GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (45 page)

Chapter 46

Out Of The Empire Of Death

In the absolute darkness (not a glimmer of
the dead-white quarry walls that surround them, not a glimmer of
hope, hope long since discarded like all those dead batteries and
digested elephant balls in their wake), Max shakes him out of
supposed sleep and whispers hoarsely that he can hear her creeping
up on them with her bare hands, can’t find his flashlight, he’d use
the sledgehammer or the crowbar on her but wouldn’t her blood on
them be like her hands on them and drain them dry?

Seymour gropes about the wet gravel-strewn
ground and finds his flashlight. In the faded circle of
illumination they see her a good twenty yards away, as strictly
commanded, curled up at the base of a rough-hewn column in apparent
sleep.

In the ghostly pallor they can make out the
contours of the vast white excavation with dozens of passageway
openings. She doesn’t move. Nothing moves except water slowly
dripping from ceiling stalactites. Seymour snaps the light off.
Light has to be economized. They’re down to their last
batteries.

Max whispers that she isn’t asleep, she’s
faking, like with the key. That key to out was a lot of shit, a
trap. Out Is A Double Cross. You can say that again. She’s waiting
for when we’re both asleep or conked out and then she’ll come and
eat our brains up with her hands. Told you not to let her come.
Keep on telling you we got to kill her before she gets to us.

Max’s whisper becomes an incomprehensible
mumble. Then he starts making drowning throat-sounds as he sinks
back into sleep.

Seymour can’t join in. Strangely, he hasn’t
slept a wink in all these days or weeks in the limestone quarries
that the door marked 147 had opened on. Once again the images of
flight come back. He vaguely remembers, as if it had happened years
before, fleeing down the rubble-choked corridors, up and down
fissured staircases, perhaps pursued by the Exiters, his feet
independent of his grief-stricken brain and automatically turning
the right way, Max close behind to catch him each time he
collapsed, which he did three times. Loyally (Seymour thought) Max
stuck by him, using persuasion and force to get him back on his
feet just as he’d done in the lightning-blasted bedroom.

But the third time, Seymour recalls, he’d
gasped, sick of everything, “Go on without me,” expecting some
understated expression of virile affection, getting instead, “How
the hell can I? I don’t know the way to the tunnel,” and Max yanked
him to his feet and forced him on until they finally reached Room
147 where they’d found the girl they called Gentille or Dummy
slumped against the steel door, her stringy hair hanging in front
of her face like a mop, her eyes white with inward focus, her hands
dangerously naked.

Once more Seymour hears Max (now snoring
away painfully by his side) commanding him to order her away from
the door because of course she’s not coming. In atonement for his
virtual crime of having voted to push Margaret down onto the
Prefect’s thirsty phallus Seymour had refused to leave Gentille
here to be caught by the Black Men.

Of course she’s coming, he’d said.

“You crazy?” Max yelled. “She’ll stick her
hands on us, pump us dry.”

Even though he too was scared of those naked
hands of hers, Seymour came up with an invention: “She knows the
way out, I don’t.” Keeping his distance, Seymour called out to
her.

But, incredibly, Dummy forswore the sea
ahead. Refused to go. Not without
Monsieur
Forster and
Madame
Williams and
Madame
Ricchi, Dummy said.

No, not Dummy, not dumbness, but Gentille, total
gentillesse
, total self-abnegation, totally unattainable by
him, Seymour Stein. At that latest confirmation of long-known fact
his grief and sense of guilt worsen, then and now, recalling it in
the darkness. He couldn’t bring himself to say that Louis and
Margaret and Helen were dead. He came up with another invention.
They’d been transferred and so didn’t need a tunnel to get to
Paris, he said. Gentille’s happiness for them was terrible.

Max’s snores strengthen to snorts. He cries
out “Bess!” and something about no flowers. After a moment of hard
breathing, he shakes Seymour. Let’s go, he commands, as though
paling stars and dawn birds signaled departure time.

Keeping the prescribed minimum of twenty
paces between herself and the men, Gentille goes through the
motions of guiding them in the obscure maze. Actually, it’s Seymour
who is in secret command. But since he has no more idea of where
they’re going than she has, it’s the empty motions of authority for
him, too.

