GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (14 page)

Sometimes their dreams of Prefecture
activities aren’t copies of things they’ve done but fantasies of
things they long to do there. That can mislead them painfully. Once
Max awakens triumphantly rigid as a scepter and wonders, since
dreams are usually copies of reality, if maybe Margaret really
hadn’t impaled herself on him, rotating them both to the verge of
orgasm.

Proof that she hadn’t done that outside of
the treacherously inventive dream comes when, that very day, he
slaps her luscious behind and sprawls with the power of her own
slap, no dream slap, that’s for sure, Max realizes as he picks
himself up groggily.

Margaret suffers more than the others from
the confusion of reality and dream, nothing as trivial as Max’s
slap on her behind.

It happens, or she dreams of it happening,
over and over.

She emerges, empty-handed as usual, from a
room explored like all the other rooms for a Bible full of useful
prayers and implorations for transfer.

There’s a smell of spoiling in the corridor.
She turns in the opposite direction. The smell of spoiling worsens.
She turns in the other direction again. In whatever direction she
goes, running now, the flowers rot with fury.

Turning a corner she cries out, almost
colliding with him standing rigid there in his impeccable white
braided uniform and beneath the braided cap, the immensely long
aristocratic face, expressionless like a white death-mask cast a
week after decease.

From his motionless lips comes the
invitation. His long white hand reaches out.

She recoils. Runs past him and past miles of
closed doors. Collapses to the floor. Escapes into sleep.

When she awakens, she makes her way back to
the dark room where Helen is protesting in her sleep. She goes to
bed, feeling safe that close to Louis on the other side of the
partition.

She awakens again in the morning and doesn’t
know if the encounter with the Prefect was a real encounter, a
dreamed encounter, or a carbon-copy dream of a real encounter.

For a while she doesn’t dare wander by
herself in the corridors to search for the Holy Bible.

Anyhow she’s beginning to doubt if those
prayers and implorations would prove useful for transfer in her
hopeless case.

Chapter 14

The Maze

In dream or reality, the main way they try
to kill time is by sitting before the window in hope of a beloved
face and by wandering in the maze of the corridors.

At the beginning, the only reason for
venturing into that maze, outside of escaping one another’s
unbearable but finally indispensable presence, is to hunt for
salvageable items in the storerooms. The idea of searching for a
way out of the labyrinth to the real world on the other side of the
window occurs to them only later, much later, and then it proves to
be the best of all time-killers.

Their first halfway systematic exploration
of the corridors is less ambitious. They want to reestablish
contact with the functionaries. Weeks drag by or maybe even months
– how can they tell here? – without a word from their “hosts.” The
Five have urgent questions.

When will the Administrative Review Board
convene to rule on their cases?

Why haven’t they received the promised visit
of the Advocate who is supposed to draw up their briefs?

Also, while waiting for those major things,
can’t they be supplied, at the very least, with toothbrushes,
toothpaste and decent toilet soap and paper?

The frightened cleaning girl has no reply to
any of these questions. She just does what she’s told to do, or
tries to, she says.

Finally, fearing that they’ve been totally
forgotten, victims of another administrative mix-up, the Five
decide to locate their “hosts” on their own and remind them that
they exist, if you can call this existing. They wander about in the
dusty labyrinth in search of the Reception Room in the great Hub
where they’d materialized. Sometimes they encounter empty-faced
functionaries on stepladders unscrewing burned-out corridor bulbs
and screwing in new ones. When they ask the way to the Reception
Room the functionaries go on screwing and unscrewing in
silence.

At the beginning, they all have trouble
finding their way back. The room numbers are chaotic. They
fluctuate wildly. They’re often astonishingly high (once, 221032,
flanked by 1560 and 34). There’s no normal sequence to guide the
Five to the beginning or the end of the rooms. Before that
theoretical beginning of numbered doors and beyond that theoretical
end to numbered doors is, logically, the longed-for outside
world.

But is there any logic to things here? Do
the rooms begin at all? Do they end at all? Each “outing,” as they
call it (perhaps sarcastically), they discover a new corridor or
staircase that opens, not on the outside world, but on a new
labyrinth of corridors and staircases. Their situation favors
metaphysical conjecture. Sometimes they wonder if this isn’t a
parallel sadly impoverished universe, an infinity of gloomy
corridors. Does this universe even impinge on the “real” universe
they’d once known and can view through the window?

