GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (24 page)

“Get the hell out of this place as fast as I
could,” says Seymour promptly, wondering at the stupid
question.

But how about the others? Louis objects. The
others to come? Wouldn’t you leave some kind of message for them to
say where the passageway is? A little bit coded, maybe, so the
zombies wouldn’t understand?

“Yes, I guess I would, at that,” says
Seymour, just to improve his image in Louis’ eyes. He knows that if
he found a passageway he’d get the hell out of this place just as
fast as he could, no time for messages. But maybe, he thinks, his
predecessors had been like Louis, better persons than he, Seymour,
is.

Then he looks at the scattering of tarred
rectangles on the wall and at long last the idea comes to him, as
it already has to Louis, that what has been censored aren’t obscene
insults but direct reference to the way out for future
administratively suspended Americans.

So they agree to analyze all of the
scrawled and scratched messages, the enigmatic ones, on the walls.
They try to ignore the recurrent
OUT IS A DOUBLE CROSS
. That one’s all too easy to decipher: the
possibility of transfer outside is a lie. For Arrivals in
Administrative Suspension, that is, because they’d witnessed
indisputably Good Americans transferred into color on the other
side of the window.

Less discouraging but a puzzle are all the
graffiti that refer to “Independence Day.” Judging by their
scribbled reflections on France and the French, their predecessors
had been intensely patriotic. But how could they have celebrated
the National Holiday here? Where could they have found rockets or
firecrackers? And how could they even have known the date was July
Fourth in this place without calendars? Twice Seymour and Louis
see, in a different hand and followed by a widely separated
date:
Goodbye Everybody. Work on Independence Day!
But you don’t work on a
National Holiday even assuming you know when it rolls
round.

One night, sick with nostalgia, Seymour
half-thinks half-dreams of Independence Day way back then in an
impossible time and land. He recalls strings of tiny fire-crackers
cracking like pungent machine-guns, also the big ones, Cherry
Bombs, banging on your eardrums or Big Boys, like miniature red
sticks of dynamite which you sometimes broke in two for a gush of
flame that devoured the Chinese characters of the newspaper twisted
about the powder. He thinks of Devil’s Tongue, like an eraser which
you rubbed against a window-screen and got sulfurous sparks and how
once he’d burned himself and was slapped and kissed by his weeping
mother, when was that? 1937? July Fourth, 1937, 7-4-37, 7-4-37.

Louis too is dreaming of his mother. She’s
serving a cold gnawed corn-on-the-cob instead of cherry pie for
dessert. That’s a poor dessert but he’s glad to see his mother and
starts asking her why there’s no cherry pie for dessert when he’s
shaken out of it and awakes to darkness and Seymour shaking him
hard and breathing hard, stammering, Independence Day, Independence
Day, it’s a code and I’ve broken it. There’s no 1937 and Devil’s
Tongue to it but it’s 74, 74, understand? Get it? July: the seventh
month and Independence Day the fourth day. Room 74 it’s got to be
and we have to find it.

Louis mumbles something, turns over to the
wall and tries to go back to the Sunday meal, this time with cherry
pie.

Seymour returns to bed. He thinks of
distant happy summers, admiring fiery fountains and comets in the
sky with his father and mother and much later, leaning against
the
Pont
Neuf
balustrade, with
Marie-Claude in 1951. He’s drifting into a dream about it when he’s
shaken awake and hears Louis close to his ear saying that his
decoding is too complicated. They’ll keep their eyes open for Room
74 but the tunnel’s sure to be in Room 1776. Understand? Seventeen
Hundred and Seventy-Six, the date of the Independence of the
Thirteen Colonies.

But that’s a year, not a day, Seymour
objects drowsily. Louis retorts that Independence Day would be the
day they found the door with 1776 on it and the tunnel behind it
leading to freedom.

Seymour doesn’t hear him. He’s back with
Marie-Claude, watching dozens of rockets exploding in the sky and
saying that it’s the best 7-4 he’s ever seen. But she rejects his
code number too. “It’s not 7-4, Seymour.” He asks: “Is it 1776,
then?” “No,” she replies, “It’s 1951, 14-7, the Fourteenth of
July.”

