GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (30 page)

The sentence breaks off in suspenseful
suspension at the bottom of the sheet. It probably continues on
another sheet, maybe the one Advocate was furiously scribbling on
when the wheelchair disappeared around the corner.

So what Advocate advocates remains (for the
time being) a mystery.

Clearly it’s some sort of a plot.

At long last, some may think.

Chapter 32

Four Now

The day Advocate staggered into their
half-lives the shop windows outside had been full of tinsel. So his
coming, like a besotted mage, had been the greatest of Christmas
presents. Good or bad, a foreseeable end to Administrative
Suspension.

“The decision-making process is, as you see,
under way,” he’d said.

Even a negative decision, they’d ended by
convincing themselves, would be better than a continuation of the
unbearable wait. Most of them assume the decision will be reached
in a matter of days, a week at the most, if Helen’s refusal to
cooperate hadn’t jeopardized things.

Days go by, then weeks, never so slowly.

They glare at Helen and hardly talk to
her.

“When are things going to start happening
here?” the men say endlessly.

Now they’re into seasons of waiting,
frustrated bored spectators of what they’ve witnessed over thirty
times already from the wrong side of the glass.

For Max the same timeless empty streets.

For the others, the same old year, 1900,
1937, 1951, being celebrated as new by the same imbecilic drunken
crowd. Monomaniac trees breaking into green again. Same summer
lovers, made faithful by repetition, strolling alongside the Seine.
Same Bastille Day fireworks (what’s to celebrate?) with their
colored arabesques known by heart.

Everything known by heart, like the shape
of the puddle of blood the dead girl is lying in and even the
license-plate of the Citroën
Traction
that killed her (HL48275) or the crowds scanned down to the
last face and never the right face, so why go on
scanning?

Can’t stand it, can’t stand it anymore.
Can’t stand you either anymore, or you or you or you. Mutual,
mutual, returned with interest, compounded quarterly. They’d forced
themselves to tolerate each other during that long wait. But now
within sight of an end to it one way or the other they can’t
control their hostility.

Max’s snores and farts keep Seymour awake.
He’s lived with it for decades but now it becomes intolerable and
one night he heaves shoes at it. Max heaves shoes back and catches
Louis on the side of the head with one of them. It degenerates into
a free-for-all.

Helen tries to intervene as usual. The three
men stop grappling and turn on her. It’s all your fault, they yell.
Helen doesn’t answer. She returns to her room where Margaret yells
that it’s all her fault. Helen doesn’t answer. She returns to bed,
presses the wax plugs in her ears and turns to the wall. Margaret’s
sobs get through to her anyhow, for hours.

Religion (or lack of it) becomes an
explosive issue here as out there. Max calls Seymour a Jew bastard
at the slightest pretext. Louis tries to convert Seymour to
fundamentalist Christianity. Seymour ends by shouting that he’s fed
up with religion, any religion, all religion, coming out of his
ears. Louis knocks him down and looks aghast at the unchristian
thing he’s done. They wait for Helen to reestablish peace. But by
this time Helen has given up intervening. The men resent her new
indifference and let her know it.

Religion again when Louis and Max and
Margaret find another reason for blaming Helen. Pray, pray, for
God’s sake and for our sake. She refuses to get down on her knees.
Atheist, they cry, an atheist like you doesn’t deserve transfer.
Why you who don’t pray and not us who do?

Time creeps on ponderously like a
glacier.

Each time they awake, the three men say,
more and more dully: “When are things going to start happening
here?”

Suddenly things start happening, but not the
way they’d hoped. One night deep concussions wake them up. They
rush out into the windy corridor, scantily clad, even Margaret. Her
pajama-blouse is unbuttoned and a tremendous gust unveils the
splendor of her breasts, last seen by Louis on the day of
resurrection so long ago, no such splendor seen in this place
since. For a dazzled second, till her hands eclipse that splendor,
he forgets what’s brought him out into the midnight corridor.

Nothing more happens and they return to bed.
Louis can’t sleep.

In the morning they see a long fine crack in
the wall opposite their rooms and they remember the collapsed
floors they’d seen way below long ago. Will Advocate come before
their own floor disintegrates?

