GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (46 page)

They start running in the direction of the
shuffling feet somewhere ahead, the echoing voices in English,
German and Italian, the murmurs, the teenage Bela Lugosi laughter
and woo-wooing ghost cries, sneezes, coughs, shrieking laughter.
They weave through the maze of damp corridors with their calcium
sampling of six million Parisians, thirty generations of them,
disinterred in the 18
^th
century
from overcrowded pestilential cemeteries.

At one moment they stop, panting and
perplexed, at a corridor crossing, not knowing which way to turn.
To their right, facing more ramparts of jawless skulls stands a
black marble altar with an inscription:

Listen dry bones

Listen to the voice of the Lord

Dry bones, you will live again

A faint echoing scrape of feet comes from
the right and they run past the altar, run and run until finally
they come to a rectangular opening with brighter light behind it.
They step into a broad banal corridor without skulls, the walls
covered with graffitied dates and names, the cement floor littered
with crumpled paper handkerchiefs and cigarette butts discarded by
herds of tourists on the threshold of the guided tour of death.

They’re out of it, the two of them, out by
the unauthorized way, as the melodramatic inscription over the
opening tells Seymour.

They’d missed the way to the exit. Didn’t
matter. They were exiting via that entrance, they were emerging
from that empire after having already, long ago, entered it the
usual way and not as tourists.

But stepping forward, Seymour’s heart goes
wild; the corridor whirls; he lets himself down, imitating Max.
Something held inhumanly taut within during all that time in the
quarry snaps. He loses consciousness.

When consciousness returns, Seymour sees
Max, color seeping into his cowboy suit, crouched forward between
his raised knees in the foetal position that is Seymour’s own. Max
raises his head, shakes it dazedly and picks himself up. Seymour
gets up too. He feels incredibly light, unburdened of all the
things behind him. He understands that the fit came from hysteric
joy at escape.

“Let’s get out of here,” he says. “We don’t
want to be locked in for the night.”

They hurry down the corridor and up a long
spiral stone staircase and exchange the theatrics of mortality for
a space of matter-of-factness occupied by two joking uniformed
functionaries with cigarettes pasted in the corners of their lips
and a ticket booth with the price of the visit (300 francs).

Strangely, the functionaries pay no
attention to the unauthorized exit of the two men, one of them
conspicuous in a cowboy outfit. Seymour observes that Max’s scarf
is bright red now.

Preparing his eyes for colored glare,
Seymour pulls the street door open. It takes all his strength to do
it. They step out into dull whiteness. The fog is so thick that it
conceals the great bronze lion and the
Avenue du Général Leclerc
with
the
Denfert-Rochereau
station on the other side. It drowns the light of
a midday streetlamp. The sun is a vague inflammation.

“The planes’ll be grounded,” Max mutters.
Seymour guides him toward the barely visible curb. They step off it
and venture forward alongside another pedestrian reduced to a dark
smear.

Blurred headlights loom; a horn blares
indignantly; they pull back and feel the wind of the speeding car,
crazy, speeding in fog. Seymour imagines the driver at the sudden
ghostlike sight of the three of them, jabbing his temple with an
outraged forefinger at the craziness of jaywalking in fog.

More blurred headlights loom. They dodge and zigzag
their way to the other side of the avenue where they blunder
against a mobile metal barrier guarding a blurred stretch of black
ditch. Seymour recalls how the French were always tearing up their
streets to get at their archaic pipes and wires, imposing long
circumnavigations on the pedestrians.

He makes out the dark shapes of other
fog-blinded trapped pedestrians trying to bypass the barrier in
single file. Seymour steers Max that way and they advance slowly.
Why so slowly? “Can you hear the planes?” Max says. All Seymour can
hear is the occasional blare of car horns and the slow shuffle of
the feet ahead. So slow. Too slow.

“Come on,” he says to Max who is looking up
at the invisible sky, mouth agape. Seymour steps out of the line
and short-circuits it, trotting past the dark figures.