The fireworks vanish and she vanishes too
and Seymour is back in his clammy bed. He gets up, shakes Louis and
tells him that he still thinks the number of the room with the
tunnel is 74, but maybe also 147.

That morning Louis convenes the others in
the Common Room and informs them of his tremendous discovery. They
all got to keep their eyes peeled for Room 1776, he says.

Seymour cuts in: “Or Room 147. Maybe, too,
Room 74.”

Louis ignores the interruption and repeats
“Room 1776” three times.

Seymour persists: “Or maybe Room 74 or Room
147, more likely Room 147.”

Margaret is radiant for the first time in
years.

Helen pokes her finger in the dust
again.

“What’s the matter now?” says Seymour,
irritated.

“What’s wrong now?” says Louis,
irritated.

“Oh, nothing,” she says, drawing a zero in
the dust. She evades their questions with “Nothing,” “Never mind,”
and “It doesn’t much matter.”

She’s being good again, Seymour thinks.
Doesn’t want to spoil things for us. Chalking up more good points.
They insist on knowing what’s the matter now.

Finally, very apologetically, she says that
she doesn’t see how knowing the number of the door can possibly
help them since in any case they open all the doors they find, have
been opening all the doors they find for all these years, tens of
thousands of doors it must be by now, tens of thousands of years it
seems like too.

Dead silence.

How is it they hadn’t thought of that
obvious fact? If they have no map guiding them to it, what good
does it do knowing that the tunnel is hidden in Room 1776 (or Room
74 or Room 147 or Room Anything) since they open all the doors they
find, have been doing nothing else, as she’d said, all these
years?

Helen looks genuinely pained for them and
stares down at the table where her finger is drawing a second zero
alongside the first one.

Chapter 27

1776

Yes, but a week after that painful scene in
the Common Room, draw all the zeros she likes in the dust, Louis
comes back from the depths with a grimy triumphant face. He stares
at Helen in silence. Of course when someone doesn’t hide being in
possession of a tremendous secret and waits in silence to be asked
about it, you have to do the polite thing and ask about it.

“You’ll see,” he says. He says that to all
of them.

The next morning Louis, still great with his
tremendous secret, guides Max and Seymour into black twists and
turns, down more unexplored staircases, down and down, never so
deep before.

Just one little problem, he says.

Half a day later they labor through a zone
of great destruction. They’re forced to halt at the brink of a
collapsed corridor. Their flashlight beams poke into blackness in
all directions, overhead, below, on all sides. Their spared
corridor is like a spur of rock overhanging dark void.

Louis points at a door with a faint number
on the far side of the chasm where their corridor resumes intact.
Incredibly, ceiling bulbs illuminate the door despite the nearby
devastation. How had the wiring survived?

“What do you see?” Louis asks in understated
triumph.

“Another goddam big hole,” says Max.

“Watch your language. Who gives a hang about
the hole? The room on the other side of the hole, I mean, the room,
the door, the number on the door. What’s the number on the door on
the other side of the hole?”

Seymour squints hard. By this time he’s
learned to be wary of hope. The idea is slowly crystallizing in his
mind that too much hope puts a hex on things. It must be Helen’s
influence. She’s contagious. He decides to avoid her as best he
can. In the meantime he says what he thinks he sees, not what he
wants to see.

“I see 7776.”

“Get new specs, perfessor. All them books.
That ain’t 7776 you see. That’s 1776 you see. Independence Day.
Tell the perfessor what you see, Pilsudski.”

Max squints hard. “Might be 1776 like you
say. I make it 1770 though. Or, wait, maybe 7776, like he
says.”

It’s not that Max is suspicious of hope.
It’s just that he’s forgotten the tremendous private non-historical
significance of 1776 and has become a little nearsighted as
well.

“Blind as a pickled bat, you too. No wonder
you had that there truck accident of yours that landed you here,
Pilsudski.”

The three of them argue about it for a
while. Finally Seymour says: “OK, have it your way, 1776.” He says
that casually but oh how he wants it to be Louis’ way, Louis’ way
out to way out there. “How do we cross over, though?”