The four Arrivals who had once dwelt in
Paris recall the real
Préfecture de Police
as a very big building with a vast courtyard
filled with paddy wagons and
flics
.
Big, yes, but nothing compared to where they wander now, mile after
mile of dimly lit crazy-angled corridors. As they venture further
and further into the maze, they guess at the area they’ve covered
and mentally transpose it onto the Paris they’d known. They
progressively realize that the part of the building they’ve
explored easily covers a whole quartier of the city, then all of
the First
arrondissement
,
then all of the capital. At that point they try to stop transposing
here on there, for fear of mentally finding themselves on the bank
of the Vistula or even the Volga.

Once, still on the hunt for the Reception
Room, Max gets lost for two days. It’s his own fault. At the
beginning, it had happened to all of them. But they’d soon learned
to mark distinctive signs on strategically located walls, imitating
past generations of other suspended Americans. Nearly every
corridor corner swarms with scratched or scribbled suns, crescent
moons, ringed Saturns, rectangles, squares, circles, rumbuses,
five-and-six-sided stars, etc. These symbols contain cryptic
penciled numbers.

The Five finally understand that their
predecessors had passed by particular corners hundreds of times
(thousands maybe, judging by some of the discouragingly high
numbers). In order to avoid repetitions of earlier explorations and
to find their way back they’d effaced the number of the previous
passage and inscribed the most recent one in their personal
symbol.

The Five, then, had added their own symbols
to those walls. Helen had chosen a matter-of-fact “H” with the
number inscribed on the top of the bar. Louis, two linked circles.
Margaret, a heart. Seymour, a round face with dots for eyes and the
number for a mouth. Max, a circle within a circle. It looked like a
tire or a doughnut. Each time they passed by their symbol they’d
been careful – all but Max – to efface the number of their previous
passage and scribble the new one.

So naturally Max gets lost. The others work
the corridors, shouting Max! Max! The only reply they get is:
Aaaax-ax-ax-ax. Finally, Turnkey brings him back half starving and
says that he’ll be reported for infringing on forbidden areas and
violating two successive curfews. It’s typical of the arbitrariness
of regulations here. Nobody has told them the hour of curfew.
Anyhow, there are no timepieces here. The functionaries look blank
at their questions. They don’t seem to grasp the concept of time.
And how can you recognize forbidden areas? Certain doors are
clearly banned but nothing signals – they think – forbidden
areas.

Where were you? they ask Max.

He tells a confused story of a deep deep
forbidden area signaled, yes, signaled this one by two crossed
timbers, each the girth of a tree, barring the passage and dripping
foreign words tarred on the timbers that had to mean: don’t go any
further. And you could see why because maybe a hundred yards
further (Max had gone further): cracks in the walls and the floor
full of plaster from the ceiling and doors sagging on a single
hinge, like a little quake had happened.

Then two crossed timbers again and Max
hadn’t gone beyond these because it was like a real bad quake had
happened, the walls cracked so bad you could have stuck a fist in
the cracks, the ceiling caved in and the floor buckled. And the
funny thing was you could see all that because, crazy, the bulbs
weren’t dead, everything around them busted but they went on
shining so you could see a big lopsided staircase full of rubble
and shooting down and down past the light into the dark. It made
him so dizzy, just looking, that when he returned past the first
crossed timbers he lost his way.

In any case, Max is reported and loses seven
(7) points. When that happens he’s already down to twenty-three
(23) of the original fifty (50) allotted points. There was the
window he’d kicked blind plus the plate of hash he’d hurled at the
poor well-meaning cleaning girl, missing her but smashing the dish
(State-property) against the wall. The others are alarmed for him.
It’s partly selfish. They don’t want to be reduced from Five to
Four. That might mark the beginning of exit or transfer for the
others, leaving just one of them alone in this place.

