GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (25 page)

But there’s no authority to what Louis says,
no iron ring to his voice, no Marine jaw-thrust to it. It sounds
more like a plea than a command.

Max bellows in protest. Seymour sides with
Max. He argues that of course they’ll return to the women but first
they have to know if the tunnel isn’t a dead-end, a few yards
excavated and then abandoned. No use raising false hopes. If it’s
the genuine tunnel they’ll stop at the final wall. There has to be
another wall at the other end. The tunnel can’t be open on the real
world for real people to wander in and wind up here like us poor
unreal bastards.

Seymour breaks off, bothered by something.
To emerge, their predecessors had had to smash that final wall.
Wouldn’t the outside world, the real world, have noticed the gaping
hole?

Louis stands there expressionless for a
second. He scowls, shakes his head and sharply orders them to
follow him. Leaving the tools on the ground, he squares his
shoulders and turns his back to the wall with military briskness.
He’s taken a couple of strides toward the women when he hears the
smashing of masonry. Even before he halts and turns about he knows
that Max has grabbed the sledgehammer and finished the job his head
had begun.

Louis stares at the jagged opening of the
tunnel entrance, like a black star, lit up by Seymour’s flashlight.
Max crouches and passes through the black star. Seymour follows.
Louis hears the long babble of their shouts, multiplied into a
joyous insubordinate crowd by the echo. Louis goes up to the black
star. Their wagging beams dimly light up a man-high brick vaulted
tunnel.

Louis orders them to return. They continue
down the tunnel, trotting now. They break into a run. They shout
again. Had they sighted the final wall between Paris and here?

“Hey, wait up for me!” Louis yells. His echo
repeats the order or plea a dozen times.

Louis passes through the black star, runs
hard and finally joins them. He takes command. He makes Max hand
over the sledgehammer. “Okay, but like what Stein said, explore the
tunnel and then go back to the women. We don’t touch that there
second wall if it turns out there really is a second wall. Hey, did
you fellers see it?”

No, they hadn’t seen it yet, but expect to
any moment. They run on, all three of them. Just beyond the feeble
range of their flashlight beams they expect the ultimate wall to
loom any moment. Panting, they run on.

The moment becomes a minute.

The minute becomes an hour.

The tunnel goes on and on. They reduce their
pace from a run to a trot, then to a trudge, then stop and collapse
on the cold concrete and gasp until strength returns. When they get
up they don’t run. They begin a dogged long-distance jog. They
strain their eyes for scrawled messages of encouragement on the
walls but see nothing but bricks.

Bricks and bricks. The tunnel goes on and
on, an identical vista of dimly illuminated concrete ground and
dingy brick vault bearing no messages. They end by losing all sense
of progress. They seem to be marking time on a treadmill, the
unchanging tunnel jerking by. Louis orders the other two men to
switch off their flashlights. Way things are going, there’s no
telling how many batteries they’ll need till they get to the final
wall. Then they’ll need juice to light up the return to the
women.

“Longest fucking tunnel I ever been in in my
life,” Max gasps, hours later. “And boy you can bet I been in
plenty of fucking tunnels in my life.”

Probably the longest fucking tunnel in the
whole world, Seymour reflects. Of course this tunnel isn’t in the
world, just the far mouth of it is but Seymour begins comparing it
to real tunnels. Longer, much longer, than the mile-long Lincoln
and Holland Tunnels or the Queens-Midtown Tunnel or the
Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Longer even than the Simplon Tunnel
between Switzerland and Italy, easily ten miles long, that one.
What kind of a tunnel is it, though? In the real world there are
railroad tunnels, subway tunnels, highway-traffic tunnels, tunnels
to transport water or gas or oil. This seems to be a tunnel tunnel,
a tunnel for the sake of a tunnel, no sense to it, like everything
else here.

Their only guides to the passage of time are
the diminishing vitality of Louis’ flashlight batteries, their own
diminishing vitality, hunger pangs, the growing stubble on their
faces, sleep and defecation. When Louis’ beam illuminates no more
than a few feet of brick ahead he changes his batteries, trying to
remember the lifespan of batteries. He does it three times. Their
stomachs sadistically force them to eat four times. With their
bottles of chlorinated water they wash down their elephant balls.
At irregular intervals one of them lags behind to defecate in
privacy. They sleep twice, huddled together for warmth. When they
awaken they have no idea of how long they’ve slept. Hours?
Days?

