GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (11 page)

Again they try to resist sleep. Despite the
talk about all those possible electric light bulbs to come they’re
afraid their hopeless case has been examined and that sleep will be
the portal to a second death. But sleep comes.

Seymour sees Marie-Claude’s smiling face,
very close to his, in enlarged black and white. She’s undone her
ponytail and has swept her hair up as he often asks her to do to
get the perfect oval of her face and all of her neck. Her
off-the-shoulder blouse reveals the clean understated lines of her
collarbones with the exquisite faint shadowed gap between them. Her
eyes, a dark shade of gray representing original brown, are
wide-pitched with a little slant to them, a western-world
reverse-slant.

You haven’t changed at all, he says even
though she has, diminished by that loss of color. He approaches his
lips to her parted lips and smells her cold ashen breath and awakes
to a gray starved face hovering inches above his.

He gives a startled jerk away from the ashen
breath of the cleaning girl who had upset the pail over his leg in
the corridor. She too jerks back. She’s wearing rubber gloves.
Behind her is a trolley of the sort used in hospitals to bring in
basins and ether and meals. On the table lie three trays with
dishes of indeterminate food. Max and Louis are snoring away on
their beds.

“
Oh sir, don’t be alarmed,” she whispers.
“It’s only me. I’ve brought your meal.” She points at one of the
trays. “I hope it’s not cold. The kitchen is two kilometers from
here. But I ran all the way. I brought you a sweet little present
that I stole at the risk of more punishment so that you will
forgive me for what I did to your leg. I’m so terribly sorry,
sir.
(
Je suis désolée, désolée, Monsieur.
)”

She has her pail on the floor beside her. She dips a
sponge in it, looks about fearfully and begs him in a breathless
whisper to allow her to clean his leg. With her guilty expression
she’s like an Untouchable begging a Brahmin for a touch, a single
touch in this disgraced life. Seymour says it doesn’t matter. She
looks even more désolée at that. She takes it, he understands, as
refusal to forgive her for her terrible act.

Feeling sorry for her, Seymour consents to
unwanted reparation. He sits uncomfortably on the edge of the bed
while she kneels before him. He pulls up the trouser leg. At the
sight of gray crusted blood, she gasps fast little in-gasps: O! O!
O! Did I do that, sir? Did I injure you like that? She’s on the
verge of tears. He reassures her. Water, even dirty water, can’t
draw blood.

The sponge looks filthier than his leg but
he lets her wash it. She seems to be in a withdrawn second state
now, like a somnambulist. He winces at the pain and she apologizes
in a droning elsewhere voice. O … your … poor … leg … your … poor …
poor … poor … leg, she says over and over in that sleepwalker’s
voice. She touches his knee and then his calf and ankle, inquiring
tonelessly whether it hurts there or there or there. It doesn’t
hurt but her hand is ice-cold beneath the rubber.

She snaps out of her sleep-walker state. She
awakens to where she is and to what she’s doing. Eyes widening, she
gives a cry and shrinks back from his leg. She must have heard
Turnkey’s clump-jangle in the corridor, Seymour supposes.

She leaps to her feet, almost upsetting the
pail on his other leg, grabs the trolley and to Seymour’s vast
relief, flees.

Seymour draws up a chair before the tray the
girl had pointed to. He’s tempted to wake the others before the
food gets cold. But it turns out to be cold already despite her
breathless two-kilometer run, much colder than the chlorine-tasting
luke-warm water in the pitcher. It’s some kind of gray hash. It
tastes gray too.

There’s a lump of chocolate with white fuzz
on the tray. It tastes moldy. He’s on the point of spitting it out
when he remembers that the girl is sure to come back for the dirty
dishes and see how he’s treated her present, stolen for forgiveness
for what she thinks she’d done to his leg. He swallows it.

Seymour limps into the Common Room and sits
down in one of the dilapidated leather armchairs facing the big
window. With the taste of mold persistent on his tongue, he stares
out at the river and the trees, the domes and the bridges, the
crowded cafés and the quay-side lovers.

