 
###

### GOOD AMERICANS

#### GO TO PARIS

# WHEN THEY DIE

##### HOWARD WALDMAN

Copyright

2014

Howard Waldman

Pour Valou, le voyageur

About the author

Born in Manhattan, Howard Waldman has long resided in Fance.

He taught European History at a France-based American university

and later taught American Literature at a French University. He now

grows roses and writes novels.

### CONTENTS

Opus One Postumous

Part One

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Part Two

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Part Three

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

Thirty-seven

Thirty-eight

Part Four

Thirty-nine

Forty

Forty-one

Forty-two

Forty-three

Forty-four

Forty-five

Forty-six

Forty-seven

Forty-eight

Forty-nine

Part Five

Fifty

Other Books by Howard Waldman

Contact

Behold, l show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised, incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

First Epistle to the Corinthians XV, 52-53.

Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.

Thomas Gold Appleton

### Good Americans

## Go To Paris

### When They Die

######

######

######

###### Opus One, Posthumous

This is how my posthumous account got written.

One night I woke up to a body I could do practically nothing with and a mind I could do practically anything with. Given the choice I'd have preferred it the other way around. But who can choose, in this diminished life or the past one? When I emerged from another methodical beating at the gloved hands of the Black Men I found myself paralyzed from the waist down but able to read the minds and destinies of people present and to come, so, who knows, maybe one day yours.

Yes, your mind and destiny too, assuming that after your first demise you find yourself, like me, administratively suspended in the other-side Préfecture de Police, awaiting either return to void or transfer to the Great Good Place of your twenty-fifth year, age and ailments and embitterments shed, hot for love again.

The Great Good Place is the pretentious term my senile rival in omniscience knows Paris by. I am positive about this because most of the time His Mind is an open book to me. Those capital letters, incidentally, are typographical irony. So far as I'm concerned, he's strictly lower-case. Granted: he was once credited with spectacular cosmic tricks but that was in pre-scientific days, and now he sleeps most of the time. I have to admit, though, that he can still blast people (as you'll see if you stick around with me) albeit on a strictly limited scale, the odd sexual offender here, the straight sexual offender there, when he notices them, which isn't often.

It's more than I can do, though. Omniscience and impotence is a terrible combination, believe me. I see and foresee but can't forestall. After emergence, I tried that with my Administratively Suspended companions: kept pestering them with, Jesus, don't do this, don't do that or you'll never be transferred to Paris, and they'd exchange meaningful looks which I had no trouble deciphering since (to repeat myself) I could leaf though their minds as easily as through pornographic mags, no big difference. Anyhow, things got tense in the Living Quarters with them calling me bats each time I warned and prophesized, too many whacks on the head, so one day I swung away from them between my new crutches and set up in one of the million or so rooms of the Préfecture. To kill time I explored minds and learned the stories of all the people who ended up and who will end up in the Préfecture and decided to write about them. Writing's as good a way as anything else to kill time if you can't use your body for better things.

So I chose one batch of poor bastards (Batch MLX 59833) and started writing about them the way it happened, strictly omniscient point of view of course, given my special talents in that direction, even though that narrative technique has gone out of favor and the know-it-alls call you a mind-reading Fly on the Ceiling and swat you if you use it.

Anyhow here it is, for better or for worse, my Opus One, Posthumous. Maybe later I'll come up with a better title for it.

Part One

### Long First Day At The Prefecture

Chapter One

Is

Suddenly Maggie Williams is again.

It happens in the promised twinkling of an eye, but without last trumpets or angelic choirs and she's still corruptible.

Maggie Williams, first of the poorly Chosen Five to emerge from no-being, hadn't been for twenty-two years. Naturally she hadn't known it. There's no sense of time in no-being. No sense of anything. No sense to it at all. No present, no past and absolutely no future there, short of resurrection.

She hadn't stood for the last ten of her eighty-three years. Now she stands unassisted. Blind for as many bitter years, she now sees.

Sees what?

Hardly sees the gigantic colorless shabby bureaucratic room with all those pillars and empty benches and those high peculiar walls. Doesn't at all see the lofty stepladder and on top of it the little middle-aged man in a gray smock and a filthy beret, filing files in one of the thousands of drawers that make up the wall from floor to ceiling.

What Maggie Williams does see, almost dazzled by the sight, is a lovely milk-white girl, perfectly nude, with green eyes and a generous red mouth. A cascade of fiery hair spills over her freckled shoulders. Fiery crotch-fleece below attests to the authenticity of the color of the cascade above. The girl's legs are long and lithe, her breasts as explosive as howitzer shells. There's a tag attached to her beautifully turned right ankle.

Maggie, catholic about the gender of love objects in her sexually active years, is instantly smitten, an odd reaction, she's aware, for a woman of her quavering age. Maggie smiles at the girl and the girl instantly smiles back at Maggie. She looks smitten too. She's faintly familiar. Maggie raises her hand in greeting. When the girl simultaneously does the same thing in reversal she becomes totally familiar.

Maggie realizes that she herself is the girl and the girl is she, reflected in a tarnished full-length wall mirror.

"Oh God!" she whispers, burning with even more intense love for the girl of twenty-odd she'd been so long ago and is again. She's drunk with joy at the miracle (that will be her defense much later for her scandalous behavior). Her renovated body longs to express that joy in a dance. She recalls that she had once been a professional dancer.

Why "had been" though? Why that mournful pluperfect? Is. The great present of the present tense. Is. Is a professional dancer again. Also an amateur sculptress and jewelry designer, she further recalls. Of course she can't exercise those talents here, not having the raw material of statues and jewelry handy.

But she does have the raw material of dance with her lovely naked body and the desire to dance the dance of blessed Is. That's what she does now.

While Maggie Williams leaps about ecstatically, the four other members of Batch MLX 59833 materialize in the gigantic bureaucratic room, naked and young and tagged (one of them strangely). Unaware of materialization, they're still in the grip of supposedly final things.

For the squat hairy man, it's a tree looming in the windshield of his skidding truck.

For the man in horn-rimmed glasses, despair and ten-story plummet with cartwheeling buildings and sky, the sidewalk coming up fast.

For the two others, a woman and the strangely tagged man, the supposedly final thing is less dramatic: a run-of-the-mill sterile white room with scared and grieving faces looking down into theirs.

Now – though they don't know it yet – they're here in the Great Good Place for good people of the right nationality.

But will they be here for long?

Flinging herself about with graceful abandon, Maggie Williams dedicates her dance to the Most High she'd never believed in before, except for three months at thirteen when, terrorized by periodic blood, she'd yearned for purity in a convent. She believes now, with all her newly discovered soul. She understands that this is divinely commanded resurrection.

Panting, her body gleaming with perspiration, she falls to her knees next to a great pillar, like a church pillar, casts her eyes upward and then closes them on tears and fervently thanks God for an end to was and had been, thanks Him for miraculously renewed light and youth and beauty after so long.

Concentrated on her prayer of thanks, as she had been on the dance of joy, Maggie Williams doesn't notice any of the four others until she opens her wet eyes again. She breaks off thanksgiving and stares in disbelief at the pillar and what's protruding from it. She breathes, "Ohh!"

Protruding from the pillar, no mistake possible, is a great male organ, at repose, with a tag attached to it.

Maggie moves on her knees and rounds the pillar. Casting her eyes upward again she beholds the most beautiful naked man she'd ever seen and she had seen and enjoyed countless many, but so long ago, so terribly long ago.

O God, that heroic heart-cleaving wedge of a torso: broad shoulders slanting down to muscled loins and O God those lovely muscled thighs on each side of O God O God. She guesses at adorably tight small muscular buttocks behind those thighs. Maggie gazes even higher at sky-blue eyes, long blond hair and a blond drooping mustache above a full red mouth. She burns to be explored and adored by that mouth to the tickling accompaniment of that mustache.

He could only be another gift, like light and youth, tagged for her like a Christmas present.

She smiles at him shyly, eyelashes fluttering in incendiary demureness. Then she returns her gaze to the tagged part of him, expecting to see radical modification. There is none at all.

She clasps her hands behind her neck and slowly bends back into a lovely tense sharp-nippled arc and waits for him to rise to the occasion and salute her supple beauty.

She waits and waits, uncomfortably, but nothing outstanding happens.

Maggie finally realizes that those open sky-blue eyes are staring, not at her, but at inner things. She straightens up and reaches out for the peculiarly positioned tag. On one side she sees tiny words in French, on the other, Louis Forster, 1877-1927 Fournée MLX 59833. With great care she removes the tag but lingers on the support. Like marvelous velvet Louis is. The precious weight of it.

Louis begins responding now, responding and responding. "My God, my God," she murmurs at the incredible extent of the response. Soon her hands are cupping his buttocks, adorably tight, small and muscular, as suspected, and she's unable to articulate her deep thankfulness for the supreme gift, except for a muffled "Mmm, Mmm."

Atop the high stepladder the little middle-aged man in the gray smock and the filthy beret gapes down goggle-eyed at the couple, a cloudy drop of saliva forming on his lower lip.

He mutters: " _Ah, Bon Dieu, Bon Dieu de Bon Dieu!_ "

As if in reaction to all these ill-inspired evocations, in two tongues, of the Most High, there comes a brief petulant mutter in the sky above the celebrated metropolis, surprising in that pure blue. It's inaudible except to a surviving handful of the Faithful. Even to them it sounds more like a distant celestial breaking of wind than genuine wrathful thunder. But most of the Faithful are old and hard of hearing.

Chapter 2

Ire

Roused from dreams of bygone omnipotence, I, the Eternal Eye, awake in wrath. Things abominable are being perpetrated close at hand. I feel that quite strongly. I feel all manner of abomination in the world, of course. To merely skim the endless black catalogue of iniquities and lubricity: tagging of edifices of worship, violation of virginity and dietary laws, child and self abuse and, most heinous of all, blasphemous complaints. But for long now these things have been no more than a buzz in Mine ear, save for the blasphemous complaints. To have awakened Me, this wrongdoing must be much closer to home, in the Great Good Place where I dwell and largely sleep. I shall now locate the precise area of infection.

Can it be? Again? Yet again? I shall betake Me to the Reception Department of the Préfecture de Police and view the latest arrival of Good Americans and determine the nature of the abomination and duly chastise it.

Awake, I shall unavoidably be assailed by the worldwide chorus of petitioners and protesters on the subject of Good Americans. I had hoped that now, in semi-retirement, no longer concerned with the universe but, intermittently, with one tiny speck of it by the River Seine, I would cease being importuned by supplicators. I hear them now despite the deaf ear I turn to them. From all the nations of the world, save the mightiest of these, rises the bickering envious chorus: "Why the Americans and not us? Why? Why? Why?" When awake I hear it without cease, sickened to the soul by those endless wails and jeremiads concerning My Second Chosen People, couched in trivial terms: "Why the Americans? Why them and not us? Who needs wings and harps and unisex white gowns? Who wants them? What we want After is Paris, like the Americans. Why them and not us?"

It cannot be denied that the Great Good Place, as I prefer to name it, is an enviable destination, richly endowed with four-star fleshpots which I delight in frequenting. The inhabitants' heavy-footed heavy-tongued eastern neighbors (whose cuisine, let it be said in passing, stinks to high heaven) are wont to say: "Glücklich wie Gott in Frankreich." Happy as God in France. True. Not that I would belittle the land of the Second Chosen People. It is marvelous of course, despite the inferior quality of the fleshpots. They name it God's Country; hyperbole, to be sure, but how can I not be flattered at that? I like to visit it from time to time but am not sure that I would like to dwell there.

The Great Good Place is something else altogether. I must confess that now in My declining tranquil days of semi-retirement I take pleasure in strolling about, in the cool of the day if possible, in certain quiet provincial-like quartiers shaded by leafy chestnuts. I shun crowds. Clamor and agitation tire me quickly. I am grateful for the Great Good Place's numerous quiet empty churches where I can rest untroubled. Grateful too for the calm of its vast cemeteries. Nobody recognizes Me in the form I assume during My visits. To look upon Mine unmediated Face is to be dazzled to blindness and insanity. But take heed not to jostle a certain bearded old gentleman with the red Commander of the Légion d'Honneur insignia in his lapel buttonhole. The last offender to have done that was reduced to a smear, seconds later, by a Number 38 bus on the Porte d'Orléans-Porte de Clignancourt line.

That intervention took much out of Me. It is no longer as in time past when for six days, as I dimly recollect it, I labored mightily without respite, banishing dark chaos, creating lesser and greater lights in the firmament, summoning forth the ocean and the dry land and all manner of beast and bird and, in a moment of culpable weakness I was later to rue, Man.

A day's rest sufficed to recover from those labors and on Monday I was up and about, everywhere at once, inspiring prophets and saints, imposing diets and ritual, upholding, downbringing, halting the sun, cleaving the seas, decimating evil-bent hosts, generating whirlwinds and out of them posing mighty insoluble conundrums to blasphemous wailers on their dung-heaps, etc, etc.

Where did I get the energy in those days? Only in dreams can I exercise that omnipotence now.

But I digress. That vast envious chorus strives to rouse Me to wrath against My Second Chosen People. They cry out in their trivial parlance: "Don't they already control everything in this life? Monopolize the global hamburger-circuit and the global cinema-circuit with their miraculous special effects, daring to compete with Thee in that? And how about those defiant Babel-like towers of theirs, violating the heavens? Or the way they rain long-distance brimstone and fire on so-called rogue cities, having the chutzpah to measure themselves with the Most High Himself by decreeing who, among nations, is Good and who Evil.

" _Instead of wrathful punishment (say the spiteful jealous voices) why that reward, After, for puffed-up presumption? Why are the meeker Australians or Canadians or even the citizens of the UK excluded from it? They're hard to find, granted, but good people live in those lands too. So why Birmingham, Alabama and not Birmingham, England? Why a place like Woonsocket, Rhode Island and not Toronto or Melbourne or London?"_

So murmur the envious hosts.

How many times have I not heard that plaint? I could say in answer to it that I have a weak spot in My vast heart for a people with My Name ever on the ready on their lips, a pious people that proclaim their trust in Me on their very currency. But I choose not to justify Myself. I elect the people I like. My ways are impenetrable. I thought everybody knew that. And, parenthetically, let it be known that I hold in special abhorrence people who strive to justify My ways to Man. The last individual who tried that on a large scale was stricken blind for his pains.

I owe no explanations. It's that way because that's the way it is. In other words, putting it in an even smaller nutshell and to silence the blasphemous wailers once and for all: that's life and if you don't like it, leave it.

But if so you do, count not on awaking After to the great good things in the Great Good Place unless it be that you boast the right citizenship and have been a paragon of proper behavior.

Proper behavior? Proper behavior? What manner of Abomination do Mine eyes now behold? Can such things transpire in the sanctity of the Reception Department of the Préfecture de Police?

Why are the Newly Arrived shamelessly bare?

And there, O, to what hideous idol is yonder kneeling naked daughter of Baal rendering deep homage, more than lip service?

The Cities of the Plain were smitten and blasted for less grave transgressions. Still another unforgivable confusion has been perpetrated by My servants. My Chief Steward, Prefect d'Aubier de Hautecloque, must amend this and forthwith. Laxity and slackness and negligence grow apace in the Administration.

I have long been discontented with Prefect d'Aubier de Hautecloque's management. He has already received warnings. No one is indispensable in the Scheme of Things excepting, of course, Myself, creator of that Scheme. Prefect d'Aubier de Hautecloque can always be replaced by Sub-Prefect Antoine Marchini, able and ambitious man. Perhaps overly ambitious? Give the matter thought.

But hold! What do Mine eyes now descry?

O supreme abomination: My lower echelon servant aloft on the ladder, what doeth he? In time past a self-polluter of his ilk would have been broken with a rod of iron, dashed in pieces like a potter's vessel, reduced to ashes in the twinkling of an eye. But, as already stated, I now command but a tithe of My glorious old puissance. Still, at whatever cost, I shall gird up My loins and commence generating chastising power.

Generating, generating.

Generating, generating.

Still generating.

A fussily-dressed scented young man bearing a pile of dossiers wanders into the vast bureaucratic room, which he hardly sees. His vision is inward as he tries for the millionth time to recall beloved faces and names out of the fog of memory. Of course he can't, not at his modest echelon.

He halts and stares at the unusual spectacle of statue-like Arrivals, unannounced and clearly erroneously processed because stark naked. His white frozen melancholy features almost achieve a gleeful expression. Prefect d'Aubier de Hautecloque has slipped up again.

There are two men, one disgustingly hairy like an ape, the other better, fairly well equipped, but nothing outstanding. There is a plain sad female with perceptible breasts.

The young man's eyes shift from the depressing sight. They widen and widen in his white mask-like face at what he now beholds with beating heart: the most absolutely gorgeous man in creation, monopolized – lucky she! – by a kneeling vulgar female with big boobies. But here? Here? The most marvelous scandal is in the making. Prefect d'Aubier de Hautecloque is going to be in for it. Marvelous, marvelous, beyond words!

Generating. Generating.

Generating. Generating.

Generating process now completed.

Waxing wrathful I now summon My miserable lower-echelon servant in a voice of sky-splitting earth-shaking thunder: "Cease and desist from the sin of Onan! Desist and cease at once!"

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.

Sub-Prefect Antoine Marchini takes instant command of the situation. He understands that the long but patiently awaited moment to topple his enemy has come. A Corsican proverb has it that vengeance is a dish more delectable cold than hot. The Burning Ladder proves that The Eye of the Supreme Echelon has witnessed the scandal. That Eye is now focused upon him. Although the privilege of judging and exiting the mistakenly Materialized lies beyond his area of competence, Sub-Prefect Antoine Marchini is strongly tempted to earn good points by short-circuiting the chain of command, undoing the latest and most outrageous blunder of his superior, Prefect d'Aubier de Hautecloque.

Not superior for long. Not prefect for long. Sub-Prefect Marchini imagines himself promoted into that supreme white uniform, dazzling his hierarchical inferiors with it. Above all, he imagines himself promoted into more memories of his past life, the most precious reward of that new echelon.

Another Corsican proverb has it that the extent of authority is in inverse ratio to the expenditure of energy necessary to assert it. Literally: "Facing his enemy, the man with a rotten stick shouts, the man with a long keen knife smiles." Tight-lipped and impassive, the Sub-Prefect jerks his chin an imperious centimeter in the direction of a spectacled functionary and then again at the Arrivals visible or hidden behind their pillars.

The designated functionary is small and fat. Iron-framed bottle-thick glasses magnify his colorless eyes. With his pepper-and-salt short stiff prickly hair and snout-like nose he looks extraordinarily like a giant hedgehog (which is actually his nickname among his colleagues: "Hérisson"). He pulls on gloves and trots stiffly toward the Arrivals. A female functionary is prepared to take down the information in shorthand as he goes from ankle to ankle.

Hedgehog kneels before Seymour, delicately lifts his ankle, peers at the tag and drones out:

"Seymour Stein, 1925-1980. Sojourn in France: November 5, 1951 to November 2, 1952. As winner of First Prize in a Martel cognac raffle (two unforgettable weeks in Paris, all expenses paid), issued a two-week visa, then a two-year temporary resident carte de séjour. Legal Activities: 1. Four months as English instructor at the Fry-Fitz Academy of Modern Languages. Discharged. 2. Three months as English instructor for the OECD. Discharged. Illegal Activities (none sanctioned at the time): 1. Failure to report to the Tax Department income deriving from private English lessons. 2. Contact-man for a criminal abortionist..."

All of the functionaries shrug at the first offense and look scandalized at the second. Sub-Prefect Marchini interrupts the sing-song recital.

"Enough. A preposterous error has obviously been committed. Clearly, this individual is no Good American. In no way does he merit Paris. Can there be any doubt that he deserves instant exit?" Sub-Prefect Marchini scowls and ponders the matter.

Seymour feels faint hearing that. He sinks down to the floor in a uterine posture, hugging his jack-knifed knees, head bent forward. That close to it, he can't help seeing the big white tag attached to his ankle like an ID tag on a morgue inmate. The tag is shaped like a tombstone as well. On it is his name and the date of his birth, bad enough, that first and fundamental mistake. But also, worse, in terrible confirmation of the giant hedgehog's droning voice, the date of his death. He hadn't fucked up the Great Plunge Out after all.

Seymour's brain, a high-strung neurotic organ back in had-been time, can't cope with the tremendous input of inconceivable information. Broca's Area is swamped and he's speechless. Now Wernicke's Area and he's deaf. His motor cortex is overwhelmed and he can't command a single muscle. Overtaxed neurons threaten to pop by the billion. Protecting his brain from overload, safety-switches are tripped. He blacks out.

When consciousness returns a few seconds later, Seymour's first thought is: so it's true, all the mumbling hocus-pocus obscurantist opium-of-the-people pre-scientific mentality stuff he'd mocked in his wise-guy New York days. The Bible Belt is humiliatingly right. Gimme that old-time religion, if it's good enough for grandpa it's good enough for me. It's no bull-shit. There's something after, after all.

You'll get pie in the sky when you die by and by.

It's no lie.

Except that it's not in the sky you'll be getting your pie but in Paris, first stop the Préfecture de Police in the capital's First arrondissement.

Get it, that is, if you're American and Good, he understands. He's American all right but even by the loosest definition of the word, he hadn't been Good, he knows, oh does he know that! Not just his association with the shady doctor, but hundreds of other things, like the way he'd acted to that girl way back in time here in Paris, the great love of his life for six months, what was her name again? What did she look like?

Seymour Stein's longing for void has weakened. His brain and heart are flooded with nostalgic yearning to see the nameless and faceless short-time love of his life again. But that was back in 1951. It's 1980 now. If she's still alive she'd be in her mid-fifties. Anyhow, he won't be seeing her at any age. Napoleon had just said he'd be exited on the spot. Exited where? Where, oh where, and why again, my God? Oh God, in whom I'm now forced to believe, tell me, tell me, why again?

Seymour blacks out a second time. When he emerges, he realizes that the blackness is a preview of what he's going to be exited to and he blacks out for the third time.

Sub-Prefect Marchini emerges from reflection. "Next!" he commands.

Hedgehog trots over to Helen. She passively abandons her ankle to him. He drones out:

"HELEN RICCHI NEE FORD, 1927-1988.

Two-year carte de séjour issued January 7, 1951 in view of studies in French Literature at the Sorbonne. In July of that same year returned to the United States of America and married. Returned with husband to France in September of that same year. Husband disappeared on third day of arrival and was never found. Cleared of initial suspicion. Issued two-year temporary resident carte de séjour November 23, 1951. Remained in Paris until April 3, 1953. Legal activities: unsuccessful search for husband. No evidence of illegal activities."

The Sub-Prefect decrees: "Pending the inquiry this individual will remain. Next!"

Hérisson kneels before Max Pilsudski and reaches for his right ankle and the tag somewhere beneath the hair. Max pulls his foot back and growls:

"Hey, you queer, take your fucking paws off of me or I'll kick your teeth down your fucking throat."

"What does he say?" the functionary asks Seymour, in French, of course.

Seymour has recovered a little from all those shocks. Maybe the word "exit" has some other meaning.

"He would prefer that you not touch him," he replies in fluent French. ( _"Il préférerait que vous ne le touchiez pas."_ )

Seymour is surprised at his perfect mastery of the subjunctive, a stumbling-block during his long-ago sojourn in France despite Marie-Claude's patient explanations. Of course, Marie-Claude was her name. Great trusting brown eyes. Ponytail. Fragrance of cold-cream. Palm-tickling nuzzle of an aroused breast, O my darling. My aging ex-darling. Fifty-five years old now. With that thought, Seymour shakes free of her.

He advises Max not to make trouble. He isn't in a position of force here, he adds. So Max abandons his shaggy ankle to the functionary's pudgy hand. He doesn't understand what's going on.

Little more than a second is necessary for Hedgehog to transmit what's inscribed on the tag.

"Max Pilsudski, 1950-2000," the kneeling functionary chants. He abandons Max's ankle and stands up.

Seymour nearly blacks out again. The year Two Thousand! Marie-Claude would be seventy-five by now. He feels like weeping and is almost reconciled to his first interpretation of "exit" as black nothing and nowhere.

"Continue with the further information!" orders Sub-Prefect Marchini with brows like thunder-clouds.

"There is no further information, Monsieur le Sous-Préfet," replies Hedgehog, standing at attention.

"What do you mean, no further information?"

"A perfect blank, _Monsieur le Sous-Préfet._ "

"Worse and worse!" exclaims Sub-Prefect Marchini, thinking: "Better and better!"

No information. That means – inconceivable precious blunder on the part of Prefect d'Aubier de Hautecloque! – that this hirsute individual has never set foot in France. Since 1803, the Préfecture de Police possesses dossiers on all aliens who have stepped, however briefly, on French soil (dossiers even on migratory birds who have impinged on France's aerial space, say some). The Good Americans have, by definition, all dwelt in Paris at one time or another and administrative documents necessarily exist attesting to that sojourn. The celebrated adage, "Good Americans go to Paris when they die" is wrongly put. It should read, "Good Americans return to Paris when they die."

The materialization of a voided allegedly Good American (American perhaps, but there's nothing that looks good about this orangutan) who had never set foot in Paris is the most glaring of blunders. Could it not set a judicial/administrative precedent, opening the door to millions of deceased Americans? There are, God knows, quite enough foreigners in France as things stand, the Sub-Prefect reflects.

"An error of monumental proportions has obviously been committed with this individual. Surely this individual deserves instant exit." Sub-Prefect Marchini ponders for a minute. Again he postpones decision and commands: "Next!"

Hedgehog peers down at Louis' right ankle, then at his left ankle, then at his wrists. Before he can investigate elsewhere, he sees the tag on the floor where Maggie dropped it in her haste. He drones:

"LOUIS FORSTER, 1877-1927. Diplomatic visa 1899-1901. Marine guard at American Embassy, Paris. No evidence of illegal activities."

"With the exception of the activity recently indulged in here," says Sub-Prefect Marchini sarcastically. "His status as a Marine only aggravates his case. In no way does this individual deserve Paris. An error has obviously been committed. Can there be any doubt that this individual too deserves instant exit? Next!"

Hedgehog trots over to Maggie. Her body still earthquaking, she offers no resistance to the pudgy rubbered hand at her exquisite ankle. He drones:

"MARGARET WILLIAMS, 1912-1994 Sojourn in France: April 5, 1937 to July 30, 1938. Issued two-year Temporary Resident carte de séjour. Legal or semi-legal activities: Cabaret Fan and Bubble Dancer. Illegal activities: modeling for indecent postcards. Sanctioned by a nominal fine, suspended sentence. In addition, arrested and/or fined over a period of thirteen months for: 1. Indecent exposure, bathing nude in the fountain of the Boulevard Saint Michel at midday, causing public disturbance verging on riot. 2. Nocturnal disturbance of the peace (tapage nocturne) aggravated by rebellion to Officers of the Peace in the exercise of their function. 3. The lighting of a cigar from the Eternal Flame of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe. 4. Shop-lifting in a Rue de Rivoli jewelry shop (charges later withdrawn following interview with shop owner). 5. Shop-lifting in..."

"Enough!" commands the Sub-Prefect. How had they been able to inscribe all that (and more to come) on one side of a tag?

"With your permission, Monsieur le Sous-Préfet, one last thing concerning this individual. She was expelled from France on July 30, 1938."

"I should hope so," says the Sub-Prefect. He draws close to Maggie, stares down at her and assumes an attitude of profound and prolonged reflection.

Clearly the fate of four of the Five hangs in the balance.

Max is still completely confused. He doesn't know what's going on in this nut-house. The Yid's right. This can't be Las Vegas, can't be the States even, not with that foreign jabbering. It has to be Paris, France, like he said. "Hey," Max booms, "What the fuck am I doing in Paris, France anyhow? What happened to Rickie? And where's Bess? I wanna put through a call to Las Vegas to Bess."

Max moves shakily toward the gilt Empire table with the three phones, one of them awesomely gigantic. Before he can reach it, two rubber-gloved male functionaries easily overcome him. Normally he could have disposed of them in two seconds flat, one hand tied behind his back. He's keenly aware of this and starts weeping at his diminished state as they drag him back alongside Seymour. The functionaries upbraid him for making a scandal. _"Pas de scandale!"_ says one. _"Oui, surtout, pas de scandale!"_ says the other. Max collapses to a sitting position and weeps like a little boy.

Seymour, standing now, places his hand consolingly on Max's shoulder. Max stops sobbing although the tears keep dripping down his face. His eyes, inches from Seymour's right ankle, focus wetly on Seymour's tag. Wiping his eyes with a shaggy forearm, he stares again at the tag, lets out a great cry and jerks back as though Seymour's hand were red hot. He scrambles to his feet, bellowing:

"Jesus, you're dead. You goddam Jew corpse, you keep away from me!"

Stung to the quick and the dead by the double insult, Seymour invites Max to look at his own tag. Max's death-date had been chanted out, but in French. "Deux Mille" didn't mean anything to Max. The nearest to it was the name of an old-time Hollywood producer, Cecil B. DeMille, no connection. But written black on white, the figures 2000 coming after 1950 do mean something. Max remembers the giant tree and the splintering windshield.

Max starts howling, inhumanly. It's terrible when a hairy man, built like a Mack truck and who says "fuck" every third word, breaks down like that.

His howls fail to rouse Sub-Prefect Marchini out of his deep reflection.

Helen is standing quietly in her corner, eyes shut. She's a little sorry she hasn't been chosen to exit with the others. Dying, even a second time, doesn't really bother her. She doesn't want to return to Paris. She'd just walk up and down in it again, from dawn to dusk, searching for one face among millions of faces as she'd done for two years back then.

Now she hears Max's howl of terror and instinctively moves toward it. She places her hand on his heaving shoulder and looks down at his ankle. "Max," she says. His name is Max. The other is Seymour. The tags come as a shock but at least they make communication easy, like the badges people wear at conventions.

"B-Bess. R-Rickie. B-Bess. R-Rickie." He goes on blubbering the names.

Helen gets out of him that Bess is (was) Max's wife. Rickie is (was) the dachshund pup he'd bought for her birthday. They had no children. He'd been sitting nice and quiet alongside him when the truck went into the skid.

"I wanna phone Bess, tell her what happened to me and ask about Rickie and they won't let me, they won't let me phone Bess."

Helen's hand soothes his head now. "Max, I don't think you'll be able to get through to Bess anyhow. If you did, it might be bad for her heart."

"I don't wanna stay here. I wanna fly back to Las Vegas. I could do that, couldn't I, huh? Be close to Beth. And find out if Rickie's okay."

"Maybe it's possible, Max, but I don't really know. I'm new here myself." Her hand goes on comforting him.

At that moment, Maggie looks past Sub-Prefect Marchini standing before her in meditation. She catches sight of herself again in the tarnished full-length mirror, draped in towels like swaddling clothes.

But this time she shrinks back from her image in terror.

Chapter 5

Margaret's Vow

Terror because her hair and mouth, once red, are pale gray. Her eyes, once green, are black as night. She sees the towels not as swaddling clothes now but as a seven-piece shroud.

