GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (21 page)

The couple, surely unknown to each other in
had-been time, turn to one another and embrace passionately. The
gray middle-aged spectators at the window of the phantom Prefecture
weep, even Helen a little. Then the lovers vanish along with the
rest of 1970 and the weepers are back to their repetitious Paris of
1900, 1937 and 1951.

But not for long.

They thought they’d been allowed another
fifteen-year respite from physical deterioration. But one day,
surely not fifteen years later, Margaret brings out with
difficulty: something funny’s happening to my face, it’s, like,
paralyzed. God, my face is getting paralyzed. Helen and Seymour say
with difficulty: no, no, it’s all in the head. But it seems to be
happening to them too, to all of them. It’s a stiffening, like an
invisible plaster mask setting, a death mask, they think. It’s hard
to smile and even speech is an effort. They tell themselves that
maybe it’s because they’re out of practice: so little reason to
smile and less and less to say.

“We’re becoming like them,” Margaret repeats
with difficulty.

Maybe it’s just imagination, they tell
themselves, except for Margaret.

Margaret is secretly sure it’s more
collective punishment for her having run away from the Prefect once
again.

One day they look out of the window and see
fog in the place of the city. They wait for the fog to lift. It
doesn’t lift, that day or the next. They think: this is the
functionaries’ vision and now it’s ours. We’re becoming like them.
But later the city comes up bit by bit like a latent image in a
developer bath. With great relief, they understand, think they
understand, that it had been real fog.

But they see that blankness more and more
often. It lasts longer and longer. It can’t be fog but a programmed
defect in their eyes, like a growing cataract. All that’s left of
the city, from time to time, are colorless tatters of buildings and
spectral trees perceived through the window and, for Seymour, a
clumsily sketched street in black and white on the wall of a
distant room.

Margaret wanders in the corridors in search
of the Prefect and implores God to tell her what she should do if
she meets him. She doesn’t meet him.

Once, in the Common Room, the girl Seymour
calls Gentille approaches him timidly and looks with unbearable
pity at the decline of his face. Again she asks him to describe
what he sees through the window, probably hoping he’ll finally see
her longed-for sea. He doesn’t, that or anything else. He sees the
blankness she sees every day when she dares to risk punishment and
look.

He’s frightened at sharing her infirmity. To
conceal it, he describes the lost golden domes, the gaily-colored
awnings and the enlaced lovers as he’d seen them in earlier better
days. It’s an unsatisfactory compensatory act of imagination like
his penciled mural drawing of Marie-Claude’s street. Gentille
stares at the white window. Fantasizing too, she claims she can
make out breakers and the lighthouse.

Profoundly
depressed at this further similarity with her, Seymour leaves
Gentille in front of her fictitious sea. The idea of suicide
crosses his mind, but very briefly. He’d tried that already and had
wound up here. Second time around might be worse. How could it
possibly be worse, though?

The others see
little of Seymour now. He gets up while they’re still sleeping and
winds his way to distant room 1265. He’s furnished it with a chair
and brings scraps of food to last the whole day. There’s an inside
bolt on the door and he uses it for privacy. Sometimes he hears
Gentille’s dragging footsteps in the corridor and then a timid
knock. He stops working and is careful to make no sound. She knocks
again, no louder. After a while she tries the door, very timidly
and just once. Her dragging footsteps fade away and then he goes
back to the street.

When he
returns to the Living Quarters the others are asleep or trying to
sleep. He himself gets little sleep, tossing about, trying to
recall more details of the real street. When he succeeds, he
incorporates the triumph into his wall street the next day.

Gradually the
one-dimensional street takes on more reality than the corridors or
his fellow prisoners, now reduced to dim recumbent shapes on their
cots when he returns from the street or goes back to it.

One day,
facing the street on the wall of Room 1265, imagination and
yearning project him into that other space and time. The flat
monochrome opens up to him in colored three dimensions. He’s there,
at last passed into it, standing in sunshine, almost beneath the
golden horse head, pressing the bell.

