GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (42 page)

With soft words and touches Margaret coaxes
Seymour away from the wall. Finally, sobbing, he tells her about it
and she strokes his poor battered face.

“Of course you are innocent Seymour.
Otherwise would the promise have been made to me that you will be
transferred back there to your sweetheart? As you knew her, of
course, and of course as she knew you.”

Seymour too falls into a deep slumber and
dreams of green trees and blue skies and fragrant flowers.

But when they awaken to the ruin and
drabness of the room and the memory of their trial, Margaret is
gone and they no longer believe in the promise supposedly made to
her on their behalf. They wonder what strange things had happened
to Margaret during the second trial transfer that had allowed her
to come back to them with a madly radiant face. They wonder how,
even in madness, she could have imagined promises made to her in
that space of torture and how they could have, for a short while,
believed in those promises themselves.

Chapter 42

Promises

Margaret tries to run from the looming car.
Her left high-heel twists and she catapults forward. Her bleeding
palms, outflung, catch the frail old man in the small of the back,
propelling him out of the path of the suddenly swerving car. In a
split-second she sees him staggering into safe downfall, straw hat
and spectacles and dentures flying and then she’s down herself,
sprawling, and replacing him in the fatal spot. It could easily be
taken for a gesture of supreme self-sacrifice, instead of the
result of a defective heel.

The black car is upon her.

But then past her as though some merciful
force had levitated it. She picks herself up unscathed.

Second miracle, the old man too is back on
his feet, holding his black-ribboned straw-hat, his spectacles and
dentures back in place, white suit strangely impeccable again. His
hair, moustache and beard bristle electrically, like a multitude of
rays, enlarging his face into a stern white-hot sun as he stares
thunderously at the car.

It veers and smashes into a clothing shop
window: a massacre and dismemberment of pink dummies. One of them
is thrust against the splintered windshield. With her long lashes
and simpering bow-lips she’s like a soliciting streetwalker poorly
equipped for her profession, armless, devoid of nipples and
smooth-crotched. But the bloody broken-faced driver is poorly
equipped to respond. A crowd gathers.

The old man is suddenly drained of power. He
trembles and pants as though he’d undertaken some strenuous task
that outstripped his strength. Margaret, deeply grateful for his
state, seizes the long-sought opportunity to exercise charity.
Maybe he can tell her where Jean’s street is. She links her arm in
the old man’s and guides him to a sidewalk café table. He’s
paper-light, like a dried-out mummy.

“Please, quickly, a glass of mineral water!”
she begs the bald waiter standing on tiptoe next to their table for
a better view of the accident. He ignores her, probably doesn’t
understand English. She begs again, with even greater urgency. He
goes on ignoring her.

“
Two double-cognacs, four-star
Hennessy
, VSOP
forty years of age immediately!” the old man commands, in
English.

The waiter jerks violently as though visited
by twenty thousand volts. With fantastic rapidity, like a
fast-motion film, he’s gone and back again with the two cognacs. He
resumes his tiptoed neck-craned position, taking in the shop-window
shambles and the growing crowd.

Another waiter trots back from it. “The
driver must have had a heart attack,” he says to his colleague.
“Looked pretty dead to me.”

“Of course he is dead,” the old man croaks
vindictively. “Dead and burning.” He starts cackling. He seems to
have recovered.

Both waiters look back at the glass-strewn
car halfway through the shop-window. There are no flames or
smoke.

Now the old man addresses Margaret. His lips are
motionless but his voice resounds in her head: “Your act of
self-sacrifice, woman, although perfectly superfluous, will be
rewarded. You shall witness the glory of My Creation, a spectacle
vouchsafed to few.”

Behind his thick lenses his eyes enlarge
into revolving spiral galaxies of blinding radiance. She squeezes
shut her eyes and loses consciousness.

Margaret awakens, eyes still shut, to
exultant music coming from all quarters. The volume swells.
Breakers of sound assault her. Thousands of trumpets puncture her
eardrums. Her bones vibrate to massed trombones. Cellos wrench her
bowels. A million-throated angelic choir bursts forth:

T h e h e a v
e n s r e l a t e

t h e g l o r
y o f G o d .

