GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (34 page)

Choosing a card from the pack and without
looking at her, one of the men says without passion: “Go fuck
yourself, you old sow.
(
Eh, va te faire foutre, vieille
connasse
.)
You report us
and we’ll go on strike. Who else knows how to handle the transfers?
You, maybe?”

“
It is true,” murmurs the Sub-Prefect in a
strangely triumphant voice. “No technicians have been formed to
replace these.
Criminal negligence.”

Sadie cries:
“
ZTV3!
ZTV3!
” It
appears to be the supreme punishment.

Another card-player blows smoke at her. “Go
away.”

She cries “
ZTV3! ZTV3!
” again, leaves the room and joins the others,
rigid with fury.

Advocate and Turnkey lead the Four to two
nearby rooms. As Louis and Seymour enter theirs, they can hear
Helen’s protests. She wants to return to the Living Quarters and
her books. Her lack of faith in the forthcoming operation
disheartens the two men that much more.

The shabby room principally contains a
stony-faced rubber-gloved old nurse, four medical-style wheeled
couches and the banner
Welcome to Paris!
tacked to a wall. The nurse takes command. Her
first command involves a shower. The cubicle is raw concrete, the
water rusty, niggardly and lukewarm, the hospital-style soap harsh,
but it’s their first real shower in this lifetime.

After, they’re issued a freshly ironed
change of clothes, a passport and a wallet. Turnkey drones out the
contents of the wallets and they must sign the checklist for each
item. For Seymour it’s a
carnet
of yellow
second-class metro tickets, violet bus tickets, 40,000 inflated
francs (about $110 at the 1951 exchange rate), a temporary
resident
carte de
séjour
, three packs of
Belgian condoms of the brand
Le Costaud
, three to a pack, so nine in all, flattering for a
twenty-four hour sojourn.

The nurse makes them drink a foaming liquid
that looks like Advocate’s beer. It doesn’t taste any worse. She
commands them to lie down on one of the medical-style couches. “The
women now,” she says and leaves.

Advocate sits alongside Seymour’s couch. The
setup reminds him of his $40-an-hour visits to his first analyst in
New York with Weinberg, pencil poised over his pad, waiting for a
recital of diffused anguish. Except that now his anguish is keenly
focused.

“
Listen,
Maître
, I’m scared stiff. Those drunk technicians of yours. I
want to land up in Paris, France not in Paris, Texas or on the
moon, almost as bad.”

“I assure you that, assuming compatibility,
all will go smoothly. Sub-Prefect Marchini himself is overlooking
the operation although this lies beyond his sphere of competence
and could have grave consequences for him. He has your best
interests at heart.”

“Why don’t you get rid of those
rummies?”

“Only Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque
exercises authority, direct and undelegated, over the transfer
technicians.”

“Okay, so why doesn’t the Prefect get rid of
them?”

A long silence. Seymour is beginning to feel
drowsy. The medicine? The contagion of Louis’ snores from the other
couch? Finally Advocate replies. “A pertinent question, Mr Forster
…”

“Mr Stein,” Seymour mumbles. Really
drowsy.

“To be sure. A pertinent question, Mr Stein,
one of many asked by many, but under their breath. I am but quoting
their questions now. Questions such as: why are the very
foundations of the Préfecture allowed to collapse? Why are so many
glaring errors of transfer allowed to happen? Why are whole
roomfuls of vital files allowed to disappear? Why – but the
catalogue is endless.”

“Okay, so why don’t you get rid of the
Prefect?”

“Only the Supreme Echelon is empowered to do
that, empowers Himself to do that, I should say.”

Seymour suppresses a yawn. “Okay, so why
doesn’t he? I mean, why doesn’t He?”

Advocate darts fearful glances right and
left and up. He leans toward Seymour and whispers: “Ah, do not
question all the uncorrected irregularities and seeming injustices
of the world, lest you be questioned yourself by the Voice out of
the Whirlwind or worse, much worse, befall you.”

Seymour can’t suppress a long jaw-cracking
yawn. He excuses himself and asks why they don’t contact the
Supreme Echelon and tell Him that the Prefect’s doing a lousy
job.

