Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

Chapter 14

  The Maze

  In dream or reality, the main way they try to kill time is by sitting before the window in hope of a beloved face and by wandering in the maze of the corridors.

  At the beginning, the only reason for venturing into that maze, outside of escaping one another’s unbearable but finally indispensable presence, is to hunt for salvageable items in the storerooms. The idea of searching for a way out of the labyrinth to the real world on the other side of the window occurs to them only later, much later, and then it proves to be the best of all time-killers.

  Their first halfway systematic exploration of the corridors is less ambitious. They want to reestablish contact with the functionaries. Weeks drag by or maybe even months – how can they tell here? – without a word from their “hosts.” The Five have urgent questions.

  When will the Administrative Review Board convene to rule on their cases?

  Why haven’t they received the promised visit of the Advocate who is supposed to draw up their briefs?

  Also, while waiting for those major things, can’t they be supplied, at the very least, with toothbrushes, toothpaste and decent toilet soap and paper?

  The frightened cleaning girl has no reply to any of these questions. She just does what she’s told to do, or tries to, she says.

  Finally, fearing that they’ve been totally forgotten, victims of another administrative mix-up, the Five decide to locate their “hosts” on their own and remind them that they exist, if you can call this existing. They wander about in the dusty labyrinth in search of the Reception Room in the great Hub where they’d materialized. Sometimes they encounter empty-faced functionaries on stepladders unscrewing burned-out corridor bulbs and screwing in new ones. When they ask the way to the Reception Room the functionaries go on screwing and unscrewing in silence.

  At the beginning, they all have trouble finding their way back. The room numbers are chaotic. They fluctuate wildly. They’re often astonishingly high (once, 221032, flanked by 1560 and 34). There’s no normal sequence to guide the Five to the beginning or the end of the rooms. Before that theoretical beginning of numbered doors and beyond that theoretical end to numbered doors is, logically, the longed-for outside world.

  But is there any logic to things here? Do the rooms begin at all? Do they end at all? Each “outing,” as they call it (perhaps sarcastically), they discover a new corridor or staircase that opens, not on the outside world, but on a new labyrinth of corridors and staircases. Their situation favors metaphysical conjecture. Sometimes they wonder if this isn’t a parallel sadly impoverished universe, an infinity of gloomy corridors. Does this universe even impinge on the “real” universe they’d once known and can view through the window?

  The four Arrivals who had once dwelt in Paris recall the real Préfecture de Police as a very big building with a vast courtyard filled with paddy wagons and flics. Big, yes, but nothing compared to where they wander now, mile after mile of dimly lit crazy-angled corridors. As they venture further and further into the maze, they guess at the area they’ve covered and mentally transpose it onto the Paris they’d known. They progressively realize that the part of the building they’ve explored easily covers a whole quartier of the city, then all of the First arrondissement, then all of the capital. At that point they try to stop transposing here on there, for fear of mentally finding themselves on the bank of the Vistula or even the Volga.

 

  Once, still on the hunt for the Reception Room, Max gets lost for two days. It’s his own fault. At the beginning, it had happened to all of them. But they’d soon learned to mark distinctive signs on strategically located walls, imitating past generations of other suspended Americans. Nearly every corridor corner swarms with scratched or scribbled suns, crescent moons, ringed Saturns, rectangles, squares, circles, rumbuses, five-and-six-sided stars, etc. These symbols contain cryptic penciled numbers.

  The Five finally understand that their predecessors had passed by particular corners hundreds of times (thousands maybe, judging by some of the discouragingly high numbers). In order to avoid repetitions of earlier explorations and to find their way back they’d effaced the number of the previous passage and inscribed the most recent one in their personal symbol.

  The Five, then, had added their own symbols to those walls. Helen had chosen a matter-of-fact “H” with the number inscribed on the top of the bar. Louis, two linked circles. Margaret, a heart. Seymour, a round face with dots for eyes and the number for a mouth. Max, a circle within a circle. It looked like a tire or a doughnut. Each time they passed by their symbol they’d been careful – all but Max – to efface the number of their previous passage and scribble the new one.

