GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (13 page)

Max describes Margaret in crude graphic
terms. Maybe it’s all sex-starved fantasy. But maybe not. Seymour
wants his turn at the clown face. Max lets Seymour peep too in
exchange for the lumps of moldy chocolate the frightened cleaning
girl continues smuggling through to him.

Most of the time Seymour sees nothing at
all. And his nose gets in the way of comfortable viewing of nothing
at all. Once, though, he catches Helen, bare to the waist, brushing
her teeth vigorously with a finger. Her small pointy breasts quiver
vigorously. It’s nice but nothing sensational. But can beggars be
choosers? He never catches even a glimpse of Margaret, the star
attraction.

The peeping sessions come to an end when
Louis discovers what the two of them are up to all of the time in
the washing area. He presses his face against the clown’s face for
half a minute and then withdraws with a shocked expression.
Grim-faced, he hammers wooden pegs into the clown’s pupils,
blinding the voyeur for good. Seymour guesses that, beginner’s
luck, he’d seen Margaret at her intimate ablutions.

Louis decrees a daily shave. But the
Administration has allotted the men an archaic straight razor (not
archaic for Louis of course). Seymour doesn’t know how to strop
properly and his angle of attack is wrong. The nicked blade draws
blood each time. That’s terrible because the gray ooze really does
look like embalming fluid.

To escape the depressing chore, Seymour
decides to grow a beard. In had-been time he’d occasionally been
tempted by a beard for dignity and concealment. But he’d been
afraid of looking like an orthodox rabbi. Louis is hostile to
beards in general, not just to beards worn by orthodox rabbis.
Beards had gone out circa 1890. Imagining a bearded Marine is
grotesque. And for Louis, Max and Seymour are Marine bootcamp
fodder.

Things come to a head over the beard issue.
One morning Seymour refuses to cut his throat again with the nicked
straight razor.

“No, I won’t. Won’t do pushups and kneebends
or jog anymore either. Won’t. This is a concentration camp all
right, but you’re not the head fuehrer. I don’t know who the head
fuehrer is but you’re sure as hell not. You’re just an inmate, like
the rest of us. So enough already.”

Max joins in the revolt and says he won’t
either, won’t do pushups and kneebends or jog anymore either,
won’t.

Their voices rise. By now they know they can
afford to do it without the risk of serious consequences. Helen is
sure to propose her sad mediating services before friction ignites
into brawl.

She does it this time too, knocking timidly
at their door. She explains to Louis that in Seymour’s time, her
time too, beards had come back in style. It seems to her (but it’s
just her opinion) that Seymour is justified in wanting to grow a
beard even if he wouldn’t look very good in one. In her opinion,
she adds apologetically to Seymour.

She convinces Louis to let Seymour grow his
beard (which he doesn’t do after all since she said he wouldn’t
look good in one). She also tells Louis that pushups and jogging
are very healthy activities, but that maybe (“I don’t know, I may
be wrong but it seems that way to me”) they ought to be on a
volunteer basis.

Predictably, Louis ends by seeing things her
way. Seymour, a little guilty at such total victory, says that
maybe they could go on doing deep knee bends. He quickly adds: “Say
ten a day.” Helen wonders if perhaps she could join in on the
knee-bends. “Basically Louis’s right,” she says. “We don’t get
nearly enough exercise here.”

So that’s an end to daily shaving and
pushups and toe-touching and dawn jogging for Max and Seymour.
Louis goes on with it, inhumanly tripling the dose, taking on the
others’ share and trying to sweat Maggie out of his brain. He also
goes on disciplining his roommates emotionally, cracking down on
tears and sobs. They’re secretly glad of that. He saves them, they
realize, from mental collapse. He’s their stern pillar of
strength.

As usual, Seymour and Max express their
gratitude to Helen for her arbitration. They suspect that they’re
being tested on their behavior here. Without her soft-spoken
interventions coexistence would be impossible. Maybe a brawl was a
serious debit in the ledger-book.

