GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (22 page)

Maybe Helen’s sudden age has changed her.
This open skepticism is something new. Seymour tries to combat
it.

“We didn’t explore systematically is the
problem. We’ll have to be systematic this time, go further, explore
more rooms. And if we don’t find their tunnel we’ll dig one
ourselves.”

“Dig where? In what direction?”

She shouldn’t be doing this, Seymour thinks.
It’s not good for our morale.

“We’ll find the right direction, all right,”
says Louis.

“If the others found the right direction so
will we,” says Seymour.

“No problem,” says Louis.

Louis and Seymour say that, but secretly
they recognize that there is a problem. Even the biggest POW camp
had reasonable limits. If the prisoners looked hard enough they
were sure to unearth an old tunnel if there was one to unearth. And
even if there wasn’t and they had to dig their own tunnel they
could be sure of the right direction to dig. They could see beyond
the barbed wire and aim their tunnel at, say, a wheat field or
(best bet) at a stand of pines. It isn’t that way in this place of
blind and perhaps infinite walls.

Margaret, easy to influence one way or the
other, is visibly affected by Helen’s skepticism. “That tunnel of
theirs, isn’t it like trying to find a needle in a haystack?” she
says faintly. Her face isn’t radiant any more.

Seymour too is affected by Helen’s
skepticism. He tries to reassure Margaret but thinks that her
comparison, the needle-in-a-haystack business, is wildly
optimistic. More like trying to find a particular grain of sand in
a beach. No, worse, in all the beaches of the world.

“The dirt, tell ’em about the dirt,” Louis
whispers to Seymour. ‘Talker’ and ‘New Yorker’ rhyme. Louis knows
that Seymour the New Yorker is a better talker than he is.

Dirt. Seymour remembers the point that Louis
had made that night. He feels a tiny bit better about it now. Not
as easy as finding a needle in a haystack but, still, not as bad as
a grain of sand in all the beaches of the world. Say a particular
grain of sand in one of those beaches.

Finding a tunnel isn’t as impossible as it
seems, Seymour explains, commanding his features and voice into
optimism. The great problem for the digger of an illicit tunnel is
the byproduct of digging. Any kind of tunnel, even a small
hands-and-knees job, produces a fantastic amount of dirt. Dirt that
has to be disposed of in such a way that the jailers won’t notice
it. So maybe a whole corridor of rooms are filled with dirt, more
or less concealed under files and books. Once they find dirt in a
room then the room with the tunnel won’t be far away.

In other words, he says, it’s not a needle
they’ll be looking for in a haystack but a fair-sized box of
needles.

Seymour doesn’t add the thought that has
just occurred to him.

Even if a haystack and a fair-sized box of
needles in the haystack, how do you go about finding the
haystack?

Chapter 23

Toward The Depths

Find a tunnel.

If you can’t find a tunnel dig one.

To find or to dig a tunnel, though, you have
to operate below ground level.

A tunnel, dug or to be dug, is a
subterranean thing by definition.

But how do you get down to ground level in
this place? From the size of the crowds and trees they view from
the Common Room window they estimate (wrongly, it turns out) that
they’re on the tenth floor of their building-universe. In the
course of the ups and downs of their long wanderings had the
staircases ever led them ten flights down? They can’t tell for
sure.

True, they’d spent a good part of their most
recent lifetime exploring the labyrinth. But with the twistings and
turnings of all those corridors, some with ceilings as lofty as a
basilica’s and some with ceilings as low as a coffin-lid, they
still can’t mentally position the explored part of their prison
vertically. It seems to them, however, that the staircases rose
more than they fell. In all likelihood, the deepest the Five had
got, with one exception, was far above the ground floor.

The exception is Max. The others dimly
recall how, long ago when they were still young, Max had come
across a “deep deep” forbidden area in ruins with a big lopsided
staircase twisting down and down, he said, into darkness. Surely
the darkness of the foundations. They nag and harass Max. But he
can’t remember where that staircase was.