Before each corridor crossing and in each
of the cave-like excavations with their dozens of passageways she
halts and asks submissively, as she’s been doing since the
beginning of their blind wandering in the quarries, “What shall I
do,
Monsieur
Saymore? Where shall I go now?” and Seymour says, “Straight
ahead” or “Left” or “Right,” right hand of course because it’s
never the right direction, just a succession of identical-looking
pallid corridors with flint nodules embedded in the walls and
opening up on vast worked-out spaces, excavations for the limestone
blocks that over the centuries had been incorporated into Paris
above.

One day or night Seymour stops and once
again expends precious current on the walls in hope of discovering
guiding messages from possible predecessors. Max shuffles past him
in the narrow passageway, following Gentille’s faint glow ahead.
Seymour’s circle of alarmingly faint light reveals carved
confusions, like ideograms or messages in Central Asian alphabets,
actually chance configurations created by pickaxes centuries
before. Not for the first time he makes out mortuary messages from
much earlier predecessors: the fossil remains of fish skeletons,
gigantic insects and extinct flowers. Those petrified flower
imprints are the nearest to a real flower he’d encountered in his
second life, he realizes. He thinks of the crepe-paper flower on
the table seen just before the blue explosion.

Louis, boohoo, Maggie, boohoo, boohoo,
Helen, boohoo, boohoo, boohoo.

Seymour is still at it when Max goes down
with a clatter of crowbar and shovel and groans with pain. He picks
something up from the ground, stares at it and strangles with rage.
Scrambles to his feet, snatches up the crowbar and hurls it at
Gentille. It clatters far short. Grabs the heavy shovel, heaves it
over his head, starts after her, goes down again and starts
howling. The echo is terrible. Gentille stares at him,
uncomprehendingly. It’s clear she wants to approach and comfort him
but doesn’t dare.

Seymour can’t get a word out of Max.
Blubbering, he holds up the first battery he’d slipped on and then
points at the second battery he’d slipped on, those dead batteries
they’d discarded long ago, they guess. They’ve been going around in
a circle all this time. She’d planned it that way, Max finally
brings out. No, says Seymour, but Max goes back to blubbering. By
this time the last batteries in their flashlight are about to give
up the ghost. Soon they’ll be groping in total darkness. Soon
they’ll be giving up the ghost too.

But something miraculous happens a minute
later as they turn left, following Gentille. Failing instructions
she’s taken the initiative for the first time at a passage
crossing.

Gentille’s beam turns yellow and she cries
out.

Seymour switches his flashlight on. His beam
is yellow too, an anemic straw-yellow, nothing like Van Gough
sun-flower yellow, but unmistakably yellow anyhow, and, look, the
bulb-filament is red, an anemic earthworm-red, nothing like
sun-rise red or poppy red, but a try at red anyhow, so the first
colors in their second lives here, except for that annihilating
blue flash in the bedroom.

Up ahead Gentille cries out again, a cry of
intense pain. She collapses to her knees. Seymour approaches
cautiously. He calls Max over. In the beam her face is a medallion
of suffering, and at the same time a deceptive affirmation of life.
Her mask has lost its post-mortem rigidity and whiteness, look,
aren’t her lips a little bit red, and maybe her hair too? Her face
is the face of a deathly sick person on the way to recovery. But
her moans are agonized. It’s another reversal of normality, like
hearts on the wrong side. Pallor is normal for them, color seems to
indicate fatal sickness.

Still moaning, she slowly arises and lurches
ahead, ignoring the passages to the right and the left. One of the
passageways is badly obstructed with rubble.

The miracle ceases. Her beam is back to gray
in the darkness. She stops moaning. Seymour switches on his
flashlight. His beam is back to gray in the darkness, the bulb
filament gray too. She drags herself into another excavation and
stops, facing the dozen passage openings. Her face is back to white
rigidity.

“
Where shall I go,
Monsieur
Saymore?” she whispers. “Tell me where to
go.”

He tells her to take whichever one she likes. She
stands there. He has to tell her which one. As she splashes through
puddles toward the designated opening, Max orders Seymour to order
her to go back to the place where there was color.

“It’s bad for her,” Seymour says.

