Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

Chapter 37

  Dead Flies

  When Seymour Stein opens his eyes he’s still flat on his back, not freezing on a marelle in a distorted street as in that terrible dream, but lying on the medical wheeled couch in a big bare room. Somewhere a leaking faucet goes pong … pong … pong at long regular intervals. A dream, he keeps telling himself until he becomes aware of the throbbing ache of his right ankle and the box of Camembert he’s gripping. It stinks.

  Next to him are three wheeled couches with the other voyagers on their backs. He listens first to Margaret and then to Louis telling their story in a whisper as flat and gray as the cracked ceiling they seem to be telling it to. They tell it with long pauses, the silence measured by a pong, sometimes two. There’s no grief or terror in their matter-of-fact account. It’s as though they’d been drained of all emotion out there or stunned out of it. Seymour is able to supply the missing grief and terror to their stories which are basically his own, just the object of desire differing.

  For Louis it’s the flower shop in a street whose name he’s forgotten and had never been able to pronounce, with a bouquet to be bought again but for a new recipient, the slim honey-blonde seller of it. For Margaret, past the sooty spires and gargoyles and flying buttresses of Notre Dame, the sacred sanctum where prayers are pronounced and heard.

  For both, as for Seymour, there’s the terrible cold, the terrible heat, everything twisty and heaving and blurred and the approach, past hard-to-recognize landmarks, to the flower shop door for Louis, to the portal of the cathedral for Margaret. For both, too, the last-second denial of entry happening hundreds of thousands of times with the sense of seasons coming and going.

  But unlike Seymour’s incidental flower shop, there’s nothing to mark the change of seasons in Louis’ essential flower shop. No May tulips followed by June roses. Nothing but persistent All Saints’ Day chrysanthemums and ornate funeral wreaths that hide Louise from him.

  Both Margaret and Louis, like Seymour, had heard the great voice in the sky putting an end to it all.

  Louis stops with that. The slow drips go on. Seymour feels he’ll be purged of it if he tells. Louis and Margaret must have felt that too. So he tells his version of the common experience to the ceiling. He omits the humiliation of hopping on the marelle and the terminal slip on dog-shit and sprawl into Enfer. When he finishes he feels a tiny bit better.

  They wait for Helen to tell.

  Instead, the leaky faucet goes on measuring the silence. They’re sure that the world outside had been normal for her. They’re sure that she hadn’t been pulled back from her great encounter. She doesn’t want to pain them by telling them about it. That pains them even more, proof of the unbearable goodness that had earned her that encounter, emphasizing their own unworthiness.

  Still, they long to hear about happiness, even enviable third-person happiness. They nag her in exhausted voices. Finally she does tell about it, in the same exhausted voice as theirs.

  She’d done what Advocate had advised them to do, concentrate on a well-known public building. Her choice had been the Bibliothèque Nationale, the National Library with its million-odd volumes in the Rue de Richelieu. It hadn’t been a good trip, but then she hadn’t expected it to be. Everything was twisted and blurred and shifting. There was no color. But for where she wanted to go color didn’t matter. The printed page is black and white. Each time she approached the entrance, though, she was snatched back. That didn’t matter much either. In any case you needed a special pass to use the library facilities and the bureaucrats in this place hadn’t supplied her with one. Didn’t matter, she had plenty of books here, no need to go out there for books. Being pulled back and forth all that time had been annoying but she hadn’t hoped for anything better, had expected much worse.

  The stony-faced rubber-gloved old nurse marches in, gripping a tray with four glasses of a foaming liquid. She hands them out. “Drink!”

  They’re being sent out a second time. They feebly refuse to drink.

  “Drink!” the nurse commands. That granite voice and face overpowers their resistance. Propped up on a shaky elbow, they drink and then sink back to a prone position, eyes closed. The nurse snatches the glasses out of their hand, already numb, and leaves.

  The mellow fragrance of cognac slowly mitigates the astringent smell of the medicine they’ve just absorbed.

  “Mes enfants, mes enfants, mes pauvres enfants!”

  They force their eyes open on Advocate standing unsteadily at the foot of their couches, hair dramatically white above his black gown. His rigid mask tries for an expression of pity. His ample black sleeves flap with a wide-armed gesture of woe that imperils his stability.

  To their drowsy brains his voice seems to come from far off as he recounts their narrow escape from total and permanent extinction. Wagging a bony forefinger, he admonishes them gently. Part of the responsibility for the fiasco lay with them. They had been warned and yet all of them had attempted a meeting with a previously known individual. Useless to deny the fact. They had been monitored.

  This (he goes on) in no way extenuates the outrageous circumstances of transfer, due to the drunken blunders of the transfer technicians. The Four owe continued existence to Sub-Prefect Marchini. Observing how badly transfer was proceeding, Sub-Prefect Marchini had endeavored over and over to contact Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque. In vain.

  Naturally, in vain. For who, walking the inner corridors, can hear the ringing of a phone? Or the collapse of foundations? Or the collapse of the very universe?

  Sub-Prefect Marchini took it upon himself, then, to intervene, at terrible hazard to himself, and rescue them from undeserved void. Sub-Prefect Marchini has always had their best interests at heart. How often has Sub-Prefect Marchini not confided that were he in charge, all four of the legitimate Suspended Arrivals would have been transferred – as you say – “long ago”.

  Advocate’s image and voice grow faint, prelude to a second transfer, they understand. Their minds are woozy but they’re able to mutter implorations not to be sent out a second time now and for years again, spare them that torture.

  They hear, from an even greater distance, Advocate’s soothing assurance that there is no question of a second trial transfer on the heels of the first. He corrects their error. This first abortive transfer had not lasted for – as you say – “years.” They had been dispatched shortly before lunch. Soon dinner will be served. Hash, alash … er … alas. How often has not Sub-Prefect Marchini expressed his indignation at the miserable fare meted out like punishment to the Administratively Suspended, adding that if he were in charge, hash would be replaced by juicy tender beefsteak and fluffy mashed potatoes.

  But of course such menu transformations could hardly interest them. For in the event of Sub-Prefect Marchini being in charge (and, who knows? this may one day occur, sooner than they think) they would immediately be transferred, perhaps as a start to a four-star restaurant and would partake of noble fare, perhaps bouillabaisse or …

  Advocate breaks off as lower-echelon functionaries enter the room.

  “More of this later,” he whispers and leaves.

  The functionaries start wheeling the Four out. Seymour is the last to go. Henri with his filthy beret moronically pulled down to his eyes sidles into the room and in passing snatches the box of Camembert out of Seymour’s hand.

  He claws off the lid. The stink is overpowering. Thousands of maggots pour onto the floor. They instantly metamorphose into fat flies that rise in a whining black swarm. They buzz about for a second and then fall back to the floor mummified.

  Henri looks about fearfully and then sinks to his knees as in prayer. Seymour’s last image, before darkness, is of Henri gathering up the flies and bearing them to his salivating mouth.

  When Seymour emerges from the darkness hours later in the Living Quarters that image seems to be imprinted on the dingy ceiling above his bed. He can’t help thinking that the scene has profound relevance to all of th
em. But it doesn’t really bother him. Like the others (except for Max) he’s indifferent to everything.