The heavy door buzzes ajar. He pushes it
open and steps into the familiar shabby courtyard with irregular
paving stones and the workshops between the battered bikes leaning
against peeling walls. And yes, there, the cat, meditating in front
of her father’s shop which bears the scrolled words
“
Tailleur
pour Dames et Messieurs
.”

He goes past the
concierge in her lodge. He spirals up to the fourth floor,
breathing in the staircase fragrance of cabbage and wax and knocks
on the dark varnished door. It starts opening.

In his back another door opens.
He’d forgotten to lock
it.

“
Monsieur Saymore. Monsieur
Saymore
.”

He recoils at the sound of that wrong voice,
expelled from the street, back here. He blunders against Gentille,
loses his balance and for support grabs her skinny bare arm,
intensely cold above the rubber glove.

She cries out, recoils from him, her
features congealed into a mask of horror at that touch. He stands
there petrified, his mind frighteningly blank, as though his
outrage at being treated like a leper had driven everything else
away (as, a minute later – once again in possession of his identity
– he’ll analyze it).

For a few seconds he stands in a windowless
room with a poorly drawn street on a wall, not knowing where he is
or who he is, stared at by a strange gaunt girl, her chalky face
divided between horror and revelation. He hears the girl mumble
senseless things: “The mole, the nets, the fishermen, Momma, don’t
go, Momma.”

She utters a cry, turns and runs out of
the room. He emerges from the queer blankness, recalls who he is,
who she is, where they are, and, dimly, as though it had happened a
long time ago, that he, the leper, had touched her. Later he
recalls the notice that Turnkey had stuck on the wall enjoining the
functionaries to avoid all contact with the Arrivals
sous peine de
ZTV3
.

She avoids him after that, just as he avoids
her.

But one day turning into either end of a
short corridor they meet. Neither dares insult the other by
retreating.

Going past him with her washing tools, her
eyes fixed on the floor, she presses against the wall to maintain
maximum distance from him. The outrage at being treated like a
leper by this stupid zombie returns.

“Don’t worry, I won’t touch you. You won’t
catch my disease.”

She stops and looks up at him.

“Oh, sir, don’t think that. I would love to
touch you and would love you to touch me but we mustn’t, ever,
either of us, either way. I try not to remember the nets and the
fishermen you gave me.”

She steps back from him and runs away, her
empty pail bonging against her fast bony knee.

He doesn’t understand her reference to nets
and fishermen. He finds her imbecilic wide-eyed sexual frankness
repellent. He doesn’t want to touch her or be touched by her. The
other men’s quips and jibes come back to him: “Your sweetie-pie”
and “Get into her yet?”

He goes on trying to avoid her,
systematically now. He ducks behind the
U.S. GO HOME
screen when he hears her squealing chariot
and ventures out only when the squealing fades away down the
corridor. He remains barricaded in his room when he hears her
scrubbing that corridor. Of course he’s vulnerable when he’s in bed
and she wheels in their wrong-time lunch in what is the middle of
the night outside. Not wanting to disturb their sleep she unloads
the trays by the light of the corridor. She’s a shadowy figure.
Sometimes she stands there for minutes looking, he thinks, at him.
He must be a shadowy figure too to her.

Seymour can’t imagine that one distant day a
great discovery will make Stupide central to them all and that he
will have to approach her again, careful though not to touch her
this time or be touched by her.

Chapter 22

Beach Or Haystack?

One night a tremendous idea awakens Louis
and Seymour out of an identical gray dream (exploring corridors at
unprecedented depth). They get up and grope their way in the
pitch-dark room toward each other’s bed. They meet unexpectedly at
midway point. Their foreheads clunk painfully. Both lose their
balance and fall.

“Jesus Christ!” Seymour mutters, rolling
over onto his knees and rubbing his forehead.