A n d t h e f
i r m a m e n t s h o w s f o r t h

H i s h a n d i w o r k.

Margaret keeps her eyes tightly shut in fear
of the dazzle of the announced splendor, the visual equivalent of
the deafening jubilation. She imagines the furnace of creation,
luminous light-years of gas pregnant with stars and worlds;
galactic whirlpools of fire; multitudes of suns glowing ruby-red,
topaz-yellow and diamond-blue like an immensely enlarged jeweler’s
window-display.

The celestial music breaks off. She opens
her eyes on black void.

Slowly Margaret makes out a low dim smear of light
and a poor scattering of dim stars overhead. Their faint light
shows that she is seated uncomfortably on a rocky plain. What has
happened to the glory of God? Where is His handiwork? Where is He?
Margaret casts herself down in a prayerful attitude. Volcanic
cinder lacerates her knees. She implores the Most High to listen
and reply to her supplications.

The Most High too would like to know what
has become of His Glory and Handiwork, what has happened, since His
last visit, to the most impressive spot in His universe. Where are
those hosts of stars, those illuminated Nebulas, those pulsing
Cepheid variables, those clusters and super clusters of
Island-Universes with their lovely outflung spiral arms? Now where
multitudes of galaxies rejoiced, reigns near void.

He demands an explanation of the solitary
elliptical galaxy, M39871. She bewails:

They have cruelly flown leaving me in grief
alone

To sigh and to moan to weep and to
groan.

On all sides receding my pleas unheeding

Though reddening with shame me they dared
blame

For flight

Crying till out of sight:

Quit us not

O reddening hot

Galaxy M39871 dot.

Disgruntled, the Most High understands that
they’ve burdened Him with yet another radical cosmological
definition. That early cozy cosmic egg hadn’t been good enough for
them. So they’d enlarged His area of activities (manageable though)
with the earth-centered universe bounded by star-studded
crystalline musical spheres. Couldn’t let good enough alone, so
revision into their new-fangled fatiguing solar system, pious
faggots couldn’t dissuade them. Then worse: their Milky Way with
its two hundred billion stars and eighty-three million-odd
inhabited planets to manage. And then far far worse: inhuman
enlargement with their billions of other galaxies. Now, all of it
expanding in Doppler red shift, diluting Him even further.

The Most High’s cogitations (should He try
to herd the errant galaxies back here or return to the Great Good
Place and deserved slumber?) are interrupted by a tiny indistinct
voice.

Who is that female mumbling on the Class IV
planetoid? Of course, the girl. Kneeling. Wants reward, of course,
for her self-sacrificing gesture. But what’s she saying? Can’t make
her out. Mumble, mumble. People mumble more and more as time goes
on. Time was anywhere in the universe one could hear the last chirp
of a dying sparrow. Can’t make her out. Seems to want a yes or no
answer. They never take no for an answer. Reward her with yes,
then.

But the Most High has no time to hear her
out for He has decided to pursue the errant galaxies immediately.
He makes a great effort and leaves a replicate of Himself in AAAM
(Automatic Affirmative Answer Mode), a rare privilege for the
beneficiaries. With the general decline of His vital forces He had
lost the precious power of efficient ubiquity. How many
World-Islands with countless billions of inhabited worlds, each
containing billions of anguished individuals of wildly variable
shapes, implore answers from non-AAAM replicas which, deaf and
dumb, are devoid of the capacity of reply to prayers?

And so Margaret Williams at long last
receives pre-programmed answers to great questions that she has
rehearsed for decades. Only the answer to the first of those
questions is a disappointment, a bitter disappointment:

“Oh Lord, must I return to the Prefecture?”
She has to repeat the question twice before the great voice
conquers void and replies in thunder: “YES!”

Margaret masters a sob and poses her second
question, a supplication:

“O Lord, if I dance for the Prefect, but
perhaps more, will I be transferred and be able to do good, save
Jean Haussier from the sin of suicide, take the veil as Sister
Margaret and minister to the poor little monsters, O Lord, will I
be transferred and be able to do all those good things, and so many
many more, if I dance, but perhaps more, for the Prefect, O
Lord?”

In thunder: “YES!”

