GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (37 page)

Advocate’s discourse now becomes almost
totally obscure, bogged down in subordinate clauses, clothed in
elaborate senseless metaphors. Approaching the subject he veers
away from it, like a finger snatched away from the intense halo of
something incandescent; orbiting in on that white-hot subject, then
veering away into the safely tepid outskirts of it. Everything is
implicitness, indirection, ornate with euphemisms.

A violent
concussion.
Fragments of
plaster rain down on Advocate’s head. He breaks off in the middle
of a verbose sentence and looks about fearfully. He struggles to
his feet and departs, muttering: “A word to the wise,
n’est-ce
pas?
”

A minute after Advocate’s departure, Max returns,
ghostly with plaster dust. He starts brushing himself off, a
swearing white cloud.

Louis’ snores quicken to snorts. He cries
out and awakens wide eyed to the ceiling.

“Bad dream, Louis?” says Seymour
indifferently.

“Thought I was still out there.”

“Relief to wake up here, huh?”

“Wake up here, wake up there, no relief
wakin’ up anywhere. Advocate’s gone? Could you make out what he was
drivin’ at?”

“Think so. He wants us to pimp for him and
the Sub-Prefect.”

“Watch your language, Stein. How so, to …
what you said?”

“Wants us to try to convince Margaret to let
the Prefect … um … possess her carnally. If we do and she does,
we’ll all be transferred for real out there. That’s what he
says.”

“Who the dickens does he take us for? For …
that word you said? Anyhow, who wants to go out there?”

Max stops brushing himself. He stares at
them and yells: “I sure as hell do. You mean if Maggie lets the
Prefect screw her we’ll all be transferred? And she says no?
Screwed like a blind weasel back then and she says no now? Transfer
for all of us out there just for a quick bang and she says no? She
can’t do this to us.”

“You watch your language, Pilsudski,” says
Louis.

“The Paris they transfer us to isn’t all
that great, Max,” says Seymour. “It’s not worth a … um … a carnal
relationship.”

“Paris? Who gives a shit about Paris?”

“Forgot about that. Not Paris, Las Vegas. I
was in Las Vegas once. If you forced me to choose between the two I
wonder if I wouldn’t pick Las Vegas, that’s how bad it was out
there in Paris.”

Advocate totters back into the room, smiting
his forehead. He apologizes profusely for having allowed the main
purpose of his visit to slip his mind. He had meant to inform them
that, Sub-Prefect Marchini having impounded all the bottles in the
Transfer Center, the second transfer trial run is certain to be
more successful than the first.

That rouses the recumbent men out of apathy.
They sit bolt upright.

Louis exclaims: “Second trial run?”

“Quite so. A second trial run is statutory
procedure in the case of a defective initial trial run.”

“When?” says Seymour. He fears some
inhumanly close date like next month. It would take them more than
three months to recover from the first trial run.

“Shortly following lunch. Hash is not on the
menu, I am happy to inform you.”

“
Lunch? You can’t mean
today
?”

“Quite so. As you say, ‘today’.”

“Oh no!”

“No, no, no!”

For Max all those violent
Non’s
(just about the one thing he
can understand in French) can only mean that Advocate’s come back
for another try at talking Louis and Stein into getting Maggie to
screw them all out of this place. And they yell “No” to that, the
shitheads.

Max decides to convince Maggie himself. He
leaves the room with the others still hollering like Advocate
wanted to cut their balls off.

Max stops before the women’s door. He hears
Helen’s voice inside. She’s sure to say “No” too. Have to get
Maggie alone. Anyhow, have to find the right words. Max starts
trotting down the corridor, in search of them.

Seymour and Louis go on with their No’s.

Advocate opens his rubber-clad hands in a
gesture of helplessness.