The second death process is already under way, she thinks. She goes back to sobbing convulsively.

Maggie doesn't understand that loss of color is perfectly normal in this space. No more than the four other Arrivals, she hasn't noticed that everything in the vast bureaucratic room is black and white and gray as in an old-fashioned pre-Technicolor movie. Color (as they'll soon see) is outside with that blue sky and those golden domes and gay striped awnings and, briefly, with what the Arrivals bring into the room. They quickly lose it. Already Helen's resurrected mousy brown hair is a shade of mousy gray and Louis' sky-blue Nordic eyes Latino black.

Color can't survive here. Red turns to gray the way fire turns to ashes. Green turns black the way grass molders to compost. Blue too turns black, the way afternoon sky loses out to night. All these losses happen much faster here than outside.

Maggie, unaware of this phenomenon, sees herself condemned again to terrible things. Runny in a box beneath sunny earth. Or sentenced back to her terminal state. She imagines blindness and mental confusion in the wheelchair, her lovely body in ruin again.

She throws herself on her knees before the moth-eaten sub-prefectoral uniform. A torrent of pleas and vows pours from her gray lips. Spare her from the nickeled chair and the long box and she would be good, forever good, chaste and prayerful and saved.

Beyond this ragged figure of authority Maggie pours out her soul to the Supreme Authority, God Himself.

She vows an end to frivolity.

An end to drunkenness and gluttony.

Vows an end to lascivious nude dancing.

An end to dancing of any sort.

Vows an end to the poisoned delights of the flesh.

Vows absolute chastity until holy post-nuptial union with Jean Hussier in the event of Divine Forgiveness and transfer out there.

Or perhaps, better yet, union with no man ever again, her sole bridegroom Jesus Christ. She sees herself saved, taking the veil as Sister Margaret as she'd once imagined doing at the age of thirteen before the depravities of fourteen. Saved spiritually and physically, leading a cloistered life, cloistered but life anyhow. Her fiery hair (fiery again, for once the dying process reversed, it was sure to win back its natural hue) censored by scissors and the remnants condemned to solitary confinement beneath a nun's cowl. Her depraved body concealed and knowing no itch other than the holy itch of rough-spun cloth.

Meditation.

Fasts.

Vigils.

Prayer.

Penitence. Penitence. Penitence.

Oh, unending Penitence for her sinful selfish life, for the men she'd inflicted suffering on. She thinks of Jean back in 1937 here in Paris, sees Jean's chalky face that last time, hears his threat of suicide if she left him. Oh Jean. What happened to you? And now: Oh Louis. For she sees a bulging bit of Louis' towel – no towel but a shroud like hers – projecting from the pillar. Louis, the most recent of her victims, whom she'd involved in unmerited punishment.

Sudden spiritual illumination transfigures Margaret's lovely tear-stained features. Margaret (never again Maggie) understands the self-deception of her pleas, the hypocrisy of her longing to embrace humiliations and privations. Not out of genuine repentance, not out of love of God but out of abject terror at extinction, a clinging to life on any terms.

Now Margaret pleads for Louis with great eloquence, crying out in essence to Sub-Prefect Marchini: send me back to no-being but spare Louis from it, Louis, my partner in sin, but free from sin himself because unconscious of it. Whatever I touch or look upon I destroy.

Louis stares at the white-clad kneeling girl with the modestly compressed bosom and the strange gray hair. Her wet face is radiant with intense spirituality. Louis is completely confused. He can't make the connection between the kneeling unclad shameless girl with the flaming red hair of a few minutes before and this one, kneeling too but in supplication. There's a faint puzzling resemblance, though, between the two.

Now he understands that she's begging for annihilation in his place. He finds that incomprehensible. Also intolerable.

Clutching his towel, Louis steps out from behind his pillar and proclaims her innocence.

Not this girl, the other girl, he exclaims.

Not true! Not true! she exclaims, thinking he's referring to the thin sad-faced girl called Helen Something.

True! True! he exclaims.

Then he understands that she's defending the other girl, the other girl who must be her sister. He understands that faint puzzling resemblance now. Louis is a deeply religious man when he thinks of religion. Like so many of his compatriots, his mind naturally operates in the Manichean mode of black and white. He has difficulty understanding how Virtue and Vice can be related and how Virtue can accept annihilation to save Vice.

Louis, who had heroically defied poorly aimed Spanish lead at San Juan Hill in July 1898, matches her selfless sacrifice. Heroically, he takes the thing upon himself.

He forced her to do what she did, he exclaims, meaning her sister, of course.

Not true, it was my fault! she exclaims.

No, mine! he persists.

The quarrel of goodness quickens. As at a spirited tennis-match, the functionaries' heads pivot from right to left and from left to right with each retort and counter-retort of abnegation. Few of them understand English. But the intense emotion of the exchange between the handsome lad and the lovely girl, like a climactic duo in Italian opera, overcomes the language barrier. The chins of a few of the lower-echelon female functionaries tremble.

Sub-Prefect Marchini is deaf to the pathos. He finally emerges from reflection, determined to run the risk of encroaching on the prerogatives of his hierarchical superior. He turns to the stern-faced female functionary.

"Summon the Exit Squad at once!"

She seizes the largest of the whistles hanging from her squat neck, imports vast quantities of air in her lungs, puffing up and leaning back like a cobra ready to strike. Her eyes pop as she venomously injects all of the air into the whistle.

There's no sound. A needle-sharp pain in their temples informs the Five that the summons is transpiring at an inhuman pitch as though alerting a beast sensitive to extreme frequencies. In the continuing silence the lower-echelon female functionaries huddle together defensively like veldt antelopes scenting approaching meat-eaters.

A door bursts open. Four black hulking booted helmeted figures trot into the room. They are encased in black leather. The only visible part of them are their grim mouths and massive chins beneath protective Plexiglas visors that resemble great panoramic insect eyes. Their gloved hands grip long supple black clubs.

"Dispose of the individuals clad in towels, all five of them!" commands Sub-Prefect Marchini, forgetting that he'd spared one of those five.

Three of the Exiters (also known as the Black Men) corral Louis and Seymour and Max.

"Oh what a pity," whispers the fussily-dressed scented young functionary drawing close to Louis. "But there is no pain involved and guaranteed peace after, no second awakening, ever, ever."

He approaches his hand to Louis' bare heroic chest. A good inch away Louis feels the icy aura and pulls back.

"Hand down!" barks the severe-faced female functionary with the iron-gray bun. The Exiters turn their insect-eyed heads, like praying mantises, toward him.

Trying for an expression of impugned innocence, the young functionary holds up, as for inspection, his safely rubber-clad hands.

"Hand down! Distance!"

Pouting, the young functionary lowers his hands and steps back.

Three of the Exiters start marching the three men away to the void they should never have left. They offer no resistance. Max is glad to be leaving this crazy place. He thinks they're taking him to a Las Vegas-bound Boeing. Helen accompanies him.

Creaking with totalitarian leather, the fourth Exiter marches toward Margaret who has totally broken down.

A door opens and closes with quiet authority. Sudden silence in the room. The functionaries, including the five Exiters and Sub-Prefect Marchini, stiffen to attention.

A murmur. Feet withdrawing. Feet approaching. A growing stench of rotting flowers. Margaret breathes through her mouth and opens her eyes. The sub-prefectoral scuffed shoes and moth-eaten trousers have made way to brilliant black English shoes and spotless white trousers with razor-sharp creases.

Raising her eyes she sees an impeccable white uniform covered with braid that would be golden if color existed in this dusty space, golden like the buttons, epaulettes and all those medals. A ceremonial sword in an engraved silver scabbard hangs smartly by his side.

Beneath the braided cap, an immensely long aristocratic face, a frighteningly chalky-white face. The whiteness can't come from emotion, because his emaciated face is expressionless like a white death-mask cast a week after decease.

For long seconds Margaret is wordless, paralyzed with dread. Then she returns to imploration on behalf of her victim. One of her wild gestures of despair bursts a safety-pin and the uppermost towel starts slipping, barely retained by her nipples. She clutches it into half-way decency and blushes dark gray.

"Spare Louis Forster, sir. Oh sir, he's innocent. Destroy me but not him. Destroy me body and soul," she implores the frightening powerful presence.

"Cela serait vraiment bien dommage, mon enfant," says PrEfet D'Aubier de Hautecloque (for yes, it is he) gazing down at her. His voice seems to come from a deep vault. The words emerge between the motionless lips of his death-mask and the stench of rotting flowers is overpowering.

Strangely, Margaret understands the remark perfectly although in her previous existence she'd been unreceptive to foreign tongues, linguistically speaking. In reply to her passionately expressed willingness to lose her renovated body, the dread presence had said: "That would indeed be a great pity, my child."

The Prefect delicately tugs off his right-hand white glove. The Sub-Prefect stares intensely at that starved white hand that resembles an albino open-jawed prehistoric lizard. It moves toward the girl's shoulder. Will he dare? Here? Before witnesses? Perhaps before the pitiless gaze of the omniscient omnipotent Most High Himself? The Sub-Prefect silently prays that the Prefect will dare.

But the white starved hand withdraws. The Prefect tugs back on the glove. The hungry lizard is muzzled. With his gloved hand the Prefect comforts her bare shoulder. Her shoulder flinches at the freezing contact that turns her heart to a block of ice.

Margaret backslides to Maggie as she tries to make up for the involuntary recoil. She smiles timidly up at the death-mask in a flutter of eyelashes. Then she stops doing that terrible inciting thing. Margaret again, she lowers her head in deep humility. Her heavy cascade of once fiery hair, now extinguished, falls forward, masking her face like a fundamentalist Moslem veil. Possibly she isn't aware that the displaced hair has bared her downy neck vertebras, praised by countless lovers. Staring down at them, the Prefect asks in a cavernous boom that carries:

"Who ordered that this woman be exited without the habitual inquiry?"

"I did, Monsieur le Préfet," says Sub-Prefect Marchini, still at rigid attention and staring into space past the Prefect's left epaulette. "In her case and in three others."

"I was unaware that you were vested with the authority to do so, Monsieur le Sous-Préfet."

"Technically I am not, Monsieur le Préfet. But the anomalies, numerous and glaring, testified to obvious erroneous handling. [On your part, as everybody knows.] As you are doubtless aware, Monsieur le Préfet, administrative inquiries can take months or years. [Again, your entire responsibility, as everybody knows.] During that time, the Receiving Department is responsible for the detention of the investigated individuals, with no budgetary provision for their upkeep. [Whose fault?] I believed it to be in the best interest of all concerned, in view of the obvious anomalies, to take immediate action. Allow me, Monsieur le Préfet, to enumerate these anomalies. One: the complete nudity of the Five, partially rectified by the Receiving Department. The towels that now imperfectly clothe them are State property. Two: the absence of exit-date and sojourn-date conformity. The dates of exit range from 1927 to 2000, the dates of sojourn from 1899 to 1951. Three: the flagrant violation of the criterion of Goodness in the case of four of the five: criminal abortion activities, theft, desecration of a national shrine, tax evasion, indecent behavior in the Reception Department..."

"Precisely what sort of indecent behavior, Monsieur le Sous-Préfet?"

Sub-Prefect Marchini glances right and left. The women functionaries are within earshot. Much smaller than his superior (superior for the time being) the Sub-Prefect elevates himself to extreme tiptoe and whispers something long in the Prefect's ear.

"Be more precise, _Monsieur le Sous-Préfet_."

Once more, Sub-Prefect Marchini tiptoes to the level of the Prefect's ear and whispers something long.

"Kindly eschew garbled Latinisms, laborious euphemisms and obscure circumlocutions, Monsieur le Sous-Préfet. Express yourself in plain French."

The Sub-Prefect sees the trap but sees no way to avoid it. He whispers something very brief in the Prefect's bloodless ear.

Prefect d'Aubier de Hautecloque looks coldly at Sub-Prefect Marchini.

"I am surprised at the use of such vulgar language here in the Préfecture de Police, Monsieur le Sous-Préfet." His voice carries to the furthest corner of the room. Then he forgets Sub-Prefect Marchini altogether and gazes musingly down at Margaret.

Sub-Prefect Marchini's gun-metal features acknowledge nothing of the public humiliation endured. He follows the Prefect's gaze at the woman's bare shoulder, the exquisite slope of it, and remembers the hushed-up scandal involving the Prefect and the platinum-blonde silent-film starlet in the August 1923 batch. Sub-Prefect Marchini is certain that the Prefect will again yield to temptation. Certain too that retribution will be devastating this time.

The cold dish, the cold dish, how delectable that cold dish, further seasoned by this latest humiliation, will soon be.

The Prefect removes his gaze from Margaret's shoulder. He makes a tiny dismissive gesture in the direction of the Exiters. They stiffen with a creak of leather, salute and march out of the Reception Room. The Prefect orders the concerned functionaries to accompany the Arrivals to the Living Quarters.

The Arrivals stagger out of the Reception Room into a gigantic circular passageway that seems suspended in darkness. A drab alternation of doors and open corridors, hundreds of both, run about a black pit a mile in diameter and delimited by a shoulder-high iron fence bristling with needle-sharp spikes and barbs. Dim lights in the circular wall illuminate no more than the initial curve of what must culminate in a gigantic dome. To one side of the Reception Room is an ornate Greco-Roman peristyle. Six identical marble nudes uphold the Doric roof topped by a giant bronze eagle. A carpet leads to an impressive door. Any doubt as to the occupant of this dusty grandeur is dispelled when the Prefect marches stiffly towards that door. It opens obediently and closes behind him.

On the other side of the Reception Room is another ornate door, but much smaller and in sad disrepair. Fastened to the wall above it is another emblematic bird, originally an eagle but much smaller than the Prefectoral eagle and so battered that it resembles a crow.

The five Americans, maybe good, maybe not, stand there shivering. The stern-faced middle-echelon female functionary with iron-gray hair blows inaudibly on a smaller whistle. In a minute three policemen join the group. While they go on waiting for something or somebody else, Helen tries to soothe Max. She touches his arm. "Maybe you're right, Max. Maybe they'll take you to the airport."

But Max doesn't believe that anymore. He pulls away from her hand. He knows the score now. And maybe this woman is in cahoots with his captors.

Sub-Prefect Marchini passes by jerkily, heading for the inferior door and bird.

"Monsieur," Seymour Stein inquires timidly: "What will happen to us if we are not voided? Where will we go? And how long will we have to wait here?"

"You will be informed in due course," says the Sub-Prefect without breaking his jerky stride. "Learn to arm yourself with patience in this place. As we all do."

Chapter 6

In The Corridors

They go on shivering in the gloom. After a while they hear a clump-jangle, clump-jangle, and another gray-smocked functionary joins the three flics and the stern-faced middle-echelon female functionary. He's bald and immensely tall and thin. There's a hint of drab eyes at the bottom of the shadows that fill his bony eye-sockets. His cheek-bones protest sharply against his parchment-like skin. Three whistles hang from his neck. Attached to his belt is a great metal ring with dozens of big keys. On his left foot is a thick-soled orthopedic shoe.

The turnkey leads the way. He pitches and tosses like a rusty freighter in heavy seas. The orthopedic shoe makes a clumping sound, the keys a dull jangle. He turns into a corridor and the others follow.

Clump-jangle, clump-jangle, past obscure doors set in cracked walls covered with blistered gray paint and scratched graffiti, illegible in the gloom. There are no windows. Feeble light filters down from wicker-enclosed bulbs of thrifty wattage pitched at regular intervals and dangling from the ceiling. Sometimes a succession of bulbs are smashed or dead. When that happens the gaunt turnkey halts and folds to a squat and makes notes in a notebook on his knee, noting the number and location of the burst or dead bulbs for later administrative action. Then he unfolds to his full height and convoys them through the long zone of darkness, clump-jangle, clump-jangle.

Left turns, right turns, up creaking staircases, down creaking staircases with wobbly banisters. In certain staircases, rectifying obvious miscalculation, the last few steps are much higher or lower than the others. Max and Seymour stumble and sprawl several times. Sometimes the new corridors, turning, deviate from the normal ninety degrees and veer off at unconventionally acute angles. Without warning, and for no apparent reason, the ceiling of a new corridor swoops down oppressively low or soars to a fantastic height. The building-plan seems to have been slapped together on some unimaginably huge draftsman's table by a stoned or stewed architect. Or perhaps – the notion will often occur to Seymour in the long time to come – by a trembling hand poorly commanded by a brain suffering from senile dementia.

The bare feet of the Chosen Five encounter grit and scraps of paper. Once, they turn into a howling corridor and a ferocious wind almost knocks them down, almost rips the towels off their shivering bodies. They cough and weep in the driven dust. Papers blow past them like panicked birds. Their shadows rock wildly as the overhead bulbs reel in the storm. Some of the bulbs strike the wall and expire with a feeble pop.

They pass by a cell. Shadowy silent figures are seated on the floor in attitudes of prostration.

Further on, behind certain of the closed doors they hear banging noises. The fists of other prisoners hammering for release or shutters banging in the high wind?

Half-asleep, the Five stumble forward, leaning against the wind. They have colorless unimaginative dreams in which they are walking down endless dusty windowless corridors with doors that never open and when they awaken out of the dreams it's to endless dusty windowless corridors with doors that never open. The notion occurs to some of them that their case has already been judged, that they have already been exited and that this is what you do for all time when you are exited.

The notion doesn't occur to Helen maybe because she still doesn't care much about what's happening to her personally. But she is concerned about Max, plodding alongside her. His features are set in an expression of intense suffering. Naturally Helen thinks the cause is metaphysical and that any second now he'll sag to the floor again and howl unbearably at being dead.

Helen can't know that Max has rejected the dismal testimony of the tag. He's trying to figure out the real situation. His brain is working hard. It's a novel exercise and hurts. That explains his expression of intense suffering.

One thing he's practically 100% sure of now: Max Pilsudski hasn't bitten the big one yet. The tag with that 2000 exit date is some kind of a brain-washing trick. Trying to make him think he's gone nuts. Why? Who's behind it? What are they after? Something somebody smuggled in his truck? He remembers the load: a thousand or so cases of Perrier mineral water. French too. Couldn't be a coincidence. He doesn't know what the hustle is yet. There are plenty of loose pieces in the picture, like that accident (or was it an accident?) and the plastic surgery job on his body and these other prisoners, if they really are prisoners. He's sure though that the pieces will fit together at the end.

Max is terrifically relieved by the way things have simplified into the possibility of action. What he has to do is escape. This is the kind of set-up you can escape from, not like the other set-up they're trying to make him buy. But he isn't buying. He hasn't bought it, hasn't bought it, he keeps on telling himself.

They turn into a windless acutely-angled corridor. At the end of it they see a girl on her knees next to a pail, sponges, rags, a scoop and a bottle. Her scrubbing-brush moves in feeble inch-by-inch arcs. Clearly she's daydreaming of more pleasant places than this. She looks up as they approach and the rhythm of the scrubbing-brush accelerates furiously in a foolish avowal of shirking. She's very young. Her face is frozen in an expression of fright. Now she starts gasping for breath, probably to give the impression that she's been scrubbing at that furious pace for hours. A pathetically transparent childish ruse. She looks like a child. Perhaps, though, the three-second burst of energy really has exhausted her. She's very thin.

Turnkey speaks for the first time. His voice sounds like a rusty key turning in a rusty lock.

"Stupide," he says. "You should be preparing the rooms for the new Arrivals."

"Monsieur," she replies in a tiny frightened voice, "nobody told me there were Arrivals."

"You can see that there are Arrivals, five in all, two women and three men," says the stern-faced middle-echelon female functionary. "Prepare the rooms immediately."

The girl stares up at Seymour in dim-witted imploration, as though Seymour, despite his scanty loin-cloth and dazed expression and chattering teeth, somehow could exercise powers of intercession. "Monsieur, I swear nobody told me..."

The stern-faced middle-echelon female functionary cuts her short. "It is forbidden to talk to Arrivals. As you well know. You have been warned dozens of times. You will be reported if you do so again. Also if you are not gone immediately to prepare the rooms."

The stern-faced female functionary's hand moves toward one of the whistles. The girl wildly gathers up the rags and the sponges and the scoop and the bottle of cleaning liquid. She thrusts them clumsily into a plastic shopping-bag. She grabs the mop and the broom leaning against a wall.

In her haste she upsets the pail. The filthy water spatters on Seymour's bare leg. She lunges at the pail, as if the spilled water could be undone, loses her balance and collides with Seymour. The freezing contact lasts a fraction of a second. She shrinks back, horrified, as a whistle shrills.

The stern-faced female functionary removes the whistle from her lipless mouth and commands: "Inspection!"

A pair of policemen drag the girl beneath a naked bulb. One of them twists her arms behind her back. The other grabs her stringy hair and pulls her head back, exposing her long skinny throat. Turnkey's bony fingers pluck at the lids of her right eye, exposing her eyeball, white and gigantic, like a terrorized horse's. He peers at it for a few seconds and steps back.

"Negative," he reports to the stern-faced female functionary. The policemen release her.

"Oh, Monsieur," she sobs, turning to Seymour. The stern-faced middle-echelon female functionary cuts her short.

"You will be reported, for the contact and for speaking a second time, although warned, to an Arrival. Your case will be judged."

"Oh Madame, Madame, please don't take the sea away from me. Leave me the dunes and the lighthouse, I beg you."

Ignoring the plea, the female functionary pulls out a notebook and notes the transgression.

"Moreover, Toilets 34, 36 and 42 have been poorly cleaned, not for the first time. There have been more complaints. After you have prepared the rooms for the Arrivals you will clean those toilets again."

The girl's shoulders start shaking. She seems to be crying although there are no tears in her funereal eyes. She limps past them, gasping hard as though her shopping bag and mop and broom and scoop and empty pail weigh a ton. Despite his wet leg Seymour is glad for her that the pail is lighter now.

Turnkey leads the way past the spreading pool of dirty water. Dust has already settled on the moist swathes left by the mop. Or maybe she's done as poor a job on the corridor as on the toilets and will be reported for that too.

Closely escorted by the silent flics, the Five trudge on, their pace regulated by the clunk-jangle of the pitching and tossing turnkey. More turns, left turns, right turns, more obscure staircases, long flights up, long flights down. More long corridors, some windy, most stagnant.

How long? How long?

Chapter 7

Here Now, There Then

They turn again.

A window on the world outside dazzles them.

They halt before it.

Certain details differ for the transfixed onlookers but all of them see the essential blue sky arching over golden domes and white facades, white bridges arching over the celebrated river.

They see gay striped shop-awnings, yellow and white and red and blue stripes tempered with white stripes.

Max doesn't, but the others see slow lovers advancing along the tree-shaded cobble-stoned quays.

They see bright summer-clad couples sipping at sidewalk café tables.

The distant onlookers thirst for those green and amber drinks and the world the colored drinks belong to. Except for Max, tears spring to their eyes. They are profoundly thankful for what they see. It's only later that they'll wonder if the sight of once-possessed things isn't punishment.

The clump-jangle goes on ahead but the Five remain like statues before the window. A flic behind them commands: "Avancez. _Y a rien à voir._ Du brouillard." Max wants to know what the cop (the so-called cop) said. Helen tells him: "He says there's nothing to see. Just fog. He wants us to go on."

They go on reluctantly, herded past the window into a stretch of more gray blistered walls with illegible graffiti.

But they cling to the torturing blessed vision. Except for Max, who has never been in the celebrated city before, they are all back there again, in space and in time, in the city of their twenty-fifth year.

The clopping of the orthopedic shoe accelerates into the clopping of hooves on wooden paving blocks, the jangle of the keys into harness jangling and Louis Forster sees the elegant carriages, not yet horseless, thronging the avenue. He sees the archaic manure droppings and imagines he can smell the rural fragrance that will be replaced by exhaust fumes in a decade or so. Louis sees flights of pigeons in the blue sky, no trace of the square rigid-winged aeroplanes that will buzz in the skies of Louis' middle-aged future.

And there, the elegant flower-shop where for months he's pretended to admire seasonal flowers in the display window: first daffodils like gay yellow telephones and then tulips, red like her cheeks when she catches his gaze on her, for his gaze is focused past the flowers on one of the three florists, honey-blonde and slim, more graceful than all the flowers in the world, and then, finally, one June day (roses displayed now), he summons up courage and pushes the door open, another jangle, the bell, the three aproned girls twittering in French no more comprehensible to him than the twittering of the two love-birds in the great gilded cage and Louise (he is Louis and she is Louise, he'll say to her later and say it couldn't be coincidence) smiles shyly and in lovely fragmented English counsels his bouquet and later tells him she was jealous of the girl the bouquet was for, not knowing then that it was a pretext.

A pretext. Once outside the shop what can he do with a bouquet? He takes it back to the Embassy.

They wink and poke their elbows in his ribs. "Margie," they guess and say. So he gives it to Margie. He's already gone out with her. There aren't many female employees at the Embassy in those days. Margie is one of the telephone operators, pretty in a wholesome mid-western way, corn-flower blue eyes, corn-tassel blonde hair, off an Iowa farm like himself and Methodist too and inevitably he'll end up by marrying her, which he doesn't suspect at the time because of Louise behind the flowers and whom he soon gets to know away from the flowers.

In the drab corridor Louis goes on thinking, in guilt and longing, of his first knowledge of Louise in the hotel-room and the unassumed consequences of that knowledge. A crazy notion occurs to him. (Why crazy, though? Isn't he already in the middle of a crazy miracle?) If by a second much better crazy miracle he was returned to the Paris of his twenty-fifth year (he's been given the body for it), couldn't he keep that bouquet for the slim honey-blonde girl at quitting time instead of going back with it to the Embassy and giving it to his unsatisfactory future wife? Change the future and the wife that way? Couldn't that be done?

In a grave relapse from spirituality Maggie remembers long-ago times out there enjoying herself greatly and being greatly enjoyed. Margaret again, she banishes those scandalous memories. Maybe it's the golden domes that remind her of the jewelry shop. The domes are the same color as the ring they caught her with (just a single tiny diamond for all that fuss). The director arrives and they convoy her into his office. She weeps with convincing despair. I'll lose my job. They'll expel me from France. I'm American. He understands English and speaks it with a half-French half-Oxford accent, very distinguished. His office is full of books, classics she guesses, because leather-bound and behind glass. He looks like he's read them all. He wants to know what she does for a living. Surely not stealing jewelry? Artistic dancing, sir. Where, if I may ask? At the Cabaret Arc-en-Ciel, she says, embarrassed, and adds: a little like ballet but free style. Please. I'll lose my job. Please, please.

I don't know what I should do, he says, staring down at his desk. She says she'll do anything, anything at all, if he withdraws the charges. She expects him to announce the price and his price is hers. It's no problem; on the contrary, he's young with curly gold hair, not balding and fattish like Guy, no problem at all. But instead, he talks about America and the war his father died in and how the Americans helped save France in 1917-18. He measures her by that heroic standard. How could an American young lady possibly do a thing like that? He makes her feel like a traitor. It's a sickness, sir, something-mania they call it, I see something nice and I have to have it for a while. Just hold it for a while. I would have brought it back, sir, I swear I would have. Tears come again with hardly any effort. She knows they enhance her green eyes. He stares down at the desk.

Finally he says she can go. She blinks. He reaches for the pile of letters and opens the first one as though she'd already gone. "You may go," he repeats, without looking at her. "Charges will be withdrawn." He's intent on the letter. Maggie goes, thankful but offended.

The next day, Saturday evening, he's there at the Cabaret Arc-en-Ciel. The spotlight is blinding but she can see him at the table way back in the rear, staring down at it as he'd stared down at his desk. She feels offended again and ashamed of her dance. Ignoring the wailing signal of the clarinet, she omits the final split-second flourish of the fans that gives the customers total exposure. Most of them applaud anyhow, even if some protest. He doesn't move, doesn't look up. Soon he's gone. Guy is angry. How come she forgot the climax and disappointed the customers like that? Later they leave by the side entrance. Guy's arm is around her waist, his hand near her groin. Steered toward the taxi-stand on the avenue, she sees the jeweler seated at the sidewalk café table staring at the gaudy cabaret entrance with her name in medium-size print. She removes Guy's arm. What's the matter? Guy asks alongside her in the cab. Nothing's the matter, she says.

She returns to the jewelry shop. Yes? he says, looking up from papers on his desk and then back again. I forgot to thank you, she says. She adds: That wasn't my artistic dance. I do that just to earn my living. Why doesn't he look at her? Why doesn't he say something? Of course you go to the ballet, he says finally. All the time, she says although she never did. He invites her to the ballet.

She feels deeply humiliated by that controlled perfection on the stage, no wailing clarinet. He maintains strict distance from her in the dark during the performance. After, he comments on the dancers, using terms she's never heard of. He shakes her hand and says good night to her before her hotel. The ballet invitation was to humiliate her. Back in her furnished room she weeps bitterly, no effort at all, the effort is to stop. But three months later Jean Haussier offers her a gold ring like the one she'd tried to take but with a much bigger diamond on it. She accepts it but not the permanent thing that's supposed to accompany it. She's already met Harry, no, George, Harry was later.

Why didn't I? she now thinks, stumbling down another shadowy corridor. Everything would have turned out differently in her life. And the idea occurs to her too: if by some second miracle she could return out there and back then (she's been given the marvelously renewed body for it), wouldn't it happen all over again? Except that this time, guided by miraculous hindsight, given a second chance, she would know what to do and what not to do, would know that she should say yes this time to what Jean Haussier offered with the gold ring and the two-carat diamond.

For Helen, it's a bright windy October morning in the Luxembourg Gardens with Richard, in one-sided discussion of guide-book places for the third afternoon of their honeymoon. She suggests the Eiffel Tower and gives many reasons. He wants the Catacombs and gives no reasons. He stares at the basin and the well-dressed children with gaffs sailing sleek model sailboats. The wind pushes the splashing jet about. Sudden gusts decapitate it to spray with a hint of a rainbow. The spray wets the billowing sails of the veering sailboats.

" _They'll swamp if they let them sail into the fountain," he predicts somberly. Certain days he sees disaster everywhere. She asks him, not for the first time that morning, if he's taken the pills. Usually she makes sure he does, looking at his throat to make sure he's swallowed them, swallowing herself to encourage him to, like a mother with a small child. He still doesn't answer her question. He keeps on staring at the sailboats. She tucks in his blowing tie and combs his blowing hair with her fingers. I look old, don't I? he says. On the bad days he thinks he's getting old and ugly, his bones brittle as chalk. He's twenty-six. The handsomest young man on earth, she says sincerely._

_After a while he gets up and goes over to the basin. He tells one of the children that his boat is heading for disaster. The child doesn't understand English. Richard takes the gaff out of the child's hand. The child protests. The mother rushes up, pop-eyed with outrage. What are you doing, are you drunk? Are you crazy? Luckily Richard knows almost no French, not even easy words like "_ fou _." He leans over the rim, trying to grapple the boat away from disaster. Helen tells the woman that her husband is just trying to be helpful. She's already used to explaining him. The boat tacks about, heads straight toward them and bumps against the rim of the basin._

Helen gently takes the gaff out of Richard's hand and gives it back to the child. The mother comforts her child, explaining: foreigners. Helen comforts Richard, explaining: the French. She coaxes Richard back to the bench saying that you can see all of Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower. He says he wants to buy a pack of cigarettes, he'll be right back. She wants to go with him. Sometimes I like to be alone for a minute, he says and leaves. The other people stare at her, an unusual thing here. The French come across as a discreet basically indifferent people. Helen gathers up her guidebooks and takes another seat further off.

