GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (48 page)

But years of happy exhausting devotion go by
without interruption.

Gradually he forgets the long leaden
dreams.

Seymour is describing a high summer flight
of pigeons to Joseph Lenoir (1842-1864) when, with no warning, the
distant blue sky becomes close white ceiling. Now unkind faces
hover over him and unkind hands force him into a sitting position,
then into a trembling standing position, then forward into a
tottering walk. There’s a way to escape from the heavy dream but he
can’t remember what it is.

Hands guide him back to the iron bed. He
stares up at the ceiling.

The ceiling fades and now he’s being wheeled
down corridors, a maze of corridors. He remembers the way to escape
and imagines himself standing, arms upflung, moving forward towards
freedom.

Seymour returns to the reality of the
cemetery but to the wrong side of it, to the street side of the
dark wall, the side he’d longed for at the start and doesn’t want
now. He wants the side where his underground companions are.

It’s sunrise. Seymour starts jogging about
the cemetery wall looking for the way in, careful to avoid contact
with the passersby.

At sunset, though, still seeking, eyes fixed
on the wall, he fails to pay attention to the outstretched legs of
an old man seated on a bench. Instead of passing through them as
he’d once done to legs, he trips and falls heavily, like lead.

The old man glares at him, white beard and
moustache bristling. Confused, Seymour apologizes and when the old
man responds to the apology (negatively: “If you opened your eyes
there would be no need for apologies!”) Seymour realizes that he’s
back to opaque ponderous flesh.

He prays for return to transparency and
weightlessness and return to his friends. The force of his yearning
is too great and his prayer is answered, beyond reason. He sheds
weight and rises. Snatches powerlessly at the dark wall sinking
past. Rises past top-story windows. Astonishes flights of pigeons.
Ascension accelerates. The cemetery is a pocket-handkerchief, then
a postage stamp, then a dot.

“My friends, my dear companions,” he cries
down to them. “Be patient, I’ll be back soon.”

But how can they hear him from that
distance?

Now: on his back, immobile as though cast in
lead. Different room. Different smell. Not astringency now. Smell
of paint. Room freshly painted gray. Shower-stall in corner.
Plastic curtains. Pattern of gray roses. Low table next to the cot.
Bouquet of flowers. False flowers. Gray paper. He thinks of the
real flowers he brings to his friends and waits for the dream to
end and allow him to do that.

He sees a wine-stained wall map of France
and recognizes it as the map of France poor Elizabeth had seemed to
pray to searching for a coastal village. Now he recognizes the
room, beneath renovation, as the Men’s Room in the Living Quarters
of the Prefecture in his second life, that pitiful half-life.

A pail bongs outside the door. He gets up
painfully and totters over to the door, casting a solid shadow,
like a malignant excrescence, in the light of the ceiling globe and
opens on Elizabeth at his feet, back from death, as sometimes
happens in dreams, back to her drab Gentille disguise, scrubbing
the floor. Tears burn his eyes. He forgets that he’s acting out a
dream and sinks to his knees, to her level.

“Oh Elizabeth, I thought you were dead. I
thought I had killed you.” His voice is feeble and cracked.

The plaster mask looks up a fearful instant
and then confides to the pail: “He doesn’t know the rules yet. He
doesn’t know it’s forbidden to talk to New Arrivals.”

She grabs her cleaning implements (splashing
dirty water over his leg) and runs away, her bony knee bonging and
bonging against the pail.

Escape from it. There’s a way to escape the
nightmare and join his friends but he can’t remember how.

Behind the door of the Women’s Room water
runs into a glass. A few seconds later the glass is set down on a
hard surface. Slow footsteps. The complaint of bedsprings.

He goes over to the door and knocks timidly,
then louder. Getting no answer, he pushes the door open a few
inches. The room is like a tiny chaotic library, all four walls
covered with books from floor to ceiling and hundreds of books on
the floor, a turmoil of books, crumbling piles of books. On the cot
a very old woman with thick reading glasses and wild white hair is
propped against the wall, absorbed in a book. He clears his throat.
She goes on reading. “Excuse me,” he says.

