GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (26 page)

Suddenly they are spewed out into free
space, first Louis and then Max and then Seymour, still clutching
his flashlight. The roar and stinking wind stop. The silence is
broken only by their groans.

All three of them find themselves ejected
headfirst and belly down into the original intact tunnel, sprawled
out in deep muck in an attitude of oriental prostration before what
rises impeccable above them a dozen yards away: a white wall ending
the tunnel.

No sewer after all, no iron-rungs to
negotiate or manhole cover to heave aside, Seymour thinks. Behind
that white wall lies direct access to blue sky and green trees.

They struggle to their feet and in silence
totter closer. In the strengthening light of the three flashlights
the wall gains in whiteness, an incredible pure white as they’d
never seen white in this dingy second life, the white of what
doesn’t exist here: snow-drops, plum blossoms, snowy peaks,
bridal-gowns, wedding roses, honeymoon clouds.

Max drops the flashlight and clutches the
sledgehammer. Seymour picks up the crowbar. Louis turns to
them.

“You just hand over that there sledgehammer,
Pilsudski, no more monkey business. And you give me that there
crowbar, Stein.”

They don’t react. They probably don’t hear
the command. They keep on staring at the pure white wall. Louis
pushes them back and wrenches the tools out of their hands.

“We’re goin’ back to the women first, like I
said.”

Max and Seymour don’t hear him. They’re
staring at the wall, sure of what lies immediately on the other
side of it. For Seymour, a certain street in the
6
^th
arrondissement
with a great golden horse head and a massive door. For Max,
an airport with a waiting Boeing.

Now Louis too stares at the wall.

Stares and imagines
on the other side of it the elegant
flower-shop where for months he’d pretended to admire seasonal
flowers in the display window: first daffodils like gay yellow
telephones and then tulips, red like her cheeks when she caught his
gaze on her and now, this June day on the other side of the pure
white wall, he’ll push the door open on the three aproned girls
twittering in French and Louise will smile shyly and in lovely
fragmented English counsel his bouquet and this time he’ll know
she’s jealous of the girl she thinks the bouquet’s for but it’s for
her as she’ll discover an hour later at closing time when she comes
out and finds him there (the past corrected by hindsight into a new
future) with the flowers and also with the gold ring cleaned of
muck, earned by a lifetime of suffering here, waiting for her, her
honey hair and shy smile.

Louis drops the crowbar, lifts the
sledgehammer and puts all his power behind the blow, face screwed
up against the expected glare of sunny blue sky.
The wall explodes, leaving a big jagged
opening like a star, but not Max’s dead black star at the start of
the tunnel. This one is a blinding dazzle of a star.

Weeping, they stumble through the intense
star. They grope about
blindly for long seconds.

Suddenly their eyes are able to cope with
the light on the other side of the wall and their minds have to
cope with what they see there.

They see overhead, not limitless blue sky
but familiar cracked ceiling. Instead of the promised sun, banks of
mercury lights glaring down on the familiar dingy white tile walls,
the squat-toilets with soiled bungholes, the ranked urinals, the
rows of chipped washbasins.

And above the washbasins, tarnished mirrors
in which they see three gaunt swaying men gaping at them out of
feverish eyes, bent arthritically from the long crouch. They see
their tattered beshitted clothes, their muck-caked feet, their
bleeding hands, the blood still gray, not the promised red. They
see their white tangled hair and white growth of beard and wonder
if the white comes from old age or plaster dust.

The men stand motionless and speechless for
a minute, staring at their images.

Seymour drags himself over to the urinals.
When he finishes and buttons up he finally breaks the silence.

“All that work just for a piss.”

“Where’s the airport?” says Max.

Impassive, Louis slowly circumnavigates the
WC, knocking methodically, inch by inch, on the walls for a hollow
sound that doesn’t come.

“Where’s the airport?” says Max.

After a while Louis returns to his starting
point. He says in a heavy dead voice: “It’s punishment. Divine
punishment for betraying the women.” (Did Louis say ‘women’ or
‘woman’?) “I was tempted by the devil and yielded. Now I pay the
price for sinning.”

