GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (36 page)

For Louis it’s the flower shop in a street
whose name he’s forgotten and had never been able to pronounce,
with a bouquet to be bought again but for a new recipient, the slim
honey-blonde seller of it. For Margaret, past the sooty spires and
gargoyles and flying buttresses of
Notre Dame
, the sacred sanctum where prayers are pronounced
and heard.

For both, as for Seymour, there’s the terrible cold,
the terrible heat, everything twisty and heaving and blurred and
the approach, past hard-to-recognize landmarks, to the flower shop
door for Louis, to the portal of the cathedral for Margaret. For
both, too, the last-second denial of entry happening hundreds of
thousands of times with the sense of seasons coming and going.

But unlike Seymour’s incidental flower shop,
there’s nothing to mark the change of seasons in Louis’ essential
flower shop. No May tulips followed by June roses. Nothing but
persistent All Saints’ Day chrysanthemums and ornate funeral
wreaths that hide Louise from him.

Both Margaret and Louis, like Seymour, had
heard the great voice in the sky putting an end to it all.

Louis stops with that. The slow drips go
on. Seymour feels he’ll be purged of it if he tells. Louis and
Margaret must have felt that too. So he tells his version of the
common experience to the ceiling. He omits the humiliation of
hopping on the
marelle
and the
terminal slip on dog-shit and sprawl into
Enfer
. When he finishes he feels a tiny bit
better.

They wait for Helen to tell.

Instead, the leaky faucet goes on measuring
the silence. They’re sure that the world outside had been normal
for her. They’re sure that she hadn’t been pulled back from her
great encounter. She doesn’t want to pain them by telling them
about it. That pains them even more, proof of the unbearable
goodness that had earned her that encounter, emphasizing their own
unworthiness.

Still, they long to hear about happiness,
even enviable third-person happiness. They nag her in exhausted
voices. Finally she does tell about it, in the same exhausted voice
as theirs.

She’d done what Advocate had advised them
to do, concentrate on a well-known public building. Her choice had
been the
Bibliothèque Nationale
, the National Library with its million-odd volumes in
the
Rue de
Richelieu
. It hadn’t
been a good trip, but then she hadn’t expected it to be. Everything
was twisted and blurred and shifting. There was no color. But for
where she wanted to go color didn’t matter. The printed page is
black and white. Each time she approached the entrance, though, she
was snatched back. That didn’t matter much either. In any case you
needed a special pass to use the library facilities and the
bureaucrats in this place hadn’t supplied her with one. Didn’t
matter, she had plenty of books here, no need to go out there for
books. Being pulled back and forth all that time had been annoying
but she hadn’t hoped for anything better, had expected much
worse.

The stony-faced rubber-gloved old nurse
marches in, gripping a tray with four glasses of a foaming liquid.
She hands them out. “Drink!”

They’re being sent out a second time. They
feebly refuse to drink.

“Drink!” the nurse commands. That granite
voice and face overpowers their resistance. Propped up on a shaky
elbow, they drink and then sink back to a prone position, eyes
closed. The nurse snatches the glasses out of their hand, already
numb, and leaves.

The mellow fragrance of cognac slowly
mitigates the astringent smell of the medicine they’ve just
absorbed.

“
Mes
enfants, mes enfants, mes pauvres enfants
!”

They force their eyes
open on Advocate standing unsteadily at the foot of their couches,
hair dramatically white above his black gown. His rigid mask tries
for an expression of pity. His ample black sleeves flap with a
wide-armed gesture of woe that imperils his stability.

To their
drowsy brains his voice seems to come from far off as he recounts
their narrow escape from total and permanent extinction. Wagging a
bony forefinger, he admonishes them gently. Part of the
responsibility for the fiasco lay with them. They had been warned
and yet all of them had attempted a meeting with a previously known
individual. Useless to deny the fact. They had been monitored.

This (he goes on) in no way extenuates the
outrageous circumstances of transfer, due to the drunken blunders
of the transfer technicians. The Four owe continued existence to
Sub-Prefect Marchini. Observing how badly transfer was proceeding,
Sub-Prefect Marchini had endeavored over and over to contact
Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque.
In vain.