As usual, they’re careful to hide the
resentment that accompanies the gratitude. Each one of Helen’s
selfless interventions, they sometimes think, illustrates a
goodness that’s sure to be rewarded by transfer out there. It
emphasizes their own unworthiness, the details of which had been
publicized by the hedgehoggish functionary the day of their
arrival. They can’t forget that Helen was the only one of the Five
that the ragged Napoleonic Sub-Prefect hadn’t sentenced to instant
exit.

They have another cause for resentment. If
she comforts them when they weep and listens sympathetically to
their yearnings, she never gives them the opportunity to return the
favor and so chalk up good points for commiseration. She never
weeps or confides or yearns as they do. Oh, how they yearn for
transfer to the world of color, yearn and hunger and thirst for it!
They want and want and want.

Helen yearns for nothing, wants nothing.
Isn’t indifference to reward a saint-like attribute? More deserving
goodness. Behind her back, Seymour sometimes refers to her as
“Saint Helena.” Sometimes he expands the name to “Saint Helena,
Rock of Lonely Exile.”

The Five often find each other’s company
unbearably oppressive. Not just Helen with her enviable status as a
well-placed candidate for transfer plus her nearly physical aura of
sadness. There’s Max with his sobs in the middle of a dirty joke,
heard a hundred times, the joke and the sobs. Seymour’s
interminable stories of times with his Marie-Claude, going into all
mentionable details. Louis’ mechanical gymnastics with orders to
himself to keep his knees stiff and his back straight. Margaret’s
great-eyed recoil from male contact.

When that happens once too often and they
can’t bear the sight and sound of one another, the longing for
solitude becomes insurmountable. They flee the Common Room in
solitary secession and wander in the tangle of corridors or poke
about in dusty unexplored rooms with the same contents as the
explored ones.

But sooner or later solitude too becomes
unbearable (the whisper of their soles on the floor, the sound of
their breathing and hearts) and they try to find their way back to
company.

They often get lost. They shout for rescue
from solitude: “Hellooo…” and are answered by the echo, a mournful
ghostly “O … O … O …” Or else, to improve the echo, they shout,
“Where … are … you?” and get back nothing better than “Oow … oww …
oww …” a cry of pain, ghostly too.

A few hours later, the others in the Common
Room, alarmed at being reduced to four, scatter in the corridors
and shout the same things: “Hellooo…” and “Where … are … you?” They
get the same multiplied replies.

Or else they shout the missing companion’s
name.

It gives them better, neutral, echoes except
for “Helen! Helen!”

That shout gives them: “Hell…In .… Hell…
In…
Hell …”

Chapter 12

Filaments

The bulb in their room trembles and goes
out. Four of the Five tremble too when that happens.

They replace the bulb, remembering the
bulb’s life-span.

They know that the bulb’s fate can be their
fate and at any moment, no six-month guarantee for them. They too
can go out, not outside, just out, exit, void, loss of light, no
time for a tremble and with no hope of replacement if the
Administrative Review Board finally convenes and reaches a
decision, nearly certain to be negative for Seymour Stein and Max
Pilsudski and Margaret Williams and Louis Forster. Helen Ricchi
keeps on not caring, one way or the other.

That replaced bulb trembles and goes
out.

They’re still there so they replace it,
thinking: another six months.

It goes on and on like that, bulb after
bulb.

They wait for transfer or annihilation and
nothing happens.

Each time a bulb starts trembling they start
trembling too. Even though it’s not much of a life here, on the
whole, weighing the pros and cons, most of them judge that after
all it’s better than nothing. They’ve been there.

Chapter 13

Killing Time

The Five have tremendous amounts of time on
their hands. When they were dead, time hadn’t been a problem.
Nothing had been a problem then, not even nothing. But now,
resurrected and waiting for transfer or annihilation, they’re
forced to devise distractions to kill a fraction of that time.

With a broomstick and rags wired about a
stone the men play minimalist linear stickball in the corridor, the
two women posted at each end to signal the possible arrival of
Turnkey. In the same corridor they play shuffleboard. It reminds
claustrophobic Seymour of the long-ago Le Havre-bound voyage on
the
Île de
France
, shuffleboard on
B Deck with all that free sky and sea.