Time goes by without him. She tries to reason herself out of panic, keep it out of her face. At the end of an hour he returns. He doesn't see her. He sees her empty chair. His face is filled with the same panic she'd tried to keep out of hers, that terrible wonderful lost helpless expression of his when he doesn't find her, when he thinks she isn't there. She always tries to be there. She waves and calls him over. She smells forbidden alcohol on his breath as he suddenly kisses her and calls her his nice keeper. She doesn't like that term. She's his wife. A girl goes by. Isn't she beautiful, Richard? Don't you wish you'd married her instead of me? No, I need a keeper, he says and starts laughing and holds her tight and everything is all right again.

Advancing in an obscure corridor half a century later (she guesses at the distance from it) Helen tries to remain in that moment of embrace with the joyous cries of the children, the billowing sails, the jet blown into a faint rainbow, the tarnished leaves of the pruned lindens blown into twinkling points of silver. But of course she can't. It's not possible to stave off the evening of that same day.

After an hour of no response to her remarks and questions, he speaks about the Catacombs again. They'd been to the Eiffel Tower in the afternoon, the pedestrians and traffic tiny below. She'd kept close to him all the time. Tomorrow, if you really want to, sweetheart, she says. After a while he says he wants to buy a pack of cigarettes. He leaves the hotel room with pictures of soaring birds on pale blue walls. A few minutes later he calls up to her from the sidewalk: "Helen! Helen! Throw my wallet down!" She finds the wallet on the washbasin, next to the three spat-out pills. She can't convince him to come back up for the wallet (secretly for the pills, of course, but that can't be shouted publicly). She throws the wallet down to him. He picks it up, waves to her and walks away.

She never sees him again.

_The view framed by the window (like a color-slide) brings back the lost street to Seymour. It's Saturday, noon. After lunch they'll take the coach to_ Les Cossons _. He hurries past correctly gray rabbits and hares dangling head-down at the butcher's. Then the fish store with a heap of shiny black mussels decorated with sprigs of parsley and boxes of oysters with lemons. But something's wrong with his memory. The parsley should be green and the lemons bright yellow instead of the shades of gray he sees them in. And the horsemeat butcher's life-size horse head, bright gold in reality but another shade of gray in his memory. At first he thinks his brain has been contaminated by this dusty space hostile to color. But in the window he'd seen the sky blue and the domes golden. Then he recalls that he'd photographed the fish store and the horse head and all the other things with the black-and-white film of 1951 (Panchromatic XX). What he remembers, he now understands, isn't the original scenes but his eight-by-ten enlargements of them. Back then he'd been in his photography phase. There'd been the painting phase and before that the poetry phase. Seymour had thought life wasn't worth living without artistic creation. He'd had problems with priorities._

So in memory he goes down a second-hand Panchromatic XX black-and-white street. Now the massive porte-cochere. The door buzzes open for him on the shabby courtyard with irregular paving-stones. He spirals up to the fourth floor where a dark varnished door opens at his first knock. Marie-Claude shakes his hand formally. Much less formal contact is for his hotel room. He follows her into the shabby clean living room with lace curtained windows. For months, in his lonely outsider days, he'd wandered about the streets of Paris looking with longing at all those doors that had no reason to open to him and at all those opaque windows. Now he's on the right side of doors and windows, thanks to Marie-Claude and thanks to what Marie-Claude's parents (and maybe Marie-Claude herself) assume his regular presence implies, although he's been careful not to pronounce the word "fiancé." He'd been briefly married in New York and believes that institutionalized involvement spells the death of love.

Everything's perfect as it is. He has his own habitual place at the table, between Marie-Claude and her radical teenage brother Laurent. Her father smells faintly of the cod-liver oil he anoints his body with for immortality. He speaks to Seymour of the necessity of orienting one's bed south-east to counter the effects of telluric waves and counsels the purchase of a compass. Her mother smiles timidly at Seymour and hopes he doesn't find the roast overdone. Marvelous, says Seymour. She's probably the worst cook in France. But she has the kindest face in the world and the tremendous prestige of having tended cows at the age of six in the Massif Central and speaking patois as fluently as French. How can Seymour possibly resist such authenticity?

Bearing wicker baskets filled with essential odds and ends, they take the 38 bus to the Porte d'Orléans and then the coach, battered of course. He wouldn't have it any other way. He loves basic banged-up things. The coach rattles along the poorly paved National Twenty Highway. Like Seymour France is ill-at-ease in the twentieth century. The thirty kilometers of countryside are familiar to him by now. The first trip out she'd initiated him to the names of the villages and the names in French of crops and flowers and trees. It was like a baptism. Now the two-mile trudge past rye and oats and woods to the ramshackle slap-dash country place they call Les Cossons and which he calls paradis. How could he, born and bred and unhappy in Manhattan, resist the warped old wooden gate photographed in skimming light at f 32 to get all of the marvelous details of dilapidation? Or the genuine well, thirty meters deep, a favorite subject for his f 4.5 Zeiss-Tessar? Or the roof with its sheets of galvanized iron secured against the wind by rusty parts of a Model T? He'd risked his life high up in an elm to click it. Or the wicked scythe Marie-Claude taught him to wield against high grass? When he holds Marie-Claude in his arms he embraces all that.

He has it all down on seventy-three eight-by-ten black-and-white enlargements. He sends some to a New York publisher who expresses qualified interest. That same week Marie-Claude tells him she's expecting a child. It isn't the right time. He assumes she'll agree to postponing the child. She doesn't agree at all. They start disagreeing about lots of other things. One day he explains that he'll have to return briefly to New York to sort things out with the publisher. Two weeks at the most. She says she knows he's leaving for good. No more than two weeks, he repeats, perfectly sincere about it. He leaves his camera and enlarger and other stuff in their place as proof of his sincerity. He'll write her as soon as he arrives, he says. I won't answer your letter, she says. I won't even read it.

He leaves, taking with him the other enlargements. Not counting imperfect knowledge of the language, which soon fades, the photos are all he salvages from his stay in France. Finally the publisher decides he doesn't want them. _Seymour sends Marie-Claude six letters._ He can't imagine a return to France without a return to the way things had been. But she keeps her word and doesn't answer. There's no return to France, not in that life anyhow. He loses the original things even if he has the rejected black-and-white images of them. He stares down at the gray one-dimensional enlargements (terrible reductions, actually) for hours on end in another continent. It's probably then that they usurp the place of the originals in his mind. He suffers intensely for a few months and is already tempted by high windows.

Two years later she does write him a letter informing him of the death of her mother, the move out of the apartment with the tarnished gilt-framed mirror and the impending sale of Les Cossons. She wants to know what she should do with the camera and the enlarger he'd left in their apartment. He could have written back but with the loss of the apartment and her marvelous mother (he weeps at that) and their country place, Marie-Claude is faint and impoverished, one-dimensional, like the photos, stripped of the great associations. Besides he's with another woman now. And anyhow, the camera and enlarger don't matter anymore. He's out of photography now, into a novel. The novel, vaguely autobiographical, is about his experiences with the family in France. He gives the story an ambiguous happy ending in hope of publication.

Stumbling down the gloomy corridor, the same thought occurs to Seymour Stein as to Margaret Williams and to Louis Forster. If time past could miraculously become time present, couldn't he salvage that wrecked love thanks to the hindsight wisdom he hadn't possessed at the time?

There's no sentiment at all to Max's relation to the window, no past involved, no need for nostalgic italics. He's confronted with a strictly technical problem involving not the past but the future. So, for the moment, he's the luckiest of the Five. What can you do with the past? You can always handle the future until it comes in unwanted configurations and congeals unsatisfactorily into the past.

Max's future, as immediate as possible, is to escape. He observes that there are no bars to the window. Already he's calculating the height of the window in order to determine the length of the rope or knotted sheets that will allow him to reach the sidewalk and then the American Embassy and then just as fast as possible a Boeing to Las Vegas, to Bess and Rickie.

But now he sees that Margaret's hair isn't like fire any more but like ashes. He sees the looming tree again and remembers the terminal date on the tag with all those zeros and realizes that he's a zero himself and that there's no escape from that.

The clump-jangle stops. The stern-faced woman functionary stops. The flics stop. They order the Five to stop. Turnkey chooses a big key and unlocks a door. He chooses a second big key and unlocks a second door next to the first door.

"Voilà," he says rustily. "This is the place where you will live while awaiting final decision."

Chapter 8

Can't You See It?

The men and women are allotted separate rooms, practically identical except that the women have a bidet, concealed by a folding screen. The men's room is plunged in gloom. It looks like a disaffected jail. But there are no bars in front of the tiny window which torments them with the same view as the big corridor window.

The severe-faced middle-echelon female functionary clicks a big toggle-switch. A naked bulb dangling from the ceiling awakens reluctantly. It sheds poor light on four rusty cots with thin lumpy mattresses. There are urine stains shaped like continents on them. Graffiti is scratched all over the dingy walls.

Max sinks down in a corner and stares at the dirty plank floor between his ankles. Yawning and trembling, Seymour and Louis sway on their feet like goose-pimpled metronomes. As from a great distance they hear the female functionary droning out that they will shortly receive food and drink and appropriate clothing. The room will be cleaned and the beds made up. They had not been expected.

The naked bulb starts blinking. She strides over to a chest of drawers, yanks out a drawer and calls their attention to rows of bulbs wrapped in tissue-paper. Beneath drooping lids their eyeballs sluggishly roll in the direction indicated by her rigid forefinger. Now she points to the blinking bulb.

"When a bulb burns out it is your responsibility to replace it by a new one. There are twenty new ones here. When you get to the nineteenth bulb you must be sure to notify the relevant functionary and you will receive a new lot."

That shocks the two men out of somnolence.

"The nineteenth!" Seymour exclaims.

"The nineteenth!" Louis exclaims. "We could be in this here place long enough to have to change nineteen burned-out electric-light bulbs?"

"How long does a bulb last?" Seymour asks.

The female functionary's face withdraws into frigid infinite distance, as though the requested statistics are a state secret or as though she hasn't understood the question involving the passage of time.

"Six months?" Louis ventures.

She doesn't confirm it but she doesn't deny it. The two men, secretly afraid the life-span of an electric light bulb is much longer than six months, choose to take her continuing silence for tacit confirmation. Six months, then. But multiplied nineteen times.

"Six months, nineteen bulbs..." says Seymour.

"Nineteen times six months amounts to..." Louis breaks off, trying to cope with the multiplication.

"Practically ten years," says Seymour, the New York intellectual.

He turns to the impassive silent female functionary. "You mean, you actually mean that we could be imprisoned here for practically ten years?"

"You are not prisoners," the female functionary rectifies in a scandalized tone, evading the question. "You are in Administrative Suspension, therefore imposed guests. Prisoners are locked up. Your door will remain unlocked. Unless, of course, you willfully violate regulations." She turns to the door.

"The women now. I shall soon be back."

True to her word, she leaves their door unlocked. The bulb rallies and recovers steady light. Seymour and Louis totter over to the beds and collapse in a cloud of dust and a discordant twang of springs. Even more than warmth and food and drink they crave sleep.

They close their eyes. Sleep almost comes. Time after time, though, on the brink of that darkness, they pull back from it, afraid sleep may be a prelude to a permanent end to cold and thirst and hunger, those painful precious things.

From where they lie they can see the window and blue sky. After a while, as though synchronized, they get up and drag themselves over to the window. Max remains huddled in his corner.

Seymour and Louis stand side by side in silence. They gaze out at the city. It's like warmth and food and drink to them.

"By golly," says Louis. "Hasn't changed one bit. Same swanky shops. Same elegant carriages."

Seymour stares. He sees the same swanky shops all right but not a single carriage, elegant or not. What he does see hasn't changed one bit. There are the same inelegant cars he'd dodged when suicidally jay-trotting their avenues in 1951: stolid Peugeot 203s, bug-like Renault Quatre Chevaux, a Panhard Dyna, gangsterish low-slung black Citroën Tractions, plenty of gray dinky-toy Deux Chevaux, like garbage-cans on wheels, banged-up pre-war Renault Juvas and Rosalies.

The sight fills him with tremendous nostalgia and he wants the cars to be the real things out there, not the other's carriages dating back before the birth of his ponytailed sweetheart, so meaningless. Of course, Louis rejects what Seymour claims he sees, things that hopelessly age his slim honey-blonde darling.

They start arguing about it. They agree about the buildings and the river but not about the vehicles. Not about the women either. Neat ankles, says Louis with shy admiration. Seymour sees much more leg than that. Louis is shocked when Seymour describes calves. He strikes Seymour as very strait-laced for a Marine even for an ex-Marine. They go on arguing about what they see.

The little gray-smocked middle-aged man who had disgraced himself on the stepladder enters the room. His filthy beret is moronically pulled down to the eyebrows and he wears a fearful chastised expression. He's bearing a pile of clothing with names pinned to them. He places the pile on one of the beds.

He's prepared to leave when Seymour invites him to arbitrate the quarrel. What does he see outside, carriages or cars? And how high are the women's skirts? Can he see just their ankles or their calves too?

The man doesn't even glance at the window. "No carriages, no cars," he says in a hoarse whispery voice. "No ankles, no calves, no legs, no titties, no belly, no nice warm wet cunny. No women. Nothing. Just fog."

"Fog? Look at that sunshine."

"Fog," the man persists.

"Look outside. You haven't even looked."

"Fog. It's always fog."

The scented fussily-dressed young functionary enters the room.

"Oh go away, disgusting old Henri," he says. "You be careful, you. You're not supposed to talk to Arrivals. I'll report you if you don't leave."

The little gray-smocked middle-aged functionary looks scared and leaves.

"Three's company, four's a crowd," the young functionary adds, in perfect mid-Atlantic English. He smiles stiffly at bare-chested Louis and explains his command of the tongue and its colloquialisms.

"Back then, outside, I had oodles of American friends, heaps of English too, plenty of Australians, the odd (not to say queer, hi-hi!) New Zealander. That was long ago, back then. Why don't you take your towels off and put on your nice new warm clothes?"

"Don't you see your friends any more?" says Seymour, just to change the subject and evade the invitation. The functionary's face turns petulantly tragic.

"That was a fib I just told, pure fantasy. We don't remember how it was before we came here. All that's left at my echelon are fragments. It's punishment. I don't remember for what. I remember remembering lots of things but I don't remember what they were. Now it's just scraps, like eating oysters with a marvelous boy, a street at twilight, a bridge, a public garden with flowers and butterflies on them, I don't know what color. I don't know which public garden or the name of the boy or the street. Outside of that, it's all fog. I talk to Arrivals like you and they tell me what it was like. I like to think I had all those handsome English-speaking friends. I woke up here God knows how long ago with my excellent knowledge of English. I'm so lonely. Be my friends, please. I'm called Philippe. That's what they call me when they don't call me other things. Philippe isn't my real name. I don't know what my real name was. But call me Philippe anyhow."

"Why don't you make new friends outside?" says Louis. He can't stomach nancies but the generous impulses of his heart combat the censorious impulses of his stomach in this particular case. The nancy seems to be on the brink of tears.

"Oh, we can't leave the Reception Department of the Préfecture. Ever. Ever. You've certainly heard the old French saying: 'The Préfecture de Police is where bad functionaries go when they exit.'"

"You mean you've all died too?" says Seymour. The functionary recoils.

"Don't ever use that D-word here! Say 'fuck' and 'enculer' all you like but never that D-word, M-word in French, never here! Of course, to answer your crudely formulated question, everybody here has exited, like you. But we'll never be transferred out there. I wish I could taste oysters again. One day if all goes well for you (though I don't think it will) order a dozen big juicy 00 grade Marenne oysters out there, bedded on crushed ice and seaweed. Think of me here when you squeeze lemon-juice on them. Or minced shallots with vinegar, that's even better. Enjoy yourselves while you can. After the second exit there's no second awakening, ever, ever."

The stern-faced female functionary returns.

"What are you doing here?" she says to the male functionary. Her distaste is undisguised. "Keeping up my English and admiring beauty," he says impudently. She threatens to report him again for speaking to Arrivals.

In deliberate self-caricature, he pouts, flounces over to the door and addresses a limp-wristed bye-bye to Louis. Before he closes the door he sticks out a long gray tongue at his hierarchical superior's back.

"You must dress immediately," she commands the materialized duo. "You cannot remain here. The cleaning girl will be cleaning your rooms shortly. You will wait in the Common Room opposite this room. The Prefect has informed me that he will be coming to greet you all officially. That seldom happens. It is a great honor. Try to be worthy of it."

She leaves.

Chapter 9

Rules And Regulations

Shyly, back to back, Seymour and Louis unpin their loin-towels and pull on their new clothes. They find themselves clad in obsolete garb, a little too insistently typical, as in a period-film where the clothing as well as the props (like spittoons for 1900 and tommy-guns for the thirties) are calculated to inform the most dull-witted of the spectators where they stand time-wise. Seymour had d**d in 1980 but is now attired in a turtleneck sweater and corduroy cuffed trousers of archaic 1950 cut. Louis had d**d in 1927 but is tricked out in a turn-of-the-century costume with tight trousers, narrow lapels, a string tie. He'd worn something vaguely similar during his sojourn in Paris when he wasn't wearing his Marine uniform. Apparently the functionaries in charge of the costume wardrobe hadn't been able to come up with a Marine uniform for him.

Both of the men are happy at their garb. It gives reality to a possible transfer to the Paris of their youth and reunion with their lost sweethearts.

But then they start reading the graffiti, mainly bitter, that covers the blistered gray walls. A century of other Americans of questionable goodness had wound up here in Administrative Suspension and had waited. Very few of the graffiti bear signatures or even initials, potentially incriminating, given the nature of the remarks on their hosts. But there's nearly always the scratched date, the supposed date in most cases, because followed by a question mark. It's as though the inscribers had been here so long they'd lost count of the years.

Only four more centuries to go," announces one inscription. Surely an exaggeration. But how about: "Here seven fucking years. _Fuck Prefuck de Hautecloque._ (1929?)" Was that one an exaggeration? And this: "To those who died waiting for Paris: RIP. (1962?)" Certain graffiti express bitterness toward the host country. Seymour makes out: "The French fight with their feet and fuck with their faces. (1918?)" and "French Food Sucks! (1998?)" Pathetic, this one: "I was killed on Omaha Beach in 1944 to liberate France and this is how the bastards thank me! (1953?)"

There's a scattering of tarred rectangles. Louis and Seymour assume even worse insults to France and the French. The notion doesn't occur to them (yet) that what has been carefully censored are vital messages to future generations of administratively suspended Americans.

Not all the graffiti address the problem of quasi-incarceration. There's the inevitable "Conroy was here. (1945?)" There are a few arrow-pierced hearts with initials. The initials of lost and yearned-for firm-breasted Paris sweethearts, as for Seymour and Louis? Or faithful evocation of dumpy widowed wives?

Other graffiti are political in nature. The slogans urge and denounce on these alien walls although none of the slogans could possibly influence the world the scratchers had left behind in space and, irrevocably, in time. There are numerous "I like Ike!" and a few dissenting "Stevenson for President." That was the early fifties. "Solution to the fuel crisis: don't burn oil, burn Iranians." That was 1979. "Better Dead than Red." The forties. "God Bless America, Goddam France." (1962). "America, Love it or Leave it!" The inscriber had himself contradicted the stark alternative of his injunction: he'd left it but went on loving it.

But the graffiti that rivets the duo's attention are these ominous scratchings: "Welcome to the new Arrivals. Oh you poor bastards. (1921?)" Also: "If this is heaven, O Lord, give me hell." The year 1909? is scratched under that. Twenty-three years later, (1932?) the refutation: "Where the hell do you think you are?"

Also, this one: "Going into my thirty-fourth year here I think. Who wants transfer now? They say there's nothing after exit. Hope they're right." Finally, this one: "Goodbye to all. Keep up the work on Independence Day!"

Louis and Seymour wonder at the reference to the Fourth of July. Above all they wonder at the meaning of that farewell. Had the inscriber fared well himself? Out to color or back to blackness after all those years of grayness? They search for some hint of the fate of the other inscribers. Many had waited a long time for an end to Administrative Suspension. That much was clear. But what had happened to them finally? Maybe transfer and exit sometimes occurred without warning, so fast that they had no time to scratch their joy or despair on the walls.

The worst of all the inscriptions is this in big print: OUT IS A DOUBLE-CROSS!! The meaning is clear, they think. The promise of possible transfer is a fraud. You're plucked, young, out of blackness and you waited and waited for the good things outside and then you're chucked, shriveled, back into blackness.

The only note of theoretical gaiety on the walls is a chalk-white life-size clown-face. The clown has a gigantic bulbous nose. He wears a cockeyed conic hat and an ear-to-ear smile baring all thirty-six teeth. But the smile is disturbingly mirthless, more a grimace than a smile, like the ultimate grimace of a tetanus or strychnine victim.

The naked bulb starts blinking furiously for a few seconds. It dies. Louis climbs up on a wobbly chair and replaces the dead bulb with the first of the twenty new bulbs. The outer gloom is dispelled but their inner gloom deepens.

Louis and Seymour are about to leave the room, as ordered, when they remember Max Pilsudski. He's still huddled prostrated in his corner. He starts groaning between hoarse gasps, back to his first hopeless no-escape understanding of his situation. Louis coaxes him to his feet and starts steering him to the window to cheer him up with something not gray. Going past him, Max looks fearfully at Seymour. He whispers something in Louis' ear. Probably that he (Seymour) is a corpse, a Jew corpse, a Jew corpse with horn-rimmed glasses to make things worse. Louis himself looks very much alive to Max.

Louis asks Max what he sees outside. A city or fog?

A city, Max says tonelessly. Not Las Vegas though, he says. He wants to return to his corner. Sure, says Louis, holding him back, no fog at all, a city, but the folks in the streets of the city? How are those folks dressed and does Max see horse-drawn carriages or horseless carriages, real cars?

No people, no cars, no carriages, says Max. Empty streets and sidewalks. It's like a big ghost-town. Just buildings and a river. What's the direction of the airport? He has to get out of here and get to the airport, has to right away, right away.

Max explodes into frantic energy. He's back to the conspiratorial interpretation of the situation, back to the possibility of flight, the double flight, flight from this place and winged flight to Las Vegas.

He grabs a chair and hurls it at the window. The chair flies into pieces against the panes. Whining like hammered sheet-iron, the panes are now covered with a dense network of cracks, like a smashed but still intact windshield, opaque and whitish, like a cataract-blinded eye.

The city has vanished and the gloom in the room has deepened.

"Doggone you," Louis yells. "You've gone and spoiled our window! We can't see a blamed thing now."

"Son of a bitch!" Max yells. He kicks the window with all his might. The panes are unaffected but not Max's foot. Max doubles up, howling. The other two take it for a howl of pain, with him hopping about on his good foot, clutching the foolish one. It's that too, but mainly a howl of triumph. He hops over to Seymour and sprays his face with shouted certitudes.

"I'm not dead! I can't be dead! Jesus, it hurts like all hell. If it hurts you gotta be alive. It's all a hustle, trying to make me think I'm dead, a sect, that's what it is, a sect or maybe spies."

Seymour steps back from the glaring proselytizing eyes, the saliva-specked gray lips.

"Wake up, for Chrissake," Max yells at Seymour. "You're not dead either. Ya want proof?" Max picks up a chair-leg and whacks Seymour over the shin all his might. It's Seymour's turn to howl but no triumph to it: rage and pain. "You fucking fascist Polack anti-Semite shit-head!"

But Max embraces him. "Don't believe the tag, you're alive too! It hurt! I'm telling you, that's how you know you're alive, you hurt!" He hugs him tighter.

"Let go of me you crazy bastard." Seymour breaks free and sinks to the floor. He cradles his shin and rocks with pain. Dark gray liquid drips thickly down his leg onto the floor. He jabs his finger in the pool and holds it up, as though bearing somber witness.

"Look, it's not even blood, for Chrissakes. It's embalming fluid. I'm dead, you're dead, everybody's dead, you dumb Polack bastard."

"Hey, you fellers quit scrappin' like that and usin' foul language," Louis orders in a Marine voice. If his eyes had retained their original blue they would have snapped. "They'll put in new panes and we'll see again. Tough glass, all right. Max, you just calm down and slip into your new togs. We got an appointment with the Prefect."

Max painfully struggles into his new clothes. They're grotesquely inappropriate. Since he'd never been to Paris at any period, the functionaries had no sojourn date to go by. They'd chosen something they thought was typically and timelessly Yankee: a cowboy outfit with a deerskin vest, a Stetson hat and leather boots with useless spurs. There was little prospect for a horse here. Max regrets the absence of a six-shooter to shoot his way out or a lasso to support his weight.

Max is still thinking about escape via the chair-and-foot-proof window. Tough glass all right, a problem, but he'll crack it, the problem and the window. Max bulges in the ill-fitting costume. With all that outdoor exercise cowboys had been notoriously lean. Max, even in his twenties, had been inclined to paunchiness with his daily gallon-plus of lager plus sedentary long-distance hauling.

Seymour and Max hobble badly. To help and also to separate them, Louis steps between the two groaning men. He hooks his arms in theirs. The linked trio staggers out into the corridor and enters the Common Room.

It's a big shabby room, made even bigger by a number of tarnished full-length wall-mirrors. Dust lies thick on a long massive library-style table. There are no books anywhere, though. Dilapidated leather armchairs face a big window framing the city. It's like a set-up for TV viewing.

The women are there already, standing at attention as for a military review.

Like the men, they've exchanged their towels for costumes. For one of them it corresponds to the reigning fashion of her Paris sojourn. The girl called Helen, as Seymour observes with a twinge of nostalgia, is wearing the proper-proper good-little-girl dress of the early fifties with a bell-shaped skirt ending at mid-calf.

Then the men see Margaret. They react vigorously to the sight.

Normally she should be attired in the tight long skirt of the thirties. (Seymour had often recalled that tight hobbling ankle-long sheath-like skirt that transferred impeded forward motion to rotary motion of the hips and tukkis. Ah, that intoxicating practically coital sway of women's hips and tukkis in those days of teenage desire.)

But Margaret's costume is even better than that for male beholders if not for her. She stands martyred in the radical mini-skirt and décolleté of the liberated late sixties.

Not only is the period wrong but also the size. The knitted dress was meant for a girl far smaller and thinner than Margaret. On her, it looks like an inadequate paint job on total nudity. The skirt is mini to the point of non-existence. It barely covers what must absolutely be covered, for she is naked beneath it, no lingerie having been provided. She wears it, bears it like a cross, in far greater discomfort than the most penitential of convent rough-spun.

Her hands are frantic in the service of decency. She pulls the front of the skirt down. The tug hikes the rear of the skirt up. Standing back to a full-length mirror, she can see that indecent image of twin moons in another full-length mirror opposite. She yanks the skirt down front and back. The movement aggravates her décolleté and her breasts spring forth totally denuded. She lets go of her skirt to reestablish decent concealment above and the stretched knitwear below springs back, navel-high now.

As her frantic hands go on and on, tugging and pulling up and down, front and back, concealing and involuntarily disclosing, Margaret perceives a squat cowboy and a man in a turtleneck sweater and horn-rimmed glasses. They are staring at her with all too visible lust.

Max and Seymour have forgotten their outlying injured parts in favor of more private, centrally located, parts. Max bulges even worse now in his cowboy outfit. Seymour is in the same urgent state. He exults at it. Not pain but rigidity of this type proclaims the persistence of life. Rigidity as vital attribute not mortuary essence. Strategically stiff, so not a total stiff.

Louis too is staring at Margaret. Not with lust (or if so, severely repressed), but horror, as she can see, despairingly.

Horror at the return of the first girl, the lascivious one who had publicly shamed him. She is almost as naked now as then. Where was that lovely second girl in the decent white towels and modestly compressed bosom, the one with the spiritually illuminated face pleading on his behalf, taking upon herself the sins of this present girl, her depraved sister? Louis persists in his Manichean dissociation of the girl into distinct embodiments of Vice and Virtue.

But now he notices that this shameless girl possesses attributes of the modest one: gray hair and a tear-stained face. The two incompatible images of Vice and Virtue merge impossibly into one girl. Louis is forced to recognize that there's only this one girl, subject to periodic radical transformations. Louis had seen the first movie version (silent, of course) of Robert Louis Stevenson's masterpiece and he thinks: Miss Jekyll and Miss Hyde.

Maggie perceives the Prefect standing motionless in the doorway. His gaze is fixed on her too. She imagines the gaze is censorious. Much later she will wonder if it wasn't Prefect d'Aubier de Hautecloque himself who had chosen her anachronistic garb and vetoed the issuing of undergarments.

The Prefect enters the room stiffly. He goes over to each of the four other Arrivals and pronounces a few words of perfunctory greeting. In each case his gaze is beyond his interlocutor, fixed on Margaret and perhaps on the peeping-tom mirror behind her.

Then he goes over and speaks to her for long minutes. He stands at stiff attention. He maintains his ungloved long bloodless hands clamped to his side. The stern-faced female functionary stares at them intently.

Inaudible to the others, Margaret whispers: "Oh sir, I'm so grateful to you, sir, but I couldn't. I don't dance anymore. I don't do that ever, now. My dancing days are over. It's a vow I've made to God. But I'm so grateful to you, sir."

The Prefect's white bloodless hands rise slowly to a level with the girl's bare neck. The stern-faced female functionary stares at those hands even more intently. The hands hesitate and then open in a magnanimous acceptance of her desire.

He makes a gallant bow and leaves.

Hedgehog puffs into the room bearing a small wooden podium. The stern-faced female functionary mounts it and claps her hands sharply to gain their attention. Hedgehog hands out a clipboard and a ball-point pen to each of the five guests (guests, not prisoners, they remind themselves with little conviction). The female functionary claps her hands again and drones out information.

An advocate, she announces, will be assigned to them to gather biographical particulars in order to defend their case before the Administrative Review Board. This body will meet in due course to rule on their disposal. She urges them to practice total frankness with the advocate. The advocate has their best interests at heart. She calls their attention to the clipboard.

Rusty iron jaws bite a poorly mimeographed sheet with carbon paper for a duplicate. "Rules and Regulations" stands in tiny print above a great number of rules and regulations in even tinier print. Each of them is followed by a figure. The female functionary explains the figures.

Arrivals in a state of Administrative Suspension possess a reserve of fifty points. Transgressions and violations, weighted in accordance with their degree of gravity, involve loss of points. When the original fifty points are exhausted the offender is automatically exited. Good behavior, au contraire, is rewarded with a bonus of additional points, which, in certain cases (notably a tied decision on the part of the Administrative Review Board) can tip the scales in the direction of transfer rather than exit. Collaboration is therefore essential.