A car roars behind him like a leaping beast
of prey. He throws himself aside and sprawls. A deafening roar as
though the car had passed over him. Choking from the exhaust fumes,
he lies there and sees a procession of dark feet shuffling past,
nobody commenting on his miraculous survival, nobody offering him a
hand. Dark feet after dark feet but now yellow cowboy boots.

Seymour pulls himself up, unscathed. Not
even his palms hurt although they’d borne the brunt of his fall.
Max is still gaping at the invisible sky.

They shuffle forward with the others,
testing the presence of the barrier now invisible in the thickening
fog.

The dark figure ahead turns left and they
follow. The barrier ends. A dark wall looms and they stand before a
stark giant portal, no metro entrance. Seymour tries to move away
but Max grabs him and forces him to follow the vague dark shapes
ahead through the entrance.

“The plane’s landing,” Max bellows in his
ear as though trying to outdo close jet engines. The only sound is
the soft crunch of feet on gravel.

The fog lifts like a theater curtain.

“Don’t take off without me!” Max yells and
starts running down the peculiar graveled avenue.

“Come back, Max!” Seymour cries. “It’s no
airport here!”

47

Demon Lover

Seymour breaks free and runs past the dark
procession he’d unknowingly been part of during that misguided time
in the fog.

None of the wreath-bearing mourners behind
the slow black hearse pay attention to his cries to Max as he runs
past the jumble of stones, vertical and horizontal, past the
grieving marble angels and all those crosses. He reaches a junction
and looks both ways but doesn’t see Max, just stones, angels and
crosses, a multitude of crosses.

Double cross. Seymour sinks down on a marble
bench, trying to exercise free will and deviate from the new script
imposed by the cruel, absurd and talentless
Author/Producer/Director/Set-Designer. He resists the temptation of
flight. He knows that if he runs back, the graveled avenue leading
out of this other empire of the dead won’t be there.

Seymour refuses the imposed role. No tears,
no hysteria. He recalls poor dead Helen’s remark about dignity,
about not giving them (Him, she should have said) the satisfaction
of panic. He knows from experience that revolting against the
suddenly revealed net cast over him would constrict him like a fly
in a spider-spun shroud.

He’s careful not to raise his eyes above the
crosses and beyond the dark wall, certain he’d see the top-story
windows of the neighboring buildings affording (in flagrant and
sadistic violation of the laws of optics) a frontal view of
unattainable things: happy close-knit families, a child watering a
red geranium on a window sill, slowly loving bedded couples.

Avoid prostration too, the alternate
scenario. Deny the Scriptwriter the malevolent joy of viewing him
as he is now, slumped forward on the bench, breathing hard, arms
dangling between his knees. So Seymour goes through the motions of
calm normality. Stands up and strolls to where the central avenue
had been. As expected, it’s not there. Unbroken dark wall where the
portal had been. No panic. The normal reaction of a lost person is
to ask.

Seymour stands in the path of a uniformed
cemetery functionary pushing a cart full of rotting flowers and
wreaths. To spite the sky, he bans any trace of anguish from his
voice and asks: “The way out, please?” Seymour expects elaborate
misdirection but the man doesn’t answer, doesn’t halt; the man is
upon him and Seymour passes unpleasantly through the man (no man)
as through poisonous fog.

For a few seconds he understands: despite
their flesh-and-blood appearance, these people are once-people, all
of them ghosts (the functionary, the mourners behind the hearse,
the once loved-ones sweeping the graves free of dead leaves and
offering flowered pots), the only real persons in the
phantom-infested cemetery the two of them, Seymour Stein and Max
Pilsudski.

Real?

Seymour stands there in a long suspension
of movement and breath, remembering the Catacombs functionaries who
hadn’t noticed their illicit exit, the abnormal resistance of the
door, the mourners who had ignored him sprawled on the street after
the car that had gone over (say, rather,
through
) him.

Seymour finally understands who the ghosts
are.