Naturally, in vain. For who, walking the
inner corridors, can hear the ringing of a phone? Or the collapse
of foundations? Or the collapse of the very universe?

Sub-Prefect
Marchini took it upon himself, then, to intervene, at terrible
hazard to himself, and rescue them from undeserved void.
Sub-Prefect Marchini has always had their best interests at heart.
How often has Sub-Prefect Marchini not confided that were he in
charge, all four of the legitimate Suspended Arrivals would have
been transferred – as you say – “long ago”.

Advocate’s
image and voice grow faint, prelude to a second transfer, they
understand. Their minds are woozy but they’re able to mutter
implorations not to be sent out a second time now and for years
again, spare them that torture.

They hear,
from an even greater distance, Advocate’s soothing assurance that
there is no question of a second trial transfer on the heels of the
first. He corrects their error. This first abortive transfer had
not lasted for – as you say – “years.” They had been dispatched
shortly before lunch. Soon dinner will be served. Hash, alash … er
… alas. How often has not Sub-Prefect Marchini expressed his
indignation at the miserable fare meted out like punishment to the
Administratively Suspended, adding that if he were in charge, hash
would be replaced by juicy tender beefsteak and fluffy mashed
potatoes.

But of course such menu transformations
could hardly interest them. For in the event of Sub-Prefect
Marchini being in charge (and, who knows? this may one day occur,
sooner than they think) they would immediately be transferred,
perhaps as a start to a four-star restaurant and would partake of
noble fare, perhaps
bouillabaisse
or
…

Advocate breaks off as lower-echelon functionaries
enter the room.

“More of this later,” he whispers and
leaves.

The functionaries start wheeling the Four
out. Seymour is the last to go. Henri with his filthy beret
moronically pulled down to his eyes sidles into the room and in
passing snatches the box of Camembert out of Seymour’s hand.

He claws off the lid. The stink is
overpowering. Thousands of maggots pour onto the floor. They
instantly metamorphose into fat flies that rise in a whining black
swarm. They buzz about for a second and then fall back to the floor
mummified.

Henri looks about fearfully and then sinks
to his knees as in prayer. Seymour’s last image, before darkness,
is of Henri gathering up the flies and bearing them to his
salivating mouth.

When Seymour emerges from the darkness hours
later in the Living Quarters that image seems to be imprinted on
the dingy ceiling above his bed. He can’t help thinking that the
scene has profound relevance to all of them. But it doesn’t really
bother him. Like the others (except for Max) he’s indifferent to
everything.

Chapter 38

No! No!

Like the numbing shock that follows severe
trauma, total indifference insulates the Four from further
pain.

Passive, they let Max bear-hug them and
apologize in tears for having thought they’d been bull-shitting
him. He was sure they’d gone for good instead of just the couple of
hours it had turned out to be. He’d looked out of the window for
them but the streets were empty the way they always were.

Like a high-school teacher correcting a
student, no drama or pathos to it, Helen interrupts Max, saying:
not hours but years and the streets had been full of people,
hundreds of miles of streets, millions of people. Hearing that,
Seymour and Louis and Margaret suspect that Helen’s story of the
National Library had been an invention. For all her superior words,
like them she hadn’t been able to resist the baited hook of hope.
She’d tried to establish contact but had no one particular street
as a target. All the streets of Paris and their crowds had been
possibilities in the renewed search for Richard. Out of pride, they
imagine, she hadn’t wanted to admit it.

Max wants to know how it had been out there.
Had they remembered to bring back pizza and real beer? They reply:
“No time,” or “Forgot” or (Seymour) “Things spoil.” They don’t even
bother shrugging when he reminds them of the tunnel and that Dummy
has the key to that way out. They’d been out and knew what it was
like.