She starts reading.

Violence against the functionaries is sanctioned by instant exit.

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

Sabotage is sanctioned by instant exit.

She stares at them for long silent seconds. Her features are like iron. Slowly, emphasizing each syllable, she continues.

Any physical contact, however short and superficial, with a functionary is sanctioned by instant exit for the guest and maximum punishment for the functionary.

Again she stares at them for long silent seconds before going on.

The imbibing of alcoholic beverages is strictly forbidden. Violation of this ban entails a loss of five (5) points. Intrusion into forbidden zones entails a loss of ten (10) points. Deterioration of state property entails a loss of from fifteen (15) to thirty (30) points, depending on the gravity of the act. Violation of curfew entails a loss of six and a half (6.5) points. She calls their attention to an old-fashioned wall phone next to the doorway. It is strictly forbidden to utilize the phone save in cases of emergency. They are entitled to one emergency call per month. Violation of this regulation entails the loss of five (5) points.

She drones on and on and they doze off for a while. When they jerk back to the room, the stern-faced female functionary is still reading out forbidden acts and their numbered sanction.

She invites them to sign the document. Refusal to do so entails instant exit.

They all sign except Max. "I don't sign nothing," says Max. "I don't know what it's all about." He says it over and over. Helen repeatedly urges him to sign. Finally he signs.

Hedgehog collects the papers and the pens. The Five are dismissed. They stagger back to their rooms, yawning and bleary-eyed.

Louis hardly has the strength to support his hobbling companions. The three of them are too exhausted to notice that the room has been cleaned during their absence. It's true the job is so bad you can hardly tell the difference. The cots have been sloppily made up with patched sheets and rent old blankets, probably virtual khaki. The three men collapse on their cots.

Again they try to resist sleep. Despite the talk about all those possible electric light bulbs to come they're afraid their hopeless case has been examined and that sleep will be the portal to a second death. But sleep comes.

Seymour sees Marie-Claude's smiling face, very close to his, in enlarged black and white. She's undone her ponytail and has swept her hair up as he often asks her to do to get the perfect oval of her face and all of her neck. Her off-the-shoulder blouse reveals the clean understated lines of her collarbones with the exquisite faint shadowed gap between them. Her eyes, a dark shade of gray representing original brown, are wide-pitched with a little slant to them, a western-world reverse-slant.

You haven't changed at all, he says even though she has, diminished by that loss of color. He approaches his lips to her parted lips and smells her cold ashen breath and awakes to a gray starved face hovering inches above his.

He gives a startled jerk away from the ashen breath of the cleaning girl who had upset the pail over his leg in the corridor. She too jerks back. She's wearing rubber gloves. Behind her is a trolley of the sort used in hospitals to bring in basins and ether and meals. On the table lie three trays with dishes of indeterminate food. Max and Louis are snoring away on their beds.

"Oh sir, don't be alarmed," she whispers. "It's only me. I've brought your meal." She points at one of the trays. "I hope it's not cold. The kitchen is two kilometers from here. But I ran all the way. I brought you a sweet little present that I stole at the risk of more punishment so that you will forgive me for what I did to your leg. I'm so terribly sorry, sir. ( _Je suis désolée, désolée, Monsieur._ )"

She has her pail on the floor beside her. She dips a sponge in it, looks about fearfully and begs him in a breathless whisper to allow her to clean his leg. With her guilty expression she's like an Untouchable begging a Brahmin for a touch, a single touch in this disgraced life. Seymour says it doesn't matter. She looks even more désolée at that. She takes it, he understands, as refusal to forgive her for her terrible act.

Feeling sorry for her, Seymour consents to unwanted reparation. He sits uncomfortably on the edge of the bed while she kneels before him. He pulls up the trouser leg. At the sight of gray crusted blood, she gasps fast little in-gasps: O! O! O! Did I do that, sir? Did I injure you like that? She's on the verge of tears. He reassures her. Water, even dirty water, can't draw blood.

The sponge looks filthier than his leg but he lets her wash it. She seems to be in a withdrawn second state now, like a somnambulist. He winces at the pain and she apologizes in a droning elsewhere voice. O... your... poor... leg... your... poor... poor... poor... leg, she says over and over in that sleepwalker's voice. She touches his knee and then his calf and ankle, inquiring tonelessly whether it hurts there or there or there. It doesn't hurt but her hand is ice-cold beneath the rubber.

She snaps out of her sleep-walker state. She awakens to where she is and to what she's doing. Eyes widening, she gives a cry and shrinks back from his leg. She must have heard Turnkey's clump-jangle in the corridor, Seymour supposes.

She leaps to her feet, almost upsetting the pail on his other leg, grabs the trolley and to Seymour's vast relief, flees.

Seymour draws up a chair before the tray the girl had pointed to. He's tempted to wake the others before the food gets cold. But it turns out to be cold already despite her breathless two-kilometer run, much colder than the chlorine-tasting luke-warm water in the pitcher. It's some kind of gray hash. It tastes gray too.

There's a lump of chocolate with white fuzz on the tray. It tastes moldy. He's on the point of spitting it out when he remembers that the girl is sure to come back for the dirty dishes and see how he's treated her present, stolen for forgiveness for what she thinks she'd done to his leg. He swallows it.

Seymour limps into the Common Room and sits down in one of the dilapidated leather armchairs facing the big window. With the taste of mold persistent on his tongue, he stares out at the river and the trees, the domes and the bridges, the crowded cafés and the quay-side lovers.

The sky slowly darkens and the city loses its colors and forms.

His eyes close. He starts losing everything, like the city. Again he resists sleep. Then he remembers that he'd already slept and it hadn't been a second death but a dream of Marie-Claude out there and back then. He wants to return to her.

But sleep when it comes seconds later isn't permanent void or Marie-Claude's lips.

Sleep is like a broken record.

Seymour materializes in the vast bureaucratic room again and the long day of arrival plays back in the minutest details of shock, grief and confusion till the moment when, with the nauseous taste of the moldy chocolate on his tongue, he's about to fall asleep again in the leather armchair in front of the darkening city and dream, identically, he's certain, of dreaming of the long arrival at the phantom Prefecture.

Frightened, he makes a tremendous effort to break free of a threatened cycle of endlessly diluted reality.

This time there's no repetition of arrival. He has a split-second vision of Marie-Claude, too brief for his lips to touch hers.

Then nothing.

But not permanent nothing Seymour realizes thankfully when he opens his eyes on the splendor of Paris at dawn on the other side of glass.

Thankful too that the long first day at the Prefecture is behind him. He hopes there won't be too many days like that to come.

He gazes at the brightening city for a long time.

Finally he gets up, goes into the men's room and tries to wash the taste of mold out of his mouth.

***

Part Two

### Waiting

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?

Chapter 11

Relationships

So there they are, three men and two women of different backgrounds, periods, life-styles, political leanings, religious or irreligious inclinations and diversely strung nerves, crammed together in a few square yards for how long God alone knows, and even that's not sure. They're forced to tolerate one another, no choice in the matter. And resist temptation. Margaret and Louis do their best.

Margaret constantly feels the burning focus of God's eye on her. She struggles against carnal burning. She has made a holy vow of chastity to Him and knows that the slightest trespass in act or thought on her part can result in instant exit. Already by a second inexplicable miracle God had spared her despite her scandalous behavior with the blond blue-eyed beautiful naked muscular vigorous, incredibly vigorous, man called Louis Forster, stop thinking of it, stop thinking of him.

Margaret had never confessed in her sinful first existence. She longs to do it now. But spiritual comfort is on a par with physical comfort here. No religious services are held in the Prefecture. No sacramentally empowered ear can relieve her of the burden of her sins. She turns to Helen for next-best psychological relief. She doesn't even get that. Helen prudishly interrupts the tearful account of her earliest major offence (at the age of fourteen with a friendly vigorous plumber) even though her roommate does go on rocking her consolingly in her arms.

Margaret knows her flesh is inflammable and that the sight of it inflames. So she hides it. She gets rid of her incendiary knit dress. She extemporizes underclothes out of strips of a drab French flag, once gay tricolor, salvaged from one of the corridor storerooms. She converts her bed sheet into a poncho-like floor-sweeping garment: a hole for her head and two holes for her arms. She conceals her cascade of hair, no longer fiery but still sexually potent, in a dust-rag bandana.

Eventually, Margaret abandons the ghost outfit when she's docked five (5) points for willful deterioration of state property. If they'd suspected to what intimate use she'd put their national banner she'd probably have been exited on the spot. The Administration issues her a decent gray garment like the female functionaries wear.

In the meantime, clad in that sheet, she looks spooky. Sudden encounters with her in the corridors are unsettling, for her even more than for the other party. At the beginning, before she's scared away by her encounters with the Prefect there (dreamed or possibly not dreamed), she spends much of her time wandering about in the corridors, trying to put distance between herself and the men. She doesn't always succeed.

Once, turning a corridor corner, Seymour bumps into soft whiteness. They both go down flat on their backs, which gives him a good view of her breathtaking bared legs, nothing ectoplasmic about those legs. But her spread thighs converge on absurd anticlimax: what looks like a scrap of the flag of France.

Wide-eyed with fear, she scrambles to her feet and adjusts her sheet. Before she can run away, he says: "Hey Maggie, I just remembered an old Christmas dinner: roast goose with chestnut and raisin and oyster stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy, let me tell you about that gravy..." He goes on with it. Her breathing quickens. Her moist lips part.

"Maggie," he says and reaches out.

She backs away, mumbling: "I'm not Maggie, I'm Margaret."

Then she runs away from him, those marvelous legs, rhythmically outlined under the sheet, that sweet darling bitable wagging butt of hers. He thinks of it intensely for a few miles of corridors and then returns to the old Christmas dinner, salivating with desire at the memory of the chestnut and raisin and oyster stuffing and, Jesus, that gravy.

Another time, turning a corner, Max comes upon Margaret face to face. He shouts "whaaa!" at the spectral sight and nearly runs the other way. She does run the other way in panic, not taking Max for a ghost but for worse: another flesh-and-blood man here in this solitary place. She desperately wants to avoid the temptation of flesh-and-blood men in solitary places, above all Louis. Would she have run away like that if she'd encountered Louis instead of Seymour and Max?

Temptations assailed even saints, she knows. She recalls a painting in the Louvre where Jean had taken her long ago: Saint Somebody in the desert with his eyes rolled up white toward the heavens, refusing the corrupting sight of a devil-dispatched lascivious woman. "Me with you," Jean had commented, as a joke, maybe. She'd never been sure when he joked and when he didn't.

That's what she should do in the presence of Louis, look away, like Saint Somebody. But she's no saint. Whenever Louis catches her gaze on him he blushes grayly and looks away himself. She knows he's made the connection between her and Maggie kneeling before him in no prayful way. Mortified, she rectifies her gaze. She tries to concentrate on spiritual things. Sometimes her eyes brim over. After a while, out of the corner of a wet eye, she catches him gazing at her with an expression of spiritual love for the Margaret she is now.

But when he perceives her furtive backsliding peek at him, she's back to Maggie for him, that mouth, that bosom of hers, and he turns his back on her.

For Louis too feels the burning Eye of God upon him and struggles against carnal burning. He too knows that the price of transgression in deed or thought can be instant exit. So he commands himself to stop thinking of that mouth that bosom that mouth that bosom of hers, stop thinking of it, stop thinking of her.

Louis and Margaret avoid each other as best they can. For a long time they don't exchange a single word. Margaret tries to keep her thoughts on Jean Hussier but he's theoretical, on the other side of time and fracture-proof glass. Louis Forster is real and close. Louis and Seymour too try to keep their thoughts on their long-ago theoretical sweethearts but Margaret is real and close. The pattern of faithlessness has resurrected too.

Finally Margaret and Louis manage to establish a relationship. It's a safely pious one. Margaret wants to atone and pray for forgiveness but she's forgotten the wording of her childhood prayers. Knowing the right formula is a necessary, if insufficient, condition for salvation, she thinks.

She turns to the others for assistance. She's shocked to learn that Helen doesn't pray. Max either. All Seymour Stein knows is the opening words of Kaddish, the mourner's prayer he'd had to learn by heart at ten for his mother. He refuses to recite it to her. He doesn't want to be his own mourner. The only one of the Five who has prayers at tongue-tip is Louis.

She learns that at dinner time shortly after materialization. Louis stares down at the hash and mumbles and mumbles. At first Margaret thinks he's cursing the poor quality of the fare, then realizes he's expressing thankfulness for it. Shyly, not looking at him, Margaret asks him to teach her the words of Grace. Shyly, not looking at her, he does.

From then on, Margaret joins in whenever the Five eat together. It's a kind of spiritual union with Louis. And with God too, of course.

Margaret pumps Louis dry of prayers and still isn't satisfied. She determines to explore all of the thousands (maybe millions) of storerooms in quest of a Bible. All of those prayers and supplications would be precious ammunition in the campaign for salvation and transfer. She doesn't know that the Law of December 9, 1905, separating Church and State in France, strictly forbids religious literature in government buildings.

At night Margaret and Louis lie side by side in their exactly aligned beds (almost a double bed), separated only by the thin partition. Whenever one hears the other praying inches away he/she joins in. They do it softly but still it disturbs the others.

One night, Margaret starts reciting the Lord's Prayer. She gets as far as And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us, but can't remember the rest.

"Louis," she whispers to the partition. "Are you awake?"

He's awake, trying not to think of her. He recites the rest of the Lord's Prayer to the partition.

And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

They recite the Lord's Prayer together, waking Seymour again.

He can't take it any more. He gets up and gropes his way to the Common Room. He sinks into an armchair in front of the dark window. Forgetting where he is and by what miraculous means he got there, he groans: "Jesus, Jesus, I'm so goddam sick of religion."

"What did you say?" comes a voice in the darkness.

Badly frightened, Seymour replies automatically: "Praise the Lord."

"Oh God," says Helen from a neighboring armchair, "Not you too, Seymour. I came here to try to get away from it a little."

Religion isn't Seymour Stein's only problem. Relationships are tense in the men's room. Seymour suffers greatly from the rooming arrangements. How can a late New York intellectual comfortably room with a Marine and a truck driver? They have different Weltanschauungen as Seymour once points out to Max. But Louis, not Max, is the real problem.

Louis treats the two of them like Marine recruits. He bans emotional as well as physical laxness. When they weep he commands them to stop and they have to sneak to a distant corridor to grieve in peace. Mental health goes along with physical health, he says. Stay a minute too long in bed, then it'd be an hour, then the whole blamed day and you'd end up with the wrong outlook on things. It starts with little things and ends with big things, he says.

So there are long sessions of push-ups ("Keep that back straight, Stein!"), toe-touching ("Don't bend them knees, Pilsudski!"), deep knee bends ("Squat all the way down, both of you!"). The worst is the forced jogging in the corridors. Louis' sharp voice sounds reveille and rouses them out of bed. He imposes miles of corridor jogging on them, hun-two-hun-two, wake up, Stein! Quit draggin' your feet, Pilsudski!

When they totter back to the room, streaming with sweat, all three of them collapse on their beds, exhausted. Exhaustion is the secret reason for the exercises. Louis hopes that, exhausted, he'll stop thinking of Margaret's mouth and bosom, her mouth and bosom. It does help a little. Cold showers would have been better but there are no showers here.

Finally Seymour revolts. "This isn't boot-camp. I used to have crazy ideas but enlisting in the Marines wasn't one of them for chrissakes."

"Don't take the name of Our Lord in vain, Stein!" Louis snaps, his gray, once blond, moustache bristling. He adds that if Seymour had enlisted in the Marines he wouldn't be in the mental and physical shape he is. But they'd never have taken him. "Anyhow, never seen one of your kind in the Marines."

Seymour broods over that last crack. Just his luck to be rooming with two anti-Semites. Back then, Seymour Stein had been paranoid on that subject. The trait has carried over in resurrection.

Louis disciplines them even at night. He can't see them but he has a sharp ear and nose. The corridor toilet is a long way off. It's unhygienic maybe but human to urinate in the nearby washbasin. (At least Seymour runs the water into the bowl after. He isn't sure Max does.) But finally Louis hears Max relieving himself that handy way. He leaps out of bed, snaps the light on and barks inches from Max's scared face: "If there's one thing I can't stand it's a man who micterates in a washbasin!" Louis is six foot three and armored with muscles. Max and Seymour go the long way after that.

Louis censors what little sex-life they have. It's restricted to the eyeballs but is better than nothing, just about. Max makes the discovery. He starts monopolizing the washing-area. One morning Seymour surprises him standing with his face pressed against the sinister face of the grinning clown. At first Seymour thinks Max is weeping and trying to hide it. Then he discovers that tiny holes had been bored – maybe decades earlier – in the clown's pupils, providing the peeper with a restricted view of the women's toilette area.

Max describes Margaret in crude graphic terms. Maybe it's all sex-starved fantasy. But maybe not. Seymour wants his turn at the clown face. Max lets Seymour peep too in exchange for the lumps of moldy chocolate the frightened cleaning girl continues smuggling through to him.

Most of the time Seymour sees nothing at all. And his nose gets in the way of comfortable viewing of nothing at all. Once, though, he catches Helen, bare to the waist, brushing her teeth vigorously with a finger. Her small pointy breasts quiver vigorously. It's nice but nothing sensational. But can beggars be choosers? He never catches even a glimpse of Margaret, the star attraction.

The peeping sessions come to an end when Louis discovers what the two of them are up to all of the time in the washing area. He presses his face against the clown's face for half a minute and then withdraws with a shocked expression. Grim-faced, he hammers wooden pegs into the clown's pupils, blinding the voyeur for good. Seymour guesses that, beginner's luck, he'd seen Margaret at her intimate ablutions.

Louis decrees a daily shave. But the Administration has allotted the men an archaic straight razor (not archaic for Louis of course). Seymour doesn't know how to strop properly and his angle of attack is wrong. The nicked blade draws blood each time. That's terrible because the gray ooze really does look like embalming fluid.

To escape the depressing chore, Seymour decides to grow a beard. In had-been time he'd occasionally been tempted by a beard for dignity and concealment. But he'd been afraid of looking like an orthodox rabbi. Louis is hostile to beards in general, not just to beards worn by orthodox rabbis. Beards had gone out circa 1890. Imagining a bearded Marine is grotesque. And for Louis, Max and Seymour are Marine bootcamp fodder.

Things come to a head over the beard issue. One morning Seymour refuses to cut his throat again with the nicked straight razor.

"No, I won't. Won't do pushups and kneebends or jog anymore either. Won't. This is a concentration camp all right, but you're not the head fuehrer. I don't know who the head fuehrer is but you're sure as hell not. You're just an inmate, like the rest of us. So enough already."

Max joins in the revolt and says he won't either, won't do pushups and kneebends or jog anymore either, won't.

Their voices rise. By now they know they can afford to do it without the risk of serious consequences. Helen is sure to propose her sad mediating services before friction ignites into brawl.

She does it this time too, knocking timidly at their door. She explains to Louis that in Seymour's time, her time too, beards had come back in style. It seems to her (but it's just her opinion) that Seymour is justified in wanting to grow a beard even if he wouldn't look very good in one. In her opinion, she adds apologetically to Seymour.

She convinces Louis to let Seymour grow his beard (which he doesn't do after all since she said he wouldn't look good in one). She also tells Louis that pushups and jogging are very healthy activities, but that maybe ("I don't know, I may be wrong but it seems that way to me") they ought to be on a volunteer basis.

Predictably, Louis ends by seeing things her way. Seymour, a little guilty at such total victory, says that maybe they could go on doing deep knee bends. He quickly adds: "Say ten a day." Helen wonders if perhaps she could join in on the knee-bends. "Basically Louis's right," she says. "We don't get nearly enough exercise here."

So that's an end to daily shaving and pushups and toe-touching and dawn jogging for Max and Seymour. Louis goes on with it, inhumanly tripling the dose, taking on the others' share and trying to sweat Maggie out of his brain. He also goes on disciplining his roommates emotionally, cracking down on tears and sobs. They're secretly glad of that. He saves them, they realize, from mental collapse. He's their stern pillar of strength.

As usual, Seymour and Max express their gratitude to Helen for her arbitration. They suspect that they're being tested on their behavior here. Without her soft-spoken interventions coexistence would be impossible. Maybe a brawl was a serious debit in the ledger-book.

As usual, they're careful to hide the resentment that accompanies the gratitude. Each one of Helen's selfless interventions, they sometimes think, illustrates a goodness that's sure to be rewarded by transfer out there. It emphasizes their own unworthiness, the details of which had been publicized by the hedgehoggish functionary the day of their arrival. They can't forget that Helen was the only one of the Five that the ragged Napoleonic Sub-Prefect hadn't sentenced to instant exit.

They have another cause for resentment. If she comforts them when they weep and listens sympathetically to their yearnings, she never gives them the opportunity to return the favor and so chalk up good points for commiseration. She never weeps or confides or yearns as they do. Oh, how they yearn for transfer to the world of color, yearn and hunger and thirst for it! They want and want and want.

Helen yearns for nothing, wants nothing. Isn't indifference to reward a saint-like attribute? More deserving goodness. Behind her back, Seymour sometimes refers to her as "Saint Helena." Sometimes he expands the name to "Saint Helena, Rock of Lonely Exile."

The Five often find each other's company unbearably oppressive. Not just Helen with her enviable status as a well-placed candidate for transfer plus her nearly physical aura of sadness. There's Max with his sobs in the middle of a dirty joke, heard a hundred times, the joke and the sobs. Seymour's interminable stories of times with his Marie-Claude, going into all mentionable details. Louis' mechanical gymnastics with orders to himself to keep his knees stiff and his back straight. Margaret's great-eyed recoil from male contact.

When that happens once too often and they can't bear the sight and sound of one another, the longing for solitude becomes insurmountable. They flee the Common Room in solitary secession and wander in the tangle of corridors or poke about in dusty unexplored rooms with the same contents as the explored ones.

But sooner or later solitude too becomes unbearable (the whisper of their soles on the floor, the sound of their breathing and hearts) and they try to find their way back to company.

They often get lost. They shout for rescue from solitude: "Hellooo..." and are answered by the echo, a mournful ghostly "O... O... O..." Or else, to improve the echo, they shout, "Where... are... you?" and get back nothing better than "Oow... oww... oww..." a cry of pain, ghostly too.

A few hours later, the others in the Common Room, alarmed at being reduced to four, scatter in the corridors and shout the same things: "Hellooo..." and "Where... are... you?" They get the same multiplied replies.

Or else they shout the missing companion's name.

It gives them better, neutral, echoes except for "Helen! Helen!"

That shout gives them: "Hell...In .... Hell... In...  
Hell..."

Chapter 12

Filaments

The bulb in their room trembles and goes out. Four of the Five tremble too when that happens.

They replace the bulb, remembering the bulb's life-span.

They know that the bulb's fate can be their fate and at any moment, no six-month guarantee for them. They too can go out, not outside, just out, exit, void, loss of light, no time for a tremble and with no hope of replacement if the Administrative Review Board finally convenes and reaches a decision, nearly certain to be negative for Seymour Stein and Max Pilsudski and Margaret Williams and Louis Forster. Helen Ricchi keeps on not caring, one way or the other.

That replaced bulb trembles and goes out.

They're still there so they replace it, thinking: another six months.

It goes on and on like that, bulb after bulb.

They wait for transfer or annihilation and nothing happens.

Each time a bulb starts trembling they start trembling too. Even though it's not much of a life here, on the whole, weighing the pros and cons, most of them judge that after all it's better than nothing. They've been there.

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.

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-like 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?

Chapter 15

The Window

Outside of sleeping and wandering in the maze of corridors, the Five spend most of their time in the Common Room side by side in front of the window. Even in periods of acute intergroup tension, the physical proximity involved doesn't bother them. They're never as distant from one another as seated there practically shoulder to shoulder in the semi-arc of lumpy armchairs, eyes riveted to the glass rectangle in search of a private face. Some of the longed-for faces are decades apart. So the spectators are decades apart.

The window is like a TV screen featuring three different channels for selective vision with no need to zap. Anyhow they can't zap. They're permanently tuned into Channel 1900 or Channel 1937 or Channel 1951 depending on their Paris sojourn date. It's like armchair time-travel.

Sometimes they exchange notes on their time-bound vision, except for Max. Max has nothing to exchange. He goes on seeing empty streets, empty buildings and the empty river. It's static, like a jammed color-slide in a travelogue devoted to a dead city like Petra. He listens, though, to their accounts of happenings.

Louis once describes a brawl in the summer of 1900 with smashed shop windows and white-eyed bolting horses.

Margaret tells about a pair of lovers in the late spring of 1937. They always meet at the same café and kiss and then quarrel or quarrel and then kiss. Their emotional ups and downs are like a TV serial for most of the Five. Then one day the girl comes and waits. Her lover doesn't show up. She comes five more times and waits. She weeps. Margaret weeps telling it. Seymour succeeds in keeping back tears.

Sometimes they press their faces against the frigid pane and make out, barely, far below to the right, the main entrance of the Prefecture, not this ghost Prefecture but the real familiar Prefecture they'd known back then, with its irritated female functionaries bossing the confused foreigners about and stamping their carte de séjour with an aggressive bang and rudely thrusting it at them in dismissal.

So there are two Prefectures, the phantom one they're imprisoned in and the material one, side by side. Logically, assuming logic here, somewhere a wall must separate them. Somewhere there has to be a door – one out of the perhaps million doors here – that opens on that real Prefecture. That thought occurs to them fairly often but hasn't become obsessional yet.

One day (day out there, you can't tell what it is here) Seymour too has something to recount out of his 1951 Paris. He's by himself in the Common Room. At one point he leans forward in his armchair and cries out. He leaps to the window and presses his palms and face against the cold surface, making little throat-sounds. Then he goes limp, practically collapses. He has to tell it to someone. He goes to the women's room.

Helen is lying on her bed, staring up at the blankness of the ceiling, trying to achieve the same blankness in her mind. Seymour spoils it. He's pale and stammering. She has to respond to his anguish. All her lives, past and present, people have expected that of her. Helen imagines he's seen his Marie-Something out there, arm-in-arm with another man.

Actually, what he's seen isn't nearly as terrible as that. A car accident, he says, a young woman lying smashed in the street. He doesn't tell her that he took the victim for Marie-Claude until he deciphered her features beneath the blood and realized it wasn't his sweetheart. Helen doesn't want to see the sequel to the accident. Seymour doesn't want to return to it. Anyhow, by this time the useless ambulance must have come, taking the girl away.

Sometimes a spectator breaks the silence with O!! in fear and joy, followed by a disappointed Ohh... The first time it happens the others imagine that the privileged spectator of another decade has caught a glimpse of the lost lover, (O!!) and then has lost sight of her/him in the crowd (Ohh...). But one day it happens to them too and the initiated others, hearing their joyful-fearful exclamation, know that the flock of pigeons has wheeled and is heading straight for the window in a loom of retracted claws, white wing-pinions, metal-fire neck, ruby eyes, the outside world never so close.

When they hear the cry of disappointment they know that the looming pigeons have vanished. There's no contact between the two worlds. "It happened to me too," say the others. "I don't know how long ago." They have no way of knowing when. There are no real clocks or calendars here.

The window in the Common Room is their only clock. They see the night sky paling. They watch the long morning shadows of monuments wheeling and shrinking and then lengthening again past noon and finally vanishing with dusk. As a timepiece it's no more satisfactory than a giant sundial. The approximate time is available only on sunny days and Paris is a largely overcast city.

The window in the Common Room is their only calendar. It's a pretty bad one except for two of the days. When they see the church doing a brisk business, pulling in well-dressed women, mostly elderly, for morning Mass, they're sure it's Sunday. Confirming the day, another ritual: the same women coming out of the pastry-shop with ribboned boxes that contain (behind their window the deprived onlookers guess at this, saliva flooding their mouths) rum-cake with whipped-cream topped by a candied cherry, multi-layered Napoleons (mille-feuilles), chocolate éclairs, like delectable turds. Sunday, then. Monday is the day the food-shops are closed and the work-bound crowds wear glum harried expressions.

Theoretically, Sunday and Monday provide them with bearings for the other days. But sometimes they wake and see the trays of their three missed meals on the table, the food moldy. That throws calculations out of kilter. How many days have they slept through? Of course the cleaning-girl doesn't know. She'd come with other meals but they were still asleep and so she'd gone away with those meals. She never recalled how many times that happened. Like the other functionaries, she has no sense of time and is quite stupid as well. So the Five have to wait for the rituals of morning Mass and patisserie to situate the day they're in (or think they're in).

The window does keep them roughly posted about the time of year. They're not dependent on the sun for that and you can't sleep through a whole season. But they don't want seasons. They dread the cycle of seasons. The hour and the day, yes, for short-term orientation. But they want permanence to that scene they'd witnessed, dazzled, in the dark corridors God alone (perhaps) knows how long ago: the bright summer-clad couples sipping colored drinks at sidewalk café tables, and slow lovers advancing along cobble-stoned quays, shaded by the fresh foliage of lime trees.

But the seasons wheel past. Bastille Day rockets burst in the night sky and they know it's mid-July. The foliage of the lime-trees rusts and falls. The sun weakens daily. Snow fills the window like static in a TV screen. Garlands of colored bulbs span certain streets and the shop-windows are filled with tinsel and green wreaths.

In despair they watch the tipsy midnight crowd celebrate the new year outside: 1901, 1938, 1952. The garlands of colored bulbs vanish. The sun timidly rallies and shadows shorten. Their despair deepens when joyous children go past, their faces grimed with colored chalk. That's Mardi Gras, they know, so February. Willows fill with a fine green mist and they guess at late February or early March. Chocolate bunnies and eggs in the confiserie window announce the approach of Easter, that earlier, more successful, resurrection. The sticky swollen buds of chestnuts confirm late March. They unfurl green in April. Candelabrums of white chestnut blossoms illuminate May. They fade in early June.

And now the Five are back to café couples sipping colored drinks and slow lovers on the quays, but certainly different couples and lovers. Once more, from their posthumous Bastille no mob can possibly ever storm to liberate them, the Five witness the July 14 fireworks and the final sparks drifting past the stars. In no time, from the no-time of their space, they again see the garlands of colored bulbs spanning the streets.

They're tortured on the wheel of the seasons.

By the start of the first of those new years, 1952, Seymour had been back in New York, writing imploring letters to Marie-Claude and getting no reply. What good would it do being transferred to the Paris of 1952 (or worse, later), everything wrecked beyond repair?

By the summer of 1938 Margaret – Maggie then – had met someone else and then had been expelled from France. Had Jean survived her departure? She recalls his wild threats of suicide. Wouldn't return be to his grave?

By 1901 Louis had been transferred to the States and had foolishly married at the end of that year.

During 1952 and most of 1953 Helen had wandered about Paris in search of Richard. The Paris she stared at through the window had to be situated long past 1953. She'd returned home in November, 1953.

