Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

  Chapter 38

  No! No!

  Like the numbing shock that follows severe trauma, total indifference insulates the Four from further pain.

  Passive, they let Max bear-hug them and apologize in tears for having thought they’d been bull-shitting him. He was sure they’d gone for good instead of just the couple of hours it had turned out to be. He’d looked out of the window for them but the streets were empty the way they always were.

  Like a high-school teacher correcting a student, no drama or pathos to it, Helen interrupts Max, saying: not hours but years and the streets had been full of people, hundreds of miles of streets, millions of people. Hearing that, Seymour and Louis and Margaret suspect that Helen’s story of the National Library had been an invention. For all her superior words, like them she hadn’t been able to resist the baited hook of hope. She’d tried to establish contact but had no one particular street as a target. All the streets of Paris and their crowds had been possibilities in the renewed search for Richard. Out of pride, they imagine, she hadn’t wanted to admit it.

  Max wants to know how it had been out there. Had they remembered to bring back pizza and real beer? They reply: “No time,” or “Forgot” or (Seymour) “Things spoil.” They don’t even bother shrugging when he reminds them of the tunnel and that Dummy has the key to that way out. They’d been out and knew what it was like.

  The cleaning-girl is mute and scared. Her one gesture of contact occurs when she tries to hand back the key that Seymour had thrown at her on his way out, he’d thought, for good. He tells her she can keep it. Room 1265 and its walls are all hers now. He won’t be going back there to the drawing. He’s not interested in the other key either. He knows what it opens on.

  Anyhow she doesn’t talk about that key. She doesn’t talk about anything to them. Had something happened, involving another threat of punishment? It’s of no importance to them. Nothing is.

  They spend most of their time on their backs, staring up at the ceiling. Their minds come close to achieving the same blankness. Here and out there don’t matter to them any more. The armchairs in the Common Room don’t tempt them. Their brains disarm the treacherous window on Paris to a one-dimensional picture hanging for decades on the wall, so familiar that it doesn’t register any more.

  Probably a week after their return (they can’t tell since they don’t look out of the window any more) they hear and feel the booming of collapsing staircases below, never so violent. The bulbs stutter darkness and light. Chaos is drawing closer, they understand. Let it. They can’t even muster the energy to worry about Max who is wandering somewhere in the suddenly dangerous corridors.

  Fine cracks develop in the ceiling they’re staring up at. They close their eyes against the plaster dust drifting down but they don’t bother moving. They imagine that their passionless whitening faces resemble funerary statues.

  An hour or so later, Advocate totters into their room. They haven’t budged and don’t budge now except for their eyeballs which roll an indifferent millimeter in his direction. With his long-sleeved arms flapping about for balance he resembles a blast-beruffled wounded old raven. His long white hair and his jabot are in disarray. His black gown is tattered and covered with plaster dust. He sinks into a chair, struggles for breath and finally pronounces in a wheeze almost covered by the rumbling of destruction below: “Chaos, chaos, who will deliver us from chaos?”

  A powerful fragrance of cognac accompanies the rhetorical question. Stewed to the gills, he must have collapsed on a staircase, they think. It turns out that it was the staircase itself that had collapsed, under him, followed by the ceiling above him. It had crowned him with half a ton of plaster. Hands trembling, Advocate goes on with his outraged recital of chaos drawing ever closer to the Administrative Center.

  All this – to say nothing of the quasi-fiasco of the transfer trial run – imputable to the negligence of a certain high-placed individual. Only intervention on Supreme Echelon Level (Advocate whispers the term fearfully) and appointment of a more able and conscientious individual in his place could remedy the disastrous situation.

  But the Supreme Echelon, say certain blasphemers (Advocate’s voice drops to a barely audible whisper), seems to have forgotten their existence. The most blasphemous of these blasphemers claim (I am but citing them) that the Supreme Echelon too constantly walks the inner corridors, indifferent to massacres, tidal waves, epidemics, famine, tortures and the great-eyed children herded into the cattle-cars. No staying hand for these things, that Hand that once parted the waters of the Red Sea and chastised evildoers is now inert, they (not I! not I!) say.

  The most radical of these extreme blasphemers hold that we are but thoughts in the Supreme Mind and as that mind loses its grasp, we fade, our universe disintegrates, prey to rust and dust and rot and void.

  Advocate pauses. Louis’ snores indicate that he has lost half of his audience. He resumes in a fearful whisper.

  One thing alone could call the Supreme Echelon’s attention to the lamentable state of affairs here: violation of the supreme prohibition; intimate contact between the functionaries and the Materialized. Now, the highly placed individual who is the subject of our discussion had once been suspected, strongly suspected, of precisely this transgression involving an admittedly ravishing platinum blonde starlet. There is strong indication that a certain member of Batch MLX 59833 is the object of similar attentions, which she has always spurned.