  So naturally Max gets lost. The others work the corridors, shouting Max! Max! The only reply they get is: Aaaax-ax-ax-ax. Finally, Turnkey brings him back half starving and says that he’ll be reported for infringing on forbidden areas and violating two successive curfews. It’s typical of the arbitrariness of regulations here. Nobody has told them the hour of curfew. Anyhow, there are no timepieces here. The functionaries look blank at their questions. They don’t seem to grasp the concept of time. And how can you recognize forbidden areas? Certain doors are clearly banned but nothing signals – they think – forbidden areas.

  Where were you? they ask Max.

  He tells a confused story of a deep deep forbidden area signaled, yes, signaled this one by two crossed timbers, each the girth of a tree, barring the passage and dripping foreign words tarred on the timbers that had to mean: don’t go any further. And you could see why because maybe a hundred yards further (Max had gone further): cracks in the walls and the floor full of plaster from the ceiling and doors sagging on a single hinge, like a little quake had happened.

  Then two crossed timbers again and Max hadn’t gone beyond these because it was like a real bad quake had happened, the walls cracked so bad you could have stuck a fist in the cracks, the ceiling caved in and the floor buckled. And the funny thing was you could see all that because, crazy, the bulbs weren’t dead, everything around them busted but they went on shining so you could see a big lopsided staircase full of rubble and shooting down and down past the light into the dark. It made him so dizzy, just looking, that when he returned past the first crossed timbers he lost his way.

  In any case, Max is reported and loses seven (7) points. When that happens he’s already down to twenty-three (23) of the original fifty (50) allotted points. There was the window he’d kicked blind plus the plate of hash he’d hurled at the poor well-meaning cleaning girl, missing her but smashing the dish (State-property) against the wall. The others are alarmed for him. It’s partly selfish. They don’t want to be reduced from Five to Four. That might mark the beginning of exit or transfer for the others, leaving just one of them alone in this place.

  So they keep guard over Max, as over an unruly little boy. Helen scolds him gently. He doesn’t listen to the others but he does listen to Helen. He even gives in and agrees to French lessons. The very first lesson he makes her teach him to say: “Excuse me, Monsieur or Madame or Mademoiselle, where is the airport?” He wants to stop the lessons there. But Helen points out (secretly unconvinced of it) that he’ll be getting answers to his question. It’s important to understand those answers if he wants to find his airport.

  He goes on with the lessons. They help kill time for both of them and they keep him out of mischief for a while.

  The other administratively suspended Arrivals aren’t any more successful than Max in locating the Reception Room. At best they sometimes encounter doors marked Entrance Strictly Forbidden to All but Duly Authorized Personnel! The boldest of the Five, risking loss of precious points, push such tabooed doors open a cautious crack.

  Sometimes they glimpse vast empty rooms with filing-cabinet walls and floors carpeted with dust. Sometimes gigantic offices with rows of gray-smocked female typists rigid at their chattering machines and deaf to their questions. Sometimes cathedral-l
ike steam-filled laundry rooms with ghostly female shapes that flit about and ignore their presence. Sometimes one of the Five opens a greasy door and gags at the reek of the monumental kitchen where, probably, their fiendish meals are concocted.

  Once Louis opens a door a crack on a training session for Exiters. “Force One,” croaks the black-uniformed instructor and flicks his flexible club on the egg balanced on the head of a life-size wooden dummy. He holds the egg aloft and peels it with his gloved hand, a second exploit. Then he returns to the dummy. “Force Ten,” he croaks. The club blurs and the dummy explodes into a thousand fragments. Louis closes the door very carefully.

