GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (10 page)

The naked bulb starts blinking furiously for a few
seconds. It dies. Louis climbs up on a wobbly chair and replaces
the dead bulb with the first of the twenty new bulbs. The outer
gloom is dispelled but their inner gloom deepens.

Louis and Seymour are about to leave the
room, as ordered, when they remember Max Pilsudski. He’s still
huddled prostrated in his corner. He starts groaning between hoarse
gasps, back to his first hopeless no-escape understanding of his
situation. Louis coaxes him to his feet and starts steering him to
the window to cheer him up with something not gray. Going past him,
Max looks fearfully at Seymour. He whispers something in Louis’
ear. Probably that he (Seymour) is a corpse, a Jew corpse, a Jew
corpse with horn-rimmed glasses to make things worse. Louis himself
looks very much alive to Max.

Louis asks Max what he sees outside. A city
or fog?

A city, Max says tonelessly. Not Las Vegas
though, he says. He wants to return to his corner. Sure, says
Louis, holding him back, no fog at all, a city, but the folks in
the streets of the city? How are those folks dressed and does Max
see horse-drawn carriages or horseless carriages, real cars?

No people, no cars, no carriages, says Max.
Empty streets and sidewalks. It’s like a big ghost-town. Just
buildings and a river. What’s the direction of the airport? He has
to get out of here and get to the airport, has to right away, right
away.

Max explodes into frantic energy. He’s back
to the conspiratorial interpretation of the situation, back to the
possibility of flight, the double flight, flight from this place
and winged flight to Las Vegas.

He grabs a chair and hurls it at the window.
The chair flies into pieces against the panes. Whining like
hammered sheet-iron, the panes are now covered with a dense network
of cracks, like a smashed but still intact windshield, opaque and
whitish, like a cataract-blinded eye.

The city has vanished and the gloom in the
room has deepened.

“Doggone you,” Louis yells. “You’ve gone and
spoiled our window! We can’t see a blamed thing now.”

“Son of a bitch!” Max yells. He kicks the
window with all his might. The panes are unaffected but not Max’s
foot. Max doubles up, howling. The other two take it for a howl of
pain, with him hopping about on his good foot, clutching the
foolish one. It’s that too, but mainly a howl of triumph. He hops
over to Seymour and sprays his face with shouted certitudes.

“I’m not dead! I can’t be dead! Jesus, it
hurts like all hell. If it hurts you gotta be alive. It’s all a
hustle, trying to make me think I’m dead, a sect, that’s what it
is, a sect or maybe spies.”

Seymour steps back from the glaring
proselytizing eyes, the saliva-specked gray lips.

“Wake up, for Chrissake,” Max yells at
Seymour. “You’re not dead either. Ya want proof?” Max picks up a
chair-leg and whacks Seymour over the shin all his might. It’s
Seymour’s turn to howl but no triumph to it: rage and pain. “You
fucking fascist Polack anti-Semite shit-head!”

But Max embraces him. “Don’t believe the
tag, you’re alive too! It hurt! I’m telling you, that’s how you
know you’re alive, you hurt!” He hugs him tighter.

“Let go of me you crazy bastard.” Seymour
breaks free and sinks to the floor. He cradles his shin and rocks
with pain. Dark gray liquid drips thickly down his leg onto the
floor. He jabs his finger in the pool and holds it up, as though
bearing somber witness.

“Look, it’s not even blood, for Chrissakes.
It’s embalming fluid. I’m dead, you’re dead, everybody’s dead, you
dumb Polack bastard.”

“Hey, you fellers quit scrappin’ like that
and usin’ foul language,” Louis orders in a Marine voice. If his
eyes had retained their original blue they would have snapped.
“They’ll put in new panes and we’ll see again. Tough glass, all
right. Max, you just calm down and slip into your new togs. We got
an appointment with the Prefect.”

Max painfully struggles into his new
clothes. They’re grotesquely inappropriate. Since he’d never been
to Paris at any period, the functionaries had no sojourn date to go
by. They’d chosen something they thought was typically and
timelessly Yankee: a cowboy outfit with a deerskin vest, a Stetson
hat and leather boots with useless spurs. There was little prospect
for a horse here. Max regrets the absence of a six-shooter to shoot
his way out or a lasso to support his weight.