So they keep guard over Max, as over an
unruly little boy. Helen scolds him gently. He doesn’t listen to
the others but he does listen to Helen. He even gives in and agrees
to French lessons. The very first lesson he makes her teach him to
say: “Excuse me,
Monsieur
or
Madame
or
Mademoiselle
,
where is the airport?” He wants to stop the lessons there. But
Helen points out (secretly unconvinced of it) that he’ll be getting
answers to his question. It’s important to understand those answers
if he wants to find his airport.

He goes on with the lessons. They help kill
time for both of them and they keep him out of mischief for a
while.

The other administratively suspended
Arrivals aren’t any more successful than Max in locating the
Reception Room. At best they sometimes encounter doors
marked
Entrance Strictly Forbidden to All but Duly Authorized
Personnel
! The boldest
of the Five, risking loss of precious points, push such tabooed
doors open a cautious crack.

Sometimes they glimpse vast empty rooms with
filing-cabinet walls and floors carpeted with dust. Sometimes
gigantic offices with rows of gray-smocked female typists rigid at
their chattering machines and deaf to their questions. Sometimes
cathedral-like steam-filled laundry rooms with ghostly female
shapes that flit about and ignore their presence. Sometimes one of
the Five opens a greasy door and gags at the reek of the monumental
kitchen where, probably, their fiendish meals are concocted.

Once Louis opens a door a crack on a
training session for Exiters. “Force One,” croaks the
black-uniformed instructor and flicks his flexible club on the egg
balanced on the head of a life-size wooden dummy. He holds the egg
aloft and peels it with his gloved hand, a second exploit. Then he
returns to the dummy. “Force Ten,” he croaks. The club blurs and
the dummy explodes into a thousand fragments. Louis closes the door
very carefully.

Most of the doors, like this one, bear no
warning legend to keep out. They bear nothing but faded numbers and
open on chaotic storerooms that hold out no greater hope, generally
disappointed, than salvageable items. Louis rummages about for odds
and ends to tinker into useful devices. Seymour and Helen delve for
novels. Margaret hopes for a copy of the Holy Bible. Max is on the
lookout for ropes and tools for the Big Escape and also for a map
of the Paris area with the airports clearly marked. Max also craves
for bottles, rye, if possible, but he’s willing to settle for
beer.

The search kills time but is usually
unproductive. Most of the rooms are filled with a dusty turmoil of
old law-books, leather-bound compilations of ministerial edicts and
parliamentary debates, dreary volumes of economic statistics and of
course files, files in neat 19
^th
century calligraphy covering miles of sagging shelves.
Helen carries away parliamentary debates and economic statistics
dating back to the early Third Republic. They’re dull but she can’t
survive without books, her life-long refuge from life back
then.

Some of the rooms are crammed with grimy
artifacts from three monarchies, two empires, one brief
insurrectionary Paris commune, and four republics. Helen pokes
about in these museum rooms for nice landscapes or pieces of
sculpture to introduce a little cheer to their dingy rooms. All she
comes up with in the way of art are punctured and grimy oil
portraits. There’s fat old Louis XVIII of the 1815-1824
Restoration; stupid horse-faced Charles X (1821-1830); pear-faced
Louis-Philippe of the July Monarchy (1830-1848); sly mustached and
goateed Louis-Napoleon III (1852-1870). There are also thousands of
solemn photographs of Presidents of successive Republics from
General McMahon to René Coty. In the way of sculpture there are
only severely handsome Phrygian-capped plaster Mariannes from all
four of the Republics, thousands and thousands of them, chipped and
cracked.

Once, Helen discovers a room with
ceiling-high stacks of posters, mainly mobilization orders for
three wars, declarations of hostilities and declarations of ends to
hostilities. There are lots of propaganda posters from the Phony
War (September 1939 to May 1940 when the war became authentic). One
stack shows walls with ears and the legend,
Walls Have Ears! The Enemy is
Listening
! Another stack
features a map of the far-flung French Empire in 1939, a few months
before the debacle, with the slogan:
We shall Triumph for We Are the
Strongest
! You couldn’t
tack up depressing things like that in your sleeping quarters. She
does find two big maps of France, one of them wine-stained. She
tacks them up in their rooms. The Administratively Suspended
Americans often stare at them, except for Max. France isn’t where
he wants to go.