  If another such transgression were to occur would this not come to the Supreme Echelon’s faltering attention? Would this not arouse the Supreme Echelon’s ire? Would not the present occupant of power be divested of that power and that power be wielded by a person who (Advocate pauses dramatically and stares at Seymour) had only a short time ago confided his intention, should he occupy that position, to transfer four of the Five to the space outside?

  Advocate’s discourse now becomes almost totally obscure, bogged down in subordinate clauses, clothed in elaborate senseless metaphors. Approaching the subject he veers away from it, like a finger snatched away from the intense halo of something incandescent; orbiting in on that white-hot subject, then veering away into the safely tepid outskirts of it. Everything is implicitness, indirection, ornate with euphemisms.

  A violent concussion. Fragments of plaster rain down on Advocate’s head. He breaks off in the middle of a verbose sentence and looks about fearfully. He struggles to his feet and departs, muttering: “A word to the wise, n’est-ce pas?”

  A minute after Advocate’s departure, Max returns, ghostly with plaster dust. He starts brushing himself off, a swearing white cloud.

  Louis’ snores quicken to snorts. He cries out and awakens wide eyed to the ceiling.

  “Bad dream, Louis?” says Seymour indifferently.

  “Thought I was still out there.”

  “Relief to wake up here, huh?”

  “Wake up here, wake up there, no relief wakin’ up anywhere. Advocate’s gone? Could you make out what he was drivin’ at?”

  “Think so. He wants us to pimp for him and the Sub-Prefect.”

  “Watch your language, Stein. How so, to … what you said?”

  “Wants us to try to convince Margaret to let the Prefect … um … possess her carnally. If we do and she does, we’ll all be transferred for real out there. That’s what he says.”

  “Who the dickens does he take us for? For … that word you said? Anyhow, who wants to go out there?”

  Max stops brushing himself. He stares at them and yells: “I sure as hell do. You mean if Maggie lets the Prefect screw her we’ll all be transferred? And she says no? Screwed like a blind weasel back then and she says no now? Transfer for all of us out there just for a quick bang and she says no? She can’t do this to us.”

  “You watch your language, Pilsudski,” says Louis.

  “The Paris they transfer us to isn’t all that great, Max,” says Seymour. “It’s not worth a … um … a carnal relationship.”
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  “Paris? Who gives a shit about Paris?”

  “Forgot about that. Not Paris, Las Vegas. I was in Las Vegas once. If you forced me to choose between the two I wonder if I wouldn’t pick Las Vegas, that’s how bad it was out there in Paris.”

  Advocate totters back into the room, smiting his forehead. He apologizes profusely for having allowed the main purpose of his visit to slip his mind. He had meant to inform them that, Sub-Prefect Marchini having impounded all the bottles in the Transfer Center, the second transfer trial run is certain to be more successful than the first.

  That rouses the recumbent men out of apathy. They sit bolt upright.

  Louis exclaims: “Second trial run?”

  “Quite so. A second trial run is statutory procedure in the case of a defective initial trial run.”

  “When?” says Seymour. He fears some inhumanly close date like next month. It would take them more than three months to recover from the first trial run.

  “Shortly following lunch. Hash is not on the menu, I am happy to inform you.”

  “Lunch? You can’t mean today?”

  “Quite so. As you say, ‘today’.”

  “Oh no!”

  “No, no, no!”

  For Max all those violent Non’s (just about the one thing he can understand in French) can only mean that Advocate’s come back for another try at talking Louis and Stein into getting Maggie to screw them all out of this place. And they yell “No” to that, the shitheads.

  Max decides to convince Maggie himself. He leaves the room with the others still hollering like Advocate wanted to cut their balls off.

  Max stops before the women’s door. He hears Helen’s voice inside. She’s sure to say “No” too. Have to get Maggie alone. Anyhow, have to find the right words. Max starts trotting down the corridor, in search of them.

  Seymour and Louis go on with their No’s.

  Advocate opens his rubber-clad hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  “I fear, sincerely fear, that you have no choice in the matter. May I suggest that this time you resist temptation and concentrate on well-known Parisian monuments, for example, the Eiffel Tower or Napoleon’s Tomb? Restrict yourselves to neutral mindless registering of things seen. Remain strictly on the surface of phenomena. Make of your minds a shiny blank, mirrors to throw back things seen and experienced. Allow nothing to penetrate and fester within. Otherwise, I fear, you shall once again be the artisan of your woes. But how I go on! Now I must inform the ladies.”

  They go on shouting “No” at the door that closes behind Advocate. They’re not on their backs now and they’re no longer insulated against pain. Not again, Louis mutters. Not years out there again. They said hours but it had been years.

  Yes, years, not hours, says Seymour, and what years, he hadn’t told the worst. He tells it now. Forced for years into skipping on a hopscotch drawing and his sweetheart behind the door sadistically throwing out an early version of herself, a bare-armed little girl, luring him into flopping on dog-shit into hell, not that, not ever again.