Combating metaphysical anguish with
technical considerations, he tries to situate the moment of his
second death. Fleeing the Hub, refusing to obey the injunction of
Advocate to return? Had he been exited then? Or, stepping out of
the melodramatic antechamber to the Empire of Death with that snap
of something vital within and loss of consciousness: had the warned
incompatibility with reality killed them then?

After a while, what’s left of Seymour is
able to explore the frontiers of his new state. He walks over and
tentatively touches a heavy-breasted nude female mourner, stone of
course. She resists. If he can go through people, granite is
spook-proof. He bends down and tries to pick up a pebble. It’s as
heavy as a boulder. He’s a featherweight in a world of intolerable
mass.

Impalpable and soundless, Seymour feels
lonely among these mourners, none of them mourning him. He starts
exploring the cemetery in search of Max, a quick job, he thinks. He
knows they’re in the small Montparnasse cemetery, a stone’s throw
(if he could throw it) from the Catacombs, bounded by the
Rue
Froidevaux
, the
Boulevard
Raspail
, the
Boulevard Edgar
Quinet
, and by a street
he can’t remember.

The cemetery turns out to be inexplicably vast. In
division after division the rest of that day Seymour peers and
calls, disturbing no one and getting no reply from the only
once-person who could possibly hear him.

He concludes that Max isn’t here. Back in
the half-life of the Prefecture they’d seen different things
through the Common Room window: Max an unpeopled dead city; he,
Seymour, the thronged Paris of 1951. Maybe what Max had seen,
entering this space, was no cemetery but the airport he’d longed
for all that time and claimed he could hear. Maybe he’d boarded the
Boeing, bound – he thought – for Las Vegas, joyous till the
solicitous hostess with the tray turned her fleshless face to him:
more of the Scriptwriter’s B-series horror tricks.

So Seymour is all by himself here, with
nothing, absolutely nothing, to do. Freed of the dictates of the
flesh, Seymour soon learns that his needs have been radically
simplified. But that radically complicates the problem of disposing
of time.

He tries to escape the cemetery prison and
his ghostly condition through sleep but discovers there’s no need
(so no possibility) of that nightly eclipse. No need or possibility
of dressing and undressing with all of those time-filling miniscule
actions: buttons buttoned and unbuttoned, zippers zipped and
unzipped, laces laced and unlaced. No need, either, for washing or
combing or shaving or nail clipping. No need to eat or drink with
all the associated actions and states that distract your mind from
contemplation of basic nothing: hunger and thirst, satiety,
elimination. Nothing to read except for the multi-volumned slabs
with their minimal plot of birth and death. And the breasts of the
19
^th
century Eros-Thanatos statuary
here have no uplifting effect on him.

The worst incapacity Seymour suffers is
impairment of memory, that fabulous refuge. He can remember plenty
of impersonal things like nearly all the varieties of Heinz soups,
New York Yankee batting-averages and the layout of Paris streets,
but very little about his real life before the half-life of the
Prefecture. He does remember having known a young woman of central
importance to him in this city. He tries to recall her name and
face and street. All he salvages is a golden horse head and the
rose-encircled image of a peasant girl on a dish.

Seymour tries to come up with ideas to
mitigate loneliness. He notes that he isn’t tricked out in shroud
or ectoplasmic spook attire. He’s still in civilian garb: his 1951
turtleneck sweater and corduroy cuffed trousers. Which means that
maybe some of the so-called people he sees here are ghosts like
himself. It’s an ideal place for apparitions with the ghost-rich
deposits underfoot. Couldn’t one ghost see and fraternize with
another? Swap experiences?

So for the rest of the summer he addresses
people in the cemetery (from a careful distance) and at night
halloos but with no result. It does kill time a little, though.

The leaves on the cemetery trees slowly lose
their green.

One dark day a wet gale blows the trees to
skeletons. The leaves lie plastered on the walks and tombs. The day
after, All Saints’ Day, the rush-hour press of mourners bearing
potted briars and chrysanthemums aggravates his sense of isolation
and he retires to old graves no one visits.