GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (3 page)

He heeds not the Divine Voice.

He dares to persist in seed-spilling
Abomination.

He shall receive the Final Warning.

In the vast bureaucratic room an attentive
ear might have picked up an angry squeaking sound like that of an
incensed mouse, somewhat amplified. But no ears are attentive here.
The man on the ladder and the fussily dressed young man are all
eyes. The ears of the four last materialized are still stopped by
slumber. Maggie Williams’s ears (to mention only her ears) are
stopped too, devoted as she is to closer things.

In response to those indignant squeakings
the stepladder starts rocking, in the grip of some mysterious
force.

The middle-aged man in the filthy beret and
gray smock breaks off his rhythmic activity. He squawks and grips
the crazy ladder. It grows unbearably hot. It teeters. He leaps off
it and grabs the half-open drawer for salvation. The dossiers he
was holding in his inactive hand flutter down like giant drab
wounded butterflies. Papers scatter everywhere. Ten meters from the
floor, he dangles white-wristed from the drawer. His toes drum
desperately on the drawers below.

The ladder topples and crashes to the floor
inches from the young man’s two-toned shoes, almost braining him.
He jumps back gracefully and perceives imbecilic old Henri dangling
near the ceiling. And O what else is dangling? Not at all bad for a
man his age.

At the racket, doors burst open
simultaneously. Dusty female lower-echelon functionaries in gray
smocks gape at the disruptive things going on in the room. Aghast
at the spectacle, they emit desperate little cries. Some giggle
hysterically. Wringing their hands, they trot about jerkily in tiny
ineffectual circles like barnyard fowl with severed heads. But
their white mask-like faces express no emotion.

Another door opens. A middle-echelon female
functionary with iron-gray hair done up in a big bun sweeps the
scene with her frigid gray gaze. Three whistles dangle from her
squat neck. Her marble-white features seem petrified into permanent
sternness. She claps her hands twice. It sounds like two blocks of
wood shocked together with splintering force.

“
Mesdames!
Mesdemoiselles!
Stop
this cackling immediately!”

The panicked lower-echelon female functionaries
stand stock-still. The middle-echelon functionary’s voice rings out
in a tone more of vengeful satisfaction than scandal:

“Absolutely no Arrivals were scheduled for
this date. The fourth administrative blunder in as many months! But
never as shocking as this one. Somebody will pay the piper this
time. In the meantime, find decent clothing for them all,
instantly! At least for the short time they will remain here.”

She points at Maggie Williams and Louis
Forster who are totally lost to their surroundings.

“Those two will be voided in minutes without
need for a high-level inquiry. And the others as well, I should not
be greatly surprised.”

She marches over to the wall where the
lower-echelon middle-aged functionary, Henri, is still suspended
white-wristed from his drawer. She commands him to adjust his
clothing and descend, in that order. Henri obeys his hierarchical
superior but reverses the order. Using the handles of the drawers
as foot and handholds, sweating abundantly, he descends with
difficulty. Safely grounded, he turns his back a second on the
women and then faces them again, tucked in and decently buttoned
and pretexts a sudden imperious call of nature up on the ladder a
minute before. No one is taken in by the excuse.

“You will be reported,” decrees the
stern-faced female functionary with the iron-gray bun.

She marches over to a long gilded Empire
table. It bears three telephones. One is pale gray and of
conventional size. The second is much larger and deep gray. The
third telephone is gigantic, requiring both hands to lift it. It is
black and reposes under a vast glass bell like a giant version of
the glass bell employed to protect orchids or ripe Camembert. She
gives it the widest of berths. Heedless contact with the bell could
have terrible consequences.

The authoritarian female functionary seizes
the pale gray telephone and dials with two brief zips. She
painfully manages an obsequious smile and makes deferent little
bows as she recounts the scandalous blunder in the Reception
Department to her hierarchical superior. The term “indescribable
indecency” is recurrent.

More functionaries burst into the gigantic
room.

In the meantime, with all that racket, no
surprise, the remaining Four awake one by one.

Chapter 3

Where?