What point was there for any of them to be transferred to this later Paris?

Time goes on and on out there, enlarging the gap between them and 1900 and 1937 and 1951. Over and over they observe the sun creeping closer and closer to them. At summer solstice the sun marks the high tide of the year on a particular pavement-crack and then begins retreating from it and them day after day. Shadows lengthen. Trees go bare. Christmas decorations fill the shop windows. Trees break into leaf again, the same wearisome cycle all over again.

They realize that their year in Paris – 1900, 1937, 1951 – has been left behind for all time, that they are on a train supposedly local but turning out to be wildly express, a ghost train powering past the local station with their sweetheart on the station platform, dwindling to a dot, no return ever.

They can't accept the loss of their year of love, the loss of possible return to it with the hindsight power of undoing fatal things done in that former existence, the hindsight power of doing essential things undone back then.

They clutch at theories to explain away the relentless flow of time outside. They try to believe that the rotation of seasons is largely an illusion attributable to their unimaginative dreams, largely carbon copies of their daytime activities. In those dreams they often sit before the window and watch seasons. Sometimes in the dreams they go to bed and dream of watching seasons. So with dreams within dreams within dreams, how can they tell how many times the trees have really lost green and recovered it or how many times fireworks have celebrated that enviable liberation of prisoners from a distant Bastille? It's like seeking a bouquet in a room filled with mirrors. Out of that multitude of reflected bouquets, which is the real one?

But the burned-out bulbs accumulate, contradicting the optimistic theory of dream seasons. Seymour realizes that if ever, by miracle, he's transferred outside it wouldn't be to the spring of 1951 and his twenty-three-year-old sweetheart, but to some later year, who knows, maybe the late seventies and his darling in her fifties. How could she still be his darling in her fifties, he still twenty-five? How could he imagine shaming her with his unchanged youth?

He tries to derive poor consolation from the possibility that maybe only ten years have wheeled by outside and that if he's transferred now Marie-Claude would be thirty-three, still desirable. If married she was probably dissatisfied with the state (as he himself had been after a few years of it) and so he, Seymour, would be promoted in her mind from an object of rancor into an object of nostalgic desire. But how would she react to his unchanged youth?

Unchanged youth.

Only Margaret has doubts about that facing the mirror. One day she asks Helen to use the emergency phone and request a jar of cold cream. Helen points out that the phone is for emergencies.

"But it is an emergency. My skin is getting all dry and ugly. Look."

In a second Margaret is out of her pajama top. She turns slowly, hands clasped behind her neck, her face tragic.

"See?"

"You look all right to me," Helen says, understating her feelings. "I'll try to find something though."

She salvages a hunk of rotten banana from dinner and applies it to Margaret's back in slow circular movements.

"That feels so good," Margaret breathes. "But I must smell awful."

Helen takes the remark as permission to approach her face to Margaret's satiny skin.

"You smell like a banana plantation in flower," she says and goes on breathing in Margaret's fragrance, which has nothing to do with bananas.

The slow banana-massage becomes a weekly rite.

But, with that exception, the others are convinced that, burned-out bulbs to the contrary, time has halted for good here. Whatever the season outside – passersby mopping their brows in glaring near-zenith suns or struggling bundled against snow gusts – the temperature never varies here. It's always as dank as a vault, a perpetual unheated November. The cycle of the sun out there – dawn, noon, dusk and night – is of no help here. Their suns here are static light bulbs burning overhead. There's no night here. The Five sometimes suffer from insomnia. They explore the corridors and expect to open doors on deserted offices, the lights switched off, the typewriters shrouded. But the functionaries are always there, busily typing and filing and supervising. Do the functionaries ever sleep?

Another question: do the functionaries ever age? The functionaries look uncomprehendingly at them when they ask about the date or the day. Time is a fog for the functionaries, like what they see out of the window. An inscription dating from a supposed 1929 abuses Prefect d'Aubier de Hautecloque. Max exited in 2000. Is it conceivable that d'Aubier de Hautecloque has been prefect for at least seventy-one years? And if it's at least the year 2000 here how can you explain the absence of the office equipment of even the late twentieth century? Why those cliffs of archaic filing cabinets? Where are the computers? Why those ancient Underwood typewriters like baroque altars the female functionaries endlessly bow to?

The one thing that theoretically structures time here are the meals. Breakfast has to be early morning, of course. But in that case, why are the shadows outside so long, marking an afternoon hour? When lunch is served inside it's dusk outside. The Five try to believe the meal is supper but real supper is served at what must be a wee-hour outside: those dark buildings, streetlights making spaced pools on empty sidewalks, traffic reduced to a rare car or carriage. Logically, a few hours after that supper the Five go to bed although the night sky is brightening with the promise of sunrise.

They end by refusing to conform to this crazy violation of normality. They let their food wait and match mealtimes here with mealtimes out there. They go to bed when the yellow squares of windows outside go black, announcing collective bedtime for millions out there. They try to get up when the night sky starts brightening and they bolt their breakfast then. They synchronize their nauseating lunch with the delectable lunches the restaurants serve outside. Of course their postponed meals are cold. But it's no sacrifice. Those meals are served cold to begin with. Seymour has to soothe the dim-witted cleaning-girl. She thinks it's somehow her fault if they don't eat immediately.

So their allegiance is to the normal passage of time outside even if that passage tortures them.

They have a ritual.

A little bit before dusk outside they switch the lights off in the Common Room. They're plunged in gloom but the light, what little there is of it, comes from outside, stingy but authentic light. When the darkness is complete inside, they sit waiting for the windows in the buildings outside to light up yellow. When that happens they switch the lights in the Common Room back on.

Synchronized like that with the real people outside, it's a kind of communion. It provides them with the illusion of belonging out there.

They even try to introduce measured time to their timeless space. Louis explores the rooms and comes up with scraps of metal and wood and wire and rope which he slaps together to fashion the primitive great-grandfather of all grandfather clocks complete with weights and pullies. He synchronizes his tinkered time to guessed-at time outside. But the clacking of the mechanism interferes with sleep. To Seymour it sounds like someone hammering nails in the lid of a coffin.

After a while the clock breaks down, to everybody's secret relief. Louis dismantles it. He suspects that, anyhow, it hadn't kept very good time.

Seymour often thinks that they're like inconsolable exiles, insanely faithful to the ways of their lost homeland on the other side of the world, clinging to their ancestral antipodal time-zone, sleeping through the daylight hours here which are night-hours back there.

Or they're like British colonial administrators, stiff and solemn in evening dress in a jungle, celebrating the Queen's Birthday, superior to the monkey-shit raining down on them and the shrieks of copulating natives.

The Five have no Queen but they do have Christmas to celebrate. It's an easy day to identify. When they see kids on brand-new bikes with a little tinsel still in the wheel-spokes, they guess at December 25.

Each time it comes round Helen says "Merry Christmas" to everybody, probably not ironically. She's not a humorous girl. That greeting is the only gift she has.

New Year too is identifiable.

But at the sight of the tipsy midnight crowds Helen doesn't wish anyone "Happy New Year."

The new years that keep on coming can only be unhappy for the Five.

Chapter 16

Merry-Go-Round

Time, then, stands still here and grinds on relentlessly on the other side of the window, they think in despair, the spiral of seasons like a bit biting into their hearts. Still, there's something strange about what's going on out there. Or rather about what's not going on out there.

If so many years have gone past, maybe a decade or more, why haven't skirt-lengths and hairstyles changed in supposedly post-1937 and post-1951 Paris? Where are the new car models? How come horses continue to monopolize the streets of supposedly post-1900 Paris? Where are the new motor omnibuses?

Above all, there's the enigma of what Margaret continues to see in her terrible decade. Her 1937 is just two years from war, less than three years from debacle. Why doesn't she see German occupation troops? Where are the deformed crosses of the victors flapping over French public buildings?

The answer to these riddles comes four burned-out bulbs later.

One rainy day in autumn out there (judging by the trees) Seymour is sitting by himself before the window searching for a particular aging face in the crowd. Suddenly he leaps to his feet, yelling with joy.

Without knocking, he bursts into the women's room where Helen is lying on her bed staring up at the ceiling. He'd done that before. But this time he's incoherent with joy. She thinks he's lost his mind, joy in this spot, and then understands: he's seen his Marie-Something, Marie-Claude. For his sake she tries to share his senseless joy. What use is seeing if there's no possibility of being? He practically wrenches her off the bed to see.

But there's nothing joyous about what she sees out of the window. A crowd has gathered about a black Citroën Traction with a smashed windshield. A smashed woman lies crumpled in front of the car. Helen looks away from all that blood.

Seymour is joyous at it. He stammers: "It doesn't matter for her. She already died. She'll die again. It's all happened before. It'll all happen again. I saw it all. I'll see it all again. It's the same year, 1951, our year, it goes round and round. Marie-Claude is there. Your husband – what's his name again? – is there too. It must be the same for the others too."

Sure enough, it's the same year, going round and round, not just 1951 but 1900 and 1937 too. That same day, miraculously (or was it planned that way, they'll wonder later), Louis sees the once-witnessed brawl and the bolting white-eyed horses. Margaret again sees the kissing bickering lovers in the café and, knowing how it will end, weeps again.

So their lovers are preserved for them in that unchanging repeated year outside like long-ago dragonflies perfect in amber.

Max has no cause for celebration. But by a strange coincidence (or was it planned that way?) that very day, hours before, he'd discovered four dusty bottles of wine in Room 1452: Pétrus 1922, and Pomerol 1919. Knowledgeable, Seymour proclaims their excellence. They take Max's discovery as an auspicious portent and get drunk. Seymour stands up unsteadily, toasts the window and extemporizes:

Not a train

No dark funeral express train

But a merry-go-round

Be merry

Be merry

O see how they go round and round

The merry painted wooden horses!

Back then, in another existence, Seymour had tried his hand at poetry for a year before he gave it up as a bad job.

It's the first moment of joy since their arrival in this place. They drain three of the bottles dry, even though this prohibited act can cost them they can't recall how many precious points. "I don't drink," Helen keeps on saying as Seymour keeps on pouring and she keeps on drinking, desperately.

Later, Helen sees them slumped in their tattered armchairs, after the cheers and babble and laughter, staring at the window in a beatific stupor. It's clear that, in fantasy, they're reunited with their lovers. Don't they realize (Helen does in spite of all the wine) that basically they're simply back to starting point, the desired year of Paris outside, but no way to reach it? Now asleep, they mumble, mutter, whisper, explain, defend, justify, their faces wet with joy.

Helen tries staring at the window, which slowly rotates, but she sees nothing. She hears Richard's reproachful voice: Why didn't you look for me in the right place? Soundlessly, her lips shape the answer: I looked everywhere. Richard's voice, distant now and fading: Why didn't you go down to the Catacombs? Her lips soundlessly form: I didn't want to then, I liked sunshine too much, but I'm there now. Where are you? His answer is an unintelligible whisper. It fades out.

Now the sleepers thresh about in their armchairs. The tears keep coming but they aren't tears of joy anymore. Something has gone wrong. Only half awake, they slowly get up and march stiffly, each of them, into a corner where they huddle, not looking at the window. The tears come faster. Sobs wrack their bowels. Helen automatically goes over, unsteadily, and tries to comfort them. She learns from Seymour and Louis, in a moment of guilty confession, that both men had abandoned their lovers pregnant. She makes an effort and goes on comforting them.

Despite the comforting, or because of it, they end by glaring at her, pushing her away and stopping their ears. She still doesn't understand that by relativizing their unforgivable act (pretending to) she seems to be flaunting her own goodness, emphasizing that she's the only one of the Five to stand a chance of being transferred back to that Paris she keeps telling herself she doesn't want.

Minutes later she finally learns about the image they have of her from Margaret. Margaret runs moaning out of the Common Room. Helen finds her face down on her bed repeating over and over: "Jean, Jean, O Jean." Helen mechanically comforts her, wipes the tears off her face and even kisses her. Margaret pulls away. "You never cry. You don't have to. You were good. You're going out there. Not like the rest of us."

No, Helen whispers, that's not true. Margaret, sobbing again, hears her say something confused, about how it's all a sham, shammed goodness, comforting people in distress, a kind of reflex from long habit, how as a child already, an ugly child, she'd been jealous of beautiful people ("like you"), had never come to terms with her skinny plainness, how she'd learned very early that niceness, sympathy and forgiveness could be a lure, a means of attracting men who were in bad need of niceness and sympathy and forgiveness.

So (Margaret vaguely hears her say) she specialized in flawed handsome men, dispensing calculated comfort and sympathy until she became their indispensable drug. There'd been a dying man, then a cripple, then a homosexual, others. Of course it never worked out. Couldn't possibly have. Finally there was Richard.

She'd been in Paris working on a thesis. Her father fell ill and she'd returned to Denver. She'd encountered a startlingly handsome young man standing on a corner, confused and angry because nobody could direct him to where he wanted to go. She couldn't either (it sounded almost like a description of a sewer) but she spoke to him about Paris and suddenly that's where he wanted to go, with her.

Everybody warned her about him, a hopeless case, cyclically suicidal and perhaps lovingly homicidal too in that phase. Keep away from him in that downward phase, they warned. Instead, she married him. She wasn't afraid when the cycle operated dangerously. He was much closer to her, totally dependent, in the downward phase than in the lucid phase. They didn't understand. In that lucid phase he was indifferent. Cured, he was sure to leave her. Secretly she feared the upward phase more than the downward phase.

Helen whispers: "You're wrong about me. Why do you think I'm still here after all this time?"

But Margaret's breathing is deep and regular now. She's asleep. Her face is peaceful. It's not sure she's heard Helen's confession. Helen hopes she hasn't. Still unsteady on her feet, Helen goes back to the Common Room. Slouched in their corners the others are asleep. Their faces are peaceful now. It must have all turned out well for them, after all, in their minds.

Normally they should have suffered from a bad morning-after. They don't, at least not from a conventional one. Seymour samples what's left in the fourth bottle and makes a face. The vital essence of the wine had evaporated, probably decades earlier. But their joy had been so great at the discovery of eternal return out there that they'd got drunk on a prestigiously labeled placebo. Sober, the others sip and have to acknowledge that it's no more than old water. Their joy has evaporated too.

The merry-go-round, they realize, goes round and round but they're not on it, probably never will be.

It's a terrible morning-after after all, worse than the worst conceivable morning-after alcohol could have produced.

They go on trying to kill time while waiting for the Advocate who's supposed to find ways of getting them out of here into a better place.

Sometimes, though, they wonder if the Advocate isn't a myth, pure invention to lull them into a sense of false security. It might very well be that one day (one year, one decade) the Administrative Review Board would finally meet and a button would be pressed and without warning, no fuss or bother, the administratively suspended Five would fall out of suspension into void or, very unlikely for all but one of them, into color and sunshine.

In the meantime all they can do is hope for the best and wait for the hypothetical Advocate.

Chapter 17

Again

Unable to wait any longer Margaret finally returns to the corridors she'd fled probably years earlier. She opens more thousands of doors, fearfully at first, still in search of prayers and implorations for a divinely accredited way out. If she doesn't find the Book that contains them in those rooms she doesn't encounter anything alarming either and feels safe.

But one day or night she emerges, empty-handed as usual, from a room (59257) into a stench like funeral lilies forgotten for weeks in a vase near a forgotten occupied coffin.

She turns in the opposite direction from the stench. It 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 between his motionless lips comes the cavernous invitation to dance for him.

All this had happened before.

But now something new: the promise of personal attention on his part to her appeal for transfer if she will dance for him.

Hearing that, she remains immobile and irresolute in the dim dusty corridor with visions of the bright outside world.

But when his long white hand reaches out she recalls her vow to God and understands or thinks she understands that she's being tested, unless it's a dream, and if so, still being tested because you can sin in dreams too.

She shuns the corridors again and in despair goes back to waiting for the bureaucratic processing of her case.

Chapter 18

While Waiting For Advocate

One of the Five can't wait. One night the others are jolted out of sleep by a distant thud and severe breakage. It goes on and on. They pull on their clothes and, guided by the racket, find Max two floors below destroying a wall in Room 869. He's white with plaster. He heaves his sledgehammer high and bashes a star-shaped hole in the wall. The debris rains down on the other side.

Seymour and Louis grab him. Louis yells: "You gone plain crazy?" He lowers his voice to a fearful whisper. "You want Turnkey should come and report you? You already lost seven points for smashin' that dish. You'll lose a thousand points for smashin' a wall. They'll exit you one second flat."

Max wrenches free. "I'm gonna exit all right, but my own way." He grips the ragged edges of the hole and sticks his head through it as a preliminary to total exit, his own way, into what he thinks is the space of freedom.

He remains paralyzed in that position for long seconds. Then he slowly withdraws his head. He seems to have aged. But it's probably the plaster dust in his hair. He sits down on the floor and stares ahead blankly. Helen looks through the hole. She sits down alongside Max, places her hand on his arm and talks and talks to him.

Louis and Seymour can't help laughing when they stick their heads through the hole and see the urinals.

Louis and Seymour and Helen spend the rest of the night pushing filing cabinets in front of the mutilated wall and cleaning up the toilets on the other side. Max remains seated on the floor while they do it. Then they pick up the crowbar, the sledgehammer, the pick-ax and the shovel, his crude map and the compass. They coax Max to his feet and they all return to their rooms.

Later they learn his reasons for doing that crazy thing. From the window in the Common Room they can see that building they call the Pray-Fek-Toor alongside this one, he explains. So he'd figured that if he located a room next to the Pray-Fek-Toor all he'd have to do is make a hole and pass through. He must have screwed up his calculations.

When they see him scribbling figures on a piece of paper, at it again, they confiscate his tools and stash them away in a distant room. They notice something strange about the compass he'd used. At irregular intervals the needle trembles and creeps northward and then whirls a second and creeps southward. There's no pole of orientation here. It's not surprising Max screwed up his calculations.

So Max has to wait too, like the rest of them.

While waiting for the Advocate and watching the repetition of their season of long-ago love, their past grabs them by the throat in unexpected ways. Seymour Stein is particularly vulnerable.

One day Louis extemporizes a shower out of a pierced can, a rubber hose and a pair of bellows he's found in the corridor rooms. Yankee ingenuity can turn even hell into a half-way comfortable place Seymour remarks to Helen, half-humorously. Louis is extraordinarily prudish for a Marine, even an ex one. He wants privacy for their "ablutions" and ferrets about for the equivalent of the folding screen the women have. In a room devoted to artifacts of the French Communist Party, probably confiscated by the police from clubbed demonstrators, he salvages a long white propaganda banner of the sort that is tacked to stout poles and militantly borne down avenues. He nails it from wall to wall in the men's room to conceal the washing area.

The slogan on the banner, constantly visible, often makes Max and Seymour weep: U.S. GO HOME!! What else does Max want to do? On bad days he suspects that the operation, although urged in two-foot black letters, is impossible.

Seymour's tears at the sight of that banner have nothing to do with homesickness. He hadn't really been a Good American. He tells the story to all of them over and over and that's mainly the times the tears come and they find excuses for fleeing (as he does when it's their turn to recount and, sometimes, weep).

One day way back then, he explains, he'd been photographing wall graffiti at the Place de la République. Most of the good graffiti was low (maybe inscribed by militant dwarfs) and he had to kneel to them. For kneeling shots he used a threadbare hotel rug, red unfortunately. He'd been caught in a communist demonstration that had featured an avenue-wide banner bearing that very slogan: U.S. GO HOME!! He'd been minding his business but the flics took his rug for a red flag and clobbered him.

One of the demonstrators had taken him to a hospital and then to his apartment where he'd met the boy's sister, his darling, Marie-Claude. So the sight of that banner (maybe the identical one, who knows?) brought it all back poignantly. The sight of other banners borne by the demonstrators (such as RIDGEWAY POISON! and OUI AU VIN FRANÇAIS NON AU COCA-COLA YANKEE!) would have stabbed him in the heart the same way, he explains.

One day before the window Helen calls Seymour's attention to a shrub with bright yellow flowers in a distant public garden. Forsythia, she says. Seymour says that he'd never paid attention to flowers or shrubs before he met Marie-Claude. She'd taught him all about them as soon as they flowered. When does this thing flower? What's the month out there? March or April, says Helen.

Seymour stammers, too early, too early, his face screwed up. Seymour had been a hair-trigger weeper back then. The tendency has carried over intact. What's too early? says Helen, her hand on his arm. Finally he's able to say: March or April. I met Marie-Claude in May. I left in November. So I missed out on it. I didn't give her time to teach me whaddyacallit. He can't go on.

Well, says Helen, now you know what it looks like and the name, forsythia. She says it apologetically for having been the one to have introduced forsythia to him and not his Marie-Claude. She knows his sad story by heart, he's told it so often. She can't help thinking: his own fault if Marie-Claude hadn't had time to introduce forsythia to him.

Seymour wipes his eyes with his sleeve. She's a very nice girl, he thinks, not knowing what Helen's thinking about him. Maybe he could make an effort and fall in love with her a little. It might liven things up here. A little sex wouldn't be bad for his physical and mental tone.

One day, who knows how long after their whaddyacallit dialogue – maybe years counting by outside time – they meet in a corridor. That rarely happens. There are just five of them, motes in the boundless universe of corridors. They're both exploring rooms for books. They agree to join their efforts.

Seymour decides the moment has come for a decisive gesture. It takes effort on his part. It isn't that he finds Helen unattractive. She's a little on the skinny side but has (as he'd once seen clandestinely through the clown's eyes) genuine breasts, nothing explosively sensational like Margaret's breasts, but well-perched small witty breasts anyhow. She's a very kind person too and cultured as well, in an upper-middle-brow out-of-town earnest high-school-teacherish way. But she carries about a perpetual dampening aura of sadness, a force field of melancholy that does nothing to counter the general atmosphere here. Sometimes she reminds him of an intelligent version of the cleaning-girl who had spilled dirty water over his leg so long ago.

And of course there's her enviable status as sole obvious candidate for transfer. Later, Seymour will wonder guiltily if his supposedly decisive gesture hadn't been motivated by an unconscious desire to involve her in transgression, pulling her down to his own hopeless status.

He begins with a classic ploy, observing that it's the first time they've ever been alone. She says that she hadn't noticed. After a few minutes of silence he observes that they could easily have met back there in 1951 Paris. She says that Paris is a big place.

After more silence he tries another tactic, downplaying her husband's importance in a sly metaphysical way, saying that, funny, the way the big things in your life depend on a million little things and that if just one of those million little things misses out so does the big thing. Suppose, he said, her father's condition had improved and she'd never returned home. She'd never have encountered her future husband.

She doesn't reply. He realizes that he isn't supposed to know the details of her encounter with her crazy husband. Margaret had told him the story. He doesn't break the silence this time, depressed by the thought that his own great love had been at the mercy of contingency too. Suppose he'd arrived at the Place de la République an hour later with the communist demonstration in full swing. He'd never have dared photograph that wall and deploy the red rug that had triggered the clobbering and led to his meeting with his darling.

They open a door and see the usual files and administrative volumes. The defective ceiling bulb blinks on and off at long intervals. In one of the long dark intervals he resorts to wordless action. He takes her in his arms and kisses the top of her head (she's small). In the dark he can imagine her gray hair back to original color.

She's absolutely passive in his embrace, doesn't return anything, doesn't even pull or push away, as though, with her fabulous patience in the face of adversity, she's waiting for this too to end. It's like holding a corpse, Seymour thinks, a terrible thought. The light blinks back on for another interval. He releases her. Her sad eyes scan the heap of books as though nothing's happened. But something had happened and she should have at least acknowledged it. He returns to words.

"Wouldn't it be nice, Helen, if we fell in love?"

"It doesn't happen like that, Seymour. I'm no expert on the subject but I don't think it's something you can calculate."

"We could try, couldn't we? I'm really trying. You could too, it seems to me. At least make a little effort. Already I like you," he says, sincere about it. "Like you an awful lot," he adds with exaggeration. He hopes she'll take it for understatement.

She takes it for exaggeration. "I like you too, Seymour. Look, isn't that a map of Paris over there?"

"What we need is a map of this place, to get out of it," he says bitterly, thinking of his French sweetheart, passionately responsive in his arms back then, and available in that circular year outside if he can only break free of these corridors.

Max suffers from periodic fits of despair, like all of them, except that his are severer and maybe even more justified. Rigid for hours he stares sightlessly at a wall with the discouraging graffiti. Then he sobs and occasionally howls. "Helen! Helen!" the others cry if she isn't there, and the thin dependable girl comes and soothes him as she does the others when it's their turn to sob (almost never howl, though).

Why does he howl? Sometimes Max believes what the others say about time out there, that it's the time of their twenty-fifth year, time marking time for all time, going round and round, the same things happening over and over. Sometimes he isn't sure. How can he tell with what he sees through the window: a dead city where nothing at all happens outside of the trees going from bare to green and back to bare? How can you tell it's the same bareness and the same green? Sometimes he thinks the others see the same dead scene he sees and to torment him invent a live city with crowds and lovers.

It's easier, though, for him to believe what they say about time on this side of the window, their intimate biological time: that it stands still, that they don't age here. As the burned-out bulbs accumulate and Max's image, bleak but unchanged, stares back at him in the mirror year after year, he has to believe he's still twenty-five and will be twenty-five for as long as he's stuck here.

But if you believe them, believe that time outside, like time inside, has been set back to their twenty-fifth year then the dead city he sees has to be dated 1975. That means that all other cities, real live cities, have to be dated 1975 too. Including Las Vegas, the only real live city that matters to Max. Which means...

It's at this point, grappling with the terrible logic of that version of time, that Max sometimes starts howling.

Once Seymour is there when it happens. He searches for Helen but she's wandering in a distant corridor. So he has to try to calm Max down himself and ask him what's the matter.

The answer he gets is fragmented by sobs. Finally Seymour pieces it together. If the others have the prospect of being reunited with a person they'd loved at the age of twenty-five here in Paris, Max's only possible return is to Las Vegas. But Bess hadn't lived in Las Vegas in 1975 when he was twenty-five. He didn't remember in what city she'd lived then. When he'd met her, and two months later married her, he'd been thirty-six and she'd been twenty-two.

That means (and he howls again)... means... means... that even if he escapes tomorrow and finds her, what good would it do, what good, he aged twenty-five and she eleven?

Hearing him blubber that out, Seymour feels very sorry for Max but has to stifle laughter at the imagined spectacle of that grotesque and possibly pedophilic encounter.

Much later, Seymour will bitterly remember his cruel reaction to Max's grief.

Chapter 19

Gentille

During the first spring and summer of outside time, some of the functionaries drop in on them quite often. Henri, the little middle-aged man in the filthy beret, sidles up to Seymour and Louis (but not too close) and slyly formulates questions about women they'd known, biblically, back then out there. Louis glares and marches away. Seymour tells a little. The bilingual perfumed young functionary is an even more frequent visitor. He mainly gazes at Louis and begs them to describe Paris streets and squares. Sometimes the lower echelon female functionaries spy on them from the corner of the corridor. When the guests say hello to them they giggle hysterically and disappear like a cloud of twittering sparrows.

The visitors stop coming when Turnkey posts a notice on the walls of the corridors leading to their rooms. It enjoins those whose duties are not directly involved with the guests to avoid all contact with them on pain of ("sous peine de") ZTV3. The guests don't know what ZTV3 is but it sounds very painful. They imagine that the stern-faced iron-bunned woman functionary administrates it, thoroughly and with great satisfaction. The notice also informs the guests that, if approached, failure on their part to break off illicit contact with functionaries will be sanctioned by a loss of thirty (30) points.

The one functionary they continue seeing regularly is the young scared girl who does their rooms inefficiently at long intervals and brings them their atrocious food. She's a little different from the other functionaries, her face less inhumanely frozen. There's no color to it but it's not inorganic, not chalk or zinc or lead or gunmetal. It's closer to weak or recent life. There's less rigidity to her features, as though a face of flesh were struggling against a stiffening translucent mask. The features of most of the functionaries seem frozen in one predominating caricatural mask-like expression. For Henri, the little man on the ladder, it's libidinous cunning; for the middle-echelon female functionary, pitiless severity; for the perfumed young man, tragic petulance; for Sub-Prefect Marchini, the exaggerated imperiousness of a would-be or a deposed emperor. Prefect d'Aubier de Hautecloque, though, seems to bear a perfectly inscrutable death mask.

There's nothing inscrutable about this girl's dominant expression, which is fear. When she encounters Seymour in a corridor, she bites her pale lip, maintains exaggerated distance from him and looks about fearfully before she asks, in a whisper, about the condition of his leg. She keeps on asking long after the gray scabs have crumbled off. It's her only subject of conver-sation. He doesn't know what to say to her, except to assure her that his leg is all right. Small talk is difficult here. The days are eventless and the weather outside, theoretically a rich subject for exchange, doesn't exist for her.

With the posting of the ZTV3 threat even small talk becomes superfluous. For a long while the cleaning girl visibly concentrates on saying nothing to him or to the others.

"What's your name?" Seymour asks one day, just to say something. He's standing in the doorway. She's scrubbing the floor out in the corridor. The question startles her. She glances over her thin shoulder at the corridor behind her and whispers between stiff pale lips to her scrubbing brush: "I'm not supposed to talk to you. Stupid."

With that fearful expression and voice of hers, Seymour can hardly believe his ears. She isn't at all the kind of person (if you can call her a person) who insults. She's the kind of quasi-person who's insulted. That's confirmed when Seymour asks her why she called him stupid. She looks up and stammers:

"Oh sir, not you, never never you. How... how could I dare? Me, of course. I'm Stupid. You asked my name. That's my name here. Stupid. I don't remember my real name back then. Maybe it was Stupid back then too."

Grief tries to break through her mask. Two solitary tears appear in the corner of her eyes. They haven't the vigor to roll down her cheeks. He guesses that back then it would have been a tempest of tears. Here, in this place of diminished things, it's all grief can manage.

To calm her down, Seymour says, "You're not stupid at all," even though he thinks that she is, a little, more than a little. "I can't call you that. You're the first nice person I've met here. I'll call you "Nice" (Gentille), okay?"

Now the tears do roll down her cheeks and to make her stop he tells her that his name is Seymour.

"Saymore?"

"Not Saymore, 'Seymour'. In English, 'Seymour' sounds like 'see more.' Most of the time I didn't see anything at all."

"Oh, English. Then you are English. And I who stupidly thought that you were all Americans and spoke American."

He has to explain that they speak the same language, more or less, in England and America. She is a little stupide. But also gentille in a ghost-like bloodless way.

So each time he sees her he says, " _Bonjour, Gentille_ ," and so do the others, except for Max who calls her "Dummy." Of course Gentille doesn't dare call any of them by their first name. It's always " _Monsieur_ " and " _Madame_." But Seymour is always a whispered " _Monsieur Saymore_."