“To do so would be to short-circuit the
hierarchal chain of command. The sanction for that can be
terrifying. Only the Prefect himself is empowered to establish
direct contact with the Supreme Echelon.”

“That’s a … a … crazy setup. He won’t …
denounce himself and … and … the Supreme Echelon … lets him … do …
do … whatever … he … likes …”

Teetering on the brink of sleep, Seymour
hears Advocate’s distant voice saying that no, the Supreme Echelon
would not condone all acts on the part of the individual concerned.
There is one particular act which would rouse the Supreme Echelon
to ire and cause Him to intervene forcefully and remove the
prefectoral incumbent, that act being …

He breaks off, probably for dramatic effect,
but he’s lost his audience by now. Seymour has floated into
darkness and doesn’t hear the Advocate’s revelation of the heinous
act.

When Seymour awakens, his wheeled couch is
being pushed down an erratically lighted corridor. Ahead, he can
see lower-echelon functionaries pushing Louis, Helen and Margaret
in the direction of what they hope will be successful transfer.
They have misgivings, though.

Chapter
36

Out There

Except for Louis, who exited in 1927, they
expect fancy machines, sparks, coils, switches and similar B-series
props. They expect to be placed in a crystal cylinder and to be
teleported to the world outside, the familiar Hollywood-TV
rigmarole.

But it isn’t at all like that. They’re
sent out in a gadgetless dry bureaucratic fashion. Long-winded fine
print in triplicate disclaims all administrative responsibility for
any accidents that might befall the Transferred during the trial
run.
I
affirm that I have read and understood the above.
Signature
.

They don’t bother reading the eight paragraphs. They
sign, their hands trembling with excitement and fear. The little
libidinous man with the filthy beret, Henri, bangs the first of the
four sheets with a rubber stamp. The sheet is unimpressed by his
repeated bangs. He has to rummage about for another, freshly inked,
stamp-pad before he can impressively bang the forms plus their two
carbon copies. With the final bang the rubber stamp splinters.

These technical hitches, although minor,
aggravate the malaise of the Four Administratively Suspended.

Henri drops the rubber stamp fragments into
a wastepaper basket and looks around fearfully. In a whisper he
begs Seymour to bring back a Camembert, nice and runny. He’ll do
him lots of little favors in return. Seymour promises and seconds
later forgets his promise. Who needs favors in return in a place
he’ll never be returning to?

Turnkey, accompanied by Henri, leads the
four of them through another maze of corridors. They stop before a
padlocked iron door. Turnkey carefully shields the lock from them
with his gaunt body. He clicks the combination, scrambles it
thoroughly and pushes the door open.

They find themselves in another corridor
with a series of nondescript numbered doors. Seymour has been
informed three times that his door is number 6 but, like the drunk
technician, he confuses it with number 9, Louis’ door, and Louis
vice-versa, maybe because their minds are topsy-turvy too. Turnkey
sternly corrects them. Attempted period-exchange is another offense
punishable by instant exit.

It was a mistake, they explain, and of
course that’s true. Louis doesn’t want meaningless future 1951 and
Seymour doesn’t want antediluvian 1900, twenty-seven years before
the birth of his sweetheart. Period-exchanges are strictly
forbidden and are punished by immediate exit, Turnkey repeats, like
a carbon copy duplicate of an administrative document.

Before he turns his back on them, Turnkey
commands: “When you hear a buzz you will open the second door, step
out and you will be there. Failure to step out within ten seconds
of the buzz will result in instant exit.”

The little man with the filthy beret repeats
his request for a ripe Camembert. Seymour again says he’ll try and
for the second time instantly forgets his promise.

He steps inside a tiny bare cubicle with a
wooden seat facing another shabby door with no knob on it. A bolt
is shot in the door behind him. It’s exactly like the setup in a
hospital, waiting to be summoned by a buzz for an X-ray. He sits
down and waits, concentrating, as instructed, on where he wants to
be and it’s not Napoleon’s Tomb or Eiffel’s Tower. Waits and waits,
thinking intensely of it, trying to summon up the original color.
Waits so long that he dozes off and dreams of that place he wants
to be and now is, in unsatisfactory black-and-white.

