lets him … do … do … whatever … he … likes …”

  Teetering on the brink of sleep, Seymour hears Advocate’s distant voice saying that no, the Supreme Echelon would not condone all acts on the part of the individual concerned. There is one particular act which would rouse the Supreme Echelon to ire and cause Him to intervene forcefully and remove the prefectoral incumbent, that act being …

  He breaks off, probably for dramatic effect, but he’s lost his audience by now. Seymour has floated into darkness and doesn’t hear the Advocate’s revelation of the heinous act.

  When Seymour awakens, his wheeled couch is being pushed down an erratically lighted corridor. Ahead, he can see lower-echelon functionaries pushing Louis, Helen and Margaret in the direction of what they hope will be successful transfer. They have misgivings, though.