GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (2 page)

For the two others, a woman and the
strangely tagged man, the supposedly final thing is less dramatic:
a run-of-the-mill sterile white room with scared and grieving faces
looking down into theirs.

Now – though they don’t know it yet –
they’re here in the Great Good Place for good people of the right
nationality.

But will they be here for long?

Flinging herself about with graceful
abandon, Maggie Williams dedicates her dance to the Most High she’d
never believed in before, except for three months at thirteen when,
terrorized by periodic blood, she’d yearned for purity in a
convent. She believes now, with all her newly discovered soul. She
understands that this is divinely commanded resurrection.

Panting, her body gleaming with
perspiration, she falls to her knees next to a great pillar, like a
church pillar, casts her eyes upward and then closes them on tears
and fervently thanks God for an end to was and had been, thanks Him
for miraculously renewed light and youth and beauty after so
long.

Concentrated on her prayer of thanks, as she
had been on the dance of joy, Maggie Williams doesn’t notice any of
the four others until she opens her wet eyes again. She breaks off
thanksgiving and stares in disbelief at the pillar and what’s
protruding from it. She breathes, “Ohh!”

Protruding from the pillar, no mistake
possible, is a great male organ, at repose, with a tag attached to
it.

Maggie moves on her knees and rounds the
pillar. Casting her eyes upward again she beholds the most
beautiful naked man she’d ever seen and she had seen and enjoyed
countless many, but so long ago, so terribly long ago.

O God, that heroic heart-cleaving wedge of a
torso: broad shoulders slanting down to muscled loins and O God
those lovely muscled thighs on each side of O God O God. She
guesses at adorably tight small muscular buttocks behind those
thighs. Maggie gazes even higher at sky-blue eyes, long blond hair
and a blond drooping mustache above a full red mouth. She burns to
be explored and adored by that mouth to the tickling accompaniment
of that mustache.

He could only be another gift, like light
and youth, tagged for her like a Christmas present.

She smiles at him shyly, eyelashes
fluttering in incendiary demureness. Then she returns her gaze to
the tagged part of him, expecting to see radical modification.
There is none at all.

She clasps her hands behind her neck and
slowly bends back into a lovely tense sharp-nippled arc and waits
for him to rise to the occasion and salute her supple beauty.

She waits and waits, uncomfortably, but
nothing outstanding happens.

Maggie finally realizes that those open
sky-blue eyes are staring, not at her, but at inner things. She
straightens up and reaches out for the peculiarly positioned tag.
On one side she sees tiny words in French, on the other,
Louis Forster,
1877-1927 Fournée MLX 59833
. With great care she removes the tag but lingers on the
support. Like marvelous velvet Louis is. The precious weight of
it.

Louis begins responding now, responding and
responding. “My God, my God,” she murmurs at the incredible extent
of the response. Soon her hands are cupping his buttocks, adorably
tight, small and muscular, as suspected, and she’s unable to
articulate her deep thankfulness for the supreme gift, except for a
muffled “Mmm, Mmm.”

Atop the high stepladder the little
middle-aged man in the gray smock and the filthy beret gapes down
goggle-eyed at the couple, a cloudy drop of saliva forming on his
lower lip.

He mutters:
“
Ah, Bon Dieu, Bon Dieu de Bon Dieu!
”

As if in reaction to all these ill-inspired
evocations, in two tongues, of the Most High, there comes a brief
petulant mutter in the sky above the celebrated metropolis,
surprising in that pure blue. It’s inaudible except to a surviving
handful of the Faithful. Even to them it sounds more like a distant
celestial breaking of wind than genuine wrathful thunder. But most
of the Faithful are old and hard of hearing.

Chapter 2

Ire

Roused from dreams of bygone omnipotence, I, the
Eternal Eye, awake in wrath. Things abominable are being
perpetrated close at hand. I feel that quite strongly. I feel all
manner of abomination in the world, of course. To merely skim the
endless black catalogue of iniquities and lubricity: tagging of
edifices of worship, violation of virginity and dietary laws, child
and self abuse and, most heinous of all, blasphemous complaints.
But for long now these things have been no more than a buzz in Mine
ear, save for the blasphemous complaints. To have awakened Me, this
wrongdoing must be much closer to home, in the Great Good Place
where I dwell and largely sleep. I shall now locate the precise
area of infection.

