GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (5 page)

Seymour, standing now, places his hand
consolingly on Max’s shoulder. Max stops sobbing although the tears
keep dripping down his face. His eyes, inches from Seymour’s right
ankle, focus wetly on Seymour’s tag. Wiping his eyes with a shaggy
forearm, he stares again at the tag, lets out a great cry and jerks
back as though Seymour’s hand were red hot. He scrambles to his
feet, bellowing:

“Jesus, you’re dead. You goddam Jew corpse,
you keep away from me!”

Stung to the quick and the dead by the
double insult, Seymour invites Max to look at his own tag. Max’s
death-date had been chanted out, but in French.
“Deux Mille”
didn’t mean anything to Max. The nearest
to it was the name of an old-time Hollywood producer, Cecil B.
DeMille, no connection. But written black on white, the figures
2000 coming after 1950 do mean something. Max remembers the giant
tree and the splintering windshield.

Max starts howling, inhumanly. It’s terrible
when a hairy man, built like a Mack truck and who says “fuck” every
third word, breaks down like that.

His howls fail to rouse Sub-Prefect Marchini
out of his deep reflection.

Helen is standing quietly in her corner,
eyes shut. She’s a little sorry she hasn’t been chosen to exit with
the others. Dying, even a second time, doesn’t really bother her.
She doesn’t want to return to Paris. She’d just walk up and down in
it again, from dawn to dusk, searching for one face among millions
of faces as she’d done for two years back then.

Now she hears Max’s howl of terror and
instinctively moves toward it. She places her hand on his heaving
shoulder and looks down at his ankle. “Max,” she says. His name is
Max. The other is Seymour. The tags come as a shock but at least
they make communication easy, like the badges people wear at
conventions.

“
B-Bess. R-Rickie. B-Bess.
R-Rickie.”
He goes on
blubbering the names.

Helen gets out of him that Bess is (was)
Max’s wife. Rickie is (was) the dachshund pup he’d bought for her
birthday. They had no children. He’d been sitting nice and quiet
alongside him when the truck went into the skid.

“I wanna phone Bess, tell her what happened
to me and ask about Rickie and they won’t let me, they won’t let me
phone Bess.”

Helen’s hand soothes his head now. “Max, I
don’t think you’ll be able to get through to Bess anyhow. If you
did, it might be bad for her heart.”

“I don’t wanna stay here. I wanna fly back
to Las Vegas. I could do that, couldn’t I, huh? Be close to Beth.
And find out if Rickie’s okay.”

“Maybe it’s possible, Max, but I don’t
really know. I’m new here myself.” Her hand goes on comforting
him.

At that moment, Maggie looks past
Sub-Prefect Marchini standing before her in meditation. She catches
sight of herself again in the tarnished full-length mirror, draped
in towels like swaddling clothes.

But this time she shrinks back from her
image in terror.

Chapter 5

Margaret’s Vow

Terror because her hair and mouth, once red,
are pale gray. Her eyes, once green, are black as night. She sees
the towels not as swaddling clothes now but as a seven-piece
shroud.

The second death process is already under
way, she thinks. She goes back to sobbing convulsively.

Maggie doesn’t understand that loss of color
is perfectly normal in this space. No more than the four other
Arrivals, she hasn’t noticed that everything in the vast
bureaucratic room is black and white and gray as in an
old-fashioned pre-Technicolor movie. Color (as they’ll soon see) is
outside with that blue sky and those golden domes and gay striped
awnings and, briefly, with what the Arrivals bring into the room.
They quickly lose it. Already Helen’s resurrected mousy brown hair
is a shade of mousy gray and Louis’ sky-blue Nordic eyes Latino
black.

Color can’t survive here. Red turns to gray
the way fire turns to ashes. Green turns black the way grass
molders to compost. Blue too turns black, the way afternoon sky
loses out to night. All these losses happen much faster here than
outside.

Maggie, unaware of this phenomenon, sees
herself condemned again to terrible things. Runny in a box beneath
sunny earth. Or sentenced back to her terminal state. She imagines
blindness and mental confusion in the wheelchair, her lovely body
in ruin again.

She throws herself on her knees before the
moth-eaten sub-prefectoral uniform. A torrent of pleas and vows
pours from her gray lips. Spare her from the nickeled chair and the
long box and she would be good, forever good, chaste and prayerful
and saved.