Occasionally they try to guess at the time
they’ve spent in the tunnel. Max says a month. That’s an
exaggeration says Seymour. He hazards a week, hoping it’s an
exaggeration too. Louis, going by the number of elephant balls
they’ve gagged on, makes it no more than three days. And during all
that time, whatever time was the right time, no sign that earlier
generations of Administratively Suspended Americans had ever been
here to work on Independence Day.

They go on jogging.

Much later, maybe days later, Louis, in the
fore, halts. He waits for Max and Seymour to stumble bleary-eyed to
where he stands, lighting up a nearby bit of wall.

They read in the trembling circle of his
beam, inscribed in heavy chalked characters:
CONROY WAS
HERE
!

For long seconds the three stand there motionless,
wet faces uplifted to the testimony that this is no dead end for
the dead, that Independence Day is finally at hand.

They break into a run, singing, each one
singing something different, raucous and off-key.

The echo amplifies and corrects the discord
into something like a joyous angelic choir in the space ahead.

Chapter 28

The Other Side Of The Wall

By Louis’ calculations, they’re into the
fourth day of exploration when the aspect of the tunnel starts
changing.

Thigh-thick shoulder-high pipes run into the
tunnel and accompany them on both sides. They begin to stumble over
broken brick and chunks of mortar. Progress to freedom slows down.
Soon they have to pick their way through ankle-deep debris, then
clamber over knee-deep rubble. Sometimes they have to wield the
shovel and crowbar to work their way forward. Yet the tunnel is
largely intact. They guess that stretches of vault ahead must have
caved in under the pressure of collapsed floors above and that
their predecessors had carted the debris here.

Evil-smelling pools accumulate beneath the
pipes, now covered with rust. The smell becomes unbearable.

“We’re in a goddam fucking sewer,” Max
pants, jogging alongside Seymour.

Seymour jogs on. A few seconds later he
stops in his tracks. He yells: “Towards a sewer, you mean! Not in a
sewer! Not yet!”

A chorus of joyous Seymours babbles
fragments of the sudden insight. This is no sewer, not yet, but an
outlet to a sewer, no fucking sewer but the most glorious of
sewers, the sewer system of Paris, the real Paris, object of their
longing for decades. The tunnel has meaning and destination now.
True, he’d dreamed of emerging from the space of half-life to green
trees and blue sky. Instead, the passage to freedom will be to
another tunnel, much bigger and even stinkier than this one, with a
dark malodorous river like the Styx running sluggishly in the
middle of it.

But in that giant tunnel to come (perhaps
minutes away) there are iron rungs cemented in the walls, rungs
which rise to that blue sky and those green trees. Confusing the
city of his death and the city of his rebirth, Seymour sees himself
pushing up a heavy manhole cover and emerging, two-time Lazarus,
from the depths of the street where he’d fallen long ago.

The enigma of the final wall with the gaping
hole is solved. There is no wall, no need for one. No chance that
anyone would wander into the stinking mouth of this tunnel.

In the spaces free of rubble muck squishes
underfoot. Sometimes they’re ankle-deep in it. The stink is so
ferocious that they have to breathe shallow through their mouths.
Their oxygen-starved muscles hardly respond to commands. They
stumble forward.

“Up shit creek, for real,” says Max.

An hour or so later Louis halts. “Look.”

His badly trembling beam circles another
chalked slogan:
WORK ON INDEPENDENCE DAY
!

His beam shifts and lights up the work ahead. The
tunnel had caved in completely at this spot. Their predecessors had
worked valiantly for independence. They’d excavated a miniature
tunnel in the ruins of the greater one.

The three men stoop and enter.