“And, oh Lord, if I say yes to the Prefect
will not only I but also Seymour Stein be transferred and reunited
with Marie-Claude I-forget-her-last-name?”

“YES!”

“And Helen Ricchi be transferred and
reunited with Richard?”

“YES!”

“And Louis Forster be transferred and
reunited with Louise I-don’t-know-her-last-name?”

“YES!”

“And Max Pilsudski be transferred to Las
Vegas and reunited with Bess and give her the dachshund pup and
also oh, please, please, a little sweet baby girl?”

“YES!”

With that thunderous assent and before
Margaret Williams, heart brimming with gratitude, can thank the
Most High, she finds herself back, for the last time, in the
Prefecture, standing on the threshold of the ruined men’s room, her
heart filled with pity and joy for the poor recumbent figures who
are unaware of the marvelous future that awaits them.

In the
Avenue Mozart
café the bald waiter comes over with the bill for two
double cognacs and finds the table empty and the glasses empty
too.

“He forgets all the time,” the bald waiter
says to his colleague who is new on the job. “Look at this too.” He
points to a pair of high-buttoned shoes under the table. “Does that
all the time. Then he comes back an hour later in his stocking feet
for them. He’ll pay up then, don’t worry. Really belongs in an
institution.”

Time goes by. Galaxy M39871 and the Class IV
planetoid and the faint stars dwindle and finally vanish. The
replicate AAAM goes on proclaiming assent to the absolute void.

Chapter 43

Scarecrow

Tattered and ghostly with plaster dust,
Advocate staggers into the Men’s Room. He bears green-labeled
bottles of beer to celebrate the joyful news, stale for them, that
Margaret has been rescued, thanks again to Sub-Prefect Marchini.
Abandoning metaphor and circumlocution in the urgency of the thing,
Advocate points to the partition and announces that when Margaret
awakens they must convince her to dance for the Prefect. Advocate
too, as Margaret had done (but more convincingly, because
bureaucratic process rather than miracle is involved) promises good
things outside if they succeed in convincing her to do this little
harmless thing. Harmless! Perfectly harmless! Act, before it is too
late!

Advocate loses self-control. The Prefecture
is teetering on the brink of destruction, he cries.

Office after office menaced by premonitory
cracks.

Electric bulbs stricken blind as never
before.

Rust, gnawing filing cabinets into lace,
sabotaging the typewriters.

Panicked functionaries milling about in the
corridors imploring for order, for a firm hand on the tiller to
steer them out of these perilous waters. Receiving in answer to
their pleas the brutal intervention of the Black Men who beat them
back into their disintegrating offices.

Fantastically erroneous materializations:
three Croats, two Uzbeks and a skin-clad savage.

Act! Act! Before it is too late! Speak to
her! A third trial run is scheduled for you, perhaps this very day,
perhaps this very minute, a trial run you may never return from nor
ever quit. Act!

They’re terrorized at the idea of that third
trial, immanent and endless. After Advocate leaves, they ignore the
beer and debate the matter.

“Sure, we’ll speak to her!” Max cries.

Seymour mumbles: “Why not? Nobody’s forcing
her.”

Helen protests vehemently. Haven’t they
understood by now that there are no gifts in this place?

That leaves Louis.

Louis stares down at the floor. Finally he
says: “Dunno. Dunno. I’ll go along with the majority.”

Helen is outvoted.

Louis lies down on his cot and says nothing.
Max and Seymour go, in solemn delegation, to the women’s room,
knock on the door and then pull it open. The room is empty.

Days go by. Margaret doesn’t return. They
jog down the rubble-strewn corridors, Helen too, crying out
Margaret’s name and getting nothing but echoes in reply.

They decide to question the functionaries.
But each time they venture down the two corridors that lead to the
Administrative Hub they feel the stabbing pain in their temples
that indicates nearby supersonic whistles and hear the
clump-jangle,
clump-jangle
of Turnkey
and see a black hulking booted helmeted figure gripping a long
supple black club in one hand and wrenching open door after door
with the other. When that happens, they flee but imagine they can
hear the boots of the insect-eyed Exiter pursuing them for hours
until they regain the Living Quarters.