  Most of the doors, like this one, bear no warning legend to keep out. They bear nothing but faded numbers and open on chaotic storerooms that hold out no greater hope, generally disappointed, than salvageable items. Louis rummages about for odds and ends to tinker into useful devices. Seymour and Helen delve for novels. Margaret hopes for a copy of the Holy Bible. Max is on the lookout for ropes and tools for the Big Escape and also for a map of the Paris area with the airports clearly marked. Max also craves for bottles, rye, if possible, but he’s willing to settle for beer.

  The search kills time but is usually unproductive. Most of the rooms are filled with a dusty turmoil of old law-books, leather-bound compilations of ministerial edicts and parliamentary debates, dreary volumes of economic statistics and of course files, files in neat 19th century calligraphy covering miles of sagging shelves. Helen carries away parliamentary debates and economic statistics dating back to the early Third Republic. They’re dull but she can’t survive without books, her life-long refuge from life back then.

  Some of the rooms are crammed with grimy artifacts from three monarchies, two empires, one brief insurrectionary Paris commune, and four republics. Helen pokes about in these museum rooms for nice landscapes or pieces of sculpture to introduce a little cheer to their dingy rooms. All she comes up with in the way of art are punctured and grimy oil portraits. There’s fat old Louis XVIII of the 1815-1824 Restoration; stupid horse-faced Charles X (1821-1830); pear-faced Louis-Philippe of the July Monarchy (1830-1848); sly mustached and goateed Louis-Napoleon III (1852-1870). There are also thousands of solemn photographs of Presidents of successive Republics from General McMahon to René Coty. In the way of sculpture there are only severely handsome Phrygian-capped plaster Mariannes from all four of the Republics, thousands and thousands of them, chipped and cracked.

  Once, Helen discovers a room with ceiling-high stacks of posters, mainly mobilization orders for three wars, declarations of hostilities and declarations of ends to hostilities. There are lots of propaganda posters from the Phony War (September 1939 to May 1940 when the war became authentic). One stack shows walls with ears and the legend, Walls Have Ears! The Enemy is Listening! Another stack features a map of the far-flung French Empire in 1939, a few months before the debacle, with the slogan: We shall Triumph for We Are the Strongest! You couldn’t tack up depressing things like that in your sleeping quarters. She does find two big maps of France, one of them wine-stained. She tacks them up in their rooms. The Administratively Suspended Americans often stare at them, except for Max. France isn’t where he wants to go.

  The hope that one of the doors will open on the real world outside is too fantastic to be consciously harbored. How can unlocked doors possibly conceal something so precious? But occasionally the Five encounter other doors in the corridors, thick metal doors that are always locked and the locks tamper-proof.

  Behind certain of those doors they sometimes hear a whine and clatter of what must be an elevator. At first they conjure up behind the other silent tamper-proof locked doors modest things like nice painted landscapes, Balzac, rye, rope, tools, maps, Bibles. Later, much later, the hope emerges into conscious formulation that somewhere in the labyrinth of corridors behind one of those tamper-proof locked doors lies something immeasurably better than painted landscapes: the way out to the real landscape on the other side of the window.

  So the Five don’t find much in the corridor rooms. Above all, they don’t find responsible officials, the ostensible main object of the search. Finally, they deputize Helen with her soft pleasant voice to dial the emergency number (appropriately, 000 for all the good it does). She gets a toneless female voice. When the functionary learns that the so-called emergency call isn’t motivated by legitimate things like fire or attempted suicide but by complaints, she tonelessly informs Helen that the Five will be collectively sanctioned by the loss, for each of them, of five (5) points.

  However some time later (a week? a month? a year?), Turnkey wordlessly comes with a Complaint Form. They argue about what should be given priority. Louis and Margaret are in favor of the Bible. They’re outvoted. The others place the religious requests after secular concerns like showers and gentle toilet paper.

  But Number One on the Complaint Form concerns an unkept promise.

  How much longer will they have to wait for the promised Advocate to come and prepare their defense before the promised Administrative Review Board?