A buzz wakes him up. The knobless door is
ajar.

Preparing his eyes for the dazzle of color
in his darling’s street, Seymour pushes the door open and steps out
into a rocking world of intense cold, gray blur and crazy
perspective. The planes are cockeyed like a cubist painting and
shifting.

He looks about for focus and stability and
finds a little of that at his feet. He’s standing on what seems to
be a floor plan of a church. No, not a church, simply a hopscotch
diagram, what the French call a
marelle
, childishly chalked on the sidewalk.

He staggers forward a step. The rubbery buildings
shrink squat as toads and then leap up into beanstalks. Dizzy,
Seymour halts to make it stop. If he’s careful not to budge his
head everything settles into static distortion. It’s as though he
were imprisoned in a huge sphere of deformed glass.

He’d viewed Paris through glass during all
of his second lifetime in the phantom Prefecture but at least the
glass there had been clear. The glass here must be ribbed and
pitted and scratched and full of flaws and milky swarms of tiny
imprisoned bubbles, covered with burst blisters that magnify or
minimize objects.

Why glass here, outside? How is that
possible? How can his feet propel him if he’s standing inside a
glass sphere?

He reaches out to feel it. His hands
encounter void. With that void comes a terrible thought involving
greater void.

The crazy distortions he sees must be the
result of inner warp, fatal symptoms of that possible
incompatibility with the outside world that Advocate had referred
to. Which means he’s on the verge of exit, the permanent void he’s
all too compatible with.

Sudden intense pain rescues him from it.
Practically no pain is involved in exit, Advocate had assured them.
Seymour moans and tries to be thankful for the torture of
interstellar cold biting him all over like bloodthirsty
piranhas.

Quick, sunshine, sunshine. He staggers out
of the biting shade into a cannibal Congo sun. More blessed
unbearable pain. He thinks he smells singed hair. He forces himself
back into the contrary agony of shade.

Soon he learns to zigzag into quick mutually
nullifying alternations of roast and deep-freeze. Out here for only
a minute, he’s already devised a better-than-nothing technique for
living with pain.

But where is out here? He’s certain it’s
not the celebrated Tomb or Tower. Is it the longed-for street where
his ponytailed sweetheart lived, still lives? He thinks he’s
standing a little beyond a heaving corner building. If it’s
the
Rue du
Regard
in the
6
^th
arrondissement
then that buckling shop window over there must be full of
familiar antiques.

He struggles over to it. The displayed
objects are distorted and out of focus. He pictures his
black-and-white wall drawing of the contents of that window and
tries to superimpose them on those blobs.

Isn’t that blurred circle there the
decorative dish with the peasant lass and the border of thirty-odd
roses? But if so, shouldn’t those roses show up, even blurred, as a
red circle? There’s no color there. There or anywhere else. He
looks up at a sky that should be blue, what with ferocious sunshine
a few steps away. The sky is dark gray.

He zigzags forward. Magnified by a flaw, a
giant fish leaps at him, jagged jaws agape. It vanishes back into
blur. It’s frightening but a good sign. He mentally refers to his
wall-drawing again. Yes, the fish store is next to the antique
shop.

He relies totally on his memory of the wall drawing
to guide him now. There, isn’t that the crèmerie? A freak flaw of
correct vision confirms it with those circular boxes of Brie and
Camembert.

Next to the
crèmerie,
even though he can’t make out daffodil-yellow or
pansy-blue or rose-pink in the fog, that must be the flower shop.
Now in another split-second of narrow-angled clarity he gets
further encouraging confirmation: a bouquet of white roses and he
mysteriously knows it’s the very bouquet he’d offered his
sweetheart’s marvelous mother one day back then, a back then that
is now.

And there, the penultimate landmark, a big
shop-sign. It has to be the horsemeat butcher’s golden horse head
even if it’s wobbly, battleship gray and looks more like a
hippopotamus head than a horse head. But the French don’t eat hippo
steaks. Focus and perspective improve a little. Yes, unmistakably,
the horse head neighing down at the pavement.