The sky slowly darkens and the city loses
its colors and forms.

His eyes close. He starts losing everything,
like the city. Again he resists sleep. Then he remembers that he’d
already slept and it hadn’t been a second death but a dream of
Marie-Claude out there and back then. He wants to return to
her.

But sleep when it comes seconds later isn’t
permanent void or Marie-Claude’s lips.

Sleep is like a broken record.

Seymour materializes in the vast
bureaucratic room again and the long day of arrival plays back in
the minutest details of shock, grief and confusion till the moment
when, with the nauseous taste of the moldy chocolate on his tongue,
he’s about to fall asleep again in the leather armchair in front of
the darkening city and dream, identically, he’s certain, of
dreaming of the long arrival at the phantom Prefecture.

Frightened, he makes a tremendous effort to
break free of a threatened cycle of endlessly diluted reality.

This time there’s no repetition of arrival.
He has a split-second vision of Marie-Claude, too brief for his
lips to touch hers.

Then nothing.

But not permanent nothing Seymour realizes
thankfully when he opens his eyes on the splendor of Paris at dawn
on the other side of glass.

Thankful too that the long first day at the
Prefecture is behind him. He hopes there won’t be too many days
like that to come.

He gazes at the brightening city for a long
time.

Finally he gets up, goes into the men’s room
and tries to wash the taste of mold out of his mouth.

***

Part Two

Chapter 10

Lucky Lazarus

The initial horror of the situation soon
wears off. The Five come to realize that they aren’t dead after
all. Had been but aren’t now. They’ve been resurrected.

But resurrected in a strictly secular way,
nothing spiritual about it. They haven’t been promoted to pure
essence, the way it’s supposed to happen after the final trumpet
and luck with the final judgment. Their bodies continue to boss
them around, demanding better things than this place provides them
with. They experience the pangs of hunger and sex, with no
satisfactory outlet for either of the drives. They regularly
perform the humiliating rites of intestinal transit. The women flow
periodically. The Five feel pain too, in body as well as heart.

Of course in this context of unspiritual
resurrection they can’t help thinking of poor Lazarus of Bethany.
Louis, brought up on Holy Scriptures, tells the story to those who
don’t know it. They can appreciate how Lazarus of Bethany must have
suffered mentally from his four days of corruption. His loved ones
had perfumed him against the lingering stink but it must have
remained in his nostrils long after.

And, terrible perspective, even though he
had the promise of a second awakening, this time permanent and
glorious, he’d have to die a second time to get it.

That must have been a depressing thought for
Lazarus. But it’s even worse for the Five. They have no consoling
prospect of final spiritual resurrection after that second exit. Or
resurrection of any kind. Just the dead-end of permanent void. They
say there’s nothing after exit, proclaims the scratched message on
their wall. “No second awakening, ever, ever,” the fussily-dressed
young functionary had said.

Which means that they can knock themselves
out trying to behave like saints this second time round, but still
they won’t be awarded immortality, although the Christian scheme of
the universe promises just that for deserving believers. Not even
(next best), Hindu-style successive reincarnation with suspense
about the outcome: next time round, bat or Brahmin, mouse or
Maharajah?

Lazarus, then, had had better prospects than
the Five. They suspect, however, that even with that distant
promise of eternal felicity, Lazarus couldn’t have been a gay dog.
He’d died once and knew he’d have to go through the unpleasant
business again. So he probably didn’t quaff wine in merry company
or dance with abandon to the tinkle of cymbals. He must have
suffered from solitude. Probably nubile girls avoided him. What
woman could envision lying with him, knowing where he’d lain? He
must have spent a good deal of his renovated time in joyless
occupations like praying and fasting.

No, it mustn’t have been a party for Lazarus
of Bethany in the sensual world he’d been cruelly summoned back to.
Still and all, there had to be comforting things there like, say,
wayside roses. He must have breathed in their purifying fragrance
for hours on end until the petals fell and reminded him of his
fate, past and to come. There must have been distant music and the
faint laughter of children blown his way. Also, midday sun on his
face, light shining in the wool of grazing sheep and birds
imprinted on dawn skies. Maybe, too, closer things, like a friendly
cat slinking against his leg in animal ignorance of his terrible
story. He must have had lots of minimal but precious things like
that.