They advance slowly in a crouch. Every five
yards or so extemporized mine props bearing horizontal planks or
legless tables stave off cave-in. Sometimes the prop is an up-ended
iron cot. More often, piled-up volumes of economic statistics and
parliamentary debates. They’re careful not to brush against them.
They try to keep clear of the jagged walls. They keep their heads
low beneath the vault with its wedged chunks of rubble in perilous
suspension.

Even so, their floundering passage forward
sets off miniature landslides. Off balance, they fling out their
hands against the jagged walls for support. The sharp-edged rubble
lacerates their palms. They bleed gray. They struggle for breath in
the choking dust. The muck underfoot tugs at their shoes with each
squelching step. They slip and sprawl in it. The stench is even
worse in this confined area.

From time to time they hear a long rumble
and debris dribbles down on them. They bend double and shield their
heads with their arms and pray that the collapsing floors above
will spare their tunnel.

At one point, strength abandons them
simultaneously. They sink to a squat on islets of rubble rising out
of the muck. They feel puffy and dizzy. Their vision of the props
ahead is blurred. Is it the toxic effects of the sewer stench? Or
the effect of famine? They’ve long since forced the last of the
elephant balls down their throats.

Or is it something much worse? The symptoms
are familiar. Haven’t they been clobbered by old age?

“It’s like that other time,” Max finds
enough strength to whisper. “We’re gonna croak here.”

They fall asleep. When they wake up, maybe
an hour, maybe a day later, strength has ebbed back. After a while
they rise and stumble forward again.

Sometimes the tunnel is almost blocked by
later cave-ins. Max and Louis open up hands-and-knees passages with
the crowbar and the pickaxe. Seymour has less brawn. His job is to
light the work area with the flashlight. It’s perilous inch-by-inch
excavation of a tunnel within a tunnel within a tunnel.

Emerging from one of those burrows, Seymour
exclaims: “Look!” His beam picks out a ring lying on broken brick
and half covered by muck. It’s gray but they guess at original
gold. Surely a wedding ring. How had she (he?) lost it? Trudging
down the tunnel so long without food that she’d lost the flesh that
kept it on her finger? Seymour reaches down but Louis jostles him
and gets to it first. Seymour protests. “Finders keepers, losers
weepers,” says Louis and pockets the ring.

Much later, emerging close to collapse
from another burrow, Seymour directs his weak circle of light on a
prop, a lopsided column of books. On the spine of a fat volume he
makes out, beneath the dust and grime, the letters
SHAK…EAR
. He
wonders if it’s
SHAKESPEARE
.
After all these years of deadly statistics and parliamentary
debates, Shakespeare.

But it doesn’t matter now. Where he’s going
there are hundreds of bookstores, thousands of copies of
Shakespeare, maybe just minutes away now. Because no matter what
Louis said, Seymour is determined not to retrace his steps in the
rubble and muck of the tunnel, confront the giant spider web spun
over void, repeat those miles of ruined staircases and corridors to
return to the women and tell them about the discovery of the way
out. Somehow, he’ll elude Louis’ vigilance and run for it at the
first sight of the Paris sewer.

He thinks of Helen, guiltily. Not returning
to tell her the way out wouldn’t matter to her. She wouldn’t care
about the way out. But not telling her about the location of
Shakespeare is betrayal, he knows. This book would have lighted up
her face. She’d once confessed that she’d always preferred books to
reality. He’d never once seen her face light up.

He reaches out in the hope that it’s not
Shakespeare and so be delivered of the burden of guilt. Gently,
gently, with the whorls of his fingertip he begins brushing the
dust away on the obscured part of the title.

The reaction to the displacement of maybe a
dozen motes of dust is wildly disproportionate. The pillar of books
trembles, quakes, disintegrates. The legless tabletop pressing
against the roof splits and falls. Bricks rain down. Behind them,
other props yield, the books spilling to the ground. They hear a
faint pulsating roar behind them. Whole flights, they’re sure, are
crashing down on the tunnel. The roar strengthens. They start
floundering forward away from the pursuit of chaos.

A stinking wind raises clouds of dust. The
roar covers their cries. A jagged torrent of debris sweeps them off
their feet, moving them forward in pulsating surges as though
powered by contractions of the tunnel walls. Their arms flail
wildly as the rhythm of the surges accelerates.