GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (38 page)

Seymour lets himself down in the grass. He
stares at the bugs and the flowers, thankful that at least the
grass and the bugs and the flowers are the same. He waits patiently
for the voice in the sky to do something about the things that
aren’t the same.

He knows exactly where he is. He knows the
name (the later name) of that island. How does he know it? How can
he be sure? He knows. He’s sure, sure it’s the
Île de la
Cité
, the historical
heart of Paris, and the river the river Seine, of
course.

But even the names (like himself here in his
1950 turtleneck sweater and corduroy pants) are anachronisms,
because the French language is unborn. By what guttural phonemes do
the hut-dwellers name the island and the river?

What he sees is clearly prior to the
lithographed illustrations he recalls from the 1950 edition of
the
Michelin
Guide de Paris
: the
stone walls, baths and forum of the Romans, prior to the palisades
of the Celtic tribe of the Parisii in the 3
^rd
Century BC. To say nothing of the later things
he’d visited there so often with Marie-Claude and so didn’t need a
guidebook for: Notre Dame, the flower and the bird markets,
the
Conciergerie
,
those future things and that future girl maybe only a few hundred
yards from where he sits, now weeping, separated from her by
thousands of years and death.

He goes on waiting for the voice in the sky
to pull him out of this useless time.

From the sky comes no voice but tragic
hoarse cries and the ghostly sound of wings working the air. Above,
hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of long-necked cranes or
storks or geese in V formations flap by. They have a place to go,
somewhere in the direction of the sun. They keep coming, arising
like smoke from the green horizon behind him, honking overhead,
disappearing beyond the green horizon before him. Seymour stretches
out on his back and stares up at their endless passage, which
darkens the sky.

When he awakens the sun is higher.
Stragglers are flapping by overhead. In the island clearing, in
front of the miserable huts, dirty wild-haired Proto-Parisians in
tattered skins are gathered about a fire. They have fire at least.
It’s more than he has.

How will he ever survive here without fire?
For he realizes now that he’s stranded for good in this time by the
fault of those sozzled transfer technicians (or by dead-sober
malevolence on a much higher level?). There’ll be no voice in the
sky to summon him back. He’s like a relay satellite intended for
earth orbit but launched with exaggerated thrust and now, beyond
recall, captured by a distant icy planet.

Stranded for life here. A life bound to be
nasty, brutish and very short. Unless the tribe takes him in. Would
they? If so, take him in how? The two staked skulls stare back at
him. He tries to make out what the Proto-Parisians are
devouring.

What marvels does he possess to impress
them into better than digestive welcome? Passive heir to the
technology of the 20
^th
century, he’s stripped of the inheritance here. At the
Prefecture they hadn’t even issued a penknife. So how can he
stagger these stone-age savages with the sharp miracle of steel? No
cigarette lighter either to wow them with flame at the twitch of a
thumb. He does have bank notes. But those tokens of an advanced
economy would be no more than exotic toilet paper for them. The bus
and metro tickets, additional tokens of triumphant technology, are
too small for even that use. The nine Belgian condoms of the
brand
Le
Costaud
? Blow them up
into balloons for their kids? Didn’t they already do that with fish
bladders?

He doesn’t even have comic-book knowledge of
an imminent eclipse to extinguish the sun with phony incantations
and make them kneel to him by commanding it back.

A solitary goose (or crane or stork) labors
across the sky, miles and miles from the nearest yearned-for
communal V. It honks with a profound melancholy that echoes in
Seymour’s heart. He badly misses the others, even dumb Max, maybe
20,000 years distant.

Wait. Hadn’t the same drunken time blunder
been committed on them too? Helen shares his 1951 time, so maybe,
probably, certainly, she shares this prehistoric time too. She’s
not 20,000 years away but here, maybe just a hundred yards away in
the forest, probably, certainly searching for him.

Stupidly, he shouts her name. The
Proto-Parisians squatting about their fire leap up, point at him,
grab fire-hardened spears and Neolithic axes. They run to the raft,
drag it into the river and four of them scramble aboard. A snarling
broken-toothed hungry-looking savage poles it toward the shore.

