Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

Chapter 49

  Goodbye

  One sunny spring day Seymour is kneeling before a neglected stone, happy with the fragrance of nearby lilacs and trying to communicate it below, when suddenly he finds himself elsewhere, in whiteness, on his back, rigid, heavy as lead and unable to budge. His nostrils are filled with astringency.

  At first he thinks he’s changed places with the dead below. But they lie boxed in darkness. There’s light here, a poor sterile artificial light and no lid over him but a blurred ceiling. He hears a faint murmur of voices and sees blurred faces looming for a second. He thinks: this is my first spook dream. But what he sees has a shabby painful reality to it. Real people often dream spooky dreams, he thinks. Spooks logically dream of real things.

  To escape from the dream Seymour imagines himself on his feet, arms stretched up to the sky beyond the ceiling, moving forward, shedding weight and taking off for the lilacs and his deep friends.

  He finds himself back to lightness in the cemetery, still kneeling before the stone, casting no shadow in the full moon. Has he lost all those daylight hours in the long dream?

  Then the sky fills with booming and colored arabesques and he knows it’s Bastille Day, mid-July, so three months from those fragrant April lilacs.

  From the ground come the mournful sounds of the dead neglected all that time.

  He makes the rounds. Those same sounds come from all of the graves he’s so carefully tended for so long. He has to make up for lost time, redo what’s been undone. He runs from grave to grave, apologizes, does a terser job on the nature descriptions, often staggers under the burden of two flowers now.

  By this time he possesses their names and location in his mind so that in less than two seasons he’s reestablished the old contact with them.

  But a second time (it’s full-leafed summer now) the dream snatches Seymour away from them in the middle of a tending gesture. He finds himself back, heavy as lead, in the white room with the astringent smell and stony faces he can’t place looking down at him. Their voices are an incomprehensible drone.

  Again, he imagines himself on his feet, arms stretched up to the sky beyond the ceiling, moving forward toward lightness and escape.

  The drone fades and then everything else fades and he awakens to the reality of the snow-covered cemetery, months after, in the middle of the tending gesture he’d begun in June above a grave, with the desolate plaint of his dead friends he’s neglected again all that time.

  Once more, he tries to reestablish the interrupted communication. Some of his friends sulk and fail to respond to his apologies and descriptions. But in another two seasons he’s made most of them happy again. He would be happy himself except for fear of another long dream and all his loving labor undone and his friends unhappy once more.

  But years of happy exhausting devotion go by without interruption.

 

  Gradually he forgets the long leaden dreams.

  Seymour is describing a high summer flight of pigeons to Joseph Lenoir (1842-1864) when, with no warning, the distant blue sky becomes close white ceiling. Now unkind faces hover over him and unkind hands force him into a sitting position, then into a trembling standing position, then forward into a tottering walk. There’s a way to escape from the heavy dream but he can’t remember what it is.

  Hands guide him back to the iron bed. He stares up at the ceiling.

  The ceiling fades and now he’s being wheeled down corridors, a maze of corridors. He remembers the way to escape and imagines himself standing, arms upflung, moving forward towards freedom.

  Seymour returns to the reality of the cemetery but to the wrong side of it, to the street side of the dark wall, the side he’d longed for at the start and doesn’t want now. He wants the side where his underground companions are.

  It’s sunrise. Seymour starts jogging about the cemetery wall looking for the way in, careful to avoid contact with the passersby.

  At sunset, though, still seeking, eyes fixed on the wall, he fails to pay attention to the outstretched legs of an old man seated on a bench. Instead of passing through them as he’d once done to legs, he trips and falls heavily, like lead.

  The old man glares at him, white beard and moustache bristling. Confused, Seymour apologizes and when the old man responds to the apology (negatively: “If you opened your eyes there would be no need for apologies!”) Seymour realizes that he’s back to opaque ponderous flesh.

  He prays for return to transparency and weightlessness and return to his friends. The force of his yearning is too great and his prayer is answered, beyond reason. He sheds weight and rises. Snatches powerlessly at the dark wall sinking past. Rises past top-story windows. Astonishes flights of pigeons. Ascension accelerates. The cemetery is a pocket-handkerchief, then a postage stamp, then a dot.