  They sit down heavily on the edge of their cots. From the other side of the partition they can hear the two women crying out “No! No!” and then Margaret sobbing. Advocate must have delivered the tidings.

  As though awaiting a signal to storm an enemy position, Louis leans forward in a tense muscled crouch. He stares intently ahead at the wall with its scrawled inscriptions, at one particular inscription.

  “That’s another one of their traps,” says Seymour, following his gaze. “It’s the real meaning after all. What we thought at the beginning. You’re double-crossed if you go out.”

  They start arguing about it. Seymour says that at best the tunnel behind Room 147 (assuming there is a tunnel behind it) would turn out to be like that other tunnel long ago that ended up in the toilets. At worst it would really lead them out but out in the Paris they’d been tortured with during the first trial run and would be again in a few minutes.

  “It’s a chance to take,” says Louis. He dictates the strategy. They would all hide in one of the corridor rooms on Dummy’s path from the kitchen to the Living Quarters. When she went past they’d tell her to give them the key, tell her they’d take her with them, promise her anything, the moon even. No problem. She’d already agreed. They’d lay low till she came with it.

  “No time to waste. Have to tell the women to get ready.”

  Louis leaps to his feet, strides to the door, yanks it open, steps halfway outside. He freezes in that attitude. He retreats back into the room.

  “Four of them Black Men. Two at each end of the corridor. With clubs that can smash you to bits.”

  Soon after, Gentille wheels in lunch, sets the trays down in silence and flees.

  They stare down at what their dish contains despite Advocate’s assurance to the contrary. Hash augurs ill, they think, for his other assurance, that the second trial transfer would go more smoothly than the first.

  Maybe an hour later, Advocate returns to their room, in the company of Sadie, Turnkey, Sub-Prefect Marchini and the four Exiters. The Four say no again, just for the record. They offer no physical resistance, useless in any case. They are going out again, no choice in the matter. Their one consolation is that they have no more illusions about what they’ll find outside. Won’t that lessen the pain, a little?

  Max starts trotting, then running back to the Living Quarters. He knows what he’s going to say to Maggie and how to say it and he has to say it right away.

  But when he gets to the Living Quarters he has nobody to say it to. The women’s room is empty. The men’s room is empty. Breaking the silence of the corridor, he shouts their names. The only sound outside of his own voice repeating Stein, Maggie, Louis, Helen, the names in diminishing echo, is a distant clump-jangle, clump-jangle.

  What’s happened? Have they been exited? Transferred? All by himself here, not for hours like the last time, but for all time? Max returns to his room (all his now) and lies down in a huddle on his cot.

  Minutes later Dummy, her face tragic, rolls in the cart with a single tray on it. At the sight of that solitary tray, unbearable confirmation, Max struggles out of bed and advances on her. She shrinks back.

  “Gimme the key.”

  Stares at him. Doesn’t understand. Dummy. What’s the French for ‘key’? All he knows how to say in French is “Excuse me, Monsieur or Madame or Mademoiselle, where is the airport?” But to be able to say that usefully he needs the key.

  “The key, the key, key, key, key,” he yells at her.

  Max can’t know that the word comes across to her as qui, qui, qui: who? who? who? She thinks he’s referring to the missing trays, and so to the missing Suspended Arrivals, missing for good, she thinks. She brings out in a trembling whisper: “Madame Ricchi, Madame Williams, Monsieur Forster and O! Monsieur Saymore, Monsieur Saymore: all transferred.”

  Max doesn’t understand. He bellows in her face, spraying her with saliva: “Gimme the key, goddam you!”

  She panics and starts for the door. She must have it on her. He grabs her arm above the rubber glove and freezes and goes blank.

  Who?

  Where?

  Dump of a room.

  Skinny girl with a funny expression.

  Sudden loud clump-jangle, clump-jangle.

  Door bursts open.

  Mean-faced lipless woman. Two cops, funny uniforms. Tall tall bald skinny guy in a grey smock, keys hanging from his belt.

  What’s going on here? Where’s here? The cops drag the girl under the light bulb. One of them twists her arms behind her back. The other grabs her hair and pulls her head back. Baldie fiddles with her eyelid. Cinder in her eye? Stares into her eye. Steps back.

  Says: “Positif.” Not English. What’s it all about?

  Cops march the girl out of the room. Baldie and the mean-faced woman follow them. Nobody pays attention to him. He (who is “he”?) staggers over to a rusty cot and collapses, head splitting
.

  When he awakens it all comes back and he knows where he is and who he is. He, Max Pilsudski, risen uselessly from the dead, isn’t happy at the recovered knowledge. Then he remembers the key to the way out, the key to the steel door of Room 147 and the tunnel behind it.

  He goes out into the corridor, turns left and starts jogging. When he gets to the first crossing of corridors he halts, not knowing the direction to take to find Dummy and the key to the tunnel out of all this.

  ***

  Part Four

  The Most High