Still, it’s encouraging to think that if Max
had stumbled across a way down, they might too, even though that
darkness he spoke about was bound to pose a problem. If down below
turns out to be a place of darkness, they’d grope about in those
subterranean corridors like blind men with nothing to guide them
unless their predecessors had carved their symbols in deep Braille.
Louis imagines manufacturing primitive candles by molding greasy
hash about lengths of string. But coping with darkness is a
premature worry.

The Five set out early in the morning with
salvaged scraps of yesterday’s meals and a pencil or a nail to
scratch their distinctive symbols on new walls. They fan out in all
directions and explore new but identical-looking corridors, very
rapidly this time. Rooms don’t hold them up now. They’re not
interested in rooms anymore. Rooms at this useless level can
contain only dust, not dirt. Jogging past thousands of doors, they
cover lots of ground.

Each time, though, time after time, they
return late at night, exhausted and mute, having covered ever more
ground but never the longed-for ground of the ground floor.

Every seventh day they try to recover,
slouched silent in their armchairs before the window that frames
their version of Paris.

One day, though, Seymour makes a curious
discovery. The dust-shrouded paper-littered room had clearly served
as a living space. A pair of wooden crutches lean in a corner next
to a rusty cot. Seymour makes out, faint beneath the dust, familiar
words pencil-printed on one of the walls:
OUT IS A
DOUBLE-CROSS
!!

Seymour advances ankle-deep through
scribbled sheets of paper to a table with a yellowed stack. The
title sheet bears in heavy big print:
OPUS I, POSTHUMOUS
.

The hand is the same as the wall words. Realizing
that this is the abandoned dwelling of the author of the cryptic
words that had admonished them for decades of walls, Seymour
scrabbles through the hundreds of sheets beneath the title page.
They are blank. He picks up one of the scribbled sheets from the
floor and begins reading:

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):

Seymour breaks off reading on hearing the
familiar
clump-jangle, clump-jangle
in the corridors. He’s frightened at being caught
in what is probably an out-of-bounds area and at post-curfew time.
He drops the sheet and flees, meaning to return to the room in the
hope of useful information. But, stupidly, he’d forgotten to mark
the corners. He’ll never be able to find the room again.

In periods of depression – increasingly
frequent as time goes on – they expect their future will be like
their past: a blank wall.

They’ll continue to wander about in the
endless corridors and mark their signs on more corner walls.

They’ll go past a million impossible
doors.

They’ll replace dozens of burned out
bulbs.

Outside, their repetitious year will go on
wheeling around with its bare trees, green trees, bare trees, green
trees.

And above their heads grains of sand will go
on dribbling from the open-ended hourglass.

Grains of sand that will slowly agglomerate
into another sandstone block to suddenly clobber them into advanced
middle age or worse.

But happily they’re wrong, so happy about
being wrong. The quest for the depths began when the forsythia
outside was bright yellow, so March or April. Leaves are falling
(so October or November) when Louis discovers in Room 4963 boxes
containing flashlights and batteries and spare bulbs.

Helen cryptically comments on the discovery.
“There must be a reason.”

The day after, strange coincidence, Louis
finds an urgent use for his flashlight.

They don’t sleep that night. They make Louis
tell the story over and over.

Jogging down an unfamiliar corridor, he’d
heard a sudden loud clang and multiplied echoes of that clang miles
ahead. Then a terrific wind had almost knocked him down. He’d
worked his way against that wind and flying grit and papers and
discovered that the wind was shrieking out of a doorway with an
open metal door, a metal door like all of those metal doors they’d
seen so often but always locked, never open, blown open, like this
one.

On the other side of the doorway a flimsy
catwalk trembled in the uprush of wind coming from a gigantic pit
like a mineshaft with a rusty iron pillar in the middle. A rusty
iron staircase spiraled about the pillar. As far as the flashlight
beam could reach up and down (but he was only interested in down)
he could see the catwalks of other floors joining the spiral
staircase.