Despite the peril of mysterious ZTV3, she finally overcomes her fear of punishment and talks to Seymour whenever their paths cross. He learns things about the functionaries. They nearly all have nicknames. The fat one with the thick glasses is called "Hedgehog" ("Hérisson"). The severe middle-echelon female functionary with the gray bun is called "Nasty" ("Méchante"). "And O she is, Monsieur Saymore, she is." Seymour doesn't need to be convinced. The Five already have a name for her: "Sadist," which they've shortened to "Sadie."

Gentille goes on. The effeminate young man who wants to be called Philippe is called Pédale. "I don't know why, Monsieur Saymore, but he doesn't like the name so I call him "Philippe." Maybe I'll ask him to call me "Gentille" now instead of "Stupide"." She tells him that the Sub-Prefect is "Little Napoleon."

How about the Prefect? Seymour wants to know. Gentille looks scared. "Oh no, no, Monsieur Saymore, no one would dare call Monsieur le Préfet anything but Monsieur le Préfet."

As for the Arrivals, they're referred to by numbers. Madame Williams is Number One. Madame Ricchi is Number Two. Monsieur Forster is Number Three. Monsieur Pilsudski is Zero. He, Saymore, is Number Four. "But I don't like calling people by numbers. I would never call you Number Four, Monsieur Saymore."

Seymour is surprised to learn that love exists here (but why shouldn't it, he thinks bitterly, if this is, as he believes more and more, a place of torture). Gentille tells him that Sadie ("Nasty") is in love with the Prefect but that she also hates him. Pédale – Philippe – is in love "with... with... someone you know." She breaks off. Hedgehog, she resumes, is in love with one of the lower-echelon women. And so it goes: so-and-so in love with so-and-so who loves so-and-so who loves... She goes on and on with her recital of one-way love. Love is never returned, Seymour learns.

"How about you?" he asks indiscreetly.

"Nobody would love me," she says. "If somebody did, of course I would love him in return. How cruel not to."

He's tempted to ask her if she's in love with someone. Instead, he asks who the Prefect is in love with.

She stares at him with widening eyes. "It's not love, it's... it's..." She breaks off and runs away.

One day Seymour asks Gentille to look out of the window and describe what she sees. "Fog, sir," she says without looking. Again Seymour asks her to look. She says that looking out of the window is forbidden. She looks anyhow and says that she sees fog, doesn't he too? Seymour describes what he sees: the couples at the sidewalk café tables, the barges, the enlaced lovers along the tree-shaded cobblestoned quays. Can't she see that? He longs for shared vision. Only Helen can see his year, which is hers too. But she seldom bothers looking.

"No. There's nothing for us out there except fog. You're lucky. You'll soon be out there. I hope you will. If I had permission to pray I'd pray for you to be out there. We can't, ever."

"Why can't you?"

"Can't. Can't."

"Why not, Gentille?"

"Nasty says praying is 'short-cir-circuiting the hi-hi-er-arch-al chain of command.' I don't know what that means. She says it all the time. I don't know what it means."

"I meant why can't you go outside?"

"Can't. Can't."

"Tell me why not, Gentille."

"They say the fog would torture us something terrible if we tried to go out there. So that's the way it is: can't, can't."

Gentille's subjects of conversation are limited and circular. She repeats them like an old record with eroded grooves. Every time they meet she catalogues her endless chores: scrubbing the corridor floors, cleaning the toilets, doing guest rooms, washing mountains of dishes, dusting Turnkey's (Skull's) Key Rooms. There are millions of keys hanging there, she says, and she has to dust them all. At the time, Seymour doesn't realize the importance of that last piece of information, even though he hears it a hundred times. Also hears a hundred times the functionaries' nicknames, their unrequited love, the nastiness of Nasty, the ban on prayer. Gentille says the same things day after day as though her memories were sand castles built at low tide and washed away hours later by high-tide.

One of the things she says over and over is this: "A mistake was made with me I think. I shouldn't be here. I don't know where I should be. Some days I think I see real things out there. When I'm alone I stand before the window even though that's forbidden and I think it's not all fog. Sometimes the fog thins and I think I see dunes and the sea with a lighthouse and even sails on the horizon. I think it's home. I see those things in dreams too. Most of the time I don't remember the dreams but sometimes I remember dreaming that."

She gets into the habit of standing before the window alongside him, careful to maintain distance though. He goes on wanting her to see what he sees, as though her vision of that blankness they call 'fog' negated the golden domes and the sidewalk cafés and the river with its barges and quay-side lovers. Try, he says. Once, finally, she presses her forehead against the pane and after a while says: "Yes, I think I do see something. Alongside you I see something. That's a great gift and I thank you for it. Yes, yes, I see more too, like you."

But when he asks her to describe what she sees, for conformation of what he himself sees, she speaks again of the sea, here in Paris, hundreds of kilometers inland. He's irritated at her for having fragilized his vision of the nearby place he longs to reach and he almost calls her 'Stupide.'

She goes on. "When you go out there and one day you visit the seaside remember me and try to find my village. My village is by the sea. There's a saint in the name of my village, I can't remember which one. If I could I'd pray to him or her. But prayer is forbidden here because of the hi-hi-er-arch-al chain of command. There are dunes and breakers and a lighthouse. That's all I remember. I often dream about it."

It's pathetic the first few times he hears it. He now understands her rite with the wine-stained map of France tacked up in the men's room. Each time she comes to clean up she closes the door. She wedges a chair under the knob. She stands on tiptoe in front of the map and beginning at the Belgian border starts scrutinizing the long Channel and Atlantic coastline. Her nose practically touches the paper. She lingers on Brittany, exploring the peninsula's coastal complications. Then her body follows the plunge of the coastline down to the Pyrenees. As she goes past Lorient, Nantes, La Rochelle, Bordeaux and finally reaches Biarritz and the Spanish border, her knees slowly flex. It's like a slow motion preliminary to forbidden prayer.

Seymour's relation with Gentille (all that moldy chocolate) provides the other men with comic relief, badly needed here. They often address him as "Monsieur Saymore." Louis refers to the girl as "your sweetie-pie." He says over and over: "She's carryin' a torch for you." Max's remarks are much more offensive. "Nice piece of ass you got there" or "Get into her yet?" Each time he sees Seymour and Gentille together he chortles ambiguously: "Jesus, what a pair!" Does he mean the ex New York intellectual and the dumb zombie girl or is he referring jeeringly to Gentille's barely existent breasts?

Once, she says: "Monsieur Saymore, when you are transferred (she's really gentille, she never says "if" but always "when") could you take me with you, out there? They all say that the fog is poison and torture for us but there's no fog for you so I would be safe by your side. And, listen, Monsieur Saymore, if they ever try to exit you instead of transferring you, and they send the Black Men after you, I won't let that happen, ever, ever let that happen, oh no. I'll hide you in another room nobody knows about with a nice window. I'll bring you food and try to find books for you and keep you company, sometimes, for a short time, if you permit me to do so."

Seymour thanks her and to make her happy (it costs him nothing) says that yes of course he'll take her with him if he's transferred. He says "if," not "when."

Gentille helps Seymour with his great artistic project.

Seymour is finally tempted by creative expression. It's a nobler activity, he judges, than stickball and poker and forging US treasury notes. He longs to reproduce the street where his sweetheart had lived (lives, still lives, he corrects himself). He wants to account for all of the details he remembers from the black-and-white enlargements. The oysters and heaps of mussels and the mackerel in the fish store. The patterns of the old decorative dishes in the antique shop window. The horse head effigy above the horsemeat butcher's. The carafe with the legend Ricard on an outdoor café table. Hundreds of other tiny things. Thousands, even.

And of course the major thing: the heavy door of her building that had once swung open for him.

His street has to be life-size to work all that detail into his drawing, he tells himself. Maybe half-consciously he wants a life-size street so that one day he'll be able to pass into it. When the others, alarmed at his long absence, find the room, he'll no longer be in it but on the other side of that massive door next to the butcher's horse head, golden now, finally reunited with his sweetheart by the power of art and madness.

A corridor wall would be ideal, he thinks. But a corridor is dangerously public. How many points would Turnkey dock him for large-scale deterioration of State property? Seymour reduces his ambition and his scale. He hunts for a discreet room with a bare wall. Hunts and hunts. The best he can come up with is a dingy bit of free wall in Room 302. How can he get all those remembered details onto a measly four-foot stretch of plaster?

He sets to work sullenly on his shrunken inauthentic street. One day Gentille sees it and asks if he would please draw the sea for her. Seymour has trouble concealing his irritation. He hasn't got enough room for a short 6th arrondissement Paris street, he says. How can he possibly squeeze in the Atlantic Ocean or even the smaller Mediterranean?

That evening, under the plate of hash, he finds a sheet of paper with a message in childish scrawl full of spelling mistakes.

Monsieur Cémaur,

If you please distroy this paper but dont do that untill you have red this paper its about your street. I know a better room for your street then Room 302 Skull never goes their and their are nice big empty walls. Dont worry Monsieur Cémaur about the dust in the coridor I will clean your footprints their so nobbody will know ecept you and me.

Jentille

PS I can sign my name because Skull and Meanie dont know that Jentille is my real name now. I'm so glad you dont call me "Stupid."

PS 2 May be you could draw the Sea too? Theirs plenty of room for the street and the Sea on the walls.

PS 3 I almost forgot! Please turn this paper over!

Seymour finds a crude map full of arrows going up and down staircases, twisting about corners to a part of the Prefecture where none of them had ever been. Room 1265 is circled heavily. He rummages in Louis' hoard of salvaged items and comes up with a small stepladder, sandpaper, rags, a knife and an assortment of pencils. He sets out.

The corridor floor is very dusty, as she'd said. He sees tiny footprints, almost certainly hers, going to and away from Room 1265. Sure enough, it's practically empty. The walls are filthy and covered with penciled graffiti but free of shelves.

He sands the grimy surface down to clean white. He reduces the penciled graffiti to dust, one of them the enigmatic Keep up the Work on Independence Day! A deeply scratched inscription is still faintly legible, though: OUT IS A DOUBLE-CROSS. He tries to ignore that bitter warning as he begins blocking out the corner antique shop, the fish store, the wine-and-coal café, the horsemeat butcher's with an oval for the golden horse head, (golden in the abstract knowledge he has of it, but a shade of gray in his mind's image and on his drawing). And of course Marie-Claude's building with the massive door. The next day he starts in on the corner antique shop. He knows it will take a whole season just for the remembered contents of the window.

The first time Gentille sneaks a visit to Room 1265 he's working on a detail of a decorative dish, the seventh of the thirty-odd roses surrounding a peasant girl. "You remember all that, Monsieur Saymore?" she says. "All those roses?" "Every petal," says Seymour.

One day Gentille timidly asks Seymour to draw the sea, the Atlantic, but not all of it, just a village with dunes and a lighthouse. She asks him each time she comes. It's not persistence but memory failure.

Finally, he does a fast job. He's not good at seascapes. A couple of puffy clouds and Vs for seagulls define the sky. Below, wriggly lines for waves define the sea. He sticks a lighthouse on a rock. His dunes look more like muffins than dunes.

"Something's not right," she says. "I don't know what."

Seymour thinks he knows what's troubling her. It's the thing that troubles him with his street.

"The sky should be blue, not gray."

"Blue?"

"Of course the sky can be gray but it's better blue. And the sea should be green. It can be gray too but it's nicer green."

"Green?"

He gives it up. She's forgotten what color is, as though she'd been born blind to it. How long has she been here?

He wonders if one day, still here, he too won't look blank at the words 'blue' and 'green.'

Chapter 20

The Sunny Square

Margaret can't bear solitude in the Living Quarters while the others explore distant rooms for long hours. So she ends by returning to the corridors.

For three outside seasons nothing happens.

Then one day she emerges into a long corridor that ends with the Prefect standing to one side of a door wide open on a sunny square. Trees are in full green leaf. There are children with yellow and red balloons. Jean Hussier is sitting on one of the benches. He's holding a small gift package. She knows what's in it. She draws closer, fearfully. The Prefect's attitude is one of welcome, as usual. His long white hand points to the sunny square invitingly. But to get there she has to pass him.

At the last moment, with the smell of rotting flowers and that death-mask of his, fear gets the better of longing and she turns her back on the Prefect and so on Jean with his ring and on the twinkling green trees and runs back into the years of the dark maze, back to the room and her bed where she wakes up and thinks it was a dream. But not certain.

This time she can't shun the corridors as she'd once done. She can't resist the longing to see that sunny square again, no fracture-proof glass between it and her, as much for the children with their bright balloons as for Jean Hussier and the package with the engagement or wedding ring.

One night Helen comes out of the WC. Margaret walks stiffly past her with no greeting or even recognition. Her face is blank, her eyes open but unseeing. Her arms are outstretched in the conventional ambiguous attitude of the sleepwalker, a defensive or yearning outstretch, to repel or to embrace. Helen thinks of all those dangerous staircases and follows her.

After a while Margaret halts before a door, closed of course, and murmurs something over and over. Helen approaches and understands that she's begging someone to let her dance for him. She's acting out a dream. There are just the two of them, Helen and Margaret, in the corridor.

Careful not to awaken her, Helen guides her back to their room and her (Margaret's) bed.

In the morning Helen tells her about it and insists on the danger. Margaret knows about the danger but it's not the danger Helen means, a fall down a staircase. It's another danger involving a much greater fall. She doesn't tell Helen about those meetings, doesn't tell the others either, doesn't try to analyze the reasons why she keeps it secret.

Helen devises means to combat her blind wandering in the corridors. Normally they leave their door wide open because of Margaret's acute claustrophobia. Now Helen locks it. Margaret can't sleep. She suffocates. So they leave the door wide open again but with Helen's cot barring the passage. It's not Margaret's idea.

It works for a while. Most of the time Margaret bangs her shin against the iron framework of the cot, wakes up and, groaning, returns to her own cot. Sometimes she tumbles down on Helen, wakes up and after a few seconds gets up and returns to her own cot.

Once she tumbles and, maybe not awake, stays with Helen. Helen wakes up, she doesn't know how much later, passionately kissing Margaret and being kissed, less passionately but they're so unequal in beauty, Helen knows.

A while later Margaret gets up and whispers: "We mustn't ever do that again. We're being tested here."

"All right," Helen says. She knows that desire, like hope, is an unfailing source of suffering. She pulls her cot back to its original place, leaving the way out into the corridor free, which is probably what, unconsciously, Margaret wanted all along and not because of the danger of tumbling into that kind of minor temptation. She doesn't really believe that a little skin-deep pleasure with another woman, particularly if she's plain like Helen, counts as a sin. Isn't it almost an act of loving charity?

So the way is free again and the door wide open on a sunny square happens over and over, each time her longing for it stronger. But the fear is stronger too.

The last of those encounters the temptation and the fear are so strong that she cries out: "No, I'll never dance for you."

The next day the terrible thing happens to her.

It happens to all of them (poor Louis) but she's sure it's collective punishment because she'd said no for all time to Prefect d'Aubier de Hautecloque.

Chapter 21

Sandstone Clobbering

Three more seasons have rolled round since Seymour Stein started sketching his sweetheart's street. The repetitious trees are green again outside. He's finished the antique shop and, finally, the fish store. Tedious, tedious, those thousands of scales on all those mackerel. He could have chosen to portray scaleless eels. But mackerel was what he remembered and he wanted to be faithful to memory.

That day (a day none of the Five will be able to forget), Seymour finishes the horsemeat butcher's golden horse head. It's not golden in his drawing of course and it looks more like a camel than a horse, but he's done his best. He takes a deep breath and begins sketching the massive door of the building where Marie-Claude lives.

He suddenly feels dizzy and weak. All work and no play.

Pocketing his pencils, he murmurs: "Tomorrow, my darling." He can almost believe she's standing behind that door and can hear him. He sets out for the distant Living Quarters.

He takes a long time getting there. Repeatedly he has to sit down in the middle of a corridor and catch his breath. He feels puffy. He stretches the neck of his turtleneck sweater and lets out his belt. The dizziness and weakness worsen. Far doors are a distorted blur.

"I'm coming down with something," he pants to himself over and over.

It's the first time any of them have been ill in all these quasi-years, he reflects. The place is terrible for mental health but in purely physical terms it's fairly salubrious, despite the lack of fresh air, what with the ban on tobacco and alcohol and absolutely no temptation to overeat. So there are microbes here after all. No cats or dogs or even spiders or roaches but at least other living creatures to keep them company. Invisible though. Too bad. Seymour imagines the microbes dog-size and affectionate, wagging their tails.

I'm delirious now, he mutters. Microbes have no tails. Anyhow, who wants them, billions of them, dog-size?

Approaching the Living Quarters he hears sobs.

The four of them are in the Common Room. Seymour sees them in a worsened blur. Standing unsteadily before one of the full-length tarnished mirrors a distorted Margaret is staring at her image and sobbing. A distorted Louis is staring in despair into another full-length tarnished mirror. Helen, distorted too, is seated at the table staring down at her hands.

Seymour thinks: what's the matter with my eyes? Why do they look different? He tries to squint them into familiarity. A different Max is tossing his Stetson in the air and trying to catch it on his fist. Buttons on his deerskin vest have burst over his strange sagging gut. His face is different too but joyous.

What's happened now? Seymour asks.

They look at him hard and long. Louis tells him to look at himself in a mirror.

Seymour looks at himself – can that be myself? – hard and long.

Not myself, not possibly myself, he argues mentally with the mirror just as the others had with their mirror.

After a while they turn their backs on the veracious mirrors. They march in a daze to the table. They sit down heavily. It's as though a ten-ton block of granite has fallen on their heads. A sandstone block, rather. Time here, the mirrors had just taught them, isn't the familiar grain-by-grain trickle of an open-ended hourglass, each grain of sand doing its work of attrition on you imperceptibly. Time here waits patiently in temporary suspension. The billions of grains of sand patiently agglomerate and then the sudden sandstone block clobbers you and you're older, much older, in seconds.

Silent, they avoid looking at each other's faces, mirrors too. At the far end of the room Max whirls his Stetson up at the ceiling. He catches it triumphantly on his fist. His breath rasps asthmatically.

How many years, do you think? one of them finally asks.

They'd all been on the verge of asking that question. They aren't sure who actually does ask it. They all participate in what follows but it's out of collective distress. They aren't sure who speaks between the long pauses.

Twenty-five years?

Maybe twenty?

Not twenty-five years. Not even twenty. Developed a wart on my neck when I was forty-four. Haven't got it yet.

You'll get it all right. And lose things too.

Like hair. Mine's thinner. Don't look.

Lose our minds.

Lose everything.

Already have lost everything.

So say fifteen years.

That makes us forty then.

We look older than that.

Natural after what we've been through. I'd say forty.

Roughly forty.

On the bad side of forty though.

Could be worse.

Will be worse, that's for sure.

"But it'll get better before it gets worse. That's for sure too."

Helen says that, still staring down at her hands. She usually consoles. Is what she said a consolation? Her hands have aged too of course.

Inconsolable, they sit there in silence.

Max tosses his Stetson the wrong way. It sails onto the table.

Louis opens his eyes. He stares at the hat.

"Pilsudski, you quit that foolishness with your hat and wipe that grin off your fat face. You got no more call to grin than the rest of us. Go and have a look at yourself the way you are now."

He already has. Max already has looked at himself in a mirror. He goes on grinning like an imbecile. All that wonderful flab and sag and grizzle. He likes the way he is now. Later they learn why. He explains it over and over.

Explains that, before, he'd been twenty-five and Bess eleven. Way things stand now, with him forty, Bess is twenty-six. All he'll have to do is find her once he breaks out of this place.

The others realize that Max is in the phase where he doesn't believe that time out there is circular. What he sees outside is a dead empty city where nothing occurs and so nothing can reoccur. He assumes that time out there is linear like the time he'd known back then. So Bess, synchronized with him, has moved forward in time too, out of tabooed childhood into attainable nubility.

Sometimes, exasperated by his happiness, the others are tempted to remind him that, like a dog chasing its tail, outside time goes round and round in a twelve-month cycle for their beloved and so for his too. Bess is still a distant eleven years old with him forty now, even further from her. But they don't tell him that. His new moronic grin is better than his former howls.

Like everything that happens here, that savage aging ("savaging" they call it) was programmed, Helen thinks. Had to be programmed because the next day indifferent functionaries come equipped to measure their advance toward decrepitude. Philippe, the fussily dressed young functionary (still young, after all this time), stares briefly at Louis with a grief-stricken expression and then avoids looking at him. New ID photos are snapped. Protected from contact by long rubber gloves, one of the functionaries measures them with a tape. Another functionary tacks an alphabet-soup chart to the wall. The Arrivals peer at it and chant out the diminishing letters.

A few days later Seymour is fitted with new cruelly corrective lenses. He can see the inroads of age on their faces and on his own even more clearly now. Helen is issued reading glasses. She says yes, they must be forty. She'd needed reading-glasses "back then" at that time of life. So now she has reading glasses here. "But nothing to read." It's still her major regret outside of having been pulled out of void in the first place.

A week after the tape measurements, they're issued better-fitting clothes except for Margaret who doesn't need any. Her stunning figure defies those sudden years. She's the one who takes things the hardest but she has the least cause to, the others think enviously. But Margaret has to cope with guilt as well as grief at incipient wrinkles. She's certain that she's brought this savage aging upon the others by saying no to Prefect d'Aubier de Hautecloque. It's not nearly as bad as her wrinkles, but bad enough.

For a long time they avoid the Common Room and its sarcastic mirrors and the window on the city with an unaged sweetheart in it who might not even recognize them now if, by miracle, they were ever transferred out there. Seymour dreams about it repeatedly. In the long-ago street the heavy door buzzes ajar. He spirals up to the somber fourth-floor door. At his knock it opens on Marie-Claude. Radiant in her twenty-third year she stares blankly and inquires "Monsieur?" to the middle-aged stranger he's become to her. He can't know that the others have parallel dreams.

After the initial prostration, during which they remain in bed for what must be three days, eyes shut and wordless except to refuse food, they feel crushing humiliation. They try to avoid each other. But it's not easy, crammed together as they are. When they're confronted with one another, what can they say to that faintly familiar stranger? They'd spent their whole life together (this poor simulacrum of a life) so they can't even resort to those pathetic minimizing ploys of old acquaintances meeting, secretly aghast, for the first time in fifteen years: "You're looking just great!" or "Haven't aged a day!" Most of the time they look away and pass each other without saying anything.

Sometimes, though, trying to salvage scraps of his former identity, Margaret steals glances at the stranger they go on calling Louis. Finally, she finds he's not at all bad the new way he is. But Louis hardly looks at her at all. She'd been, bewilderingly, two different (if related) girls before. Now there's a third woman in their place, who answers to their name but that's practically the only resemblance. At first he's indifferent to this vastly different woman. That indifference may be due more to a weakening of desire on Louis' part than to a loss of beauty on Margaret's. Helen tells her over and over that she's never been so beautiful. But Margaret weeps endlessly.

Seymour agrees with Helen. Margaret possesses a less blatant, a finer menaced kind of beauty now. Maybe with his own additional years, his taste has evolved and he now prefers maturing women. But his appreciation of her beauty is largely cerebral. Seymour too experiences a weakening of desire. It's the same with Max. He doesn't seem to notice Margaret anymore. When you're forty how can you be twenty-five?

Margaret has a tragic sense of this weakening of desire in her presence.

One night, perhaps not in a dream, Margaret sees the Prefect at the end of a corridor marching stiffly toward her. She runs away, out of fear as before, but now too out of shame at her new aging face. Later, she turns a corner and finds herself face to face with him and the smell of rotting flowers. His hollow voice formulates the familiar request as he tugs off the glove from his long white hand.

Margaret runs away again. Fear is still involved in it but now, also, sinful joy at the survival of desire in her presence.

Helen wonders if it isn't also programmed that just at this critical stage, never further from transfer to Paris – not even sure that they want it on these new terms – they witness legitimate Arrivals, indisputably Good Americans, rapidly recycled out there. Louis is the first to see it one day as he passes by the Reception Room where they too had been materialized so long ago.

The great bureaucratic room has been summarily prepared. A banner with the words BIENVENUE A PARIS is clumsily stretched between two pillars. The rest of the Welcome to Paris consists of a few mournful functionaries wearing conic New Year's Eve caps and mechanically tossing handfuls of gray confetti on the batch of Good Americans, five of them, standing before a table with bottles of alcohol-free mousseux and stale-looking cookies. Louis can't know this but the five must have sojourned in the Paris of the early seventies. They're already attired for the return to it.

Louis is shocked at the extent of bare thigh the two girls display below their gray miniskirts. From a corner, ragged Sub-Prefect Antoine Marchini stares at resplendent Prefect D'Aubier de Hautecloque who, from another corner, is staring at those bare thighs. Two of the Good Americans, a man in a polo shirt and a shorthaired girl, are gazing at one another with parted lips. Can love at first sight exist here? They are led away. Louis runs back to the Common Room to alert the others.

Minutes later, four of the poorly chosen Five press their faces against the cold windowpanes. Of course none of them should be able to see the indisputably Good Americans recycled. Their Paris isn't the Paris of 1970. But for a few seconds they're granted that vision. They see the well-chosen Five emerge from the other Prefecture and flame into color, the young man's gray polo-shirt into sunny yellow, his gray-jeans into blue-jeans, the short-haired girl's mini-skirt from ash-gray into fiery red, a miraculous reversion of process, ashes back to flame.

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."

Maybe Helen's sudden age has changed her. This open skepticism is something new. Seymour tries to combat it.

"We didn't explore systematically is the problem. We'll have to be systematic this time, go further, explore more rooms. And if we don't find their tunnel we'll dig one ourselves."

"Dig where? In what direction?"

She shouldn't be doing this, Seymour thinks. It's not good for our morale.

"We'll find the right direction, all right," says Louis.

"If the others found the right direction so will we," says Seymour.

"No problem," says Louis.

Louis and Seymour say that, but secretly they recognize that there is a problem. Even the biggest POW camp had reasonable limits. If the prisoners looked hard enough they were sure to unearth an old tunnel if there was one to unearth. And even if there wasn't and they had to dig their own tunnel they could be sure of the right direction to dig. They could see beyond the barbed wire and aim their tunnel at, say, a wheat field or (best bet) at a stand of pines. It isn't that way in this place of blind and perhaps infinite walls.

Margaret, easy to influence one way or the other, is visibly affected by Helen's skepticism. "That tunnel of theirs, isn't it like trying to find a needle in a haystack?" she says faintly. Her face isn't radiant any more.

Seymour too is affected by Helen's skepticism. He tries to reassure Margaret but thinks that her comparison, the needle-in-a-haystack business, is wildly optimistic. More like trying to find a particular grain of sand in a beach. No, worse, in all the beaches of the world.

"The dirt, tell 'em about the dirt," Louis whispers to Seymour. 'Talker' and 'New Yorker' rhyme. Louis knows that Seymour the New Yorker is a better talker than he is.

Dirt. Seymour remembers the point that Louis had made that night. He feels a tiny bit better about it now. Not as easy as finding a needle in a haystack but, still, not as bad as a grain of sand in all the beaches of the world. Say a particular grain of sand in one of those beaches.

Finding a tunnel isn't as impossible as it seems, Seymour explains, commanding his features and voice into optimism. The great problem for the digger of an illicit tunnel is the byproduct of digging. Any kind of tunnel, even a small hands-and-knees job, produces a fantastic amount of dirt. Dirt that has to be disposed of in such a way that the jailers won't notice it. So maybe a whole corridor of rooms are filled with dirt, more or less concealed under files and books. Once they find dirt in a room then the room with the tunnel won't be far away.

In other words, he says, it's not a needle they'll be looking for in a haystack but a fair-sized box of needles.

Seymour doesn't add the thought that has just occurred to him.

Even if a haystack and a fair-sized box of needles in the haystack, how do you go about finding the haystack?

Chapter 23

Toward The Depths

Find a tunnel.

If you can't find a tunnel dig one.

To find or to dig a tunnel, though, you have to operate below ground level.

A tunnel, dug or to be dug, is a subterranean thing by definition.

But how do you get down to ground level in this place? From the size of the crowds and trees they view from the Common Room window they estimate (wrongly, it turns out) that they're on the tenth floor of their building-universe. In the course of the ups and downs of their long wanderings had the staircases ever led them ten flights down? They can't tell for sure.

True, they'd spent a good part of their most recent lifetime exploring the labyrinth. But with the twistings and turnings of all those corridors, some with ceilings as lofty as a basilica's and some with ceilings as low as a coffin-lid, they still can't mentally position the explored part of their prison vertically. It seems to them, however, that the staircases rose more than they fell. In all likelihood, the deepest the Five had got, with one exception, was far above the ground floor.

The exception is Max. The others dimly recall how, long ago when they were still young, Max had come across a "deep deep" forbidden area in ruins with a big lopsided staircase twisting down and down, he said, into darkness. Surely the darkness of the foundations. They nag and harass Max. But he can't remember where that staircase was.

Still, it's encouraging to think that if Max had stumbled across a way down, they might too, even though that darkness he spoke about was bound to pose a problem. If down below turns out to be a place of darkness, they'd grope about in those subterranean corridors like blind men with nothing to guide them unless their predecessors had carved their symbols in deep Braille. Louis imagines manufacturing primitive candles by molding greasy hash about lengths of string. But coping with darkness is a premature worry.

The Five set out early in the morning with salvaged scraps of yesterday's meals and a pencil or a nail to scratch their distinctive symbols on new walls. They fan out in all directions and explore new but identical-looking corridors, very rapidly this time. Rooms don't hold them up now. They're not interested in rooms anymore. Rooms at this useless level can contain only dust, not dirt. Jogging past thousands of doors, they cover lots of ground.

Each time, though, time after time, they return late at night, exhausted and mute, having covered ever more ground but never the longed-for ground of the ground floor.

Every seventh day they try to recover, slouched silent in their armchairs before the window that frames their version of Paris.

One day, though, Seymour makes a curious discovery. The dust-shrouded paper-littered room had clearly served as a living space. A pair of wooden crutches lean in a corner next to a rusty cot. Seymour makes out, faint beneath the dust, familiar words pencil-printed on one of the walls: OUT IS A DOUBLE-CROSS!!

Seymour advances ankle-deep through scribbled sheets of paper to a table with a yellowed stack. The title sheet bears in heavy big print: OPUS I, POSTHUMOUS.

The hand is the same as the wall words. Realizing that this is the abandoned dwelling of the author of the cryptic words that had admonished them for decades of walls, Seymour scrabbles through the hundreds of sheets beneath the title page. They are blank. He picks up one of the scribbled sheets from the floor and begins reading:

At that, and perhaps too late, they understand what they should have grasped from the moment of their materialization among these zombies with their prophylactic rubber gloves (unless their delay in comprehension was programmed like everything else here):

Seymour breaks off reading on hearing the familiar clump-jangle, clump-jangle in the corridors. He's frightened at being caught in what is probably an out-of-bounds area and at post-curfew time. He drops the sheet and flees, meaning to return to the room in the hope of useful information. But, stupidly, he'd forgotten to mark the corners. He'll never be able to find the room again.

In periods of depression – increasingly frequent as time goes on – they expect their future will be like their past: a blank wall.