“Worry about us,” says Max. “Tell her to go
back there, for chrissake.”

So Seymour tells her to go back there. He
neutralizes his participation in the directive by adding, “Unless
you don’t want to.” But Gentille’s not accustomed to exercising
choice, in this life or in the past one (doesn’t Seymour know
that?). Dutifully, she turns back out of the excavation as the men
stand at a safe distance. They follow her, eyes fixed on the
beam.

She reaches the intersection. Yellow comes
back. She collapses.

When she finally gets up, Max tells Seymour
she should go into the obstructed passageway. Seymour relays the
message. In his mind he’s reduced his participation to the function
of relay. She obeys. Her state briefly worsens. Or improves,
depending on the point of view.

But then she emerges from the zone of color and is
able to totter to another crossing. Max continues directing things,
Seymour relaying his commands, command after command and it goes on
and on like that, the beam sometimes yellow, sometimes gray and
getting weaker and weaker. She’s a remote-controlled Geiger counter
to localize color and real life for them.

A few seconds after Max discovers a spider
web, so life, she gasps, claws open her blouse and collapses,
rolling on her back and writhing. The beam of the flashlight is too
weak to go beyond the pale-straw register but she herself is
transformed by color into deceptive skin-deep normality, lying
there, still now, a lovely eighteen-year-old girl, her staring eyes
a fatal blue, her hair a fatal red, her cheeks flushed as though
she’d been running on a dune for a view of the sea.

Seymour falls to his knees beside her. He
stammers: “Forgive me, Gentille. Touch me, Gentille, take some of
me, there’s too much of me, don’t take it all, though, Gentille,
leave me a little.”

He holds his trembling hands over her for
her to reach out for a transfusion of life, not sure he won’t
snatch them away if she tries. She doesn’t try. She doesn’t hear or
see him. He lowers his right hand on to her between her small
breasts (her flesh is almost warm) and does lose something but not
the right things, guilt still festering. He receives a trickle of
things, so it’s an exchange: he sees a dark squalid room, the
lighthouse distorted through a smudged cracked window a hulking
figure over the bed and the little girl, hears her voice, “No,
Poppa, no, don’t hurt me again,” hears a woman’s distant voice
outside crying “
Elizabeth
!”

The flow ceases. In the circle of pale straw
light Elizabeth ceases. Their Geiger counter is dead. But it has
accomplished its function. Max at the end of the caved-in corridor
shouts: “Come here! We’re out!”

Seymour doesn’t move or answer. Max rushes
over and drags him to the caved-in passage. Yellow light seeps
through the chaotic blocks of fallen limestone. They hear a faint
functionary voice on the other side: “Closing time! Everybody
out!”

Everybody out. Max thrusts the crowbar
between the blocks and enlarges the gaps. “I don’t want to go,”
Seymour says. “We don’t deserve it.” But he has no choice. Max
forces him through. “You gotta show me the way to the airport.”

“Closing time! Closing time!” the jovial
functionary voice calls out again from a great distance. “Don’t
want to spend the night here, do you?”

No, neither night nor eternity. They break
free of the stone fragments, faces matted with spider webs like
birth cauls, and emerge into blinding glare.

Max’s eyes are the first to adapt to it.
Seymour hears a scared “Jesus” and seconds later he too is able to
focus on walls lined with tibias and skulls tight-packed from floor
to ceiling. Spotlights dramatize them.

Badly scared, Max wants to turn back to
their recent corridors. Seymour, joyous, all the things behind him
fading in his mind like a nightmare on awakening, has to drag him
forward. He explains that they’re in the Catacombs, a Paris tourist
attraction, he’s been there, which means they’re practically out
already.

Seymour sees with startling clarity what
awaits him up there: the great bronze Lion of Belfort and on the
other side of the
Avenue du Général Leclerc
the
Denfert-Rochereau
metro station with its glass-covered map and its
tangle of numbered lines. The way to Marie-Claude comes back,
evacuating from his brain Louis and Margaret and Helen and
Elizabeth: Line 4, change at
Montparnasse
(all those subterranean corridors and stairs) for Line 3
and climb up and out at
Sèvres-Babylonne
, a ten-minute walk to her street, three minutes
running.