Can it be? Again? Yet again? I
shall betake Me to the Reception Department of the
Préfecture de Police
and view the latest
arrival of Good Americans and determine the nature of the
abomination and duly chastise it.

Awake, I shall unavoidably be assailed by
the worldwide chorus of petitioners and protesters on the subject
of Good Americans. I had hoped that now, in semi-retirement, no
longer concerned with the universe but, intermittently, with one
tiny speck of it by the River Seine, I would cease being importuned
by supplicators. I hear them now despite the deaf ear I turn to
them. From all the nations of the world, save the mightiest of
these, rises the bickering envious chorus: “Why the Americans and
not us? Why? Why? Why?” When awake I hear it without cease,
sickened to the soul by those endless wails and jeremiads
concerning My Second Chosen People, couched in trivial terms: “Why
the Americans? Why them and not us? Who needs wings and harps and
unisex white gowns? Who wants them? What we want After is Paris,
like the Americans. Why them and not us?”

It cannot be denied that the
Great Good Place, as I prefer to name it, is an enviable
destination, richly endowed with four-star fleshpots which I
delight in frequenting. The inhabitants’ heavy-footed heavy-tongued
eastern neighbors (whose cuisine, let it be said in passing, stinks
to high heaven) are wont to say: “
Glücklich wie Gott in
Frankreich
.”
Happy as God in France. True. Not that I would belittle the land of
the Second Chosen People. It is marvelous of course, despite the
inferior quality of the fleshpots. They name it God’s Country;
hyperbole, to be sure, but how can I not be flattered at that? I
like to visit it from time to time but am not sure that I would
like to dwell there.

The Great Good Place is
something else altogether. I must confess that now in My declining
tranquil days of semi-retirement I take pleasure in strolling
about, in the cool of the day if possible, in certain quiet
provincial-like quartiers shaded by leafy chestnuts. I shun crowds.
Clamor and agitation tire me quickly. I am grateful for the Great
Good Place’s numerous quiet empty churches where I can rest
untroubled. Grateful too for the calm of its vast cemeteries.
Nobody recognizes Me in the form I assume during My visits. To look
upon Mine unmediated Face is to be dazzled to blindness and
insanity. But take heed not to jostle a certain bearded old
gentleman with the red Commander of the
Légion d’Honneur
insignia in his lapel buttonhole. The last
offender to have done that was reduced to a smear, seconds later,
by a Number 38 bus on the
Porte d’Orléans-Porte de Clignancourt
line.

That intervention took much out of Me. It is no
longer as in time past when for six days, as I dimly recollect it,
I labored mightily without respite, banishing dark chaos, creating
lesser and greater lights in the firmament, summoning forth the
ocean and the dry land and all manner of beast and bird and, in a
moment of culpable weakness I was later to rue, Man.

A day’s rest sufficed to recover from those
labors and on Monday I was up and about, everywhere at once,
inspiring prophets and saints, imposing diets and ritual,
upholding, downbringing, halting the sun, cleaving the seas,
decimating evil-bent hosts, generating whirlwinds and out of them
posing mighty insoluble conundrums to blasphemous wailers on their
dung-heaps, etc, etc.

Where did I get the energy in those days?
Only in dreams can I exercise that omnipotence now.

But I digress. That vast envious chorus
strives to rouse Me to wrath against My Second Chosen People. They
cry out in their trivial parlance: “Don’t they already control
everything in this life? Monopolize the global hamburger-circuit
and the global cinema-circuit with their miraculous special
effects, daring to compete with Thee in that? And how about those
defiant Babel-like towers of theirs, violating the heavens? Or the
way they rain long-distance brimstone and fire on so-called rogue
cities, having the chutzpah to measure themselves with the Most
High Himself by decreeing who, among nations, is Good and who
Evil.