“I fear, sincerely fear, that you have no
choice in the matter. May I suggest that this time you resist
temptation and concentrate on well-known Parisian monuments, for
example, the Eiffel Tower or Napoleon’s Tomb? Restrict yourselves
to neutral mindless registering of things seen. Remain strictly on
the surface of phenomena. Make of your minds a shiny blank, mirrors
to throw back things seen and experienced. Allow nothing to
penetrate and fester within. Otherwise, I fear, you shall once
again be the artisan of your woes. But how I go on! Now I must
inform the ladies.”

They go on shouting “No” at the door that
closes behind Advocate. They’re not on their backs now and they’re
no longer insulated against pain. Not again, Louis mutters. Not
years out there again. They said hours but it had been years.

Yes, years, not hours, says Seymour, and
what years, he hadn’t told the worst. He tells it now. Forced for
years into skipping on a hopscotch drawing and his sweetheart
behind the door sadistically throwing out an early version of
herself, a bare-armed little girl, luring him into flopping on
dog-shit into hell, not that, not ever again.

They sit down heavily on the edge of their
cots. From the other side of the partition they can hear the two
women crying out “No! No!” and then Margaret sobbing. Advocate must
have delivered the tidings.

As though awaiting a signal to storm an
enemy position, Louis leans forward in a tense muscled crouch. He
stares intently ahead at the wall with its scrawled inscriptions,
at one particular inscription.

“That’s another one of their traps,” says
Seymour, following his gaze. “It’s the real meaning after all. What
we thought at the beginning. You’re double-crossed if you go
out.”

They start arguing about it. Seymour says
that at best the tunnel behind Room 147 (assuming there is a tunnel
behind it) would turn out to be like that other tunnel long ago
that ended up in the toilets. At worst it would really lead them
out but out in the Paris they’d been tortured with during the first
trial run and would be again in a few minutes.

“It’s a chance to take,” says Louis. He
dictates the strategy. They would all hide in one of the corridor
rooms on Dummy’s path from the kitchen to the Living Quarters. When
she went past they’d tell her to give them the key, tell her they’d
take her with them, promise her anything, the moon even. No
problem. She’d already agreed. They’d lay low till she came with
it.

“No time to waste. Have to tell the women to
get ready.”

Louis leaps to his feet, strides to the
door, yanks it open, steps halfway outside. He freezes in that
attitude. He retreats back into the room.

“Four of them Black Men. Two at each end of
the corridor. With clubs that can smash you to bits.”

Soon after, Gentille wheels in lunch, sets
the trays down in silence and flees.

They stare down at what their dish contains
despite Advocate’s assurance to the contrary. Hash augurs ill, they
think, for his other assurance, that the second trial transfer
would go more smoothly than the first.

Maybe an hour later, Advocate returns to
their room, in the company of Sadie, Turnkey, Sub-Prefect Marchini
and the four Exiters. The Four say no again, just for the record.
They offer no physical resistance, useless in any case. They are
going out again, no choice in the matter. Their one consolation is
that they have no more illusions about what they’ll find outside.
Won’t that lessen the pain, a little?

Max starts trotting, then running back to
the Living Quarters. He knows what he’s going to say to Maggie and
how to say it and he has to say it right away.

But when he gets to the Living Quarters he
has nobody to say it to. The women’s room is empty.
The men’s room is empty.
Breaking the silence of the corridor, he shouts their names. The
only sound outside of his own voice repeating Stein, Maggie, Louis,
Helen, the names in diminishing echo, is a distant
clump-jangle,
clump-jangle
.

What’s happened? Have they been exited? Transferred?
All by himself here, not for hours like the last time, but for all
time? Max returns to his room (all his now) and lies down in a
huddle on his cot.

Minutes later Dummy, her face tragic, rolls
in the cart with a single tray on it. At the sight of that solitary
tray, unbearable confirmation, Max struggles out of bed and
advances on her. She shrinks back.

“Gimme the key.”

Stares at him.
Doesn’t understand. Dummy.
What’s the French for ‘key’? All he knows
how to say in French is “Excuse me,
Monsieur
or
Madame
or
Mademoiselle
,
where is the airport?” But to be able to say that usefully he needs
the key.