Max is still thinking about escape via the
chair-and-foot-proof window. Tough glass all right, a problem, but
he’ll crack it, the problem and the window. Max bulges in the
ill-fitting costume. With all that outdoor exercise cowboys had
been notoriously lean. Max, even in his twenties, had been inclined
to paunchiness with his daily gallon-plus of lager plus sedentary
long-distance hauling.

Seymour and Max hobble badly. To help and
also to separate them, Louis steps between the two groaning men. He
hooks his arms in theirs. The linked trio staggers out into the
corridor and enters the Common Room.

It’s a big shabby room, made even bigger by
a number of tarnished full-length wall-mirrors. Dust lies thick on
a long massive library-style table. There are no books anywhere,
though. Dilapidated leather armchairs face a big window framing the
city. It’s like a set-up for TV viewing.

The women are there already, standing at
attention as for a military review.

Like the men, they’ve exchanged their towels
for costumes. For one of them it corresponds to the reigning
fashion of her Paris sojourn. The girl called Helen, as Seymour
observes with a twinge of nostalgia, is wearing the proper-proper
good-little-girl dress of the early fifties with a bell-shaped
skirt ending at mid-calf.

Then the men see Margaret. They react
vigorously to the sight.

Normally she should be attired in the tight
long skirt of the thirties. (Seymour had often recalled that tight
hobbling ankle-long sheath-like skirt that transferred impeded
forward motion to rotary motion of the hips and tukkis. Ah, that
intoxicating practically coital sway of women’s hips and tukkis in
those days of teenage desire.)

But Margaret’s costume is even better than
that for male beholders if not for her. She stands martyred in the
radical mini-skirt and décolleté of the liberated late sixties.

Not only is the period wrong but also the
size. The knitted dress was meant for a girl far smaller and
thinner than Margaret. On her, it looks like an inadequate paint
job on total nudity. The skirt is mini to the point of
non-existence. It barely covers what must absolutely be covered,
for she is naked beneath it, no lingerie having been provided. She
wears it, bears it like a cross, in far greater discomfort than the
most penitential of convent rough-spun.

Her hands are frantic in the service of
decency. She pulls the front of the skirt down. The tug hikes the
rear of the skirt up. Standing back to a full-length mirror, she
can see that indecent image of twin moons in another full-length
mirror opposite. She yanks the skirt down front and back. The
movement aggravates her décolleté and her breasts spring forth
totally denuded. She lets go of her skirt to reestablish decent
concealment above and the stretched knitwear below springs back,
navel-high now.

As her frantic hands go on and on, tugging
and pulling up and down, front and back, concealing and
involuntarily disclosing, Margaret perceives a squat cowboy and a
man in a turtleneck sweater and horn-rimmed glasses. They are
staring at her with all too visible lust.

Max and Seymour have forgotten their
outlying injured parts in favor of more private, centrally located,
parts. Max bulges even worse now in his cowboy outfit. Seymour is
in the same urgent state. He exults at it. Not pain but rigidity of
this type proclaims the persistence of life. Rigidity as vital
attribute not mortuary essence. Strategically stiff, so not a total
stiff.

Louis too is staring at Margaret. Not with
lust (or if so, severely repressed), but horror, as she can see,
despairingly.

Horror at the return of the first girl, the
lascivious one who had publicly shamed him. She is almost as naked
now as then. Where was that lovely second girl in the decent white
towels and modestly compressed bosom, the one with the spiritually
illuminated face pleading on his behalf, taking upon herself the
sins of this present girl, her depraved sister? Louis persists in
his Manichean dissociation of the girl into distinct embodiments of
Vice and Virtue.

But now he notices that this shameless girl
possesses attributes of the modest one: gray hair and a
tear-stained face. The two incompatible images of Vice and Virtue
merge impossibly into one girl. Louis is forced to recognize that
there’s only this one girl, subject to periodic radical
transformations. Louis had seen the first movie version (silent, of
course) of Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece and he thinks: Miss
Jekyll and Miss Hyde.

Maggie perceives the Prefect standing
motionless in the doorway. His gaze is fixed on her too. She
imagines the gaze is censorious. Much later she will wonder if it
wasn’t Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque himself who had chosen her
anachronistic garb and vetoed the issuing of undergarments.