The old woman doesn’t respond. She must be
deaf. She finishes her page and looks up over her glasses. She
squints at him and finally says in a feeble cracked voice: “You
must be a suspended New Arrival. The Corsican will be furious.
There hasn’t been a suspended New Arrival since the overthrow of
the old Prefect. This is the Women’s Room. The Woman’s Room. The
Men’s Room is the next door to your left.”

She waits for him to disappear. He waits for
her to disappear along with the room and everything else and for
himself to cast off heaviness and go back to the interrupted
description of a flight of pigeons, probably not the same, in a
later sky, probably not blue (he’s prepared for that), to Joseph
Lenoir (1842-1864).

Nothing disappears. This is the longest of
the heavy dreams. The old woman continues staring at him. “I know
you, knew you. You’re … Seymour. Seymour I-forget-your-last-name.
Nobody told me you came out of it. After all this time.”

Again forgetting that this is a dream, he
says, “My God, you were Helen,” a terrible tense to inflict on
someone, even in a dream. But she doesn’t seem to care. She seems
anxious to return to her book, closed on a place-marking finger.
Why doesn’t she ask about Max? He starts explaining that after they
got out of the tunnel they ended up as ghosts in the Montparnasse
Cemetery and that he’d lost Max there.

She stares at him. “Don’t you know where
you’ve been all this time? Didn’t they tell you? Tell you about Max
and the others? Poor Seymour.”

He hears her, this caricature of the girl
called Helen he’d once attempted to fall in love with, trying to
make him believe where he’d been all that time – a hundred seasons
at least, she says – following the blind thunderbolt that had
killed Margaret and Louis and Max, killed everybody except him,
Seymour, and of course Hautecloque, cursed with immortality,
downgraded from prefect to a mindless toilet cleaner.

She’d seen it all, she says, when she limped
into that exploded room, the others charred but not him, Seymour,
and then she’d fainted. After, she’d visited him once a month in
their terrible hospital. But he was still in coma so she spaced her
visits the second year to every other month and the year after
every six months and then not at all.

Hearing her deny the reality of his years
of selfless devotion in the
Montparnasse
Cemetery, Seymour recalls the way out of nightmare, the way
back to his deep friends. He raises his arms heavenward, his eyes
too, staggers forward, trips over a pile of books and sprawls. His
sleeve is shoved up, disclosing, inches from his eyes, a scrawny
old arm, heavily veined and covered with white hairs. He guesses
his face must match hers in decrepitude. He starts
crying.

The old woman tries to comfort the old man.
Things are much better here since the Corsican took over long ago.
Ruin has been halted and repaired, showers installed, toilets
modernized, the food vastly improved although far from good. Above
all, books, thousands and thousands of books available as he could
see. Now that he’s out of coma the two of them could discuss books
until the final age-clobber, with any luck nothing after that.

An authoritarian fist thumps on the door. A
second later it bangs open and Sadie stands on the threshold,
unchanged with her iron-gray hair done up in a bun, her severe
marble-white face and her frigid gray gaze fastened on Seymour
spread-eagled among books and crying.

She orders Number Two and Number Four to
prepare themselves for a visit, an all-important visit, in the
Common Room.

The Common Room has been repainted and
refurnished. Two new leather armchairs have replaced the five
battered ones before the window. It frames blue summer outside.
They turn their back to it and sit down at the new oak table.
Seymour slumps forward and rests his head on his crossed arms. He
closes his eyes and tries to summon up incised stones. He hears the
old woman’s dry cough and the pages of her book turning.

Footsteps. Sadie barks: “Attention!” Seymour
sits up. Helen closes her book on a finger and looks up.

Accompanied by Advocate in deferent
attendance, Prefect Marchini, resplendent in his white uniform,
advances and surveys the room with his piercing black eyes. He
strides to the table, touches the surface and examines his finger.
“Dust,” he pronounces and scribbles in a notebook. He turns to the
seated pair, looking at them as though they were more intrusive
grains of dust.

“I have come to announce your transfer and
settle the appertaining administrative details.” He signals to
Advocate who places papers and a pen before each of them.

