Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

Chapter 43

  Scarecrow

  Tattered and ghostly with plaster dust, Advocate staggers into the Men’s Room. He bears green-labeled bottles of beer to celebrate the joyful news, stale for them, that Margaret has been rescued, thanks again to Sub-Prefect Marchini. Abandoning metaphor and circumlocution in the urgency of the thing, Advocate points to the partition and announces that when Margaret awakens they must convince her to dance for the Prefect. Advocate too, as Margaret had done (but more convincingly, because bureaucratic process rather than miracle is involved) promises good things outside if they succeed in convincing her to do this little harmless thing. Harmless! Perfectly harmless! Act, before it is too late!

  Advocate loses self-control. The Prefecture is teetering on the brink of destruction, he cries.

  Office after office menaced by premonitory cracks.

  Electric bulbs stricken blind as never before.

  Rust, gnawing filing cabinets into lace, sabotaging the typewriters.

  Panicked functionaries milling about in the corridors imploring for order, for a firm hand on the tiller to steer them out of these perilous waters. Receiving in answer to their pleas the brutal intervention of the Black Men who beat them back into their disintegrating offices.

  Fantastically erroneous materializations: three Croats, two Uzbeks and a skin-clad savage.

  Act! Act! Before it is too late! Speak to her! A third trial run is scheduled for you, perhaps this very day, perhaps this very minute, a trial run you may never return from nor ever quit. Act!

  They’re terrorized at the idea of that third trial, immanent and endless. After Advocate leaves, they ignore the beer and debate the matter.

  “Sure, we’ll speak to her!” Max cries.

  Seymour mumbles: “Why not? Nobody’s forcing her.”

  Helen protests vehemently. Haven’t they understood by now that there are no gifts in this place?

  That leaves Louis.

  Louis stares down at the floor. Finally he says: “Dunno. Dunno. I’ll go along with the majority.”

  Helen is outvoted.

  Louis lies down on his cot and says nothing. Max and Seymour go, in solemn delegation, to the women’s room, knock on the door and then pull it open. The room is empty.

  Days go by. Margaret doesn’t return. They jog down the rubble-strewn corridors, Helen too, crying out Margaret’s name and getting nothing but echoes in reply.

  They decide to question the functionaries. But each time they venture down the two corridors that lead to the Administrative Hub they feel the stabbing pain in their temples that indicates nearby supersonic whistles and hear the clump-jangle, clump-jangle of Turnkey and see a black hulking booted helmeted figure gripping a long supple black club in one hand and wrenching open door after door with the other. When that happens, they flee but imagine they can hear the boots of the insect-eyed Exiter pursuing them for hours until they regain the Living Quarters.

  One night, Helen doesn’t return.

  Seymour, like Louis and Max, capitulates to sleep until detonations, never so violent, pull him out of the recurrent nightmare. He waits, fearfully impatient, for disintegrating floors above to crush him into peace. It doesn’t happen and he has to confront the dream with Marie-Claude again.

  This time, though, she’s in her safely nubile 1951 version and visiting him in his second life. She kneels by his cot in the dark and urges him to convince Margaret to dance for the Prefect and so be able to join her outside. “I will, I will,” he says and reaches out for her.

  But in the dream it’s no longer Marie-Claude kneeling by the cot in the dark but Gentille and he pulls his hand back. She whispers that she’s escaped (although escape, like prayer, is a sin), that a big big crack had opened in the hospital prison wall and she’d escaped before they could stick the needle in her head and steal the sea from her again, that she still has the key, the key to Room 147 and the tunnel to escape from the Prefecture for good, I’ll be waiting for you there, Monsieur Saymore, I have to leave now, the Black Men are looking for me, goodbye Monsieur Saymore and sleep well but not too long because they’ll end up finding me.

  Then Marie-Claude returns in the dark next to Seymour’s cot (naked he somehow knows) and says: “Room 147, Room 147, Room 147.” Seymour reaches out for her again and then wakes up. Hoping that awakening may be part of the dream, he goes on groping in the empty darkness. Bitter, he finally gets up.

  Something small and hard falls to the floor. He switches on the light and sees a key lying by the cot.

  At that moment, Helen Ricchi finds herself in one of the ruined corridors leading to the Hub. So far she hasn’t encountered a single Black Man. The concussions begin again. She can feel the floor tremble. She trembles too and has to squat against the cracked wall until the trembling stops.

  When she reaches the Hub, the quakes start up again. She encounters hundreds of scared-looking functionaries milling about in the great circular corridor. They shrink back from her as she goes past. Between concussions, she overhears scraps of their muttered fearful remarks and fitting them together understands that chaos has invaded the offices as never before. Files are crumbling and typewriters rusting before their very eyes. Ceilings are bulging dangerously. What will become of us?

  The Prefect’s neo-classical office is in semi-ruin. Three of the marble nudes that once upheld the Doric roof of the peristyle have lost their essential arms and the roof sags badly. The giant bronze eagle atop it, insignia of power, is askew and dove-white with plaster dust. One of its wings is bent.

  Ahead, she recognizes Sub-Prefect Marchini, imperial in his bedraggled uniform. As he strides past them, the functionaries beg him to intervene, to do something. His metallic voice rings out above the uproar of chaos: “The situation lies beyond my area of competence. I am not the Prefect. I am powerless.”

  A voice murmurs: “Vive Préfet Marchini!”

  Another voice murmers: “Vive Préfet Marchini!”