The Prefect enters the room stiffly. He goes
over to each of the four other Arrivals and pronounces a few words
of perfunctory greeting. In each case his gaze is beyond his
interlocutor, fixed on Margaret and perhaps on the peeping-tom
mirror behind her.

Then he goes over and speaks to her for long
minutes. He stands at stiff attention. He maintains his ungloved
long bloodless hands clamped to his side. The stern-faced female
functionary stares at them intently.

Inaudible to the others, Margaret whispers:
“Oh sir, I’m so grateful to you, sir, but I couldn’t. I don’t dance
anymore. I don’t do that ever, now. My dancing days are over. It’s
a vow I’ve made to God. But I’m so grateful to you, sir.”

The Prefect’s white bloodless hands rise
slowly to a level with the girl’s bare neck. The stern-faced female
functionary stares at those hands even more intently. The hands
hesitate and then open in a magnanimous acceptance of her
desire.

He makes a gallant bow and leaves.

Hedgehog puffs into the room bearing a small
wooden podium. The stern-faced female functionary mounts it and
claps her hands sharply to gain their attention. Hedgehog hands out
a clipboard and a ball-point pen to each of the five guests
(guests, not prisoners, they remind themselves with little
conviction). The female functionary claps her hands again and
drones out information.

An advocate, she announces, will be assigned
to them to gather biographical particulars in order to defend their
case before the Administrative Review Board. This body will meet in
due course to rule on their disposal. She urges them to practice
total frankness with the advocate. The advocate has their best
interests at heart. She calls their attention to the clipboard.

Rusty iron jaws bite a poorly mimeographed
sheet with carbon paper for a duplicate. “Rules and Regulations”
stands in tiny print above a great number of rules and regulations
in even tinier print. Each of them is followed by a figure. The
female functionary explains the figures.

Arrivals in a state of Administrative
Suspension possess a reserve of fifty points. Transgressions and
violations, weighted in accordance with their degree of gravity,
involve loss of points. When the original fifty points are
exhausted the offender is automatically exited. Good behavior, au
contraire, is rewarded with a bonus of additional points, which, in
certain cases (notably a tied decision on the part of the
Administrative Review Board) can tip the scales in the direction of
transfer rather than exit. Collaboration is therefore
essential.

She starts reading.

Violence against the functionaries is
sanctioned by instant exit.

Any attempt to reach the Outside without
official approval is sanctioned by instant exit.

Sabotage is sanctioned by instant exit.

She stares at them for long silent seconds.
Her features are like iron. Slowly, emphasizing each syllable, she
continues.

Any physical contact, however short and
superficial, with a functionary is sanctioned by instant exit for
the guest and maximum punishment for the functionary.

Again she stares at them for long silent
seconds before going on.

The imbibing of alcoholic beverages is
strictly forbidden. Violation of this ban entails a loss of five
(5) points. Intrusion into forbidden zones entails a loss of ten
(10) points. Deterioration of state property entails a loss of from
fifteen (15) to thirty (30) points, depending on the gravity of the
act. Violation of curfew entails a loss of six and a half (6.5)
points. She calls their attention to an old-fashioned wall phone
next to the doorway. It is strictly forbidden to utilize the phone
save in cases of emergency. They are entitled to one emergency call
per month. Violation of this regulation entails the loss of five
(5) points.

She drones on and on and they doze off for a
while. When they jerk back to the room, the stern-faced female
functionary is still reading out forbidden acts and their numbered
sanction.

She invites them to sign the document.
Refusal to do so entails instant exit.

They all sign except Max. “I don’t sign
nothing,” says Max. “I don’t know what it’s all about.” He says it
over and over. Helen repeatedly urges him to sign. Finally he
signs.

Hedgehog collects the papers and the pens.
The Five are dismissed. They stagger back to their rooms, yawning
and bleary-eyed.

Louis hardly has the strength to support his
hobbling companions. The three of them are too exhausted to notice
that the room has been cleaned during their absence. It’s true the
job is so bad you can hardly tell the difference. The cots have
been sloppily made up with patched sheets and rent old blankets,
probably virtual khaki. The three men collapse on their cots.