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.
Sometimes their dreams of Prefecture activities aren’t copies of things they’ve done but fantasies of things they long to do there. That can mislead them painfully. Once Max awakens triumphantly rigid as a scepter and wonders, since dreams are usually copies of reality, if maybe Margaret really hadn’t impaled herself on him, rotating them both to the verge of orgasm.
Proof that she hadn’t done that outside of the treacherously inventive dream comes when, that very day, he slaps her luscious behind and sprawls with the power of her own slap, no dream slap, that’s for sure, Max realizes as he picks himself up groggily.
Margaret suffers more than the others from the confusion of reality and dream, nothing as trivial as Max’s slap on her behind.
It happens, or she dreams of it happening, over and over.
She emerges, empty-handed as usual, from a room explored like all the other rooms for a Bible full of useful prayers and implorations for transfer.
There’s a smell of spoiling in the corridor. She turns in the opposite direction. The smell of spoiling worsens. She turns in the other direction again. In whatever direction she goes, running now, the flowers rot with fury.
Turning a corner she cries out, almost colliding with him standing rigid there in his impeccable white braided uniform and beneath the braided cap, the immensely long aristocratic face, expressionless like a white death-mask cast a week after decease.
From his motionless lips comes the invitation. His long white hand reaches out.
She recoils. Runs past him and past miles of closed doors. Collapses to the floor. Escapes into sleep.
When she awakens, she makes her way back to the dark room where Helen is protesting in her sleep. She goes to bed, feeling safe that close to Louis on the other side of the partition.
She awakens again in the morning and doesn’t know if the encounter with the Prefect was a real encounter, a dreamed encounter, or a carbon-copy dream of a real encounter.
For a while she doesn’t dare wander by herself in the corridors to search for the Holy Bible.
Anyhow she’s beginning to doubt if those prayers and implorations would prove useful for transfer in her hopeless case.
Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die Page 14