“That’s the little problem. We’ll find a
way.”

“Hope it won’t take more than ten
years.”

Of course when they return they tell the
women about it.

Helen says: “Oh, that’s interesting.” After
a politely interested interval she returns to her parliamentary
debates or statistics or whatever it is.

Margaret hugs Louis and wants to go down
immediately. A tunnel out is surer than dancing for a way out. It’s
been a long long time since she last encountered the Prefect, even
in dreams.

“Got to solve a little problem first,” says
Louis, breaking free of her.

“Technical problem,” says Seymour. He’s
tempted to add: “Won’t take more than ten years to solve it.” But
he doesn’t dare do that to Margaret. Why doesn’t she ever hug him?
He’d take more time breaking free than Louis did.

Anyhow, Seymour’s wrong. It takes no more
than an estimated month for Louis to whirl an iron-weighted rope
over the chasm, finally catching it on a bit of solid-looking
rubble and then repeat the operation a dozen times. He firmly
attaches the free ends to doorknobs on their side.

“Well, all set to go,” he finally declares,
clapping his hands free of dust. Max and Seymour stare at the
result in silence. It looks like a gigantic crazy hammock. No, more
like a try at a web by a giant stoned spider. No harder than
climbing up the rigging of a sailing ship, Louis assures them.
Seymour and Max had never climbed up the rigging of a sailing
ship.

The moment has come. Louis grabs the
sledgehammer, pivots on his heel like an Olympic contender and lets
fly. The sledgehammer thumps down on the far side of the chasm,
yards to spare. He does the same thing to the shovel. Hurled like a
javelin, the crowbar follows, clattering, yards to spare.

Then Louis himself follows. Belly-down on
the swaying bucking network, he grabs and pulls himself forward. In
the gloom he resembles a wounded insect struggling in a web. He’s
half way across the chasm when one of the ropes snaps. The net
lurches and nearly shoots Louis into the void. He catches hold of a
rope. Dangling over the chasm and rising and falling like a yoyo,
he yells “No problem!” to the terrorized duo on the other side.

As he hoists himself back to relative
safety, his saucepan miner’s lamp slips off his head. “Damnation!”
he exclaims in a rare outburst of profanity. He’d been proud of
that artfully tinkered lamp which is now plunging into the abyss.
It takes ten seconds before they hear the faint crash below.

Louis makes it to the far shore with no
further incident. He pulls out his spare flashlight and trains the
beam on the net. He barks orders to Max and Seymour to follow. They
are very reluctant. He barks and barks till they do follow, first
Max, inch-worming his way to the other side, moaning and sweating
like a horse and concentrating his thoughts not on the void below
but on Bess.

Then Seymour, faint with fright at the sway
of the giant hammock above that ten-second drop, like the ten-story
drop that had ended his first life long ago. Midway across he has a
violent urge to urinate. But with both hands clutching the ropes,
how can he? When he reaches the other side the urge vanishes.

Louis leads them solemnly to the door. He
blows the number free of dust.

The number of the door, no possible doubt
now, is 1776. The door, which looks very solid, is locked.

Louis goes over to pick up the tools. The
private non-historical significance of 1776 dawns on Max now. He
can’t wait. He backs up, takes a deep rasping breath and charges
shoulder-first against the door. It proves to be no more resistant
than moldy balsa.
In an
explosion of fragments Max bursts through and hurtles headlong into
the dark room.

A second later Louis and Seymour hear a
resounding hollow sound from inside the room, the marvelous hollow
sound they’d been knocking for on a million solid walls all these
years. They click on their flashlights, step over Max’s body and
train their beams on the wall. They see the rough plaster job,
cracked from the impact of Max’s head, that poorly conceals the
mouth of the tunnel. They dance in front of it, knocking and
knocking their knuckles sore and getting the precious confirming
hollow sounds.

Max sits up unsteadily, groans and rubs his
bleeding head. He hears the sound of what’s behind the wall,
forgets his head, gets up and grabs the sledgehammer.

Louis hesitates and then disarms him. They
can’t leave now, he explains. The women don’t even know where the
tunnel is. We got to go back and tell them. Then we’ll all leave
together.