GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE

Copyright

2014

Howard
Waldman

Pour Valou, le
voyageur

About the
author

Born in Manhattan, Howard Waldman has long
resided in Fance.

He taught European History at a France-based
American university

and later taught American Literature at a
French University. He now

grows roses and writes novels.

Opus
One Postumous

Part One

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Part Two

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Part Three

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

Thirty-seven

Thirty-eight

Part Four

Thirty-nine

Forty

Forty-one

Forty-two

Forty-three

Forty-four

Forty-five

Forty-six

Forty-seven

Forty-eight

Forty-nine

Part Five

Fifty

Other Books by Howard
Waldman

Contact

Behold, l show you a mystery; we shall not
all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the
twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall
sound, and the dead shall be raised, incorruptible, and we shall be
changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this
mortal must put on immortality.

First Epistle to the Corinthians XV,
52-53.

Good Americans, when they die, go to
Paris.

Thomas Gold Appleton

This is how my posthumous account got
written.

One night I woke up to a body I could do practically
nothing with and a mind I could do practically anything with. Given
the choice I’d have preferred it the other way around. But who can
choose, in this diminished life or the past one? When I emerged
from another methodical beating at the gloved hands of the Black
Men I found myself paralyzed from the waist down but able to read
the minds and destinies of people present and to come, so, who
knows, maybe one day yours.

Yes, your mind and destiny too, assuming
that after your first demise you find yourself, like me,
administratively suspended in the other-side
Préfecture de
Police
, awaiting either
return to void or transfer to the Great Good Place of your
twenty-fifth year, age and ailments and embitterments shed, hot for
love again.

The Great Good Place is the pretentious term
my senile rival in omniscience knows Paris by. I am positive about
this because most of the time His Mind is an open book to me. Those
capital letters, incidentally, are typographical irony. So far as
I’m concerned, he’s strictly lower-case. Granted: he was once
credited with spectacular cosmic tricks but that was in
pre-scientific days, and now he sleeps most of the time. I have to
admit, though, that he can still blast people (as you’ll see if you
stick around with me) albeit on a strictly limited scale, the odd
sexual offender here, the straight sexual offender there, when he
notices them, which isn’t often.

It’s more than I can do, though.
Omniscience and impotence is a terrible combination, believe me. I
see and foresee but can’t forestall. After emergence, I tried that
with my Administratively Suspended companions: kept pestering them
with, Jesus, don’t do this, don’t do that or you’ll never be
transferred to Paris, and they’d exchange meaningful looks which I
had no trouble deciphering since (to repeat myself) I could leaf
though their minds as easily as through pornographic mags, no big
difference. Anyhow, things got tense in the Living Quarters with
them calling me bats each time I warned and prophesized, too many
whacks on the head, so one day I swung away from them between my
new crutches and set up in one of the million or so rooms of
the
Préfecture
. To
kill time I explored minds and learned the stories of all the
people who ended up and who will end up in the
Préfecture
and decided to write about them. Writing’s
as good a way as anything else to kill time if you can’t use your
body for better things.

So I chose one batch of poor bastards (Batch
MLX 59833) and started writing about them the way it happened,
strictly omniscient point of view of course, given my special
talents in that direction, even though that narrative technique has
gone out of favor and the know-it-alls call you a mind-reading Fly
on the Ceiling and swat you if you use it.

Anyhow here it is, for better or for worse,
my Opus One, Posthumous. Maybe later I’ll come up with a better
title for it.

Part One

Chapter One

Is

Suddenly Maggie Williams is again.

It happens in the promised twinkling of an
eye, but without last trumpets or angelic choirs and she’s still
corruptible.

Maggie Williams, first of the poorly Chosen
Five to emerge from no-being, hadn’t been for twenty-two years.
Naturally she hadn’t known it. There’s no sense of time in
no-being. No sense of anything. No sense to it at all. No present,
no past and absolutely no future there, short of resurrection.

She hadn’t stood for the last ten of her
eighty-three years. Now she stands unassisted. Blind for as many
bitter years, she now sees.

Sees what?

Hardly sees the gigantic colorless shabby
bureaucratic room with all those pillars and empty benches and
those high peculiar walls. Doesn’t at all see the lofty stepladder
and on top of it the little middle-aged man in a gray smock and a
filthy beret, filing files in one of the thousands of drawers that
make up the wall from floor to ceiling.

What Maggie Williams does see, almost
dazzled by the sight, is a lovely milk-white girl, perfectly nude,
with green eyes and a generous red mouth. A cascade of fiery hair
spills over her freckled shoulders. Fiery crotch-fleece below
attests to the authenticity of the color of the cascade above. The
girl’s legs are long and lithe, her breasts as explosive as
howitzer shells. There’s a tag attached to her beautifully turned
right ankle.

Maggie, catholic about the gender of love
objects in her sexually active years, is instantly smitten, an odd
reaction, she’s aware, for a woman of her quavering age. Maggie
smiles at the girl and the girl instantly smiles back at Maggie.
She looks smitten too. She’s faintly familiar. Maggie raises her
hand in greeting. When the girl simultaneously does the same thing
in reversal she becomes totally familiar.

Maggie realizes that she herself is the girl
and the girl is she, reflected in a tarnished full-length wall
mirror.

“Oh God!” she whispers, burning with even
more intense love for the girl of twenty-odd she’d been so long ago
and is again. She’s drunk with joy at the miracle (that will be her
defense much later for her scandalous behavior). Her renovated body
longs to express that joy in a dance. She recalls that she had once
been a professional dancer.

Why “had been” though? Why that mournful
pluperfect? Is. The great present of the present tense. Is. Is a
professional dancer again. Also an amateur sculptress and jewelry
designer, she further recalls. Of course she can’t exercise those
talents here, not having the raw material of statues and jewelry
handy.

But she does have the raw material of dance
with her lovely naked body and the desire to dance the dance of
blessed Is. That’s what she does now.

While Maggie Williams leaps about
ecstatically, the four other members of Batch MLX 59833 materialize
in the gigantic bureaucratic room, naked and young and tagged (one
of them strangely). Unaware of materialization, they’re still in
the grip of supposedly final things.

For the squat hairy man, it’s a tree looming
in the windshield of his skidding truck.

For the man in horn-rimmed glasses, despair
and ten-story plummet with cartwheeling buildings and sky, the
sidewalk coming up fast.