“Already told you don’t know how many times
don’t take the name of the Lord in vain, Stein,” says Louis,
already back on his feet, still athletic for his sudden age.
“Listen, I got somethin’ real important to tell you.”

“So have I,” says Seymour, picking himself
up. “Something really important to tell you too.”

It turns out to be the same very important thing. A
funny coincidence, they agree. They switch the light on and start
searching. Max hides his head under the tattered blanket and
protests. They shake him hard and tell him to help them find the
carbon-copy of Rules and Regulations from way back, remember? He
keeps his head under the blanket and soon goes back to snoring.

Seymour and Louis poke around and finally
come up with the paper under Max’s cot.
Stupide
never cleans under the cots. It’s illegible. Louis
blows away a fifteen or maybe fifty-year deposit of dust, most of
it in Seymour’s face, inadvertently. He reads out loud in a strong
triumphant voice over Max’s snores and Seymour’s coughs:

Any attempt to reach the
Outside without official approval is sanctioned by instant
exit
.

“That means it can be done,” says Louis.

“
Probably means it already
has
been done. There must be a
tunnel somewhere. All we have to do is find it.”

“And if we don’t find it, dig one
ourselves.”

“If we look hard enough we’ll find it, all
right. Wonder why we didn’t think of this before.”

“Sure is strange we didn’t. All this time.
But it ain’t too late.”

“Pretty late, the way we are now. We’d
better begin right away, before we turn into wheelchair cases.
We’ll tell the others about it tomorrow.”

They go on talking about it all night
long.

The morning following their decision to find
or dig a way out, they hear Margaret’s joyous cry: “Paris!
Paris!”

Three of them hurry into the Common Room.
The window greets them with sunrise in a newborn blue and pink sky
above the golden domes. They feel like going down on their knees.
It’s like a sign, Seymour wants to say to Helen but she isn’t
there. He goes into the woman’s room. She’s sitting on her bed
reading a big tattered book.

“Helen, we’ve got Paris again. It’s a sign,
I think. Don’t you want to look?”

Seymour is sure she’d have preferred to go
on reading. But she’s too polite and considerate, he knows, to let
her indifference show and minimize the significance of the event to
the others. So she responds to his invitation, closing her book but
careful to place a bookmark between the pages. (Later Seymour
glances at the book-marked pages. They’re covered, in fine print,
with statistics of French cotton and coal imports for the year
1886).

Facing the sun rising over the city, most of
them smile and say joyful things. Doing that, they discover that
the death-mask stiffness is gone too, like the fog that had
shrouded Paris. They can smile with no effort. Words of joy come
easily to their lips. Or is it because they finally have something
to smile about, a reason for joy? At least for as long as they’re
able to avoid the thought that they’re simply back to starting
point facing the tantalizing window, except that they’re fifteen
years older now. That thought had instantly occurred to Helen.

Louis solemnly tells them to sit down at the
table, he has important news. Louis and Seymour and Max and
Margaret sit facing the window. Helen sits with her back to it.
Louis reads from the Rules and Regulations and concludes from it
that escape is possible and that’s what they are going to do,
escape.

Max explodes with joy and indignation.
Escape was what he’d been trying to do right from the start, he
yells, and none of you listened, none of you helped me, you all
laughed and you stole all my tools and the compass. Didn’t I tell
you you can always escape? Like in POW camps, they spend all their
time digging tunnels, sometimes they get caught, okay, but then
they dig another tunnel and they end by escaping.

Margaret’s face, taking the growing light of
the sky, is almost radiant.

They look at Helen who blinks and doodles in
the dust covering the table. That’s as far as she’ll ever go to
expressing disagreement. But it’s already too far. Irritated,
Seymour asks her if she doesn’t want to join them looking for a way
out.

“But haven’t you been doing just that all
these years?”

She says “you” not “we” Seymour notes. She
goes on with it, still pushing the dust with her forefinger.

“I mean, all those doors all this time and
nothing behind them except more walls.”