“The key, the key, key, key, key,” he yells at
her.

Max can’t know that the word comes across
to her as
qui, qui, qui
:
who? who? who? She thinks he’s referring to the missing trays, and
so to the missing Suspended Arrivals, missing for good, she thinks.
She brings out in a trembling whisper: “
Madame
Ricchi,
Madame
Williams,
Monsieur
Forster
and O!
Monsieur
Saymore,
Monsieur
Saymore: all transferred.”

Max doesn’t understand.
He bellows in her face, spraying her with
saliva: “Gimme the key, goddam you!”

She panics and starts for the door. She must
have it on her. He grabs her arm above the rubber glove and freezes
and goes blank.

Who?

Where?

Dump of a room.

Skinny girl with a funny expression.

Sudden loud
clump-jangle,
clump-jangle
.

Door bursts open.

Mean-faced
lipless woman. Two cops, funny uniforms. Tall tall bald skinny guy
in a grey smock, keys hanging from his belt.

What’s going on here? Where’s here? The
cops drag the girl under the light bulb. One of them twists her
arms behind her back. The other grabs her hair and pulls her head
back. Baldie fiddles with her eyelid. Cinder in her eye? Stares
into her eye.
Steps
back.

Says: “
Positif
.” Not English. What’s it all about?

Cops march the girl out of the room. Baldie and the
mean-faced woman follow them. Nobody pays attention to him. He (who
is “he”?) staggers over to a rusty cot and collapses, head
splitting.

When he awakens it all comes back and he
knows where he is and who he is. He, Max Pilsudski, risen uselessly
from the dead, isn’t happy at the recovered knowledge. Then he
remembers the key to the way out, the key to the steel door of Room
147 and the tunnel behind it.

He goes out into the corridor, turns left
and starts jogging. When he gets to the first crossing of corridors
he halts, not knowing the direction to take to find Dummy and the
key to the tunnel out of all this.

***

Part Four

Chapter 39

Searching

The bolt
shoots home like a rifle in his back.

Once again Seymour Stein finds himself
imprisoned in the cramped space of Cubicle 6. With almost no hope
it will happen, he wants the knobless door to buzz open on
something safe this time. Forget the
Rue du Regard
with its torturing distortions and deprivations,
try to forget it.
Concentrate on one of Advocate’s recommended
landmarks.

Napoleon’s
tomb? Tombs have bad associations. So, like a dutiful tourist,
Seymour mentally contemplates the Eiffel Tower for maybe half an
hour. He ends by finding the prospect boring and can’t resist a
dangerous sneak revisit to a marvelous hotel room memory of his
darling. A second there and he returns to the safe tower.
Persistence of vision, though, operates even for the mind’s retina
and he can’t help transporting her in double exposure to Eiffel’s
erect structure in the blushing nude posture he’d coaxed her into
long ago.

A prudish girl like her in such a private
attitude in that most public of places?
Absurd. Perilous too, Advocate had warned. Seymour
manages to efface her from the tower, just in time.

The door buzzes open.

Ten seconds to leave, Turnkey had warned,
otherwise exit. Seymour’s tempted but at the seventh second steps
out, fast.

Steps out into swirling mist that hides
everything except the grass he’s standing in, close trees looming
spectrally and the low sun reduced to a faint red disk. He thinks
he’s in one of the two big public parks of Paris at dawn:
the
Bois de
Vincennes
or the
Bois de
Boulogne
.

The sun asserts power. The mist thins and now rises
like a tattered curtain, revealing things incompatible with
civilized public parks. From his sloping meadow he can see green
forest to the horizon. A stone’s throw away, a slow broad muddy
river pushes past him. Just opposite is a long island covered to
the shores with tremendous trees except for a clearing with a
miserable huddle of skin-and-branch huts. A crude raft lies pulled
half way up the muddy beach. Wooden stakes impale two shattered
skulls.