  “My friends, my dear companions,” he cries down to them. “Be patient, I’ll be back soon.”

  But how can they hear him from that distance?

  Now: on his back, immobile as though cast in lead. Different room. Different smell. Not astringency now. Smell of paint. Room freshly painted gray. Shower-stall in corner. Plastic curtains. Pattern of gray roses. Low table next to the cot. Bouquet of flowers. False flowers. Gray paper. He thinks of the real flowers he brings to his friends and waits for the dream to end and allow him to do that.

  He sees a wine-stained wall map of France and recognizes it as the map of France poor Elizabeth had seemed to pray to searching for a coastal village. Now he recognizes the room, beneath renovation, as the Men’s Room in the Living Quarters of the Prefecture in his second life, that pitiful half-life.

  A pail bongs outside the door. He gets up painfully and totters over to the door, casting a solid shadow, like a malignant excrescence, in the light of the ceiling globe and opens on Elizabeth at his feet, back from death, as sometimes happens in dreams, back to her drab Gentille disguise, scrubbing the floor. Tears burn his eyes. He forgets that he’s acting out a dream and sinks to his knees, to her level.

  “Oh Elizabeth, I thought you were dead. I thought I had killed you.” His voice is feeble and cracked.

  The plaster mask looks up a fearful instant and then confides to the pail: “He doesn’t know the rules yet. He doesn’t know it’s forbidden to talk to New Arrivals.”

  She grabs her cleaning implements (splashing dirty water over his leg) and runs away, her bony knee bonging and bonging against the pail.

  Escape from it. There’s a way to escape the nightmare and join his friends but he can’t remember how.

  Behind the door of the Women’s Room water runs into a glass. A few seconds later the glass is set down on a hard surface. Slow footsteps. The complaint of bedsprings.

  He goes over to the door and knocks timidly, then louder. Getting no answer, he pushes the door open a few inches. The room is like a tiny chaotic library, all four walls covered with books from floor to ceiling and hundreds of books on the floor, a turmoil of books, crumbling piles of books. On the cot a very old woman with thick reading glasses and wild white hair is propped against the wall, absorbed in a book. He clears his throat. She goes on reading. “Excuse me,” he says.

  The old woman doesn’t respond. She must be deaf. She finishes her page and looks up over her glasses. She squints at him and finally says in a feeble cracked voice: “You must be a suspended New Arrival. The Corsican will be furious. There hasn’t been a suspended New Arrival since the overthrow of the old Prefect. This is the Women’s Room. The Woman’s Room. The Men’s Room is the next door to your left.”

  She waits for him to disappear. He waits for her to disappear along with the room and everything else and for himself to cast off heaviness and go back to the interrupted description of a flight of pigeons, probably not the same, in a later sky, probably not blue (he’s prepared for that), to Joseph Lenoir (1842-1864).

  Nothing disappears. This is the longest of the heavy dreams. The old woman continues staring at him. “I know you, knew yo
u. You’re … Seymour. Seymour I-forget-your-last-name. Nobody told me you came out of it. After all this time.”

  Again forgetting that this is a dream, he says, “My God, you were Helen,” a terrible tense to inflict on someone, even in a dream. But she doesn’t seem to care. She seems anxious to return to her book, closed on a place-marking finger. Why doesn’t she ask about Max? He starts explaining that after they got out of the tunnel they ended up as ghosts in the Montparnasse Cemetery and that he’d lost Max there.

  She stares at him. “Don’t you know where you’ve been all this time? Didn’t they tell you? Tell you about Max and the others? Poor Seymour.”

  He hears her, this caricature of the girl called Helen he’d once attempted to fall in love with, trying to make him believe where he’d been all that time – a hundred seasons at least, she says – following the blind thunderbolt that had killed Margaret and Louis and Max, killed everybody except him, Seymour, and of course Hautecloque, cursed with immortality, downgraded from prefect to a mindless toilet cleaner.