Seymour stumbles toward the trees, yelling:
“Helen! Helen!”

Helen sits blank in the silence of Cubicle
3. She’s driven out of her mind the dangerous split-second image of
the Luxembourg Gardens with the splashing fountain and Richard
restless by her side. Out of her mind too (she thinks) the even
more dangerous honeymoon hotel room with pictures of soaring birds
hanging on the pale-blue walls. Knowing that choice is suffering,
she’s chosen no landing point out there.

The door buzzes open. Stepping out, she
remembers, too late, that she could have ignored the buzz and kept
sitting beyond ten seconds for the only landing point she really
wants.

The unwanted landing point proves to be a
noisy crowded street.

She pulls back against a shabby hotel,
prepared for chaos, freezing shade and broiling sun and enforced
breasting of crowds for years like the last time out.

Instead, everything is right. The costumes and cars
and advertising posters are mid-century. Everything is clearly
focused and stable. There’s the first genuine sun on her face in
this second lifetime, a dangerous joy: resist it. The colors are
true, the sky correctly blue, the shrubbery in the square correctly
green: resist them. The faces in the passing crowd must be clear
and stable too but she’s careful not to look at those faces, not to
let herself get caught and swept away for years in the currents and
eddies of wrong faces. Not again.

She negotiates it intelligently this time.
Turning her back on the lure of direct sky and sunshine she slips
into the hotel.

The door closes behind her, shutting off the
street noises. The transition from sunshine to gloom is so violent
that it takes her a while to make out the old man behind the
reception desk myopically bent over a newspaper under a
green-shaded lamp. Next to his frayed elbow is a gutted stub of
candle in a chipped saucer and a box of matches.

At her third cough, he finally looks up.
Hardly greeting her, he takes her
carte de séjour
and copies things from it into the big register.
The pigeonholes behind him are empty. The guests receive no mail.
Are there guests, outside of very transient prostitutes and their
customers, in such a run-down place? All thirty of the massive
bronze keys dangle from the numbered hooks.

Just as she finishes signing in, the lights
go out. More strikes, the old receptionist mutters, lighting the
candle. A second after, the electric lights blink back on. Strikes,
strikes, strikes, he mutters, staring at the green-shaded lamp for
a minute. Finally he blows the candle out, hands her the key to
Room 408, points to the dim staircase and returns to his
newspaper.

She spirals up the dirty staircase. Each
dimly lit floor is empty. When she reaches the fourth floor the
lights go out again. In the absolute darkness she gropes from door
to door. They refuse her key. She loses count of the number of
intractable doors, sure she’s blindly tested fifty keyholes on just
this one floor. Yet there are only thirty keys in all. She begins
to understand.

Finally one of the locks yields. She knows
what to expect. She turns the knob, prepared for a dim Prefecture
corridor.

The door opens blindingly on a sun-filled
room. She gropes, this time from excess of light, to the open
window, pushes it shut, draws the heavy drapes, walks over to the
big bed with two pillows and lies down in the gloom. She stares up
at the ceiling as she’d done for so long back in the Prefecture
prison, waiting for an end to Administrative Suspension. Here she
waits, beyond temptation, for an end to the second trial run.
Better yet, for incompatibility and an end to everything.

She closes her eyes and dozes off.

When she awakens, a thin ray of sunshine,
eluding the drapes, illuminates the room. At the sight of framed
soaring birds on pale blue walls she struggles upright. From the
street she thinks she can hear a long-lost voice: “Helen!
Helen!”

Louis stands there beneath blue sky in the
first tame sunshine of his second life. Even before his eyes
focused, harness jangling and the clopping of hooves and stable
fragrance had announced the right time, confirmed now by those
elegant carriages and the double-decker horse-drawn omnibus with
the words on it (“
Madeleine-Bastille
”) telling him it’s the right city, if not exactly the
right neighborhood.