Beyond this ragged figure of authority
Maggie pours out her soul to the Supreme Authority, God
Himself.

She vows an end to frivolity.

An end to drunkenness and gluttony.

Vows an end to lascivious nude dancing.

An end to dancing of any sort.

Vows an end to the poisoned delights of the
flesh.

Vows absolute chastity until holy
post-nuptial union with Jean Hussier in the event of Divine
Forgiveness and transfer out there.

Or perhaps, better yet, union with no man
ever again, her sole bridegroom Jesus Christ. She sees herself
saved, taking the veil as Sister Margaret as she’d once imagined
doing at the age of thirteen before the depravities of fourteen.
Saved spiritually and physically, leading a cloistered life,
cloistered but life anyhow. Her fiery hair (fiery again, for once
the dying process reversed, it was sure to win back its natural
hue) censored by scissors and the remnants condemned to solitary
confinement beneath a nun’s cowl. Her depraved body concealed and
knowing no itch other than the holy itch of rough-spun cloth.

Meditation.

Fasts.

Vigils.

Prayer.

Penitence. Penitence. Penitence.

Oh, unending Penitence for her sinful
selfish life, for the men she’d inflicted suffering on. She thinks
of Jean back in 1937 here in Paris, sees Jean’s chalky face that
last time, hears his threat of suicide if she left him. Oh Jean.
What happened to you? And now: Oh Louis. For she sees a bulging bit
of Louis’ towel – no towel but a shroud like hers – projecting from
the pillar. Louis, the most recent of her victims, whom she’d
involved in unmerited punishment.

Sudden spiritual illumination transfigures
Margaret’s lovely tear-stained features. Margaret (never again
Maggie) understands the self-deception of her pleas, the hypocrisy
of her longing to embrace humiliations and privations. Not out of
genuine repentance, not out of love of God but out of abject terror
at extinction, a clinging to life on any terms.

Now Margaret pleads for Louis with great
eloquence, crying out in essence to Sub-Prefect Marchini: send me
back to no-being but spare Louis from it, Louis, my partner in sin,
but free from sin himself because unconscious of it. Whatever I
touch or look upon I destroy.

Louis stares at the white-clad kneeling girl
with the modestly compressed bosom and the strange gray hair. Her
wet face is radiant with intense spirituality. Louis is completely
confused. He can’t make the connection between the kneeling unclad
shameless girl with the flaming red hair of a few minutes before
and this one, kneeling too but in supplication. There’s a faint
puzzling resemblance, though, between the two.

Now he understands that she’s begging for
annihilation in his place. He finds that incomprehensible. Also
intolerable.

Clutching his towel, Louis steps out from
behind his pillar and proclaims her innocence.

Not this girl, the other girl, he
exclaims.

Not true! Not true! she exclaims, thinking
he’s referring to the thin sad-faced girl called Helen
Something.

True! True! he exclaims.

Then he understands that she’s defending the
other girl, the other girl who must be her sister. He understands
that faint puzzling resemblance now. Louis is a deeply religious
man when he thinks of religion. Like so many of his compatriots,
his mind naturally operates in the Manichean mode of black and
white. He has difficulty understanding how Virtue and Vice can be
related and how Virtue can accept annihilation to save Vice.

Louis, who had heroically defied poorly
aimed Spanish lead at San Juan Hill in July 1898, matches her
selfless sacrifice. Heroically, he takes the thing upon
himself.

He forced her to do what she did, he
exclaims, meaning her sister, of course.

Not true, it was my fault! she exclaims.

No, mine! he persists.

The quarrel of goodness quickens. As at a
spirited tennis-match, the functionaries’ heads pivot from right to
left and from left to right with each retort and counter-retort of
abnegation. Few of them understand English. But the intense emotion
of the exchange between the handsome lad and the lovely girl, like
a climactic duo in Italian opera, overcomes the language barrier.
The chins of a few of the lower-echelon female functionaries
tremble.

Sub-Prefect Marchini is deaf to the pathos.
He finally emerges from reflection, determined to run the risk of
encroaching on the prerogatives of his hierarchical superior. He
turns to the stern-faced female functionary.

“Summon the Exit Squad at once!”