For something without painful associations,
Seymour manufactures a deck of cards. He snips fifty-two lopsided
rectangles out of old dossiers and painstakingly draws the figures
and numbers. He spends what must be weeks on the Queen of Hearts,
trying to give her the features of Marie-Claude, queen of his heart
when Maggie’s not around, even though he doesn’t like the idea that
hands other than his will be holding her (Marie-Claude).

But it’s hard to find hands other than his.
On religious or moral grounds Margaret and Louis refuse to play
cards. Helen pleads long-standing incapacity to learn card-game
rules. That leaves Max. Max teaches him truck-driver poker. He
teaches Max sissy games like Casino and Five Hundred Rummy. But
what are the possible stakes? Money doesn’t exist here. Seymour, a
preposterously incompetent forger, tackles the job of drawing
Federal banknotes.

The card sessions last the lives of three
light bulbs. By that time the patterns of dirt and grease on the
public side of the cards have become so familiar that they betray
the private side. At the end, Max had won $87,569. It’s not
Monopoly money for Max. When they get out of this place, he says in
his hopeful days, Seymour should wire what he owes to his Las Vegas
address.

With an end to poker, Seymour starts drawing
his longed-for Paris street from memory on a blank wall in one of
the corridor storerooms. Max goes on playing cards, with himself.
If he can’t win he can’t lose. Louis tinkers a lot, mysteriously.
Helen reads whatever dusty things she finds in the storerooms.
Otherwise, she keeps busy pacifying and soothing when the others
bicker and clash and weep. They all exchange memories of fabulous
meals and happy times out there and back then. The later dead
inform the earlier dead about new gadgets and wars and sometimes
posthumous cures for the diseases that had killed them. They read
fragmentary ancient news on the newspaper squares impaled within
hand’s reach above the WC bunghole. They despair. They hope. They
despair more than they hope. But even despairing helps to kill
time.

Probably years after an end to forced
jogging and pushups, Louis comes up with new, much more dangerous
(but time-killing), exercises for Max and Seymour. One day he
marches them to a distant room and displays the weapons he’d
tinkered out of odds and ends. There are nail-pointed spears, long,
wicked-edged knives and steel slingshots with strips of inner tube
propelling sharp-edged stones. His masterpiece is a crossbow with
leaf springs that twangs a steel bolt through a two-inch thick
target plank at twenty paces when it’s aimed correctly, always the
case for Louis, seldom for Max, never for Seymour. Seymour almost
loses an eye from the backlash of the sling.

“Got an idea for busting out of here?” says
Max.

“Mebbe,” says Louis.

The Five sleep enormously, sometimes through
whole days. There’s nothing better to do. Normally sleep should be
the great time-killer. But instead of compressing time, sleep
multiplies it unbearably during the first ten or so light bulbs.
Dreams are largely bureaucratically precise duplicates of their
activities here, if you can call them activities: mainly looking
out of the window at the city for hours, exploring miles of
corridors, and, of course, sleeping.

But dreaming of past sleep means dreaming
past dreams, themselves possibly dreams of earlier dreams of those
activities here. As a result, at any given moment, the Five can’t
be sure if what they’re experiencing is original or a second or
third-hand carbon copy of their poor reality. How can they know
whether they’re awake or dreaming? It aggravates their sense of
irreality.

Still, they willingly endure those
bureaucratic dreams in the hope of pre-mortem dreams. It’s worth
any number of depressing carbon-copy dreams of this place to be
able to go back to their first, real, existence, even in that
disincarnated way. It’s like willingly grubbing in tons of muck in
search of a nugget.

But most of the time the nugget, when found,
turns out to be fool’s gold. Louis and Margaret and Helen dream of
grieving faces above theirs in a sterile white room, Max of the
tree looming in his windshield, Seymour of cartwheeling buildings
and sky, the sidewalk coming up fast. These are scenes from back
there all right but the dead-end of back there, practically an
antechamber to where they are now.

True, Seymour had almost kissed Marie-Claude
in a dream and hopes to do that and much more in another dream. But
Marie-Claude doesn’t come to him again. Jean Hussier doesn’t come
at all to Margaret or Louise to Louis or Richard to Helen or Bess
to Max. Not even Rickie, the dachshund pup, comes to Max.