One day no meals are served. The next day,
Gentille shows up tearfully with her trays. Something went wrong in
the kitchens, she can’t remember what.

Then the toilets in their WC back up.
Impossible to negotiate their corridor, almost impossible to
breathe. Finally a team of cleaning women and two plumbers lift the
stinky siege.

A day later the bulbs start expiring. It’s
not the familiar death-bed gasps of a solitary bulb, but all of the
bulbs in the Living Quarters and the corridors, mass demise,
gasping for current and then out and the Five stand in absolute
darkness.

For the first second, Margaret takes it for
private definitive darkness, exit, the Administrative Review Board
has met and decided. Terrorized, she appeals, not to God but to the
Prefect, for a stay of execution, she’ll dance for and with him and
even more, anything for light.

Seconds later, light returns.

She thinks her promise has been heard. She’s
deeply grateful. Grateful and can’t help thinking of greater
subjects for gratitude: real light, sunlight on her face. But she’s
frightened now at the price and steps back from it when she
realizes the blackout had been collective and reversible.

Again, Gentille doesn’t show up with their
meals, this time two straight days. They feel giddy. They’d never
imagined they could long for soggy grated cat-puke carrots.

Finally they hear the familiar squeal of
Gentille’s food cart in the corridor. The girl, as close to tears
as she can get, stammers a confused story of total confusion in the
kitchens. Four of the Five throw themselves at the food and almost
come to blows over whose tray is whose. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
they ask Helen between mouthfuls. She says she’s not hungry. They
stop chewing and gulping for a second. They’re offended at this
additional proof of her superiority. Then they go back to chewing
and gulping.

A few minutes later on her bed Helen can
hear them squabbling over her tray of food.

That night Helen wakes up suddenly. She
doesn’t hear Margaret’s heavy breathing. Maybe that’s what woke
her. She calls. Getting no answer she switches on the light.
Margaret’s cot is empty. She steps outside and sees Margaret
turning at the far end of the corridor. Helen follows her down a
tangle of corridors. Margaret has the rigid gait and the
outstretched arms of the sleepwalker. She halts at the frontier of
a dark zone of dead bulbs.

Drawing closer Helen hears Margaret’s
imploring voice and thinks she can make out in the unlighted zone a
shadowy figure darker than the surrounding shadows.

As Margaret advances into the darkness,
Helen catches up and places her hand on her arm.

“Margaret, wake up.”

The shadowy figure has disappeared, if it
had really been there in the first place. Margaret stares at Helen
with furious widening eyes, breaks free and pushes Helen violently
away. Helen staggers back. Her head bangs against the wall.

When she picks herself up she sees Margaret,
past the zone of darkness now, running down the corridor and
shouting, “Come back! I will, I will!” and arousing the babbling
echoes, “…ill …ill …ill …”

Helen touches her head. Her fingers are gray
with blood. She returns to her room.

From the other side of the partition she
hears Louis tossing in his cot and mumbling contrition.

Max starts howling his death howl.

Seymour yells at Max to stop howling for
holy Christ’s sake.

Louis shouts that this is the last time
Stein will ever take the name of the Lord in vain.

Sounds of a scuffle, breakage, cries.

Thumps like a throat-wielded head
systematically banged against the floor.

Helen removes the top sheet from her bed and
ties it into a sling, which she passes over her head onto her
shoulder. She fills the sling with her toilet affairs, clothes,
bottles of water, a volume of parliamentary debates, February-May
1903. She would have taken food but her tray is in the brawling
men’s room and anyhow they’d probably devoured everything by
now.

She rolls the blanket and the bottom sheet
in the thin mattress. She embraces the mattress in her thin arms,
clutching the pillow in her left hand. Out in the corridor now, she
can hear Seymour’s strangled voice between bangs crying her name
for help. She moves away from the Living Quarters.

Hours later Margaret returns to the women’s
room. She stares at Helen’s cot and then goes behind the toilet
screen. She hammers on the partition and cries to the men to come,
quick.

