GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (47 page)

Snow transforms the stark graves but cruelly
refuses to shape Seymour out of invisibility into an animated
snowman, doesn’t even register his footprints as he wanders about
his empty white empire.

Sometimes Seymour yields to temptation and
follows visitors about in the hope they’re street-bound. But
they’re always grave-bound and he never glimpses the portal.

Seasons wheel by.

One soggy All Saints’ Day (perhaps the sixth
since he was steered into this stone trap) Seymour has an
illumination as he stops in his invisible tracks before a young
woman sweeping leaves off a grave. She’s the exact image of the
rose-encircled girl on the dish. Although photographic paper is a
more common support for a likeness than stoneware, he convinces
himself that this shapely blue-eyed blonde is the woman that had
meant so much to him in his first life.

He approaches her, closer than he’d ever
dared to a visitor, and says: “You’re so beautiful.” She goes on
sweeping.

He’s greatly relieved that his words, loud
to his ears, are inaudible to hers. He doesn’t want his (probable)
beloved to be the long-sought companionable ghost, partner in an
unsubstantial hand-in-hand affair. The relationship can be far more
intimate. That’s the illumination. Aren’t ghosts capable of
possession, psychic and maybe more than psychic? Seymour isn’t sure
he’s qualified for the wildly romantic role of incubus, demon
lover. But merging with her he’d at least be transported out of the
cemetery, stowed away in a disused portion of her brain.

Fusion with a living person, though,
supposes careful contact. Fusion hadn’t happened with the cemetery
functionary because of the (virtual) violence of their encounter.
He’d shot through and free of the man’s gravitational field. This
time he has to manage things with finesse.

Seymour is about to initiate the delicate
orbital approach when a young man comes into the plot breathless.
He kisses her cheek and, scandalously, she kisses his. Soon they
leave together arm in arm. Seymour looks at the forsaken stones.
The family name is Fournier. He wishes he could remember his
faithless darling’s first name.

Seymour spends the rest of that year and
most of the next searching for
Mademoiselle
Fournier. She haunts him. Month after month his
desire to be incarnated as her demon lover grows. He tries to
salvage scraps of information from his readings on paranormal
phenomena. Sometimes doubts trouble him. Can ghosts really be
demon-lovers? Don’t you have to be a demon to start with? In the
hierarchy of supernatural entities ghosts must be at the bottom of
the organization chart. Weren’t demons high-placed, angels gone
bad? Demons were dynamic, while ghosts were too feeble to manage
more than the odd apparition. Seymour can’t even pull that. So
would a transparent entity who could hardly budge a pebble be
capable of unleashing uninterrupted midnight-to-dawn
orgasms?

Assuming the operation is possible, Seymour
is determined to be a well-behaved demonic entity, no unclean
spirit to throw his darling into fits and convulsions or make her
spout blasphemous obscenities in a rasping guttural croak. Sadism
is no part of his love. Anyhow, he doesn’t want to call down
exorcism rites on him and maybe be humiliatingly expelled, as
dybbuks reputedly were, through the victim’s great toe or
worse.

On the following All Saints’ Day, he sees
her again, with her cascade of blonde hair and her breast-swollen
russet coat and her ritual broom.

Seymour sidles up and delicately passes into
her.

He’s instantly seized by a mighty
centrifugal force, a revolving door that revs up wildly, ejecting
him, a whirlwind bum’s-rush out, blown a hundred feet away against
an unflowered tomb with a violence that would have brained any
living creature.

Stretched out in misery, Seymour sees his
unattainable probable sweetheart go on sweeping and then the young
man comes into the plot breathless, kisses and is kissed and they
leave arm in arm.

Seymour looks beyond them for relief, beyond
the dark wall at the high windows on the other side of the street
and suffers even more cruelly from what he views there.

He starts sobbing.

The miracle happens then as the earth starts
speaking to him.

48

Spectral Happiness

Still in the posture of rejection, ear
pressed against the damp earth, heart festering with self-pity,
Seymour hears the plaint of the neglected dead.