He stepped forward on his catwalk, crouched
low against the wind. He gripped the railings of the staircase as
he spiraled down and down, leaning against the uprush of grit and
papers. At one point the wind stopped. Leaning against sudden
nothing, he nearly pitched into the void.

It took him maybe half an hour, passing
fifty-odd catwalks, to reach the bottom. By then his flashlight
beam had weakened and he’d advanced no more than a mile down a
badly dilapidated unpainted concrete corridor with cracked walls.
An occasional bulb was lit. He’d examined some of the rooms. They
were filled with files and books like the rooms they’d explored up
here.

Helen
interrupts Louis.
She wants to
know what kind of books. Novels?

Books? Who cared about books? He hadn’t
bothered looking at books. It was a tunnel he’d been looking for.
He hadn’t found one. But he’d searched no more than about fifty
rooms.

It looked like there was more rooms than
that down there.

Plenty more rooms than that.

Chapter 24

In The Depths

They slowly discover that the part of the
Prefecture they’d already explored all those years and which had
seemed endless to them was only the tip of their gloomy
passage-riddled iceberg.

What had been coastal navigation turns into
perilous voyages on dark uncharted seas in search of a passage to a
perhaps mythical continent. Their lines of communication are much
longer than before. Access is fiendishly difficult with that long
and perilous spiral down the well shaft, sometimes in the teeth of
a howling gale. It’s even worse having to pull themselves back up,
utterly exhausted, fifty-odd flights, even when the wind gives them
a goosing lift in that direction.

They take salvaged food to last three
estimated days in the handy form of big tightly compressed balls of
hash that Max calls “elephant balls,” seasoned with rotten banana
and apple and chunks of the moldy chocolate the girl Seymour used
to call Gentille continues smuggling through to him.

They venture down broken stairways into dark
regions surely deeper than the telephone-lines, the pneumatique
tubes, the sewer, the metro, the catacombs, the limestone-quarries
that riddle the foundations of Paris. They learn to stuff their
pockets with spare batteries and bulbs. In the maze of unlit
corridors failure of light would be tragic. Their questing circle
of feeble light aggravates the darkness. They’re thankful for the
rare oasis of overhead light, survivor bulbs trembling with old age
and illuminating a few yards of rubble-strewn passages.

The scrape of their soles on the floor and
the thud of their hearts are unbearably amplified by the darkness.
Often they call out the names of the others. They have little hope
of reply for they’ve scattered in opposite directions and must be
miles apart. They do it for the sake of the echo. They avoid
calling out for Helen, though, because of what the echo of her name
gives them.

They open tens of thousands of doors and
find more old files and administrative volumes. They knock
methodically on the walls, hoping for a hollow sound. It never
comes. They rummage in search of concealed dirt indicating a nearby
tunnel. They find dust. Helen searches for Balzac. She finds more
import statistics. She knows them by heart. As on the upper floors,
certain of the doors are metal with tamper-proof locks. They often
suspect that if there is a tunnel it lies behind one of these
inviolable metal doors.

Hunger cramps are their only clock. They
sleep, when they’re able to sleep, by dropping to the floor of a
corridor, a lighted corridor when possible.

Exploration is perilous. The foundations of
the building-universe are in a state of advanced and advancing
ruin. Sometimes they halt at the sound of a rumble and they realize
that a distant (they hope it’s distant) floor has collapsed. Once
Max is thrown to the ground by the concussion and in the feeble
circle of light of his flashlight sees a big crack slowly
zigzagging in the wall. It’s a mystery – still another one – how
the building can go on standing on these crumbling foundations.

The ruins complicate their explorations.
They constantly stumble over rubble. Sometimes their weak light
outlines chaos ahead, the ceiling and the floor caved in, floors
below too. They are forced to a halt at the crumbling brink of a
chasm. Their beam can’t define a bottom to it. Some ten yards on
the other side of the chasm the corridor continues with all those
doors that have to be opened in search of dirt and a telltale
hollow sound.