The cleaning-girl is mute and scared. Her
one gesture of contact occurs when she tries to hand back the key
that Seymour had thrown at her on his way out, he’d thought, for
good. He tells her she can keep it. Room 1265 and its walls are all
hers now. He won’t be going back there to the drawing. He’s not
interested in the other key either. He knows what it opens on.

Anyhow she doesn’t talk about that key. She
doesn’t talk about anything to them. Had something happened,
involving another threat of punishment? It’s of no importance to
them. Nothing is.

They spend most of their time on their
backs, staring up at the ceiling. Their minds come close to
achieving the same blankness. Here and out there don’t matter to
them any more. The armchairs in the Common Room don’t tempt them.
Their brains disarm the treacherous window on Paris to a
one-dimensional picture hanging for decades on the wall, so
familiar that it doesn’t register any more.

Probably a week after their return (they
can’t tell since they don’t look out of the window any more) they
hear and feel the booming of collapsing staircases below, never so
violent. The bulbs stutter darkness and light. Chaos is drawing
closer, they understand. Let it. They can’t even muster the energy
to worry about Max who is wandering somewhere in the suddenly
dangerous corridors.

Fine cracks develop in the ceiling they’re
staring up at. They close their eyes against the plaster dust
drifting down but they don’t bother moving. They imagine that their
passionless whitening faces resemble funerary statues.

An hour or so later, Advocate totters into
their room. They haven’t budged and don’t budge now except for
their eyeballs which roll an indifferent millimeter in his
direction. With his long-sleeved arms flapping about for balance he
resembles a blast-beruffled wounded old raven. His long white hair
and his jabot are in disarray. His black gown is tattered and
covered with plaster dust. He sinks into a chair, struggles for
breath and finally pronounces in a wheeze almost covered by the
rumbling of destruction below: “Chaos, chaos, who will deliver us
from chaos?”

A powerful fragrance of cognac accompanies
the rhetorical question. Stewed to the gills, he must have
collapsed on a staircase, they think. It turns out that it was the
staircase itself that had collapsed, under him, followed by the
ceiling above him. It had crowned him with half a ton of plaster.
Hands trembling, Advocate goes on with his outraged recital of
chaos drawing ever closer to the Administrative Center.

All this – to say nothing of the
quasi-fiasco of the transfer trial run – imputable to the
negligence of a certain high-placed individual. Only intervention
on Supreme Echelon Level (Advocate whispers the term fearfully) and
appointment of a more able and conscientious individual in his
place could remedy the disastrous situation.

But the Supreme Echelon, say certain
blasphemers (Advocate’s voice drops to a barely audible whisper),
seems to have forgotten their existence. The most blasphemous of
these blasphemers claim (I am but citing them) that the Supreme
Echelon too constantly walks the inner corridors, indifferent to
massacres, tidal waves, epidemics, famine, tortures and the
great-eyed children herded into the cattle-cars. No staying hand
for these things, that Hand that once parted the waters of the Red
Sea and chastised evildoers is now inert, they (not I! not I!)
say.

The most radical of these extreme
blasphemers hold that we are but thoughts in the Supreme Mind and
as that mind loses its grasp, we fade, our universe disintegrates,
prey to rust and dust and rot and void.

Advocate pauses. Louis’ snores indicate that
he has lost half of his audience. He resumes in a fearful
whisper.

One thing alone could call the Supreme
Echelon’s attention to the lamentable state of affairs here:
violation of the supreme prohibition; intimate contact between the
functionaries and the Materialized. Now, the highly placed
individual who is the subject of our discussion had once been
suspected, strongly suspected, of precisely this transgression
involving an admittedly ravishing platinum blonde starlet. There is
strong indication that a certain member of Batch MLX 59833 is the
object of similar attentions, which she has always spurned.

If another such transgression were to occur
would this not come to the Supreme Echelon’s faltering attention?
Would this not arouse the Supreme Echelon’s ire? Would not the
present occupant of power be divested of that power and that power
be wielded by a person who (Advocate pauses dramatically and stares
at Seymour) had only a short time ago confided his intention,
should he occupy that position, to transfer four of the Five to the
space outside?