GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (31 page)

No, not unexplored. On a further wall she
makes out the familiar hand-printed admonition, the truth of which
she’d long been convinced of:
OUT IS A DOUBLE CROSS
.

The corridor turns. Ahead, she sees two great
crossed timbers barring the way. She has a faint memory of this. A
dream? Something recounted by somebody long ago? On one of the
timbers words in dripping tar warn of danger and forbid access.

Despite (or because of) the warning, she
squeezes through into a zone of destruction. The walls are badly
cracked. The floor is littered deep with plaster dumped by the
ruined sagging ceiling. Doors are askew on a single hinge.
Strangely, the wickered bulbs are unaffected by this destruction
and illuminate it. Ahead there’s a replica of the first crossed
timbers. It comes as no surprise. Picking her way through the
rubble, she reaches it and reads the same tarred warning, this one
with extra exclamation marks.

Again she’s impelled to go beyond this
second, even more imperious, warning, as though to reconstruct the
half-forgotten dream or recover all of the long-ago account of this
place.

She finds herself standing precariously in
the midst of much worse destruction. It’s incredible that the
fragile bulbs had survived to shine on what looks like the
aftermath of an aerial bombardment: blasted ceiling, gaping cracks
in the walls, the debris-littered floor buckled in places like
geological strata. She struggles forward and stops at a great chasm
with a big lopsided staircase full of rubble. It plunges down and
down past the light into darkness. Just looking down at it makes
her dizzy.

Her foot displaces a brick. It tumbles into
the dark chasm. Five seconds later the faint impact fifty feet
below sets off chaos above. The ground trembles. Debris starts
raining down. Helen deploys the mattress and hoists it on her head
for protection. Her foot slips and starts a minor avalanche.
Blinded by the drooping mattress she teeters and falls forward on
the first staircase steps.

The mattress cushions the shock, a positive
point. But then it slides bumpily down the stairs like a sled. She
grips the sides as it gains momentum. The broken steps blur with
her acceleration. They vanish as she plunges into the zone of
darkness.

The mattress, like a magic carpet, takes off
and she sails into the dark void and sinks down, knowing that this
is the long-desired exit. She ought to be glad. Instead, she has
visions of unrelated things enjoyed in a previous lifetime: yellow
tulips, sledding in Québec, making love with Richard in the
honeymoon hotel room with pictures of soaring birds on the pale
blue walls, the Seine at sunrise, things that of course she’d
already lost. But she can’t help reacting to their second,
definitive, loss as memories.

Her five-second scream is cut off abruptly
by arrival below, not far from the badly fragmented brick.

Margaret is the one who finds Helen, poorly
guided to her by the feathers that had leaked out of the rent
pillowcase. Pebbles, the classic resort in labyrinths, would have
done a better job than feathers. Pebbles are heavy and stay put
even in drafty not to say gale-swept corridors. But feathers, not
pebbles, are what you find in pillowcases. So Margaret has to make
do with feathers.

Finally, days later, on the point of
collapse, Margaret follows the last of them. She goes past the
hand-printed warning that out is a double-cross and soon sees what
Helen had twice seen blocking the way. Like Helen, she ventures
past the timbers into growing ruin. She halts at the broken
staircase that Helen had seen.

But she sees far below what Helen couldn’t
possibly have seen (except as sinister prescience): a pool of light
from a naked dangling bulb and in the center of the pool of light,
on a vast heap of books, papers and files splattered by the
peculiar shade of gray that blood has here, Helen, doll-size seen
from that height, splattered with blood too and motionless,
slouched forward, her face hidden.

Margaret’s scream is a whisper. She’s lost
her voice crying out Helen’s name for days in all those corridors
and staircases. Soon she even loses the whispered screams.