She seizes the largest of the whistles
hanging from her squat neck, imports vast quantities of air in her
lungs, puffing up and leaning back like a cobra ready to strike.
Her eyes pop as she venomously injects all of the air into the
whistle.

There’s no sound. A needle-sharp pain in
their temples informs the Five that the summons is transpiring at
an inhuman pitch as though alerting a beast sensitive to extreme
frequencies. In the continuing silence the lower-echelon female
functionaries huddle together defensively like veldt antelopes
scenting approaching meat-eaters.

A door bursts open. Four black hulking
booted helmeted figures trot into the room. They are encased in
black leather. The only visible part of them are their grim mouths
and massive chins beneath protective Plexiglas visors that resemble
great panoramic insect eyes. Their gloved hands grip long supple
black clubs.

“Dispose of the individuals clad in towels,
all five of them!” commands Sub-Prefect Marchini, forgetting that
he’d spared one of those five.

Three of the Exiters (also known as the
Black Men) corral Louis and Seymour and Max.

“Oh what a pity,” whispers the
fussily-dressed scented young functionary drawing close to Louis.
“But there is no pain involved and guaranteed peace after, no
second awakening, ever, ever.”

He approaches his hand to Louis’ bare heroic
chest. A good inch away Louis feels the icy aura and pulls
back.

“Hand down!” barks the severe-faced female
functionary with the iron-gray bun. The Exiters turn their
insect-eyed heads, like praying mantises, toward him.

Trying for an expression of impugned
innocence, the young functionary holds up, as for inspection, his
safely rubber-clad hands.

“Hand down! Distance!”

Pouting, the young functionary lowers his
hands and steps back.

Three of the Exiters start marching the
three men away to the void they should never have left. They offer
no resistance. Max is glad to be leaving this crazy place. He
thinks they’re taking him to a Las Vegas-bound Boeing. Helen
accompanies him.

Creaking with totalitarian leather, the
fourth Exiter marches toward Margaret who has totally broken
down.

A door opens and closes with quiet
authority. Sudden silence in the room. The functionaries, including
the five Exiters and Sub-Prefect Marchini, stiffen to
attention.

A murmur. Feet withdrawing. Feet
approaching. A growing stench of rotting flowers. Margaret breathes
through her mouth and opens her eyes. The sub-prefectoral scuffed
shoes and moth-eaten trousers have made way to brilliant black
English shoes and spotless white trousers with razor-sharp
creases.

Raising her eyes she sees an impeccable
white uniform covered with braid that would be golden if color
existed in this dusty space, golden like the buttons, epaulettes
and all those medals. A ceremonial sword in an engraved silver
scabbard hangs smartly by his side.

Beneath the braided cap, an immensely long
aristocratic face, a frighteningly chalky-white face. The whiteness
can’t come from emotion, because his emaciated face is
expressionless like a white death-mask cast a week after
decease.

For long seconds Margaret is wordless,
paralyzed with dread. Then she returns to imploration on behalf of
her victim. One of her wild gestures of despair bursts a safety-pin
and the uppermost towel starts slipping, barely retained by her
nipples. She clutches it into half-way decency and blushes dark
gray.

“Spare Louis Forster, sir. Oh sir, he’s innocent.
Destroy me but not him. Destroy me body and soul,” she implores the
frightening powerful presence.

“
Cela serait vraiment bien
dommage, mon enfant
,”
says
PrEfet
D’Aubier de Hautecloque
(for yes, it is he) gazing down at her. His voice seems to
come from a deep vault. The words emerge between the motionless
lips of his death-mask and the stench of rotting flowers is
overpowering.

Strangely, Margaret understands the remark
perfectly although in her previous existence she’d been unreceptive
to foreign tongues, linguistically speaking. In reply to her
passionately expressed willingness to lose her renovated body, the
dread presence had said: “That would indeed be a great pity, my
child.”

The Prefect delicately tugs off his
right-hand white glove. The Sub-Prefect stares intensely at that
starved white hand that resembles an albino open-jawed prehistoric
lizard. It moves toward the girl’s shoulder. Will he dare? Here?
Before witnesses? Perhaps before the pitiless gaze of the
omniscient omnipotent Most High Himself? The Sub-Prefect silently
prays that the Prefect will dare.