“
Instead of wrathful punishment (say the
spiteful jealous voices) why that reward, After, for puffed-up
presumption? Why are the meeker Australians or Canadians or even
the citizens of the UK excluded from it? They’re hard to find,
granted, but good people live in those lands too. So why
Birmingham, Alabama and not Birmingham, England? Why a place like
Woonsocket, Rhode Island and not Toronto or Melbourne or
London?”

So murmur the envious hosts.

How many times have I not heard that plaint? I could
say in answer to it that I have a weak spot in My vast heart for a
people with My Name ever on the ready on their lips, a pious people
that proclaim their trust in Me on their very currency. But I
choose not to justify Myself. I elect the people I like. My ways
are impenetrable. I thought everybody knew that. And,
parenthetically, let it be known that I hold in special abhorrence
people who strive to justify My ways to Man. The last individual
who tried that on a large scale was stricken blind for his
pains.

I owe no explanations. It’s that way because
that’s the way it is. In other words, putting it in an even smaller
nutshell and to silence the blasphemous wailers once and for all:
that’s life and if you don’t like it, leave it.

But if so you do, count not on awaking After
to the great good things in the Great Good Place unless it be that
you boast the right citizenship and have been a paragon of proper
behavior.

Proper behavior? Proper behavior? What
manner of Abomination do Mine eyes now behold? Can such things
transpire in the sanctity of the Reception Department of the
Préfecture de Police?

Why are the Newly Arrived shamelessly
bare?

And there, O, to what hideous idol is yonder
kneeling naked daughter of Baal rendering deep homage, more than
lip service?

The Cities of the Plain were smitten and
blasted for less grave transgressions. Still another unforgivable
confusion has been perpetrated by My servants. My Chief Steward,
Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque, must amend this and forthwith.
Laxity and slackness and negligence grow apace in the
Administration.

I have long been discontented with Prefect d’Aubier
de Hautecloque’s management. He has already received warnings. No
one is indispensable in the Scheme of Things excepting, of course,
Myself, creator of that Scheme. Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque can
always be replaced by Sub-Prefect Antoine Marchini, able and
ambitious man. Perhaps overly ambitious? Give the matter
thought.

But hold! What do Mine eyes now descry?

O supreme abomination: My lower echelon
servant aloft on the ladder, what doeth he? In time past a
self-polluter of his ilk would have been broken with a rod of iron,
dashed in pieces like a potter’s vessel, reduced to ashes in the
twinkling of an eye. But, as already stated, I now command but a
tithe of My glorious old puissance. Still, at whatever cost, I
shall gird up My loins and commence generating chastising
power.

Generating, generating.

Generating, generating.

Still generating.

A fussily-dressed scented young man bearing
a pile of dossiers wanders into the vast bureaucratic room, which
he hardly sees. His vision is inward as he tries for the millionth
time to recall beloved faces and names out of the fog of memory. Of
course he can’t, not at his modest echelon.

He halts and stares at the unusual spectacle
of statue-like Arrivals, unannounced and clearly erroneously
processed because stark naked. His white frozen melancholy features
almost achieve a gleeful expression. Prefect d’Aubier de
Hautecloque has slipped up again.

There are two men, one disgustingly hairy like an
ape, the other better, fairly well equipped, but nothing
outstanding. There is a plain sad female with perceptible
breasts.

The young man’s eyes shift from the depressing
sight. They widen and widen in his white mask-like face at what he
now beholds with beating heart: the most absolutely gorgeous man in
creation, monopolized – lucky she! – by a kneeling vulgar female
with big boobies. But here? Here? The most marvelous scandal is in
the making. Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque is going to be in for
it. Marvelous, marvelous, beyond words!

Generating. Generating.

Generating. Generating.

Generating process now completed.

Waxing wrathful I now summon My miserable
lower-echelon servant in a voice of sky-splitting earth-shaking
thunder: “Cease and desist from the sin of Onan! Desist and cease
at once!”