They'll continue to wander about in the endless corridors and mark their signs on more corner walls.

They'll go past a million impossible doors.

They'll replace dozens of burned out bulbs.

Outside, their repetitious year will go on wheeling around with its bare trees, green trees, bare trees, green trees.

And above their heads grains of sand will go on dribbling from the open-ended hourglass.

Grains of sand that will slowly agglomerate into another sandstone block to suddenly clobber them into advanced middle age or worse.

But happily they're wrong, so happy about being wrong. The quest for the depths began when the forsythia outside was bright yellow, so March or April. Leaves are falling (so October or November) when Louis discovers in Room 4963 boxes containing flashlights and batteries and spare bulbs.

Helen cryptically comments on the discovery. "There must be a reason."

The day after, strange coincidence, Louis finds an urgent use for his flashlight.

They don't sleep that night. They make Louis tell the story over and over.

Jogging down an unfamiliar corridor, he'd heard a sudden loud clang and multiplied echoes of that clang miles ahead. Then a terrific wind had almost knocked him down. He'd worked his way against that wind and flying grit and papers and discovered that the wind was shrieking out of a doorway with an open metal door, a metal door like all of those metal doors they'd seen so often but always locked, never open, blown open, like this one.

On the other side of the doorway a flimsy catwalk trembled in the uprush of wind coming from a gigantic pit like a mineshaft with a rusty iron pillar in the middle. A rusty iron staircase spiraled about the pillar. As far as the flashlight beam could reach up and down (but he was only interested in down) he could see the catwalks of other floors joining the spiral staircase.

He stepped forward on his catwalk, crouched low against the wind. He gripped the railings of the staircase as he spiraled down and down, leaning against the uprush of grit and papers. At one point the wind stopped. Leaning against sudden nothing, he nearly pitched into the void.

It took him maybe half an hour, passing fifty-odd catwalks, to reach the bottom. By then his flashlight beam had weakened and he'd advanced no more than a mile down a badly dilapidated unpainted concrete corridor with cracked walls. An occasional bulb was lit. He'd examined some of the rooms. They were filled with files and books like the rooms they'd explored up here.

Helen interrupts Louis. She wants to know what kind of books. Novels?

Books? Who cared about books? He hadn't bothered looking at books. It was a tunnel he'd been looking for. He hadn't found one. But he'd searched no more than about fifty rooms.

It looked like there was more rooms than that down there.

Plenty more rooms than that.

Chapter 24

In The Depths

They slowly discover that the part of the Prefecture they'd already explored all those years and which had seemed endless to them was only the tip of their gloomy passage-riddled iceberg.

What had been coastal navigation turns into perilous voyages on dark uncharted seas in search of a passage to a perhaps mythical continent. Their lines of communication are much longer than before. Access is fiendishly difficult with that long and perilous spiral down the well shaft, sometimes in the teeth of a howling gale. It's even worse having to pull themselves back up, utterly exhausted, fifty-odd flights, even when the wind gives them a goosing lift in that direction.

They take salvaged food to last three estimated days in the handy form of big tightly compressed balls of hash that Max calls "elephant balls," seasoned with rotten banana and apple and chunks of the moldy chocolate the girl Seymour used to call Gentille continues smuggling through to him.

They venture down broken stairways into dark regions surely deeper than the telephone-lines, the pneumatique tubes, the sewer, the metro, the catacombs, the limestone-quarries that riddle the foundations of Paris. They learn to stuff their pockets with spare batteries and bulbs. In the maze of unlit corridors failure of light would be tragic. Their questing circle of feeble light aggravates the darkness. They're thankful for the rare oasis of overhead light, survivor bulbs trembling with old age and illuminating a few yards of rubble-strewn passages.

The scrape of their soles on the floor and the thud of their hearts are unbearably amplified by the darkness. Often they call out the names of the others. They have little hope of reply for they've scattered in opposite directions and must be miles apart. They do it for the sake of the echo. They avoid calling out for Helen, though, because of what the echo of her name gives them.

They open tens of thousands of doors and find more old files and administrative volumes. They knock methodically on the walls, hoping for a hollow sound. It never comes. They rummage in search of concealed dirt indicating a nearby tunnel. They find dust. Helen searches for Balzac. She finds more import statistics. She knows them by heart. As on the upper floors, certain of the doors are metal with tamper-proof locks. They often suspect that if there is a tunnel it lies behind one of these inviolable metal doors.

Hunger cramps are their only clock. They sleep, when they're able to sleep, by dropping to the floor of a corridor, a lighted corridor when possible.

Exploration is perilous. The foundations of the building-universe are in a state of advanced and advancing ruin. Sometimes they halt at the sound of a rumble and they realize that a distant (they hope it's distant) floor has collapsed. Once Max is thrown to the ground by the concussion and in the feeble circle of light of his flashlight sees a big crack slowly zigzagging in the wall. It's a mystery – still another one – how the building can go on standing on these crumbling foundations.

The ruins complicate their explorations. They constantly stumble over rubble. Sometimes their weak light outlines chaos ahead, the ceiling and the floor caved in, floors below too. They are forced to a halt at the crumbling brink of a chasm. Their beam can't define a bottom to it. Some ten yards on the other side of the chasm the corridor continues with all those doors that have to be opened in search of dirt and a telltale hollow sound.

Louis equips himself to negotiate the chasms. He hammers a saucepan into a crude helmet to protect himself against falling rubble. He wires a flashlight to his helmet in rough imitation of a miner's headgear. He carries a coil of rope on one shoulder and Max's pickaxe over the other. But the chasms are usually unbridgeable even for Louis. Like the others he has to backtrack for hours past hundreds of already explored rooms. They never succeed in circumnavigating the zones of destruction.

Often sudden fatigue hits them. They're totally drained of energy and collapse into a squat or a sprawl and wonder if they haven't been savaged again, if the sandstone block hasn't clobbered them into another wasted fifteen years. But they have no mirror here to check and they want none.

The third day, they stagger back to their rooms, too exhausted to wash off the mask of filth and blood. Anyhow it conceals the age of their faces. They collapse on their beds and dream that they are still below, blundering and stumbling forward in an endless unlighted corridor.

Before they return to the depths they spend a few hours slouched in their armchairs staring at the goal of all those efforts and observe the garrulous repetition of seasons on the other side of the glass.

Helen and Margaret go into the depths less and less often.

Max gives up on the idea that they'll ever be able to find a tunnel. His palms are itching to dig one as fast as possible, anywhere, any old wall. More of the same. Louis and Seymour make sure he doesn't go down into the depths with a pickaxe or a sledgehammer. They try to reason with him. They remind him of what had happened decades ago when he'd already assaulted any old wall, the place it had landed him in. They try to laugh at the image of Max with his head through the wall and protruding into the toilets. It used to be good for a laugh. But they can't manage even a smile now.

Helen and Margaret stop going into the depths altogether. Exploration is an all-male enterprise now. When the men come back the women always tell them that, with the usual exception, none of the functionaries had appeared. They haven't seen Sadie or Turnkey for years it must be. They don't even mention Advocate. When they think of him at all they're sure he's a myth.

Once, Seymour discovers a wall covered with white fuzz. He takes it for lichen or albino moss. He's elated at encountering life at last, even a primitive form of life. He carefully notes the spot. The next time down, Louis tastes it and says it's saltpeter. That's not organic. That's mineral like the walls it crystallizes on. Seymour dismisses the idea of making gunpowder to blow their way out. You need sulfur and charcoal as well as saltpeter to make gunpowder. Even so, he's careful not to talk to Max about it and give him ideas.

Once, Louis sees a pinpoint of light a mile or so off at the end of a dark corridor. He imagines that somehow it's Paris daylight. He runs toward it. It turns out to be Max with his flashlight who's running toward Louis' flashlight that he'd taken for, somehow, Paris daylight. They pass by, panting, without exchanging a word.

In the faint circle of light begrudged by their flashlight they see that their predecessors have been here and have left their marks with the number of their passages (discouragingly high) on all the corners they themselves encounter. They add their own mark. Corner after corner is covered with Helen's H, Louis' linked circles, Seymour's childish face, Max's doughnut and Margaret's heart, and in them the number of times they've gone past. Conscientiously, they efface the number of their previous passage and inscribe the number of their latest passage, at first single digits.

The leaves outside had been falling when Louis discovered the way down.

The last of them fall.

They open more doors, knock on more walls, all of them solid, and inscribe new digits in their corner signs, double digits now.

The trees in the window are green.

They explore more corridors, negotiate more ruined staircases, knock on more walls.

Snow fills the window like static on a TV screen.

Bastille Day rockets decorate the night sky.

The trees rust.

They open more doors, knock on more walls, all of them solid, and inscribe new digits in their corner signs, triple digits now.

Christmas tinsel fills the shop windows.

Forsythia yellow announces spring.

The trees are green.

Candelabras of chestnut blossoms light up May.

Knock knock.

Knock knock knock.

Knock knock knock knock.

Chapter 25

Out Of The Depths

In constant terror of another sandstone clobbering, Margaret sees herself tottering out of it, white and brittle as chalk. It would be shared suffering of course but much worse for her than for the others, she judges. With the fragile remnants of her beauty she has so much more to lose than they have.

She weeps uncontrollably. That too frightens her. Wouldn't the loss of all those tears, torrents of them, leave her body a shriveled husk? Wouldn't the constant mask of grief leave indelible lines and wrinkles on her face? She rubs rotten banana on her face and tries to stop the tears. She chokes over the attempt and goes on weeping.

By now Margaret has abandoned all hope of a collective way out via a tunnel. There's a possible private way out for her if she dares but she doesn't dare. Yielding to that long white hand might result in instant brimstone and annihilation.

She tries to hold on to the hope that maybe resisting temptation is a possible way out, each "no" to the Prefect clicking up good points for her. Maybe one night, saying "no" again she'll suddenly be crowned for virtue and find herself out there in sunshine. But the hope dwindles every day.

One day, seated alongside the others, staring out at her exclusive vision of 1937 Paris, Margaret has another spiritual illumination as she sees cowled black nuns herding deformed loping children in institutional gray along the quay. She sobs with sudden pity for the small monsters, perhaps the first tears she's ever shed for others here or back then.

Realizing that, she's pulled out of the tar pit of depression. She sees herself again as selfless Sister Margaret out there, confined in black and dedicating herself to the deformed children. She's so badly needed out there.

She sees the deprived faces of her fellow-sufferers on both sides of her armchair, staring out at longed-for scenes invisible to her eyes and feels pity for them too. She realizes her unforgivable selfishness before, having restricted her plea for transfer to herself alone. They need her badly too.

Remembering the cruelty of her last meeting with Jean Hussier, Margaret sees herself accepting the ring, not as parting two-carat gift but as wedding ring and so changing the course of things, saving him from suicide.

But to help the little monsters, her fellow prisoners and her long-ago sweetheart she would have to say yes to the Prefect, have to sin in order to save.

Sin? Wouldn't saying yes to the Prefect be an act of piety, of supreme sacrifice of self, rather than an act of prostitution? Where was the sin of saying yes to the corpse-like Prefect? How could there be sin where, predictably, there could be no pleasure, only horror?

But isn't it possible that what she takes for spiritual illumination is actually another of the guises of temptation? Self-sacrifice a trap tricked out as altruism? For even cowled, she'd have precious sunshine on her face and enjoy colors. Or as Jean Hussier's wife how could she abstain from champagne and wild but legitimate loving?

If only God would give her a sign.

Margaret quits the window. Out in the corridor she sinks to her knees and begs God to give her a sign. The dusty silence goes on.

She fatigues her voice and knees in countless corridors as the days and seasons revolve on the good side of the window. Sometimes she imagines her words disintegrating against that shatterproof, prayer-proof window or dying out in the endless windings of corridors, perhaps ending as a file in some obscure room. The Prefecture isn't an appropriate place for prayer. The appropriate place is, of course, a church. But churches are outside and her prayer is basically to be outside in the first place.

Margaret weeps at the absence of a church here until Helen tells her that a place of prayer doesn't have to be as grandiose as a cathedral. There are chapels. A chapel is room-size. Margaret asks Helen and the others to tell her if they find a chapel. They never do. Margaret never does.

But one day as she rises from kneeling prayer in an unconsecrated place, the drab corridor vanishes and she finds herself in a familiar sunny street. She has a split-second recollection that exit or transfer might happen at any time, no warning, and now without warning it's happened, transfer, transfer, to offer loving care to the small monsters, to say yes to Jean Hussier, Oh Lord, blessed be Thy Name.

Then her posthumous future is blotted out. Sunshine and color cease being miraculous. No nun after all, she hurries down the Rue de l'Assumption, then turns into the Rue du Docteur Blanche, hurrying past l'Assiette Bleue, the corner four-star restaurant where he takes her so often, and turns into the tiny Rue Mallet Stevens. She approaches the elegant private two-story dwelling with its quietly superior flowerbeds and wrought-iron railing. She sees Jean's bedroom curtains, open now but sure to be drawn later.

Pushing the gate open she pictures the vast drawing room with precious oriental rugs and hundreds of leather-bound classics behind locked glass and the grand piano and a closed score on it which is always the same, something by somebody called Domenico Scarlatti. He'll kiss her in a distinguished respectful way on her cheeks and just brushing her lips. She knows there'll be, first, something serious and a little boring, her French lesson. But even in something awfully impersonal like verb conjugations he makes it elegantly personal. He always chooses _adorer_ as the model regular verb ("perhaps a little irregular in our case," he often says with that impassive dryness, so she knows he must be making a joke). The Present is: "I adore you" and that's certain, he says and the reflexive form, "We adore each other." "Less certain," he says, "but I like to believe it." The Past is "I adored you" but it's sad to make it something past, he says and adds things to it like "I adored you as soon as I saw you." Like what he adds to the Future, "I shall adore you forever," and makes her say it to him over and over.

After the lesson they'll sip champagne and then he'll put Ravel's Bolero on the gramophone and she'll dance in increasing nudity to it for him and then the tremendous climax to the bolero and then nothing from the gramophone except the hiss of the needle until much later when he'll put on something nice and calm, Debussy, he says, The Afternoon of a Faun, and he'll return to her.

Then the table set for the two of them involving superior things like candle flames and caviar and a certain chilled white wine, much less blatant than champagne, he says. She loves to hear him say things like that.

And there's always a little precious-looking package for her, usually things for her graceful neck and perfect earlobes. And once, she remembers, she broke down and wept (she'd drunk almost a whole bottle of Meursant 1929) and said she didn't want that, it was too much like payment, she wasn't that kind of girl, but the next time there was another gift to prove he didn't think she was that kind of a girl. He said that if she didn't accept the gold ring with the big diamond and what went with it, my darling, he would press charges against her for the first ring she'd taken.

The door is ajar for her. She pushes it open. Strange, the lights are out in the long corridor. The door clicks shut behind her.

She gropes forward, calling out, "Jean? Jean?"

The dark corridor goes on and on and then turns and she finds herself posthumous, breathing in rotting flowers and dust, facing a familiar white medalled and braided uniform and beneath the peaked cap the frighteningly bloodless emaciated mask of the Prefect with a mile of dimly lit corridor behind him and all those doors with crazy numbers.

She stammers, weeping: "Oh let me return there, sir, I beg of you."

His distant cavernous voice formulates the familiar question between motionless lips. She stammers the familiar frightened reply.

"I don't dance any more, sir, my dancing days are over. God would be angered at me. Please, oh please, let me return there."

The Prefect says nothing. His bony long white hand reaches out for her. She shrinks back at the burning cold aura of it, cries out: "No! No! O God, help me!"

Chapter 26

What The Graffiti Say

One late May day outside (the chestnut blossoms fading) in the third circular year of the quest for the tunnel, that grain of sand in all the beaches of the world, Louis stares at the graffiti on the wall of their room for maybe an hour. His lips move silently. Finally he asks Seymour what he would do if he'd been administratively suspended here all by himself and had discovered a way out.

"Get the hell out of this place as fast as I could," says Seymour promptly, wondering at the stupid question.

But how about the others? Louis objects. The others to come? Wouldn't you leave some kind of message for them to say where the passageway is? A little bit coded, maybe, so the zombies wouldn't understand?

"Yes, I guess I would, at that," says Seymour, just to improve his image in Louis' eyes. He knows that if he found a passageway he'd get the hell out of this place just as fast as he could, no time for messages. But maybe, he thinks, his predecessors had been like Louis, better persons than he, Seymour, is.

Then he looks at the scattering of tarred rectangles on the wall and at long last the idea comes to him, as it already has to Louis, that what has been censored aren't obscene insults but direct reference to the way out for future administratively suspended Americans.

So they agree to analyze all of the scrawled and scratched messages, the enigmatic ones, on the walls. They try to ignore the recurrent OUT IS A DOUBLE CROSS. That one's all too easy to decipher: the possibility of transfer outside is a lie. For Arrivals in Administrative Suspension, that is, because they'd witnessed indisputably Good Americans transferred into color on the other side of the window.

Less discouraging but a puzzle are all the graffiti that refer to "Independence Day." Judging by their scribbled reflections on France and the French, their predecessors had been intensely patriotic. But how could they have celebrated the National Holiday here? Where could they have found rockets or firecrackers? And how could they even have known the date was July Fourth in this place without calendars? Twice Seymour and Louis see, in a different hand and followed by a widely separated date: Goodbye Everybody. Work on Independence Day! But you don't work on a National Holiday even assuming you know when it rolls round.

One night, sick with nostalgia, Seymour half-thinks half-dreams of Independence Day way back then in an impossible time and land. He recalls strings of tiny fire-crackers cracking like pungent machine-guns, also the big ones, Cherry Bombs, banging on your eardrums or Big Boys, like miniature red sticks of dynamite which you sometimes broke in two for a gush of flame that devoured the Chinese characters of the newspaper twisted about the powder. He thinks of Devil's Tongue, like an eraser which you rubbed against a window-screen and got sulfurous sparks and how once he'd burned himself and was slapped and kissed by his weeping mother, when was that? 1937? July Fourth, 1937, 7-4-37, 7-4-37.

Louis too is dreaming of his mother. She's serving a cold gnawed corn-on-the-cob instead of cherry pie for dessert. That's a poor dessert but he's glad to see his mother and starts asking her why there's no cherry pie for dessert when he's shaken out of it and awakes to darkness and Seymour shaking him hard and breathing hard, stammering, Independence Day, Independence Day, it's a code and I've broken it. There's no 1937 and Devil's Tongue to it but it's 74, 74, understand? Get it? July: the seventh month and Independence Day the fourth day. Room 74 it's got to be and we have to find it.

Louis mumbles something, turns over to the wall and tries to go back to the Sunday meal, this time with cherry pie.

Seymour returns to bed. He thinks of distant happy summers, admiring fiery fountains and comets in the sky with his father and mother and much later, leaning against the Pont Neuf balustrade, with Marie-Claude in 1951. He's drifting into a dream about it when he's shaken awake and hears Louis close to his ear saying that his decoding is too complicated. They'll keep their eyes open for Room 74 but the tunnel's sure to be in Room 1776. Understand? Seventeen Hundred and Seventy-Six, the date of the Independence of the Thirteen Colonies.

But that's a year, not a day, Seymour objects drowsily. Louis retorts that Independence Day would be the day they found the door with 1776 on it and the tunnel behind it leading to freedom.

Seymour doesn't hear him. He's back with Marie-Claude, watching dozens of rockets exploding in the sky and saying that it's the best 7-4 he's ever seen. But she rejects his code number too. "It's not 7-4, Seymour." He asks: "Is it 1776, then?" "No," she replies, "It's 1951, 14-7, the Fourteenth of July."

The fireworks vanish and she vanishes too and Seymour is back in his clammy bed. He gets up, shakes Louis and tells him that he still thinks the number of the room with the tunnel is 74, but maybe also 147.

That morning Louis convenes the others in the Common Room and informs them of his tremendous discovery. They all got to keep their eyes peeled for Room 1776, he says.

Seymour cuts in: "Or Room 147. Maybe, too, Room 74."

Louis ignores the interruption and repeats "Room 1776" three times.

Seymour persists: "Or maybe Room 74 or Room 147, more likely Room 147."

Margaret is radiant for the first time in years.

Helen pokes her finger in the dust again.

"What's the matter now?" says Seymour, irritated.

"What's wrong now?" says Louis, irritated.

"Oh, nothing," she says, drawing a zero in the dust. She evades their questions with "Nothing," "Never mind," and "It doesn't much matter."

She's being good again, Seymour thinks. Doesn't want to spoil things for us. Chalking up more good points. They insist on knowing what's the matter now.

Finally, very apologetically, she says that she doesn't see how knowing the number of the door can possibly help them since in any case they open all the doors they find, have been opening all the doors they find for all these years, tens of thousands of doors it must be by now, tens of thousands of years it seems like too.

Dead silence.

How is it they hadn't thought of that obvious fact? If they have no map guiding them to it, what good does it do knowing that the tunnel is hidden in Room 1776 (or Room 74 or Room 147 or Room Anything) since they open all the doors they find, have been doing nothing else, as she'd said, all these years?

Helen looks genuinely pained for them and stares down at the table where her finger is drawing a second zero alongside the first one.

Chapter 27

1776

Yes, but a week after that painful scene in the Common Room, draw all the zeros she likes in the dust, Louis comes back from the depths with a grimy triumphant face. He stares at Helen in silence. Of course when someone doesn't hide being in possession of a tremendous secret and waits in silence to be asked about it, you have to do the polite thing and ask about it.

"You'll see," he says. He says that to all of them.

The next morning Louis, still great with his tremendous secret, guides Max and Seymour into black twists and turns, down more unexplored staircases, down and down, never so deep before.

Just one little problem, he says.

Half a day later they labor through a zone of great destruction. They're forced to halt at the brink of a collapsed corridor. Their flashlight beams poke into blackness in all directions, overhead, below, on all sides. Their spared corridor is like a spur of rock overhanging dark void.

Louis points at a door with a faint number on the far side of the chasm where their corridor resumes intact. Incredibly, ceiling bulbs illuminate the door despite the nearby devastation. How had the wiring survived?

"What do you see?" Louis asks in understated triumph.

"Another goddam big hole," says Max.

"Watch your language. Who gives a hang about the hole? The room on the other side of the hole, I mean, the room, the door, the number on the door. What's the number on the door on the other side of the hole?"

Seymour squints hard. By this time he's learned to be wary of hope. The idea is slowly crystallizing in his mind that too much hope puts a hex on things. It must be Helen's influence. She's contagious. He decides to avoid her as best he can. In the meantime he says what he thinks he sees, not what he wants to see.

"I see 7776."

"Get new specs, perfessor. All them books. That ain't 7776 you see. That's 1776 you see. Independence Day. Tell the perfessor what you see, Pilsudski."

Max squints hard. "Might be 1776 like you say. I make it 1770 though. Or, wait, maybe 7776, like he says."

It's not that Max is suspicious of hope. It's just that he's forgotten the tremendous private non-historical significance of 1776 and has become a little nearsighted as well.

"Blind as a pickled bat, you too. No wonder you had that there truck accident of yours that landed you here, Pilsudski."

The three of them argue about it for a while. Finally Seymour says: "OK, have it your way, 1776." He says that casually but oh how he wants it to be Louis' way, Louis' way out to way out there. "How do we cross over, though?"

"That's the little problem. We'll find a way."

"Hope it won't take more than ten years."

Of course when they return they tell the women about it.

Helen says: "Oh, that's interesting." After a politely interested interval she returns to her parliamentary debates or statistics or whatever it is.

Margaret hugs Louis and wants to go down immediately. A tunnel out is surer than dancing for a way out. It's been a long long time since she last encountered the Prefect, even in dreams.

"Got to solve a little problem first," says Louis, breaking free of her.

"Technical problem," says Seymour. He's tempted to add: "Won't take more than ten years to solve it." But he doesn't dare do that to Margaret. Why doesn't she ever hug him? He'd take more time breaking free than Louis did.

Anyhow, Seymour's wrong. It takes no more than an estimated month for Louis to whirl an iron-weighted rope over the chasm, finally catching it on a bit of solid-looking rubble and then repeat the operation a dozen times. He firmly attaches the free ends to doorknobs on their side.

"Well, all set to go," he finally declares, clapping his hands free of dust. Max and Seymour stare at the result in silence. It looks like a gigantic crazy hammock. No, more like a try at a web by a giant stoned spider. No harder than climbing up the rigging of a sailing ship, Louis assures them. Seymour and Max had never climbed up the rigging of a sailing ship.

The moment has come. Louis grabs the sledgehammer, pivots on his heel like an Olympic contender and lets fly. The sledgehammer thumps down on the far side of the chasm, yards to spare. He does the same thing to the shovel. Hurled like a javelin, the crowbar follows, clattering, yards to spare.

Then Louis himself follows. Belly-down on the swaying bucking network, he grabs and pulls himself forward. In the gloom he resembles a wounded insect struggling in a web. He's half way across the chasm when one of the ropes snaps. The net lurches and nearly shoots Louis into the void. He catches hold of a rope. Dangling over the chasm and rising and falling like a yoyo, he yells "No problem!" to the terrorized duo on the other side.

As he hoists himself back to relative safety, his saucepan miner's lamp slips off his head. "Damnation!" he exclaims in a rare outburst of profanity. He'd been proud of that artfully tinkered lamp which is now plunging into the abyss. It takes ten seconds before they hear the faint crash below.

Louis makes it to the far shore with no further incident. He pulls out his spare flashlight and trains the beam on the net. He barks orders to Max and Seymour to follow. They are very reluctant. He barks and barks till they do follow, first Max, inch-worming his way to the other side, moaning and sweating like a horse and concentrating his thoughts not on the void below but on Bess.

Then Seymour, faint with fright at the sway of the giant hammock above that ten-second drop, like the ten-story drop that had ended his first life long ago. Midway across he has a violent urge to urinate. But with both hands clutching the ropes, how can he? When he reaches the other side the urge vanishes.

Louis leads them solemnly to the door. He blows the number free of dust.

The number of the door, no possible doubt now, is 1776. The door, which looks very solid, is locked.

Louis goes over to pick up the tools. The private non-historical significance of 1776 dawns on Max now. He can't wait. He backs up, takes a deep rasping breath and charges shoulder-first against the door. It proves to be no more resistant than moldy balsa. In an explosion of fragments Max bursts through and hurtles headlong into the dark room.

A second later Louis and Seymour hear a resounding hollow sound from inside the room, the marvelous hollow sound they'd been knocking for on a million solid walls all these years. They click on their flashlights, step over Max's body and train their beams on the wall. They see the rough plaster job, cracked from the impact of Max's head, that poorly conceals the mouth of the tunnel. They dance in front of it, knocking and knocking their knuckles sore and getting the precious confirming hollow sounds.

Max sits up unsteadily, groans and rubs his bleeding head. He hears the sound of what's behind the wall, forgets his head, gets up and grabs the sledgehammer.

Louis hesitates and then disarms him. They can't leave now, he explains. The women don't even know where the tunnel is. We got to go back and tell them. Then we'll all leave together.

But there's no authority to what Louis says, no iron ring to his voice, no Marine jaw-thrust to it. It sounds more like a plea than a command.

Max bellows in protest. Seymour sides with Max. He argues that of course they'll return to the women but first they have to know if the tunnel isn't a dead-end, a few yards excavated and then abandoned. No use raising false hopes. If it's the genuine tunnel they'll stop at the final wall. There has to be another wall at the other end. The tunnel can't be open on the real world for real people to wander in and wind up here like us poor unreal bastards.

Seymour breaks off, bothered by something. To emerge, their predecessors had had to smash that final wall. Wouldn't the outside world, the real world, have noticed the gaping hole?

Louis stands there expressionless for a second. He scowls, shakes his head and sharply orders them to follow him. Leaving the tools on the ground, he squares his shoulders and turns his back to the wall with military briskness. He's taken a couple of strides toward the women when he hears the smashing of masonry. Even before he halts and turns about he knows that Max has grabbed the sledgehammer and finished the job his head had begun.

Louis stares at the jagged opening of the tunnel entrance, like a black star, lit up by Seymour's flashlight. Max crouches and passes through the black star. Seymour follows. Louis hears the long babble of their shouts, multiplied into a joyous insubordinate crowd by the echo. Louis goes up to the black star. Their wagging beams dimly light up a man-high brick vaulted tunnel.

Louis orders them to return. They continue down the tunnel, trotting now. They break into a run. They shout again. Had they sighted the final wall between Paris and here?

"Hey, wait up for me!" Louis yells. His echo repeats the order or plea a dozen times.

Louis passes through the black star, runs hard and finally joins them. He takes command. He makes Max hand over the sledgehammer. "Okay, but like what Stein said, explore the tunnel and then go back to the women. We don't touch that there second wall if it turns out there really is a second wall. Hey, did you fellers see it?"

No, they hadn't seen it yet, but expect to any moment. They run on, all three of them. Just beyond the feeble range of their flashlight beams they expect the ultimate wall to loom any moment. Panting, they run on.

The moment becomes a minute.

The minute becomes an hour.

The tunnel goes on and on. They reduce their pace from a run to a trot, then to a trudge, then stop and collapse on the cold concrete and gasp until strength returns. When they get up they don't run. They begin a dogged long-distance jog. They strain their eyes for scrawled messages of encouragement on the walls but see nothing but bricks.

Bricks and bricks. The tunnel goes on and on, an identical vista of dimly illuminated concrete ground and dingy brick vault bearing no messages. They end by losing all sense of progress. They seem to be marking time on a treadmill, the unchanging tunnel jerking by. Louis orders the other two men to switch off their flashlights. Way things are going, there's no telling how many batteries they'll need till they get to the final wall. Then they'll need juice to light up the return to the women.

"Longest fucking tunnel I ever been in in my life," Max gasps, hours later. "And boy you can bet I been in plenty of fucking tunnels in my life."

Probably the longest fucking tunnel in the whole world, Seymour reflects. Of course this tunnel isn't in the world, just the far mouth of it is but Seymour begins comparing it to real tunnels. Longer, much longer, than the mile-long Lincoln and Holland Tunnels or the Queens-Midtown Tunnel or the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Longer even than the Simplon Tunnel between Switzerland and Italy, easily ten miles long, that one. What kind of a tunnel is it, though? In the real world there are railroad tunnels, subway tunnels, highway-traffic tunnels, tunnels to transport water or gas or oil. This seems to be a tunnel tunnel, a tunnel for the sake of a tunnel, no sense to it, like everything else here.

Their only guides to the passage of time are the diminishing vitality of Louis' flashlight batteries, their own diminishing vitality, hunger pangs, the growing stubble on their faces, sleep and defecation. When Louis' beam illuminates no more than a few feet of brick ahead he changes his batteries, trying to remember the lifespan of batteries. He does it three times. Their stomachs sadistically force them to eat four times. With their bottles of chlorinated water they wash down their elephant balls. At irregular intervals one of them lags behind to defecate in privacy. They sleep twice, huddled together for warmth. When they awaken they have no idea of how long they've slept. Hours? Days?