“We’re being played with,” says Seymour.
“We’re pieces of shit to them.”

“The lights were on here,” Louis says.

“Expecting company,” says Seymour. “Played
with all along. Pieces of shit.”

They drag themselves out of the WC by the
conventional route. On the opposite wall of the corridor they see
the big scrawled admonition:
OUT IS A DOUBLE-CROSS
!

They turn a corner and see the spiral iron staircase
that leads back to their starting point.

The WC that climaxed the tunnel must have
been one of the very first rooms they’d explored long ago, knocking
and knocking everywhere on the walls and, strangely, getting no
hollow response. But even if they had, the revealed tunnel would
have led them, at the price of great suffering, not to Paris but to
a room sarcastically numbered 1776, that year of independence for
Good Americans.

Seymour and Louis start pulling themselves
up the spiral staircase.

Max stands at the foot of the staircase,
looking up at them.

“Where’s the airport?” he says.

Chapter 29

Hero On His Knees

When they finally turn into their home
corridor, Louis emerges from mute despair long enough to command
Max and Seymour to quit blubbering and to go into the WC. They
can’t let the women see and smell them the way they are.

They wash themselves over a bunghole. They
wash and wash and wash. The white of their hair proves to be
plaster dust, not old age. Then they stagger barefoot into the
men’s room, clutching a towel about their loins as they’d done that
first time in their distant youth following resurrection. They cram
old food down their throats and collapse on their beds and sleep
for days.

Seymour wakes up with a splitting headache
and a confused memory of dreams of tunnels and giant spider webs
and (probably not a dream) the cleaning girl called Stupid noisily
bringing in trays and clean clothing and looking down at him with
unbearable pity till he escaped from it by returning to the dream
refuge of tunnels and giant spider webs.

The other two men are still in bed, Max
snoring painfully, Louis staring up at the ceiling and mumbling
what sounds like prayers. Seymour gets up, dresses and goes into
the women’s room where he finds Helen in her usual position, seated
on her bed staring down at a book of statistics. She must know the
details of coal imports for the decade 1880-1890 by heart by now,
he thinks.

She looks up and greets him as though he’d
been absent an hour instead of days or weeks. She doesn’t even ask
him how things had gone all that time in the depths, as if there
was no point asking. Seymour tells her anyhow.

“So it was nothing,” he concludes. “Except
for the book. I found a real book with ‘Shakespeare’ on the spine.
I thought of you. I tried to bring it back. It was like a booby
trap. As soon as I touched it the roof caved in. It must be under
tons of rubble now. I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter. If you’d brought it back
the pages would have been blank or printed in Serbo-Croat.”

“Serbo-Croat?”

“Or Eskimo. Any language I can’t read.”

“I’m beginning to think you were right all
along. We’re being played with. They treat us like pieces … Like
garbage they treat us.”

“Didn’t you know that? I’ve always known
that, from the beginning, here and back then.”

“What can we do about it?”

“Not try to do anything about it. Not give
them that satisfaction.”

Seymour tries her formula. He gives up the
underground quest. He’s willing to admit that there may be a tunnel
to the real world but if so it’s behind one of those thick steel
doors with intricate impregnable locks. If he jogs down nearby
corridors now it’s purely for exercise. He opens no more doors. He
sometimes convinces Max to join him.

Once, they hear Margaret’s tragic voice
somewhere in the maze. She’s still trying to do something about it.
“Oh sir, please let me dance for you. Let me dance for you and then
let me go out.” The men don’t know what she means, who she’s
talking to. She repeats the imploration over and over, each time
fainter as she moves away from the men but no closer to the
Prefect.

Louis spends most of the time prostrate in
bed, praying to the ceiling. He’s abdicated leadership. He’s a
general who’s deserted, leaving his troops to their own devices.
Their devices are feeble. Max and Seymour feel like paralytics
suddenly deprived of braces. Their pillar of strength is broken.
They don’t recognize the hero of San Juan Hill, the bridger of
chasms, the fearless explorer of dark corridors in that limp
recumbent figure begging the cracked ceiling for forgiveness.