  Other voices, more frightened than scandalized, hush them up.

  The Sub-Prefect, expressionless, strides on.

  Helen starts trotting to catch up with him and ask about Margaret. He turns into the Reception Room and once again the lights go out.

  In the total darkness, groping slowly forward, arms outstretched, she hears frightened voices.

  “Ruin is reaching the upper floors now.”

  “He’s walking the inner corridors again.”

  “Hasn’t got his mind focused on here but on back then.”

  “He has a long memory supply with the woman as long as she lasts.”

  “What’s to become of us?”

  “Pray to have him removed.”

  “Shh. You know direct prayer is forbidden. All prayers are routed through him.”

  The lights return. Standing before the shut door of the Reception Room, Helen hears a sharp tonal hubbub. It sounds like a mob of incensed Chinese within. She pulls the door open.

  Yes, exactly that: a mob of incensed Chinese, at least thirty of them, a mob of Chinese in a bad scramble of periods, a mob of anachronisms. Some can only be pre-Ming Dynasty Imperial Civil Servants, inscrutable pigtailed mandarins in long silk gowns with great floppy sleeves, clasped hands concealed in them, jade pendants at their waist. There are also bare-chested skin-and-bone coolies with rice-straw paddy hats. Others wear Mao unisex uniforms, certainly blue in the shade of gray that represents blue in the Prefecture, and there, there (Helen’s eyes widen in astonishment), isn’t that the Helmsman, Chairman Mao himself, bearing aloft in his right hand the celebrated book, doubtless red, that shade of gray? Other Chinamen are dressed in Hong Kong western business suits and have well-fed moon-faces and they look scared: for isn’t the man who looks like Mao and probably is Mao haranguing the coolies against them?

  Sadie is enraged. “No such gigantic blunder of processing has ever been committed, ever, ever.” The Sub-Prefect stands there close to the Empire table with the three telephone
s, gazing at the milling throng of Asians with a tight little smile.

  Sadie empties her lungs into a mute whistle. Helen shrinks aside as a dozen Black Men materialize and march into the Reception room. Using their clubs like cattle prods they jab the Chinese out into the circular corridor. Turnkey takes the largest of the keys on his ring and unlocks a steel door marked 48596. The Exiters prod and club the screaming Asians into the room. The Exiters and Turnkey follow. The door clangs shut on them. The vehement ching-chang-choong goes on for a minute and then is suddenly cut off.

  Profound silence ensues. A few seconds later, the Black Men and Turnkey emerge. Turnkey locks the door behind him, sinks to a knee and on his skinny calf scribbles a note in his worn notebook.

  The lights blink twice and go out. Helen collides with someone in the dark and feels an icy burning hand on her neck.

  She loses everything, where she is and who she is, loses everything except intense pain.

  Light now.

  Shabby corridor.

  Stone-faced man in gray smock opposite. Hand outstretched. Ecstatic expression. Eyes blank like a statue’s. My head, my head.

  Who is he? Where am I? Who am I?

  In the face opposite, real eyes replace the statue-white eyes. Terror replaces the ecstatic expression. He runs away from her. She looks about in bewilderment.

  Vast arena. Dark in the middle. Illuminated mile-long circular corridor with doors and corridor openings, hundreds of both. Ornate ruined Graeco-Roman peristyle.

  A scarecrow creature stumbles out of it. Her skimpy knit dress exposes blood-streaked thighs no thicker than normal arms, not hers, her abnormal arms are like broomsticks and raised in defense before her wasted terrified face. A profound décolleté exposes jutting collarbones and breasts like wrinkled deflated balloons.

  A great dusty white wind sweeps down the corridor. The creature whirls like a dead leaf and collapses on the broken arms of a marble statue.

  What is this place? Who is she? Help her up.

  But the scarecrow gasps “Don’t touch me, O please, lady, please, don’t touch me again!” and now a gray-smocked frozen-faced mob runs toward them, crying in French: “Exit her! Exit her!”

  Black-uniformed goggle-eyed men like giant insects charge the mob. One of them yanks the scarecrow to its feet. Propels it back through the open door of the ruined peristyle. The mob surges back. Quick, out of harm’s way. Here: an open door. Inside, quick, shut the door. My head.

  Huge room with churchlike pillars. Chinese caps and jade pendants on the floor. Over there two men, one old with long white hair in a big-sleeved black gown, the other small and imperious in a tattered white uniform, standing before a big Empire table with three telephones, one of them black and gigantic under a glass bell. My head, my head. The old man in black says (in French): “Try again. Surely her state bears clear witness to his act.” The man in tattered white says: “For the nineteenth time, then.” He grits his teeth, heaves the glass bell up and sets it down on the table. With both hands he lifts the telephone, sinks to his knees and murmurs. Murmurs. Murmurs. “Still no reply,” he says finally.

  The old man in black says: “With the actress in Batch C2645, intervention was immediate, almost upon first contact.”

  The man in tattered white says: “All things are running down. He too.”

  The old man in black says: “Try again.”

  My head, my head, my head.

  She (who is she?) slumps against the wall and loses the little she possesses.

  When she awakens the pain is still there but the old man in black and the small man in tattered white are gone. The concussions and the uproar in the corridor have stopped.

  In the silence, knowledge starts seeping back.

  Slowly she realizes where she is and who she is.

  Finally she realizes who the mumbling scarecrow is, who it once had been.