Feathers had guided her to Helen’s fall. The
same feathers guide her back, half-mad, to the others. Louis
immediately dials 000 on the phone reserved for emergencies. A
crackling female voice says something unintelligible and the line
goes dead. Louis tries again and again, then Seymour, then Max,
again and again. Max cries repeatedly: “It’s an emergency, goddam
you.” Finally, bawling, he punches the phone all his might, even
though such willful destruction of State property can cost him
thirty points. The pain distracts him from his grief for a
while.

The Four set out with ropes, an improvised
stretcher and food too, enough for Five, more as a gesture than out
of necessity. Margaret had estimated the fall to have been a
hundred feet and ending with gallons and gallons of blood.

The Four too go past the two crossed timbers
and see her far below as Margaret had seen her; her back to them,
slouched forward motionless, face concealed, on the mattress
crowning a great heap of files with dozens of books and with blood
on her and on the files and papers but not on the books.

They cry her name but get no response except
the terrible echo her name has given them for all of this
lifetime.

They accuse themselves of having driven her
to this bloody death. They weep and eulogize, evoking her
qualities. Seymour chokes up when he remembers that he’d almost
fallen in love with her. At least he’d tried to. He wants to
console the others and himself by saying that now she’s where she’d
always wanted to be but he chokes up on that to.

They can’t leave her there. Louis is about
to attach the rope to a broken pillar when they see Helen’s hand
rise and push aside a dangling lock of gray hair.

Joyous, they know that she’s alive but
ignoring them as punishment.

Guilty, they cry apologies.

Helen, answer us.

Answer us, Helen.

Please, please.

Finally, her head jerks up as if hearing
them for the first time. She turns around and looks up. Her face is
strangely luminous beneath the blood and the dirt. She gives a
little wave and returns to her nearsighted crouch over the book on
her lap. They can see it now.

They yell down to her. Are you all right?
All that blood. She looks up at them again with, perhaps, an
expression of annoyance. In a tiny abstracted voice she says: a
long fall but cushioned by the mattress and all these files, so
nothing worse than a very bad nose bleed and maybe a sprained
ankle. Could they throw down something to eat? Did they bring her
reading glasses, maybe? She hadn’t expected to find these marvelous
books.

She returns to the book.

They toss down elephant balls. One of them
lands a few feet from her with a plop on an open book. They hear
her little cry of annoyance and see her limp over to the book and
carefully clean the soiled pages. Then she devours the flattened
elephant ball. She limps over to the other flattened elephant balls
and devours them.

She returns to the book she’d been
reading.

Louis secures the rope and goes down to her
hand under hand. The others above see his eloquent gestures of
persuasion. She doesn’t seem anxious to go up to them. They call
down to her, coaxing and imploring.

Finally she slings the pouch over her
shoulder and fills it with carefully selected books. It takes her a
long time to pick and choose. The others hear Louis promise he’ll
return for all the other books.

He ties the rope around her waist and climbs
up to the others. Weeping and laughing, they all heave her up out
of the depths.

They kiss and hug her but gently as though
she could break like glass. She’s covered with dirt. When she
eagerly shows them the books, dirt pours off them. They wonder at
it. Oh the dirt, she says. Yes, in all the rooms she’d visited, the
books had roughly concealed great heaps of dirt. She starts talking
about those books: complete sets of Balzac and Dickens and Victor
Hugo and …

They interrupt her. Of course it’s the dirt
that interests them, all that pay dirt in all those rooms.

Yes, she says, impatient at the
interruption, the tunnel they’d been looking for a long time ago
must be somewhere in that corridor, of course it’s …

She breaks off. She can’t bring herself to
extinguish their shining faces – Margaret’s above all – with “it’s
a trap.” She completes her sentence with a lamely inadequate “… of
course it’s very nice.”

She returns to the important thing. So not
only the complete works of Balzac and Dickens and Victor Hugo, but
also poetry anthologies and, greatest of all, the complete plays of
Shakespeare, a scholarly annotated edition.

They (the Four) badly want to explore the
depths, but they’re short of food and anyhow they’ll need tools and
rope ladders for the job. They rein in their impatience and turn
back to the Living Quarters, bearing Helen on the stretcher like an
injured queen.