The first of the remaining Four to focus on
outside things is MAX PILSUDSKI, the squat hairy man standing next
to a pillar. He looks like everybody’s idea of a naked
truck-driver, which is exactly what he is: naked and a
truck-driver. More exactly, had been. For the moment, though, he
doesn’t realize he’s a had-been. He vividly recalls the tree
gigantic in the splintering windshield of his truck and then
nothing. A terrible accident, he understands, and maybe coma, but
now he’s come out of it and is standing in what must be a rehab
center. They’ve done a goddam good job on him too. He feels a
little woozy (who wouldn’t?) but otherwise like a million bucks.
Funny thing though about his body: buck-naked and no more sag and
flab to it and the hair on it not grizzled anymore but black.

Who’s making that racket? That jabbering
don’t sound like English. Sounds like Mexicans with bad head colds.
Standing where he is, next to the pillar, the only person he can
see is a guy in the raw with the cut of a Yid. Looks like an
egg-head too with those horn-rimmed glasses.

The young man in horn-rimmed glasses who
looks like everybody’s idea of a naked futile New York intellectual
is SEYMOUR STEIN. He now opens his eyes and comes up with exactly
the same matter-of-fact materialistic interpretation of his present
situation as Max Pilsudski: he’s a patient in a rehabilitation
center. He feels tremendous bitterness at survival. He’d fucked up
his life and had even fucked up his would-be departure from it. How
he’d hungered for no-being! Instead, he’s back to being Seymour
Stein, the crown-prince of shmucks, the only man in history to have
screwed up a ten-story dive onto a sidewalk. How had he possibly
survived? Maybe he’d overshot the targeted sidewalk and plunged
into an open sewer manhole, shit unto shit, and had been fished
out? He starts weeping at this latest of a lifetime of failures and
gropes for a handkerchief. Instead of pockets he finds skin
everywhere, vastly improved skin, the grossness of his mid-fifties
effaced. A real medical miracle.

But why is he naked? And what’s that racket
going on? Isn’t that French?

Helen Ricchi
, the plain sad-faced girl with the small but
witty breasts, awakens to banging and cries in French, not the
French of Québec, the city of her birth, but the French of France.
Helen had been a high-school teacher of French in Denver, Colorado.
She opens her eyes and notes that her white hair is back to mousy
brown now, no great improvement, and her body back to what she
takes to be youthful unattractiveness. Helen accepts the new
situation – the mysterious place she’s in, nudity and rejuvenation
– with incurious fatalism as she’d accepted everything after the
tragedy that had befallen her as a two-week bride forty years
before. She’d never asked questions. She waits now without
impatience for whatever might happen next.

LOUIS FORSTER is lingering in a badly
distorted memory of a close to final thing. Paralyzed, he’s
undergoing a toilette – the last one before the funeral toilette
two days later – at the hands of a shy young nurse who suddenly
loses her shyness and her uniform. He tries to pull away from her
caressing hands and her sharp-pointed breasts grazing his thighs
and her mouth, her mouth. But he has no muscles to do it. He tries
to cry out: “What in tarnation are you doin’? Are you tetched? Stop
doin’ that! Let go of me!” But he has no breath to cry it.

Louis escapes the avid naked nurse as his
open blue eyes shift from inward to outward focus. He emerges.

But things are still going on here, wherever
here may be. He stares down at a closely associated nude woman
kneeling as in adoration before him. Louis lets out a great cry of
revulsion, lots of breath to do it this time.

“What in tarnation are you doin’? Are you
tetched? Stop doin’ that! Let go of me!”

Lost to the world, she persists in
adoration. He pulls back and she follows on her knees like a
penitent. He places his hands on her shoulders and pushes free of
her with a moist pop. Maggie staggers back on her knees, sprawls
and encounters a stunning wall.

Horrified at his state and cupping it
inadequately with both hands Louis dodges behind a pillar.

By this time the deputized lower-echelon
female functionary has returned, holding a heap of towels and a box
of safety-pins. She apologizes to the functionary with the
iron-gray bun and explains that this was all she’d been able to
come up with in the way of clothing. Her superior shrugs and then
commands: “Gloves!” The lower-echelon functionary removes gloves
from her pocket and pulls them on. They are long rubber gloves of
the kind that protect those who are in unavoidable contact with the
mortally contagious. Her superior closely supervises the
parsimonious distribution of towels to the Arrivals.