  She’d seen it all, she says, when she limped into that exploded room, the others charred but not him, Seymour, and then she’d fainted. After, she’d visited him once a month in their terrible hospital. But he was still in coma so she spaced her visits the second year to every other month and the year after every six months and then not at all.

  Hearing her deny the reality of his years of selfless devotion in the Montparnasse Cemetery, Seymour recalls the way out of nightmare, the way back to his deep friends. He raises his arms heavenward, his eyes too, staggers forward, trips over a pile of books and sprawls. His sleeve is shoved up, disclosing, inches from his eyes, a scrawny old arm, heavily veined and covered with white hairs. He guesses his face must match hers in decrepitude. He starts crying.

  The old woman tries to comfort the old man. Things are much better here since the Corsican took over long ago. Ruin has been halted and repaired, showers installed, toilets modernized, the food vastly improved although far from good. Above all, books, thousands and thousands of books available as he could see. Now that he’s out of coma the two of them could discuss books until the final age-clobber, with any luck nothing after that.

  An authoritarian fist thumps on the door. A second later it bangs open and Sadie stands on the threshold, unchanged with her iron-gray hair done up in a bun, her severe marble-white face and her frigid gray gaze fastened on Seymour spread-eagled among books and crying.

  She orders Number Two and Number Four to prepare themselves for a visit, an all-important visit, in the Common Room.

  The Common Room has been repainted and refurnished. Two new leather armchairs have replaced the five battered ones before the window. It frames blue summer outside. They turn their back to it and sit down at the new oak table. Seymour slumps forward and rests his head on his crossed arms. He closes his eyes and tries to summon up incised stones. He hears the old woman’s dry cough and the pages of her book turning.

  Footsteps. Sadie barks: “Attention!” Seymour sits up. Helen closes her book on a finger and looks up.

  Accompanied by Advocate in deferent attendance, Prefect Marchini, resplendent in his white uniform, advances and surveys the room with his piercing black eyes. He strides to the table, touches the surface and examines his finger. “Dust,” he pronounces and scribbles in a notebook. He turns to the seated pair, looking at them as though they were more intrusive grains of dust.

  “I have come to announce your transfer and settle the appertaining administrative details.” He signals to Advocate who places papers and a pen before each of them.

  The old man and the old woman protest feebly. They don’t want to be transferred. Helen says that she’s content to be where she is, not really here but in better places as long as the books are in supply.

  “You cannot remain here. Now that Number Four has returned, both of you must be transferred. You are unwanted relics of a bygone dark period in the history of the Prefecture. There will be no more errors committed. Corridors will no longer collapse. No files will be misplaced. Above all, there will be no more Suspended Arrivals.”

  Prefect Marchini turns his back on them and strides out of the room.

  “My friends …” Advocate begins.

  “No friend of mine. No transfer for me,” says Seymour.

  “No friend of mine. No transfer for me,” says Helen.

  “My friends, my dear friends, be reasonable, I implore you. Read and sign (in triplicate) the release document. It is impossible for you to prolong your sojourn here. The only alternative to transfer is exit.”

  “Exit, then,” says Helen.

  “Yes, exit,” says Seymour.

  “Exit?” exclaims Advocate. “After all this – as you say – ‘time’? This – to quote you – ‘long wait’? Now that you are on the very verge of permanent transfer? Transfer to the quays of Paris? Beaches? Mountains? Fine food and wine? Fields of golden wheat sprinkled with red poppies? Larks arising from them? Love?”

  “Love? The scarecrow I am?” says Seymour. “More of your torture.”

  “I assure you that you will win back the youth you possessed when you materialized here,” says Advocate.

  “Another one of your traps. The way you trapped and murdered Margaret and Louis and Max with your lie.”

  “No, no,” says Advocate. He plunges his face in his hands a few seconds and emerges, muscles of grief tugging at his rigid mask.

  “I plead responsible but not guilty for that tragedy. Contact between Madame Williams and the former Prefect was to have lasted no more than the blink of an eye. In no way was the punishment to have involved the innocent victim, not to mention the others. A monstrous negligence was committed, on an echelon far higher than mine.”