So, taking the good with the bad, secular
resurrection balanced out as a fairly positive experience for
Lazarus of Bethany.

Not so for the Five despite the bonus of
rejuvenation that Lazarus hadn’t received. What can they do with
resuscitated youth? It’s like possessing a mountain of gold on a
desert island with nothing to spend it on. Where they’re stranded
the only sunshine is on distant facades and they’re separated from
it by inviolable glass. Separated too from all those other
tantalizing things out there. They can’t feast in those classy
three-star restaurants, can’t browse in the bookshops, can’t sip
amber cognac or green
Pernod
at sidewalk tables, can’t stroll along the Seine enwrapped
with a lover.

They haven’t even got Lazarus’ minimal
consolations. There’s no laughter of children or music here. No
roses either. Or flowers of any kind. No cat or sheep. Or animals
of any kind, not even the company of mice or cockroaches or
spiders. There’s nothing living here except the zombie-like
functionaries and themselves, both condemned to a poor dusty sort
of half-life.

Those aren’t the only things they’re
deprived of. If the Five have the consolation of existing, that
existence doesn’t amount to much. No cigarettes, no alcohol, no TV
or theater or movies, no books, no music. And food purely for
sustenance, nothing superfluous like pleasure involved.

The food is fiendishly terrible. And here,
of all places, the gastronomical capital of the world. Breakfast is
half a stale baguette with a slab of margarine washed down with a
bowl of cold pissy coffee, probably not coffee at all but some
economical ersatz like grilled chicory-root. Lunch and dinner begin
with soggy grated carrots looking and tasting like cat-puke.
Unidentifiable boiled vegetables accompany chunks of boiled meat
that defy knife and teeth. Otherwise, left-overs in the form of
that same meat ground into hash, without the concealing mercy of
ketchup either.

Hash, hash, hash: the kind you’re supposed to eat,
not the kind you smoke to forget unbearable things like the
basse cuisine
the Five have to endure. Everything is
ice-cold as well. Dessert alternates between blackened banana and
rotting apple. Instead of wine they have lukewarm chlorinated tap
water. There are five menus repeated in inexorable five-day cycles
and identifiable not by taste but by sight.

They often evoke fabulous meals from their
past, particularly Seymour Stein in the presence of Margaret. It’s
a seduction ploy. He’s noticed that her severely repressed
sensuality responds to gastronomical recitals. Her eyes close
voluptuously in reaction to the foreplay of
hors d’oeuvre
. With the entrée her moist lips part and
her breathing quickens. At the climax of dessert he sometimes gets
an ecstatic “Ohhh…” out of her. It’s all verbal, not even oral, but
it’s the best he can manage with her.

Comfort is no better than what a small-town
Mississippi prison offered its colored inmates in the 1930s.
Underclothing is changed only once a supposed week, bed-clothes
once a supposed month. There are no showers. Instead, they dispose
of a big chipped enamel basin and a sponge. The soap is of the
harsh laundry variety. Rusty water flows feebly from the wash-basin
faucet when it flows at all. At best it’s luke warm. There’s no
toothpaste. What for? There are no toothbrushes.

The toilet facilities are disgraceful even
for Louis who had been on familiar terms with nineteenth century
rural outhouses. There are twenty unisex squat-privies set in
doorless cubicles. Yellowed squares of old newspapers are impaled
on a spike for their convenience. Ancient dark incrustations
surround the bung-hole in the cracked porcelain. The Five learn to
hang a card on the WC doorknob for privacy during their visits
there. They learn to breathe through their mouths.

It’s true that at the beginning, till desire
fades like color in this space, there’s the theoretical exercise of
sex, the great counterweight to boredom. They aren’t dependent on
the Prefecture for that. Anyhow, with its zombie male and female
functionaries, the Prefecture has nothing to offer in that
line.