The old man and the old woman protest
feebly. They don’t want to be transferred. Helen says that she’s
content to be where she is, not really here but in better places as
long as the books are in supply.

“You cannot remain here. Now that Number
Four has returned, both of you must be transferred. You are
unwanted relics of a bygone dark period in the history of the
Prefecture. There will be no more errors committed. Corridors will
no longer collapse. No files will be misplaced. Above all, there
will be no more Suspended Arrivals.”

Prefect Marchini turns his back on them and
strides out of the room.

“My friends …” Advocate begins.

“No friend of mine. No transfer for me,”
says Seymour.

“No friend of mine. No transfer for me,”
says Helen.

“My friends, my dear friends, be reasonable,
I implore you. Read and sign (in triplicate) the release document.
It is impossible for you to prolong your sojourn here. The only
alternative to transfer is exit.”

“Exit, then,” says Helen.

“Yes, exit,” says Seymour.

“Exit?” exclaims Advocate. “After all this –
as you say – ‘time’? This – to quote you – ‘long wait’? Now that
you are on the very verge of permanent transfer? Transfer to the
quays of Paris? Beaches? Mountains? Fine food and wine? Fields of
golden wheat sprinkled with red poppies? Larks arising from them?
Love?”

“Love? The scarecrow I am?” says Seymour.
“More of your torture.”

“I assure you that you will win back the
youth you possessed when you materialized here,” says Advocate.

“Another one of your traps. The way you
trapped and murdered Margaret and Louis and Max with your lie.”

“No, no,” says Advocate. He plunges his face
in his hands a few seconds and emerges, muscles of grief tugging at
his rigid mask.

“
I plead responsible but not guilty for
that tragedy. Contact between
Madame
Williams and the former Prefect was to have lasted no more
than the blink of an eye. In no way was the punishment to have
involved the innocent victim, not to mention the others. A
monstrous negligence was committed, on an echelon far higher than
mine.”

Advocate recoils at his words, glances at
the ceiling, waits for something to happen. Nothing happens. He
resumes: “Blasphemy. Yes, blasphemy. Let me confess to more. At the
height of disorder, before Prefect Marchini threw up a frail
temporary barrier against it, I found myself wishing for the total
triumph of chaos and once had a splendid dream of it happening. The
strange wind that periodically sweeps through the corridors rose to
unimaginable tempest force. The millions of dossiers took wing and
vanished. The pillars shook and fissured and finally the entire
edifice collapsed on us, freeing us to void, blessed void. I woke,
alas, to things as they were, later corrected by Prefect Marchini.
But Prefect Marchini is fighting a rear-guard action against chaos.
For …”

Advocate breaks off, leans forward toward
the old people and whispers: “Clearly, the Central Intelligence is
disintegrating. Soon the forces of cohesion in the universe from
atom to galaxy will collapse. All things will come apart and the
dream will come to pass and we too will be free, returned forever
to void. What other prospect awaits us? We can hope for nothing
better, unlike you, able to return out there and smell roses and
taste rare river fish and weigh beloved bosoms in your cupped
hands. And you say no to all that. How can you possibly say no to
all that?”

“Another trap,” says Helen.

“To make us hope, another one of your
tortures,” says Seymour.

“No, no, never, I who share your pain would
never knowingly torture you, never,” says Advocate, eyes
brimming.

“Another one of your tortures,” says Helen.
“Like naked and old in the honeymoon room.”

“The little girl and the butcher with the
cleaver,” says Seymour.

Advocate winces as though pelted with rocks
as the outrageous catalogue of a second lifetime of suffering
tumbles out, each item scarcely formulated in the mind of one than
expressed by the other, so that finally neither of them knows who
says it, a fusion in bitterness, a polyphonic litany of grief and
grievances: all that hope in those corridors, hope before all those
doors that opened on nothing, hope at the beginning of the tunnel
that ended in urinals, hope at the two trial-runs, the horror of
them, no more of that, hope is what makes you suffer, we’ve
abandoned hope, you can’t hurt us anymore, what we want is exit,
not transfer, exit, exit, exit.