Badly battered, Max and Seymour and Louis
burst into the room. Margaret points dramatically at the bare cot
with the sagging metal mesh. She wails that it’s not just the
bed-clothes, her toothbrush and her comb and her towel and the book
she was reading, they’re all gone too, all her stuff is gone, she’s
gone too and for good. Oh God, I’m alone now. She’s been
transferred. She let herself be transferred and didn’t even s-say
g-goodbye to me.

She stumbles out into the corridor and
shouts: “Helen! Helen! Come back sweetheart!”

As though, Seymour reflects, if it were true
that she’d been transferred and that she could hear Margaret’s
ghostly voice from that unimaginable distance she’d allow herself
to be distracted from the real things out there.

Margaret goes on shouting “Helen! Helen!”
The echo, as usual, gives her “Hell…In … Hell… In…Hell …” At that
Margaret breaks down, throws herself into Louis’ arms and sobs,
“H-Hell for us, not for Helen, she’s been transferred out there and
she never even p-prayed, it’s unfair, unfair …”

Louis feels her firm breasts heaving against
the region of his solar plexus. He shamefully reacts to it but how
can he reject her? She’s so badly in need of consolation.

Seymour consoles her too. He strokes her
head and her long wild marvelous hair, adding calming words to the
effect that if Helen had been transferred she wouldn’t have taken
keepsakes like a piss-stained mattress with her. If she took it and
all her things it was to set up in another room far from them
because … because they’d all behaved like bastards to her, me the
worst of all.

None of them protest. For a few seconds
tacit acknowledge-ment of their collective guilt reconciles the men
who had just been battering one another.

“My God, she hasn’t eaten for three days
now,” Margaret cries. “We’ve got to find her and bring her
food.”

“What food?” says Seymour. “We ate all of
the food, including her food.”

Louis breaks free of Margaret and they all
start quarreling about whose idea it had been in the first place to
eat Helen’s food.

Finally Seymour says: “Let’s stop fighting.
Helen wouldn’t have liked us to fight like this.”

At Seymour’s mortuary tense, Margaret bursts
into tears again. “She’s going to starve to death. Maybe she’s dead
already.”

“No, wait, listen,” says Seymour, trying to
sound convinced by his argument. “She must have made an arrangement
for Gentille to bring her food. So Gentille knows the room she’s
in. We’ll go there tomorrow and apologize.”

The others pretend to be convinced and they
go to bed.

Hours later, Gentille rolls her food-cart
into the women’s room, awakening Margaret. The girl sees the bare
cot and exclaims “O! O!” in shocked surprise. She goes on
exclaiming “O! O!” in the men’s room.

So the Four know they’ll have to find Helen
on their own if they want to be Five again.

They mold their food into elephant balls,
put new batteries in their flashlights and set out in different
directions.

Chapter 33

Two Ways Out

Awakens, huddled on the mattress in a dark
stretch of corridor. Barely has the strength to force her gummy
eyelids open. Has a confused memory of what seems years of marching
down corridors, high-ceilinged corridors, low-ceilinged corridors,
stagnant silent corridors, corridors swept by sudden howling gales
that buffet her and her sail-like bed-things from wall to wall. All
those staircases, too, craning her neck over the end of the
rolled-up mattress but sometimes missing a step (or the step itself
missing), pitching forward and surrendering to sleep in the
unimproved posture of fall.

Despite all those corridors and staircases,
though, maybe she’d put no distance between herself and the others,
maybe circling back towards her point of departure, because over
and over she’d heard, or imagined she’d heard, the terrible
fragmented echo of their pursuing voices calling her name.

She struggles to her feet now and rolls up
the bed things. When she picks up the pillow, more feathers seep
out from the big rent made by a splintered banister at the very
beginning of her flight. The pillow is practically empty by
now.

Stumbling out of the zone of darkness she
observes with relief that the walls are free of the distinctive
signs of the Five (Louis’ two linked circles, Margaret’s heart,
Seymour’s child face with dot-eyes, Max’s doughnut, her own H). So
she’s far from them after all, in an unexplored part of the
Prefecture, for there are none of the signs of their suspended
predecessors either.