Chapter 44
San Juan Hill
The three men are seated on the edge of their cots. By now the key to Room 147 has gone the round of fists. First the hand it was intended for clenched it stubbornly. Finally Max twisted Seymour’s arm, pried the key free and started running down the corridor in the vague direction of the distant lock it fitted. Louis caught up with him. Now it’s in the impregnable keep of Louis’ big fist. Max begs Louis for it. Louis says over and over that they have to wait for Margaret and Helen before deciding anything. Max goes on begging.
A painful intake of breath makes him break off.
An unknown woman wearing a ghastly plaster mask sways in the doorway. The mask stares at them for long seconds. Then the bearer of the mask disappears.
When she returns with the plaster dust washed off her face, the ghastliness is still there but they recognize her now (barely) and wonder if those billions of hourglass grains of sand haven’t coalesced and clobbered her into early old age. Her voice too is old and cracked as she tries to tell them what she’d seen, or rather, what the “not-she” had seen during the time the state had lasted, that state she’d briefly shared with the broomstick scarecrow she recognized later as the husk of Margaret, tottering out of the Prefect’s office, recognized it only later, once that mindlessly registering “not-she” reverted to Helen.
They don’t understand her confused story. They know that something terrible has happened to her in body and mind (they can see and hear that) and apparently to Margaret as well. But they can’t see or hear Margaret. How can they possibly imagine the once-Margaret Helen encountered? Words, even coherent words, aren’t equal to the task.
Helen weeps and then shouts at their stupidly inadequate faces. In all those decades together they’ve never seen her weep or heard her shout. She points a trembling finger at Max and accuses him of having met Margaret in the corridors and told her to dance for the Prefect, the way they’d voted it. “You’re a murderer.”
Max protests violently.
Her trembling finger points at Seymour. She repeats the accusation. “You’re a murderer too.”
Seymour protests violently.
Her trembling finger points at Louis and she makes the same accusation.
At the word “murderer” Louis silently stares down at the floor as he’d done when they’d argued about telling Margaret to dance and finally he’d said that he’d go along with the majority vote.
Seymour and Max go on protesting but they feel a certain relief at the wildness of her accusations. It allows them to relativize her description of Margaret. Margaret’s alive so how can they be murderers? Anyway, how can dancing or more than dancing kill someone?
But she goes on yelling at them: a functionary had touched her just a second and she’d lost everything at that contact, been drained dry of memory for hours. How long had Margaret been in contact with the Prefect and what sort of contact? How long would it take for Margaret to recover, unless she was already beyond recovery? Don’t they understand what contact means here? It drains your mind and then it drains your body, drains you to a husk.
At that, and perhaps too late, they understand what they should have grasped from the moment of their materialization among these zombies with their prophylactic rubber gloves (unless their delay in comprehension was programmed like everything else here): the supreme temptation (and transgression) of contact with the Administratively Suspended to drain off the raw material of memory and reconstruct a past existence at the expense of the contacted, robbed of the substance of mind and body. They understand the treachery of Advocate’s assurance of collective reward to make them manipulate Margaret into prostitution with the Prefect (“harmless, perfectly harmless!”).
Why hadn’t Seymour understood what he does now and recounts: his long-ago contact with Gentille’s bare arm and his instant blankness and her terrified ecstasy at winning back forbidden bits of a past sea? Max remembers and tells about going blank, he too, upon contact with Dummy.
Yes, Helen was right; contact in their case had been brief and memory had ebbed back. But with Margaret, the contact would be (already was, and would be again and again) prolonged, total, and deep.
Seymour pictures the Prefect’s phallus, immensely long, like the deployed sting of some unimaginable insect, not spewing venom, but like a vampire, draining her of the raw material of memory, so of being, and irreversibly.
Prostrated, Helen and Seymour and Max collapse on their cots.
Louis sits on the edge of his cot, head bowed, arms dangling between his thighs.
Time goes by in silence.
But then collapsing floors below and above boom and timbers snap, boom like artillery, snap like rifles and suddenly Louis is back then and there in valor as, shirtless against the heat, they break out of the jungle into the meadow and dig in against the bullets and shells from the booming snapping entrenched heights until finally the Gatlings speak up and hold down the Spanish fire and the bugle sounds and they rise to their feet like a single man, shouting and charge. A soldier to his left crumples, the bugle goes on sounding, they go on charging, dress on the colors, boys.
He towers above them. Git up, we ain’t got time, he orders, shaking them, pulling them up to their feet, telling them that they’re going to rescue Margaret, maybe it’s too late but maybe not, so they got to try instead of just laying here on their backs. And then the tunnel. Maybe the tunnel don’t lead nowhere or to worse than nowhere but maybe to where they want to go, maybe just one chance in a thousand but they got to try. They can’t just lay here on their backs.
Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die Page 45