She tries to go on reading Dickens. With the
jolts and the dim light she can salvage no more than three or four
words at a time. They urge her to rest her eyes. They can’t
understand that any moment now the trap – her own particular
custom-designed trap – could spring and all those pages go blank,
or she would awaken, tortured, out of the marvelous dream.

At one turn of a corridor they see on a wall
the familiar words: OUT IS A DOUBLE CROSS.

No dour warning now but fabulous promise,
what it had taken them a whole second lifetime to comprehend: the
coded allusion to one of the rare landmarks in the maze, those two
crossed timbers and to the way out located nearby.

Helen gives up trying to read. Anyhow, she’s
stored up all those images, more real than the corridors jerking
past, more real, even, than what the Common Room window shows. She
closes her eyes and sees, as if she were there, the gleaming
cobblestones and the fog-wreathed gas lamps of London. She grips
the book, her precious private portable way out.

That night, Margaret wakes up and notices a
muffled light coming from the corner of the room. She gets up and
sees that Helen is reading under the blanket with a flashlight.
Approaching, she stumbles and nearly sprawls over the books on the
floor. She caresses the outline of Helen’s back.

“Just a minute,” comes Helen’s muffled
abstracted voice.

It’s a long minute. Margaret, practically
naked, shivers and sneezes. At that, Helen switches off the
flashlight and welcomes her, welcomes her very warmly, but the
books she’s taken to bed with her get in the way a little.

After, side by side, Margaret is afraid of
the consequences.

“We mustn’t ever again, Helen. That was the
second time. There mustn’t be a third time, Helen.”

“All right,” says Helen, with no more than a
second’s pause.

Margaret feels like weeping. She returns to
her cot.

After a few seconds the muffled light comes
back on under Helen’s blanket.

The next day the four of them mold elephant
balls and leave Helen in bed with her sprained ankle and her
books.

With the long rope ladders Louis had spent
the night knotting they descend into the depths. They discover
rooms filled with great mounds of earth concealed by files and more
novels. Grubbing in the dirt they come across blackened Roman coins
and fragments of bones, possibly not human.

Finally they encounter dim footprints, maybe
decades old, drowning in dust. They lead, one-way, to a door. On
both sides a long-ago hand has scratched tiny double crosses, the
final coded promise of escape on the other side of the door.

But how do they get to that other side? The
door is massive steel, like a bank vault and the treasure it holds
guarded by a clearly tamper-proof lock.

They stand there, stymied, until Louis says:
“No problem, Stein. The girl who cleans the keys. Your sweetie-pie.
Get your sweetie-pie to give us the key
to …”

He steps back and wipes the dust off the
number. “The key to Room 147.”

That number sounds vaguely familiar to
Seymour. But he can’t pin it down.

He objects that Stupid is no sweetie-pie of
his. He hasn’t said a word to her for years. Nobody has, first out
of kindness and then out of habit.

“You better start in now,” says Max.

Chapter 34

The Two Keys

Willows outside are filling with green mist,
so early April, when Seymour sets to work on coaxing the key to
Room 147 from the cleaning girl. He’s careful to wear his own key
on a string outside his turtleneck sweater.

First he has to reconstruct their old
relationship, like a survivor in a bomb-blasted city digging up
serviceable bricks from the rubble of once-home to start all over
again. Of course the relationship can’t begin the way it had begun
long ago. She’s unlikely to upset a second pail of dirty water over
his leg. She maintains too much distance from him now. But his
renaming of her happens the same way as the original naming except
that it takes much longer for her to acknowledge it.

She’s on her knees, scrubbing the floor in
mournful slow motion in the corridor opposite the men’s room.
Seymour stands on the threshold of the empty room. To leave the
field free, the other men disappear now whenever she comes.

“
Bonjour
,
Gentille.”

She goes on scrubbing. She goes on scrubbing even
when he repeats his greeting four or five times. It’s like trying
to get a reaction from the cots and the chest of drawers.