When Helen tries to coax him out of bed he
lies motionless and repeats, as though to someone else: “I
betrayed. It would of been the outside not the toilets if I hadn’t
of bashed that there white wall, if I’d of returned to the women.”
Did Louis say ‘women’ or ‘woman’?

“I don’t feel betrayed,” says Helen. “Not by
you, anyhow.”

Max and Seymour do their best to provoke
Louis into reasserting generalship. They urinate in the washbasin,
first at night and then in broad bulb light. He doesn’t react. They
both try profanity in his presence, wildly taking the Name of the
Lord in vain. In vain. He doesn’t react. They tell Louis that he
badly needs exercise, that mental health depends on physical
health. They beg him to get up and do deep-knee bends with
them.

Finally Louis does get up. But the only deep
knee-bend he consents to is alongside Margaret, begging the Lord
for forgiveness and transfer. He tells the others that collective
prayer is more effective than individual prayer, that a bundle of
reeds is stronger than a single reed, that Max and Helen, frail
reeds, should join them and raise their voices in simultaneous
prayer to the Lord.

Helen says no. Seymour can’t say no because
he hasn’t been asked. He doesn’t count, apparently. Max says maybe
and looks at Helen for a cue. She says that of course he can do
whatever he likes. Finally Max joins the others on their knees. The
prayer sessions are held in the women’s room, at all hours.

One night Helen is able to return to Richard
in the honeymoon hotel room with the pictures of soaring birds on
the pale blue walls. His mouth wanders over her body and then he’s
on the point of entering her when a fervent pious cry jerks her out
of the dream. She turns her back on the praying trio, and faces the
wall. She succeeds in not weeping at her posthumous state. Her hand
is no substitute for Richard. She hopes that when she falls asleep
she’ll be able to go back and welcome him. She doesn’t fall
asleep.

The next day, poking about in another
storeroom, with little hope, for more varied reading material,
Helen comes across a candle. She instantly understands to what
precious intimate use she can put it.

Margaret and then Louis and then Max beg
Helen to pray with them for transfer. “For me, won’t you?” says
Margaret. Helen says no.

Even Seymour suggests that she might have a
try at it. He’s willing to join the praying group himself, he says
untruthfully, but he hasn’t been invited out of his ghetto. Not
that he really believes in the efficacy of prayer, solitary or
collective, he tells her, but you never can tell. Even one chance
in a million, it’s worth trying. “Maybe you could put in a good
word for me if it works.”

Helen says no to Seymour. She says no to
them all and goes back to export statistics.

The trio goes on praying day and night.
Seymour flees it. He visits his secret room with his darling’s
street as often as he can. He’d neglected this mental escape route
during the long search for a real way out. The others don’t invite
him to kneel with them in imploration for transfer and he doesn’t
want to, but here in his sanctuary he does kneel, facing the wall,
head bowed, sketching in low-placed details in his street,
transferred there a little in his head thanks to the power of
memory and creation.

Occasionally, communing with his darling,
he hears stealthy footsteps in the corridor outside and is brutally
pulled back into this half-world. He knows it’s ex-Gentille. He now
thinks of and refers to her as “
Stupide
” even if he never calls her by that name since he never
speaks to her at all now, hasn’t for years. The doorknob turns
spookily, very slowly, millimeter by millimeter. Even more slowly
the door pushes against the shot bolt. She never persists. The
doorknob turns back millimeter by millimeter and he hears her
shuffling steps whispering away into silence. After, he’s unable to
return to the street.

Doesn’t she sneak in when he isn’t there?
There’s no outside lock on the door. The thought of her violating
his sanctuary is upsetting. His suspicions strengthen when he
starts finding faint black smudges on his sketch of the sea. He
suspects that she adds things in charcoal and then inexpertly rubs
them out.