  Advocate recoils at his words, glances at the ceiling, waits for something to happen. Nothing happens. He resumes: “Blasphemy. Yes, blasphemy. Let me confess to more. At the height of disorder, before Prefect Marchini threw up a frail temporary barrier against it, I found myself wishing for the total triumph of chaos and once had a splendid dream of it happening. The strange wind that periodically sweeps through the corridors rose to unimaginable tempest force. The millions of dossiers took wing and vanished. The pillars shook and fissured and finally the entire edifice collapsed on us, freeing us to void, blessed void. I woke, alas, to things as they were, later corrected by Prefect Marchini. But Prefect Marchini is fighting a rear-guard action against chaos. For …”

  Advocate breaks off, leans forward toward the old people and whispers: “Clearly, the Central Intelligence is disintegrating. Soon the forces of cohesion in the universe from atom to galaxy will collapse. All things will come apart and the dream will come to pass and we too will be free, returned forever to void. What other prospect awaits us? We can hope for nothing better, unlike you, able to return out there and smell roses and taste rare river fish and weigh beloved bosoms in your cupped hands. And you say no to all that. How can you possibly say no to all that?”

  “Another trap,” says Helen.

  “To make us hope, another one of your tortures,” says Seymour.

  “No, no, never, I who share your pain would never knowingly torture you, never,” says Advocate, eyes brimming.

  “Another one of your tortures,” says Helen. “Like naked and old in the honeymoon room.”

  “The little girl and the butcher with the cleaver,” says Seymour.

  Advocate winces as though pelted with rocks as the outrageous catalogue of a second lifetime of suffering tumbles out, each item scarcely formulated in the mind of one than expressed by the other, so that finally neither of them knows who says it, a fusion in bitterness, a polyphonic litany of grief and grievances: all that hope in those corridors, hope before all those doors that opened on nothing, hope at the beginning of the tunnel that ended in urinals, hope at the two trial-runs, the horror of them, no more of that, hope is what makes you suffer, we’ve abandoned hope, you can’t hurt us anymore, what w
e want is exit, not transfer, exit, exit, exit.

  The old man and woman chant the word in chorus and stop, exhausted.

  Advocate stares at them out of his mask of powerless goodness. His rheumy eyes seem on the point of overflowing. His lips tremble.

  “Transfer is a choice. It cannot be imposed. But it is impossible for you to remain here in Administrative Suspension. Exit is the unavoidable alternative to transfer. I would humbly suggest, humbly implore, that, before you formulate, through the necessary administrative channels, your decision to exit, rather than to transfer, you should sleep upon the matter and then decide. La nuit porte conseil.”

  They think it’s another trap and say so but finally agree to sleep on the matter (what else can they do, anyhow?) sure that nothing during their last night here could make them change their minds and choose transfer to more suffering.

  That night they are visited by their loved ones, never so close, never so urgent, imploring, an imploration impossible to refuse.

  Seymour is walking down his sweetheart’s street, not the copy drawn in painful black and white on a plaster wall in half-life, but the real one in true color: there, the decorative dish with the rose-encircled peasant-lass, there, the yellow lemons on the boxes of oysters and there, the golden horse head. The heavy porte-cochere clicks open and she steps out as he best remembers her, ponytailed with a gold crucifix on a high-buttoned white blouse and implores him to come, she’s been waiting for him for so long.

  Helen encounters Richard standing bewildered in the middle of the sidewalk with a guidebook in his hand. “I’ve been looking for you for so long,” he says. “Where were you all this time? I want to go with you to … to …” She’s afraid he’ll say the Catacombs but he ends by saying he wants to go to the Luxembourg Gardens which is exactly where she wants to go and she imagines them both sitting there near the basin, embracing, with the joyous cries of the children sailing model sailboats, the billowing sails, the jet of the fountain blown into a faint rainbow, the leaves of the pruned lindens blown into twinkling points of silver.

  The next morning, they wash and dress blindly and go into the Common Room. The functionaries are waiting and accompany them to the cubicles. They sign the release papers in triplicate without reading them, hardly seeing them, their vision still inward and prophetic of things outside. They don’t even say goodbye to one another despite all that time spent together.

  ***

  Part Five

  Epilogue And Prelude