Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

  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.

  For sex, then, the suspended Five are self-sufficient, in theory. They’re young, normally equipped for junction and in perpetual contact. That offers six possibilities of conventional heterosexual duo combinations. But Helen shows no interest of that sort in any of the men. Pious dread keeps the most obvious couple, Louis and Margaret, from coupling. Alone in his bed, Max possesses Margaret savagely in a variety of postures but he stammers when he tries to talk to her. Seymour too lusts for Maggie, even in her breast-bound Margaret disguise, and he isn’t shy. But she’s retreated into sexless mysticism and hardly knows he exists when he’s not reciting menus.

  Anyhow, even Maggie is a little off-putting, if you remember (and it’s hard not to) in what decrepit and then unimaginable state she’d once been before transfer here. As for Helen, Seymour tries once, much later, but it doesn’t work. Anyhow, she’s not really his type
, he reflects following the failure.

  All in all, then, sex is on a par with the food and the sanitary and entertainment facilities here.

  In short, the Five have been resurrected to a pale imitation of life. It’s maybe a little better than their recent void but not much. Real life is outside. But will they ever be transferred there?