The hairy truck-driver and the archetypal
New York intellectual are each issued a single towel. “Hey, what
the fuck’s going on here?” the truck driver growls to the
horn-rimmed Yid. “This is one hell of a rehab center.”

“I’m beginning to think it isn’t a rehab
center,” Seymour Stein replies, wrapping the towel about his
loins.

“This is Las Vegas, Nevada, ain’t it?” says
Max.

“I don’t think it is,” says Seymour.

He totters over to a dingy closed window.
His last window had been wide open. Through the grime he thinks he
can make out celebrated landmarks. He totters back, shaken to the
core of his new being.

“N-no, it’s definitely not Las Vegas,
N-Nevada. Looks a lot like P-Paris, France.”

Max feels better. “Naw, it’s Las Vegas,
okay. We got a Eiffel Tower too. Twice the size of theirs.”

But Max still can’t understand why they
don’t speak English here. He scowls and tries to puzzle it out.

Two towels are issued to Helen Ricchi. The
middle-echelon female functionary herself takes care of the garbing
of the guilty couple. She pulls on the long rubber gloves and then
throws a towel at Louis and tosses two safety-pins on the floor at
his feet. She commands sobbing Maggie to cease sobbing and stand
up. She muffles the girl’s lovely body, still shaken by sobs, with
no fewer than seven towels. She pulls the uppermost towel
vengefully tight to flatten Maggie’s breasts, no easy task.

At that moment, propelled by an imperious shove, an
ornate door bangs open dramatically.

The functionaries freeze to attention.

Chapter 4

The Corsican’s Judgment

Sub-Prefect Antoine Marchini
stands dramatically framed, as
intended, on the threshold of the lesser of the two ceremonial
doors. He’s been alerted via the pale gray telephone to the broad
outlines of the scandal going on in the Reception Department of
the
Préfecture de Police
.

He takes in the scene with a keen Napoleonic
scan. He is of Corsican origin and intensely aware of it, even
though he possesses only fragmented memories of his native island.
His stern features seem cast in gray gun-metal and his bearing is
imperial. They compensate, perhaps over-compensate, for his small
stature and the shortcomings of his sub-prefectoral uniform, which
looks like something fished out of an ashcan, threadbare and
moth-eaten. The braid is bedraggled. The trimmings are frayed. One
of the tarnished brass buttons is missing. Another button dangles
from a single thread.

Pretending budgetary restrictions (actually
out of pure anti-Corsican prejudice, Sub-Prefect Marchini is
convinced) Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque has long refused to
grant him a new uniform worthy of his echelon. Sub-Prefect
Marchini, a true Corsican in this, has a hair-trigger sense of
honor and refuses to come to terms with humiliation by having his
unworthy uniform mended and the brass buttons sewed back on.
Sub-Prefect Marchini detests Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque with
frigid burning hatred, a true Corsican in this too.

The woman functionary with the iron-gray bun
euphemistically whispers the details of the scandal to him,
pointing at Maggie sobbing in a corner of the room and at Louis, or
rather at the pillar behind which Louis is hiding.

Just as she points at the upset stepladder
with more euphemistic details concerning Henri, the stepladder
starts smoking. The room is filled with the sacred scent of balsam,
santal, myrrh, frankincense, stacte, onycha and galbanum.

And now, lo!, the stepladder commences
burning with a fire that burns but does not consume.

The functionaries are dazzled by the
intrusion of color in their space, chromatic agony for them. With
the exception of a young and ignorant newly appointed Grade A5
functionary, they all step back in awe, aware that this is the
dreaded Final Warning for one of them. A5 shields his eyes against
the unbearable red and moves toward three sand-filled buckets in a
corner.

“
Imbécile!
” the middle-echelon female functionary
hisses. “Do not attempt to extinguish that fire!”

The fire vanishes unassisted. It leaves a
gagging stench of brimstone. Henri’s mossy teeth chatter with
fright.