The passing crowd, too, tells him the time
is right. He hardly glances at the soldiers with flowery epaulettes
and cone-shaped short-brimmed caps like operetta soldiers or at
black-clad gentlemen with elegantly pommeled walking sticks. The
young women are what he looks at with their long-sleeved
high-necked blouses, their voluminous pleated skirts cascading down
to their shoes, their long hair swept up past their pretty denuded
ears and done up in a big flat crowning knot, sometimes concealed
by a great flowered hat.

Flowers.

Louis looks longingly at their faces. But of
course she can’t be here.

Where is here? In Cubicle 9 he’d
concentrated on the Embassy, the most important of Paris landmarks
because even though he doesn’t remember the name of her flower-shop
or the name of the street it was located in (is located in, is:
past is present again), he’d known the way to it from the Embassy.
A century after, his feet would remember.

He turns to passersby for guidance but
discovers that his question can only come out in English. He’s left
his miraculously acquired post-mortem French behind him. The French
he’d swum in like a fish back in the Prefecture has become thick
opaque ice now, absolutely impenetrable, the way it had been in his
first lifetime in 1900 when all he’d known how to say (taught by
her) was “
Tu
es jolie, Louise
” and
“
Je t’aime,
Louise
.” He couldn’t say
that to these strangers. They shrug and blink apologetically when
he says, very slowly in clear mid-western English, “Where is the
Embassy, please?” (“The Embassy,” he says, not “The American
Embassy” as though there could only be one Embassy that matters in
Paris).

He wanders about, sweating in the hot sun,
asking and asking and getting more blank looks and shrugs.

Finally he recalls that, of course, he has a
landmark to guide him, a holy skyline two-in-one landmark: the
spire of the American Church in Paris where he’d thank the Lord not
only for this steady blue sky and sunshine but also and mainly
because if he finds that right church he’ll know the way to the
Embassy and then to her flower shop.

But the spire of the Victorian Gothic
American Church in Paris (consecrated in 1887) apes the older
authentic spires of Paris, over a hundred of them. The law of
probabilities sabotages his quest. Louis wanders toward spire after
spire. Each broadens into another wrong church with stone saints
and black priests. He goes back to asking, over and over, “The
American Church in Paris, please” and continues to get blank looks
and shrugs or incomprehensible replies.

Hours pass. His head is aching badly from
the sun, his feet aching from the miles of streets and avenues
leading to dozens of wrong churches. He’s about to try another
unlikely spire when he remembers that, of course, the American
Church in Paris is riverside. All he has to do, then, is find the
river and stand in the middle of a bridge and he’ll be sure to see,
upstream or downstream, the spire of the right church that will
lead him to the Embassy and then to the flower shop and Louise and
allow him to use his two surviving phrases in French.

His new question is easier to understand, he
thinks, than “The Embassy,” way easier than “The American Church in
Paris” but he gets the same uncomprehending or incomprehensible
response to “River? River?” When he makes swimming motions with his
arms they stare at him queerly and shake their heads.

He’ll have to find the river on his own.
He knows it winds through the middle of Paris.
If he follows a sloping street he’s sure
to find it, sure to find a bridge and from the bridge see the spire
of the right church and from the right church find the Embassy and
from the Embassy find the street with the flower shop between the
toy shop and the corset shop and finally he’ll be able to say:
“
Tu es
jolie, Louise.
Je t’aime, Louise
.”
In his pocket he fingers the gold ring he’d found
long ago in the muck of a tunnel that led nowhere.

He wanders about, blind to everything but
the pitch of the streets. He finds no lasting pitch to any of them.
Finally, dizzy from all that sun on his bare head after a lifetime
of shade, he drags himself (slightly uphill, so the wrong way, but
he’s dead tired) into an elegant public garden with pruned trees
and a splashing fountain and ornate wrought-iron chairs. Nurses
with white aprons and perilously perched straw hats sit next to
baby carriages. Well-behaved children in sailor suits with high
dark stockings and vast straw hats roll hoops. In growing
confusion, Louis chooses an iron chair in the shade of a linden and
sits down heavily.