There are no words to it. It’s a concentrate
of desolate sounds, a cracked bell tolling in fog, the snapping of
a cello string, wind weeping in icy branches, dark arctic breakers.
They’re the lonely sounds of long-neglected dead people. The sounds
are dingy white, black, muddled gray and smell musty.

Their slow blind grief lances Seymour’s
heart of self-pity. He redirects that pity their deep way, aware of
his spectral privileges, even in this place, able to see, able to
move and make tiny things move. The underprivileged people at his
feet are dark and inert. Seymour wants to console them. He
deciphers their names beneath the lichen of their cracked cockeyed
stones, identifies himself and then addresses them loudly to
penetrate the earth and the years they’ve been in it: Paul,
Sylvain, Mathilde, Marie, Germaine, Maurice, Estelle, Louise,
Charles.

At first it’s not easy engaging in one-way
small talk with these strangers. Finally he describes the things he
sees on his better side of the cemetery, such as the mixed blue and
white of the sky, blackbirds with their saucy yellow bills and
sunshine, marvelous even if he casts no shadow in it.

He stops and listens. The desolate sounds
modulate into deep organ chords of thankfulness at being remembered
and reminded of things they too had enjoyed.

Seymour gets up, drunk with joy at being
acknowledged. He seeks out other neglected tombs and repeats the
operation. Repeats it day after day, week after week, month after
month.

His praise of the little things in and
above the cemetery makes them great in his mind. They proclaim
their own glory. Among thousands: the grain and cleavage of pebbles
and a spider web spun between marble breasts and glittering with
dew. Also, the life-stages of leaves from spring bud to the
delicate ribs and lace of fall. Clouds come in all creative shapes:
drifting continents, profiles, breasts, elaborate
18
^th
century hairdos. There are
dominoed ladybugs and paired yellow butterflies announcing August.
His close vision dispels the monotony of snowfalls, each flake
revealing a unique needle or columnar or star-shaped configuration.
He tells them about it all.

So day and night Seymour pronounces their
names and bears them tidings from the world above. The sensed
gratitude and contentment of these hundreds, then thousands, of
once-forgotten people fill him with a calm happiness he’s sure he’d
never experienced in his former lifetime. He’s shed the burden of
self.

He hardly notices the living. That has its
dangers. Once, intent on reaching a distant plot, he passes through
the legs of a seated visitor with no consequences to either, no
organs having been involved, he supposes. But he watches his steps
after that.

Dedication to these impoverished people
develops into never-ending effort, there are so many of them. His
activities become even more exhausting after he discovers that what
gives them particular happiness is the tribute of flowers. He
starts plundering brand-new graves of their grief-stricken floral
splurge and redistributes memory to the poor. He takes no more than
one flower at a time. Even so, it’s a tremendous effort lifting a
single chrysanthemum and carting it all the way to a distant
section.

Once, a child stares wide-eyed at the rose
he’s painfully carting. “Momma, look, the flower’s floating!”
Seymour drops it. “Shh,” says the mother and goes on tending the
grave.

After that incident Seymour is careful to
operate only at night. It wouldn’t do to have his levitating floral
tributes spotted. He imagines the psychic phenomenon blown up by
the popular press and the subsequent invasion, day and night, of
reporters and photographers, capped by a publicity-hungry Jesuit
trying to exorcise him (was it painful?), not allowing him an
instant to get on with the meaningful work for his friends
below.

There are other exhausting aspects to his
vocation. Particularly challenging are the sunken cracked stones of
people with no commemorative plaques or wreaths intact to say their
names. Their stones are mute too. To comfort them Seymour has to
uncover their identity. Scratching away at the lichen that clogs
the memory of the stones, he feels like a coal-miner wielding a
pickax. Brushing aside dust-motes from the blurred letters is like
shoving rocks. And after all that devoted labor sometimes he finds
nothing but blur beneath the lichen. Even the memory of stones
fades.

When that happens he has to recite in
alphabetical order all the names he’d memorized on all the other
stones in the cemetery, marking a long pause for possible response
after each name. From Adélaide to Yvette the recital sometimes
takes a whole day. But he has all those days ahead of him, years
and decades. So have they.

He notes that his strength, never great,
wanes with the moon. On moonless nights grappling with dust and
lichen makes him feel like he’d washed all the windows of the
Empire State Building. But he goes on with the job, much more than
a job, a dedication.

The Jewish section of the cemetery poses
particular problems. How can he say their names? So many of them
are twisted in Hebrew characters he can’t decipher. So he recites
all the Jewish first names he can remember, the ones that aren’t in
the other part of the cemetery (Abraham, Aaron, Amos, Benjamin,
Gabriel, Golda, Herschele, Hymie, Hannah, Jacob, Judith, Miriam,
Moische, Rachel, Rebecca, Sarah, Saul, Simon, Samuel). Before
certain monuments dedicated to the unnamed because
unnameable
Victims of Nazi Barbarity
he gets in reply no more than a faint hiss like
radio waves from distant stars. It puzzles him until one night he
realizes their bodies aren’t here, never had been here except alive
and then not in this spot, weren’t even in their fatal Poland. They
are motes of a smoke avatar circling the earth in the upper
stratosphere. The messages are faint, confused and numberless. How
is it possible to get through to them?

One All Saints’ Day, Seymour spots the
blonde in the Fournier plot. Time has marked her a little by now,
but objectively she’s still beautiful. He moves away, perfectly
indifferent. He’s sure now that he’d never known her in his past
life.

Anyhow, the living don’t interest him
anymore.

Chapter 49

Goodbye

One sunny spring day Seymour is kneeling
before a neglected stone, happy with the fragrance of nearby lilacs
and trying to communicate it below, when suddenly he finds himself
elsewhere, in whiteness, on his back, rigid, heavy as lead and
unable to budge. His nostrils are filled with astringency.

At first he thinks he’s changed places with
the dead below. But they lie boxed in darkness. There’s light here,
a poor sterile artificial light and no lid over him but a blurred
ceiling. He hears a faint murmur of voices and sees blurred faces
looming for a second. He thinks: this is my first spook dream. But
what he sees has a shabby painful reality to it. Real people often
dream spooky dreams, he thinks. Spooks logically dream of real
things.

To escape from the dream Seymour imagines
himself on his feet, arms stretched up to the sky beyond the
ceiling, moving forward, shedding weight and taking off for the
lilacs and his deep friends.

He finds himself back to lightness in the
cemetery, still kneeling before the stone, casting no shadow in the
full moon. Has he lost all those daylight hours in the long
dream?

Then the sky fills with booming and colored
arabesques and he knows it’s Bastille Day, mid-July, so three
months from those fragrant April lilacs.

From the ground come the mournful sounds of
the dead neglected all that time.

He makes the rounds. Those same sounds come
from all of the graves he’s so carefully tended for so long. He has
to make up for lost time, redo what’s been undone. He runs from
grave to grave, apologizes, does a terser job on the nature
descriptions, often staggers under the burden of two flowers
now.

By this time he possesses their names and
location in his mind so that in less than two seasons he’s
reestablished the old contact with them.

But a second time (it’s full-leafed summer
now) the dream snatches Seymour away from them in the middle of a
tending gesture. He finds himself back, heavy as lead, in the white
room with the astringent smell and stony faces he can’t place
looking down at him. Their voices are an incomprehensible
drone.

Again, he imagines himself on his feet, arms
stretched up to the sky beyond the ceiling, moving forward toward
lightness and escape.

The drone fades and then everything else
fades and he awakens to the reality of the snow-covered cemetery,
months after, in the middle of the tending gesture he’d begun in
June above a grave, with the desolate plaint of his dead friends
he’s neglected again all that time.

Once more, he tries to reestablish the
interrupted communication. Some of his friends sulk and fail to
respond to his apologies and descriptions. But in another two
seasons he’s made most of them happy again. He would be happy
himself except for fear of another long dream and all his loving
labor undone and his friends unhappy once more.