Occasionally they try to guess at the time they've spent in the tunnel. Max says a month. That's an exaggeration says Seymour. He hazards a week, hoping it's an exaggeration too. Louis, going by the number of elephant balls they've gagged on, makes it no more than three days. And during all that time, whatever time was the right time, no sign that earlier generations of Administratively Suspended Americans had ever been here to work on Independence Day.

They go on jogging.

Much later, maybe days later, Louis, in the fore, halts. He waits for Max and Seymour to stumble bleary-eyed to where he stands, lighting up a nearby bit of wall.

They read in the trembling circle of his beam, inscribed in heavy chalked characters: CONROY WAS HERE!

For long seconds the three stand there motionless, wet faces uplifted to the testimony that this is no dead end for the dead, that Independence Day is finally at hand.

They break into a run, singing, each one singing something different, raucous and off-key.

The echo amplifies and corrects the discord into something like a joyous angelic choir in the space ahead.
Chapter 28

The Other Side Of The Wall

By Louis' calculations, they're into the fourth day of exploration when the aspect of the tunnel starts changing.

Thigh-thick shoulder-high pipes run into the tunnel and accompany them on both sides. They begin to stumble over broken brick and chunks of mortar. Progress to freedom slows down. Soon they have to pick their way through ankle-deep debris, then clamber over knee-deep rubble. Sometimes they have to wield the shovel and crowbar to work their way forward. Yet the tunnel is largely intact. They guess that stretches of vault ahead must have caved in under the pressure of collapsed floors above and that their predecessors had carted the debris here.

Evil-smelling pools accumulate beneath the pipes, now covered with rust. The smell becomes unbearable.

"We're in a goddam fucking sewer," Max pants, jogging alongside Seymour.

Seymour jogs on. A few seconds later he stops in his tracks. He yells: "Towards a sewer, you mean! Not in a sewer! Not yet!"

A chorus of joyous Seymours babbles fragments of the sudden insight. This is no sewer, not yet, but an outlet to a sewer, no fucking sewer but the most glorious of sewers, the sewer system of Paris, the real Paris, object of their longing for decades. The tunnel has meaning and destination now. True, he'd dreamed of emerging from the space of half-life to green trees and blue sky. Instead, the passage to freedom will be to another tunnel, much bigger and even stinkier than this one, with a dark malodorous river like the Styx running sluggishly in the middle of it.

But in that giant tunnel to come (perhaps minutes away) there are iron rungs cemented in the walls, rungs which rise to that blue sky and those green trees. Confusing the city of his death and the city of his rebirth, Seymour sees himself pushing up a heavy manhole cover and emerging, two-time Lazarus, from the depths of the street where he'd fallen long ago.

The enigma of the final wall with the gaping hole is solved. There is no wall, no need for one. No chance that anyone would wander into the stinking mouth of this tunnel.

In the spaces free of rubble muck squishes underfoot. Sometimes they're ankle-deep in it. The stink is so ferocious that they have to breathe shallow through their mouths. Their oxygen-starved muscles hardly respond to commands. They stumble forward.

"Up shit creek, for real," says Max.

An hour or so later Louis halts. "Look."

His badly trembling beam circles another chalked slogan: WORK ON INDEPENDENCE DAY!

His beam shifts and lights up the work ahead. The tunnel had caved in completely at this spot. Their predecessors had worked valiantly for independence. They'd excavated a miniature tunnel in the ruins of the greater one.

The three men stoop and enter.

They advance slowly in a crouch. Every five yards or so extemporized mine props bearing horizontal planks or legless tables stave off cave-in. Sometimes the prop is an up-ended iron cot. More often, piled-up volumes of economic statistics and parliamentary debates. They're careful not to brush against them. They try to keep clear of the jagged walls. They keep their heads low beneath the vault with its wedged chunks of rubble in perilous suspension.

Even so, their floundering passage forward sets off miniature landslides. Off balance, they fling out their hands against the jagged walls for support. The sharp-edged rubble lacerates their palms. They bleed gray. They struggle for breath in the choking dust. The muck underfoot tugs at their shoes with each squelching step. They slip and sprawl in it. The stench is even worse in this confined area.

From time to time they hear a long rumble and debris dribbles down on them. They bend double and shield their heads with their arms and pray that the collapsing floors above will spare their tunnel.

At one point, strength abandons them simultaneously. They sink to a squat on islets of rubble rising out of the muck. They feel puffy and dizzy. Their vision of the props ahead is blurred. Is it the toxic effects of the sewer stench? Or the effect of famine? They've long since forced the last of the elephant balls down their throats.

Or is it something much worse? The symptoms are familiar. Haven't they been clobbered by old age?

"It's like that other time," Max finds enough strength to whisper. "We're gonna croak here."

They fall asleep. When they wake up, maybe an hour, maybe a day later, strength has ebbed back. After a while they rise and stumble forward again.

Sometimes the tunnel is almost blocked by later cave-ins. Max and Louis open up hands-and-knees passages with the crowbar and the pickaxe. Seymour has less brawn. His job is to light the work area with the flashlight. It's perilous inch-by-inch excavation of a tunnel within a tunnel within a tunnel.

Emerging from one of those burrows, Seymour exclaims: "Look!" His beam picks out a ring lying on broken brick and half covered by muck. It's gray but they guess at original gold. Surely a wedding ring. How had she (he?) lost it? Trudging down the tunnel so long without food that she'd lost the flesh that kept it on her finger? Seymour reaches down but Louis jostles him and gets to it first. Seymour protests. "Finders keepers, losers weepers," says Louis and pockets the ring.

Much later, emerging close to collapse from another burrow, Seymour directs his weak circle of light on a prop, a lopsided column of books. On the spine of a fat volume he makes out, beneath the dust and grime, the letters SHAK...EAR. He wonders if it's SHAKESPEARE. After all these years of deadly statistics and parliamentary debates, Shakespeare.

But it doesn't matter now. Where he's going there are hundreds of bookstores, thousands of copies of Shakespeare, maybe just minutes away now. Because no matter what Louis said, Seymour is determined not to retrace his steps in the rubble and muck of the tunnel, confront the giant spider web spun over void, repeat those miles of ruined staircases and corridors to return to the women and tell them about the discovery of the way out. Somehow, he'll elude Louis' vigilance and run for it at the first sight of the Paris sewer.

He thinks of Helen, guiltily. Not returning to tell her the way out wouldn't matter to her. She wouldn't care about the way out. But not telling her about the location of Shakespeare is betrayal, he knows. This book would have lighted up her face. She'd once confessed that she'd always preferred books to reality. He'd never once seen her face light up.

He reaches out in the hope that it's not Shakespeare and so be delivered of the burden of guilt. Gently, gently, with the whorls of his fingertip he begins brushing the dust away on the obscured part of the title.

The reaction to the displacement of maybe a dozen motes of dust is wildly disproportionate. The pillar of books trembles, quakes, disintegrates. The legless tabletop pressing against the roof splits and falls. Bricks rain down. Behind them, other props yield, the books spilling to the ground. They hear a faint pulsating roar behind them. Whole flights, they're sure, are crashing down on the tunnel. The roar strengthens. They start floundering forward away from the pursuit of chaos.

A stinking wind raises clouds of dust. The roar covers their cries. A jagged torrent of debris sweeps them off their feet, moving them forward in pulsating surges as though powered by contractions of the tunnel walls. Their arms flail wildly as the rhythm of the surges accelerates.

Suddenly they are spewed out into free space, first Louis and then Max and then Seymour, still clutching his flashlight. The roar and stinking wind stop. The silence is broken only by their groans.

All three of them find themselves ejected headfirst and belly down into the original intact tunnel, sprawled out in deep muck in an attitude of oriental prostration before what rises impeccable above them a dozen yards away: a white wall ending the tunnel.

No sewer after all, no iron-rungs to negotiate or manhole cover to heave aside, Seymour thinks. Behind that white wall lies direct access to blue sky and green trees.

They struggle to their feet and in silence totter closer. In the strengthening light of the three flashlights the wall gains in whiteness, an incredible pure white as they'd never seen white in this dingy second life, the white of what doesn't exist here: snow-drops, plum blossoms, snowy peaks, bridal-gowns, wedding roses, honeymoon clouds.

Max drops the flashlight and clutches the sledgehammer. Seymour picks up the crowbar. Louis turns to them.

"You just hand over that there sledgehammer, Pilsudski, no more monkey business. And you give me that there crowbar, Stein."

They don't react. They probably don't hear the command. They keep on staring at the pure white wall. Louis pushes them back and wrenches the tools out of their hands.

"We're goin' back to the women first, like I said."

Max and Seymour don't hear him. They're staring at the wall, sure of what lies immediately on the other side of it. For Seymour, a certain street in the 6th arrondissement with a great golden horse head and a massive door. For Max, an airport with a waiting Boeing.

Now Louis too stares at the wall.

Stares and imagines on the other side of it the elegant flower-shop where for months he'd pretended to admire seasonal flowers in the display window: first daffodils like gay yellow telephones and then tulips, red like her cheeks when she caught his gaze on her and now, this June day on the other side of the pure white wall, he'll push the door open on the three aproned girls twittering in French and Louise will smile shyly and in lovely fragmented English counsel his bouquet and this time he'll know she's jealous of the girl she thinks the bouquet's for but it's for her as she'll discover an hour later at closing time when she comes out and finds him there (the past corrected by hindsight into a new future) with the flowers and also with the gold ring cleaned of muck, earned by a lifetime of suffering here, waiting for her, her honey hair and shy smile.

Louis drops the crowbar, lifts the sledgehammer and puts all his power behind the blow, face screwed up against the expected glare of sunny blue sky. The wall explodes, leaving a big jagged opening like a star, but not Max's dead black star at the start of the tunnel. This one is a blinding dazzle of a star.

Weeping, they stumble through the intense star. They grope about blindly for long seconds.

Suddenly their eyes are able to cope with the light on the other side of the wall and their minds have to cope with what they see there.

They see overhead, not limitless blue sky but familiar cracked ceiling. Instead of the promised sun, banks of mercury lights glaring down on the familiar dingy white tile walls, the squat-toilets with soiled bungholes, the ranked urinals, the rows of chipped washbasins.

And above the washbasins, tarnished mirrors in which they see three gaunt swaying men gaping at them out of feverish eyes, bent arthritically from the long crouch. They see their tattered beshitted clothes, their muck-caked feet, their bleeding hands, the blood still gray, not the promised red. They see their white tangled hair and white growth of beard and wonder if the white comes from old age or plaster dust.

The men stand motionless and speechless for a minute, staring at their images.

Seymour drags himself over to the urinals. When he finishes and buttons up he finally breaks the silence.

"All that work just for a piss."

"Where's the airport?" says Max.

Impassive, Louis slowly circumnavigates the WC, knocking methodically, inch by inch, on the walls for a hollow sound that doesn't come.

"Where's the airport?" says Max.

After a while Louis returns to his starting point. He says in a heavy dead voice: "It's punishment. Divine punishment for betraying the women." (Did Louis say 'women' or 'woman'?) "I was tempted by the devil and yielded. Now I pay the price for sinning."

"We're being played with," says Seymour. "We're pieces of shit to them."

"The lights were on here," Louis says.

"Expecting company," says Seymour. "Played with all along. Pieces of shit."

They drag themselves out of the WC by the conventional route. On the opposite wall of the corridor they see the big scrawled admonition: OUT IS A DOUBLE-CROSS!

They turn a corner and see the spiral iron staircase that leads back to their starting point.

The WC that climaxed the tunnel must have been one of the very first rooms they'd explored long ago, knocking and knocking everywhere on the walls and, strangely, getting no hollow response. But even if they had, the revealed tunnel would have led them, at the price of great suffering, not to Paris but to a room sarcastically numbered 1776, that year of independence for Good Americans.

Seymour and Louis start pulling themselves up the spiral staircase.

Max stands at the foot of the staircase, looking up at them.

"Where's the airport?" he says.

Chapter 29

Hero On His Knees

When they finally turn into their home corridor, Louis emerges from mute despair long enough to command Max and Seymour to quit blubbering and to go into the WC. They can't let the women see and smell them the way they are.

They wash themselves over a bunghole. They wash and wash and wash. The white of their hair proves to be plaster dust, not old age. Then they stagger barefoot into the men's room, clutching a towel about their loins as they'd done that first time in their distant youth following resurrection. They cram old food down their throats and collapse on their beds and sleep for days.

Seymour wakes up with a splitting headache and a confused memory of dreams of tunnels and giant spider webs and (probably not a dream) the cleaning girl called Stupid noisily bringing in trays and clean clothing and looking down at him with unbearable pity till he escaped from it by returning to the dream refuge of tunnels and giant spider webs.

The other two men are still in bed, Max snoring painfully, Louis staring up at the ceiling and mumbling what sounds like prayers. Seymour gets up, dresses and goes into the women's room where he finds Helen in her usual position, seated on her bed staring down at a book of statistics. She must know the details of coal imports for the decade 1880-1890 by heart by now, he thinks.

She looks up and greets him as though he'd been absent an hour instead of days or weeks. She doesn't even ask him how things had gone all that time in the depths, as if there was no point asking. Seymour tells her anyhow.

"So it was nothing," he concludes. "Except for the book. I found a real book with 'Shakespeare' on the spine. I thought of you. I tried to bring it back. It was like a booby trap. As soon as I touched it the roof caved in. It must be under tons of rubble now. I'm sorry."

"It doesn't matter. If you'd brought it back the pages would have been blank or printed in Serbo-Croat."

"Serbo-Croat?"

"Or Eskimo. Any language I can't read."

"I'm beginning to think you were right all along. We're being played with. They treat us like pieces... Like garbage they treat us."

"Didn't you know that? I've always known that, from the beginning, here and back then."

"What can we do about it?"

"Not try to do anything about it. Not give them that satisfaction."

Seymour tries her formula. He gives up the underground quest. He's willing to admit that there may be a tunnel to the real world but if so it's behind one of those thick steel doors with intricate impregnable locks. If he jogs down nearby corridors now it's purely for exercise. He opens no more doors. He sometimes convinces Max to join him.

Once, they hear Margaret's tragic voice somewhere in the maze. She's still trying to do something about it. "Oh sir, please let me dance for you. Let me dance for you and then let me go out." The men don't know what she means, who she's talking to. She repeats the imploration over and over, each time fainter as she moves away from the men but no closer to the Prefect.

Louis spends most of the time prostrate in bed, praying to the ceiling. He's abdicated leadership. He's a general who's deserted, leaving his troops to their own devices. Their devices are feeble. Max and Seymour feel like paralytics suddenly deprived of braces. Their pillar of strength is broken. They don't recognize the hero of San Juan Hill, the bridger of chasms, the fearless explorer of dark corridors in that limp recumbent figure begging the cracked ceiling for forgiveness.

When Helen tries to coax him out of bed he lies motionless and repeats, as though to someone else: "I betrayed. It would of been the outside not the toilets if I hadn't of bashed that there white wall, if I'd of returned to the women." Did Louis say 'women' or 'woman'?

"I don't feel betrayed," says Helen. "Not by you, anyhow."

Max and Seymour do their best to provoke Louis into reasserting generalship. They urinate in the washbasin, first at night and then in broad bulb light. He doesn't react. They both try profanity in his presence, wildly taking the Name of the Lord in vain. In vain. He doesn't react. They tell Louis that he badly needs exercise, that mental health depends on physical health. They beg him to get up and do deep-knee bends with them.

Finally Louis does get up. But the only deep knee-bend he consents to is alongside Margaret, begging the Lord for forgiveness and transfer. He tells the others that collective prayer is more effective than individual prayer, that a bundle of reeds is stronger than a single reed, that Max and Helen, frail reeds, should join them and raise their voices in simultaneous prayer to the Lord.

Helen says no. Seymour can't say no because he hasn't been asked. He doesn't count, apparently. Max says maybe and looks at Helen for a cue. She says that of course he can do whatever he likes. Finally Max joins the others on their knees. The prayer sessions are held in the women's room, at all hours.

One night Helen is able to return to Richard in the honeymoon hotel room with the pictures of soaring birds on the pale blue walls. His mouth wanders over her body and then he's on the point of entering her when a fervent pious cry jerks her out of the dream. She turns her back on the praying trio, and faces the wall. She succeeds in not weeping at her posthumous state. Her hand is no substitute for Richard. She hopes that when she falls asleep she'll be able to go back and welcome him. She doesn't fall asleep.

The next day, poking about in another storeroom, with little hope, for more varied reading material, Helen comes across a candle. She instantly understands to what precious intimate use she can put it.

Margaret and then Louis and then Max beg Helen to pray with them for transfer. "For me, won't you?" says Margaret. Helen says no.

Even Seymour suggests that she might have a try at it. He's willing to join the praying group himself, he says untruthfully, but he hasn't been invited out of his ghetto. Not that he really believes in the efficacy of prayer, solitary or collective, he tells her, but you never can tell. Even one chance in a million, it's worth trying. "Maybe you could put in a good word for me if it works."

Helen says no to Seymour. She says no to them all and goes back to export statistics.

The trio goes on praying day and night. Seymour flees it. He visits his secret room with his darling's street as often as he can. He'd neglected this mental escape route during the long search for a real way out. The others don't invite him to kneel with them in imploration for transfer and he doesn't want to, but here in his sanctuary he does kneel, facing the wall, head bowed, sketching in low-placed details in his street, transferred there a little in his head thanks to the power of memory and creation.

Occasionally, communing with his darling, he hears stealthy footsteps in the corridor outside and is brutally pulled back into this half-world. He knows it's ex-Gentille. He now thinks of and refers to her as "Stupide" even if he never calls her by that name since he never speaks to her at all now, hasn't for years. The doorknob turns spookily, very slowly, millimeter by millimeter. Even more slowly the door pushes against the shot bolt. She never persists. The doorknob turns back millimeter by millimeter and he hears her shuffling steps whispering away into silence. After, he's unable to return to the street.

Doesn't she sneak in when he isn't there? There's no outside lock on the door. The thought of her violating his sanctuary is upsetting. His suspicions strengthen when he starts finding faint black smudges on his sketch of the sea. He suspects that she adds things in charcoal and then inexpertly rubs them out.

He rummages in Louis' do-it-yourself hoard and comes up with a stout padlock, the key to it, a hasp and nails. He secures the door against her incursions.

But he frequently misplaces the key and is locked out himself for a week. He's sure Stupid comes across the key during her weekly cleaning job on the Living Quarters, uses it for a week to violate his sanctuary and then puts it back where he finally finds it, under a cot or deep in a drawer. When he lets himself into his room he finds new charcoal smudges on the sea, proving the point.

Finally he wears the key permanently around his neck like a religious insignia. There are no more smudges on the sea after that.

Once, he thinks he hears the feeble whisper of her footsteps, then nothing. He eases the door open a crack.

She's seated against the wall opposite his sanctuary, slumped forward, head bowed. Her stringy hair hangs in front of her face like a mop. He thinks he can make out her eyes, white with inward focus. He retreats back into his room. For a long while he can't work. He feels besieged.

He's about to go back to his street and sketch a remembered geranium on a third-story window-sill when he hears a sound he hasn't heard in years. He drops the pencil in fright at the sudden clump-jangle, clump-jangle, not faint and a long way off, giving you warning, but sudden and loud, clump-jangle clump-jangle, as though the pitching and tossing Turnkey had materialized in that corridor.

The clump-jangle clump-jangle stops in front of his door. Nothing escapes those drab eyes set deep in that skull-like head. He's sure to see the open padlock on the door. Any moment now his bony fist will try the doorknob and then hammer on the door, hammer and hammer till the rusty bolt is wrenched off and the door flies open and the drab eyes will stare at the wall and Seymour be exited for willful deterioration of State property. And worse, his precious creation – recreation – of the lost street be censored by administrative tar.

Seymour grabs the knife he uses to sharpen his pencils and stands before the street in a crouch, ready to defend it at all costs.

But Turnkey's rusty voice addresses, it can only be, the girl outside. His words aren't distinct. The girl's stammering reply isn't distinct. Distinct now, Turnkey's: "Shirking again." Indistinct the girl's imploring words. Very distinct, Turnkey's: "You have been warned. Come."

Now a wail, faint but unbearable. Clump-jangle, clump-jangle, moving away from the door with the padlock. The unbearable wail fades away. The sound of the orthopedic shoe and the keys fades away.

Seymour lets himself down in the chair and sits there till his heart calms down.

He's about to try to force himself back to the projected geranium when the wail comes back, much louder, expressing all the desolation and despair of two worlds, it seems to him. "It's the wind," he mutters. Finally he gets up and slowly pulls back the bolt. He slowly opens the door a crack, then wider. The corridor is empty.

As he'd suspected, it's the wind, a powerful gale sweeping past and pulling wails out of her abandoned pail opposite his door. At the end of the corridor a ghostly column of dust rotates wildly.

He picks up her dangerously situated pail. A functionary might very well return for it and notice his door.

He abandons the pail in a distant corridor. By then the wind has dropped and it's stopped wailing.

For a long time – months it must be – a bitter-mouthed middle-aged female functionary brings them their meals. She doesn't answer their questions concerning the former cleaning girl. The new female functionary doesn't say anything, not even hello or goodbye. Seymour can't help thinking that she does a better cleaning job than her predecessor.

One day, Gentille is back, pushing the creaking cart with their trays. She seems shriveled. Her lips are compressed to a thin line as though invisible catgut has sewn them shut. She doesn't say hello or goodbye either. When they address her she seems to shrivel even more. She doesn't look at them. Her eyes are downcast, concentrating on her task. She does a better job cleaning up now, even sweeps out under the cots.

It sounds cruel, Helen says to the others, but it would actually be an act of kindness on their part not to try to talk to her or even notice her. It frightens her when they do.

So they don't any more. Soon the Five assimilate the girl they'd once called Gentille to the drab furniture she incompetently dusts.

***

Part Three

### Advocate

Chapter 30

Halleluiah!

Bangs her knuckles once on the door of the women's room. Doesn't wait for response. Yanks open the door. Strides past the sleeper (Number 2). Halts before Numbers 1, 3 and 0 on their knees, stupidly trying to establish direct connection.

Claps her hard hands and delivers the information and the orders and withdraws.

Addresses herself to the sleeper now. Claps her hard hands inches from Number 2's ear, to no avail. Reaches out to shake her awake and at the last instant snatches her hands (although safely rubber-clad) away. Anyhow, Number 2 is now staring up at her and she delivers the information and the orders.

Helen sees the iron face of the middle-echelon female functionary they call Sadie, sees her starved pale lips moving but hears no more than an indistinct whisper like ashes down a chute. Sadie has already left the women's room, heading for the men's room, when Helen remembers and removes the protective earplugs she'd fashioned out of the candle to protect a dream she's unable to return to. She hears the kneeling trio crying "Halleluiah! Halleluiah!" She replaces the earplugs and turns to the wall.

Sadie bends over Number 4. Asleep too. She claps her hard hands inches from his ear. He jerks awake and she jerks her hands out of harm's way and informs him that the Advocate is coming this very morning and will receive them collectively in the Common Room. He (Number 4) must dress immediately and be prepared to present his defense. She leaves.

Seymour hears "Halleluiah! Halleluiah!" from the other side of the partition. He tries to remember who 'Advocate' is. It finally comes back, after all that time. "Halleluiah!" he says.

With one exception, they're pathetically grateful for at last being officially taken notice of. Stalled for decades, the rusty cobwebbed bureaucratic machinery has suddenly been set in motion. Their fate is being processed through the correct channels now. An end, at last, to those hopeless attempts to short-circuit the system, to emerge by their own devices, blundering down dark corridors all those years and still in the dark for all their pains.

So that auspicious morning they stand wide-eyed and joyous (four of them at least) in the windy corridor, backs against the wall, awaiting the coming of their potential liberator.

Seymour can't help thinking of a parody of the Liberation of Paris. Instead of those cheering crowds lining sunny avenues, awaiting their liberators back in August 1944, five half-lifers in this dim windy corridor, in who knows what year. The historical comparison strengthens as Seymour hears distant slapping martial soles and a metallic clatter, constantly interrupted as though the tank had broken down and been repaired and had broken down again, all with astonishing rapidity and over and over.

But nearing, the tank turns out to be a crippled clattering wheelchair and the soldiers two familiar functionaries, petulant Philippe, pushing the wheelchair at a fast trot, followed by Hedgehog who is puffing badly.

A white-haired old man in a black gown is slouched in the wheelchair, rummaging in a sloppy pile of papers in his lap. His ample sleeves flutter in the wind. Every few seconds papers take off and Hedgehog scrambles in pursuit, crying, "Maître, Maître, your papers!" Philippe halts; the old man recovers his papers; the wheelchair jolts forward a few yards; more papers fly away; Hedgehog cries: "Maître, Maître, your papers!" And so it goes, till finally the wheelchair comes to a screeching halt before the Five.

Advocate – for who else can it be? – proves to be sound (if unsteady) of limb despite his advanced age and his handicapped mode of transportation. He slowly raises himself out of the wheelchair and lurches toward them with a benevolent smile. "Mes enfants!" he exclaims in a very rusty voice, communicating at the same time a powerful reek, like that of an exploding cognac distillery.

"Oh God, no!" says Seymour, turning to Helen. But she's returned to her room.

Supported by the two lower-echelon functionaries, Advocate totters into the Common Room and stays there for hours, probably sleeping it off, Seymour bitterly comments to the others. And this lush is supposed to defend them.

Finally Sadie returns and announces that their advocate (whom they must address as "Maître") is prepared to welcome them. They all go out into the corridor except for Helen who's on her bed, back to statistics. That holds things up.

Sadie strides into the women's room, halts at the bed and repeats that their advocate is prepared to welcome them, Number Two must get up immediately.

"If it's me you mean, I'd rather not," says Helen.

Sadie is scandalized at this passive resistance. You have no choice in the matter, she says. The presence of all of the Suspended Arrivals is indispensable.

"I'd rather not," says Helen.

Number Two is jeopardizing the operation of administrative review for all concerned, says Sadie.

By this time the others are there and they beg Helen to join them and not jeopardize their chances for transfer.

"I don't mean to be obstructive. If it makes you feel better I'll come. But it's a farce like everything else here, here and back there. Can't you see that after all this time?"

Advocate stands at the head of the library table, gripping it to correct his sway. He's a very old man with a mane of thin dingy white hair, a thin mouth and an aquiline nose. He looks like Franz Liszt in his final years, the same theatrical spirituality after youthful excesses. His dominant mask-like expression with them is paternal benevolence, which he maintains even during that first visit in his lamentable state. He wears the traditional French black lawyer's gown with a white jabot. There's a sprinkle of dandruff on his shoulders.

His wide sleeves flap with his eloquent rubber-gloved gesture of welcome as he invites them to sit down. Doing that, he resembles a giant bat vainly trying to take off. Unsupported, he comes close to falling on his face.

His rusty bumbling opening words are even more outrageous than his aspect.

"Hem-hem. Er... in my... er... official capacity as your... harrumph... advocate allow me to... to... hem... welcome, yes, welcome you to the Préfecture de Police. I am... harrumph... without exaggeration, both happy and... and... yes, truly happy and honored to... er... to be... defending New Arrivals."

He beams feebly at them.

New Arrivals! In an outraged babble they let this sodden parody of an advocate know that they'd been suspended in this place for maybe a quarter of a century. Why has it taken him such an incredibly long time to contact them?

He looks at them with rheumy distressed eyes.

"Has it been – as you say – 'long'? I have just been notified of your arrival."

They explode again.

"Whaddideesay?" Max asks, completely out of it. Helen quickly translates. Max bellows:

"New Arrivals my ass! Jesus, we been here forty fucking years and this boozed-up shit-head of a lawyer just learns about it now!"

Smiling benignly, Advocate addresses the others and confesses to a "hem, culpable ignorance of the tongue of Shakespeare." He requests a translation of his client's words.

"He's not happy about the delay," says Seymour. "Basically none of us are."

Advocate leans forward, fearfully glances about (and, strangely, up at the ceiling) and confides in a low, less hesitant, voice:

"Your... er... unhappiness at the state of affairs in the Préfecture is, alas, all too justified. Things here (and elsewhere, on a much higher level, I suspect, but shh!) are no longer what they once were. I dimly remember, oh, dimly, dimly, a distant, all too distant, past when the... er... channels of communication were free of encumbrance. Decisions were reached instantaneously. Orders were immediately carried out. Arrivals in Administrative Suspension were exceptional. The Préfecture itself was kept up. Ceilings were not permitted to crumble, nor staircases to collapse. You have doubtless had sufficient... er... 'time' to observe the sad state of disrepair of the Préfecture. And decay grows apace. Certain people maintain – I am but citing them – that a firmer hand on the tiller... But shh!"

"Whaddideesay?" Max asks Seymour.

"He says things are fucked up here. We need a lawyer to tell us that?"

Advocate's voice, at the beginning rusty like a tool long unused (the Five even wonder if they aren't his first audience in decades), gradually recovers professional eloquence as he examines the causes for the sad administrative decline.

He incriminates the system of promotion. Each promotion, he explains to his restless captive audience, brings with it not only an enlarged sphere of authority but also more bits of memory of a past existence, thousands of additional scrambled jigsaw puzzle pieces belonging to a set of a billion billion pieces of everything ever seen or felt in a previous lifetime.

"And that reward (some would say curse, but shh!) is the basis of the temptation, the terrible disruptive temptation."

Stern-faced, Advocate lets go of the table and lifts his hands theatrically as though repelling temptation. He barely manages to maintain his balance.

"What, you wonder, is the nature of this temptation? For functionaries of weak character the temptation is to dwell inwardly, trying to fit the disparate fragments of memory into coherent scenes of past existence. You will ask: what scenes? Scenes of joy? I reply: scenes of joy, yes, but principally scenes of transgression (although it is true that joy and transgression are not mutually exclusive, far from it). What motivates, you wonder, the quest for memories of transgression?"

Advocate breaks off dramatically and stares at the Five who don't ask or wonder anything at all. They sit slumped with glazed eyes in their chairs, perfectly indifferent to the problems of the Administration, waiting for Advocate to focus on their own problems. But Advocate continues on his single track.

"Transgression, of course, explains the presence of the functionaries here. Their quest for memory of that transgression is a quest for absolution. Absolution and with it the supreme reward of release from this joyless place into blessed void. But for absolution there must be contrition."

Advocate clasps his hands and bows his head. He tries, unsuccessfully, to force his stiff features into a contrite expression. Then he looks up with a successful expression of despair and questions his clients rhetorically.

"How, though, can there be contrition for a forgotten act? Hence the temptation to piece the bits of memory together into the configuration of that sin, an operation we call familiarly, 'walking the inner corridors'. But – my central point – this self-centered inward gaze inevitably results in gross neglect of administrative duties."

Advocate pauses to clear his throat and blow his nose, like a trumpet.

"Whaddideesay?" Max asks.

"I wasn't really listening," says Helen apologetically.

"Nothing to do with us," says Seymour, not knowing how wrong he is.

Advocate examines his handkerchief, thrusts it into a pocket and resumes.

"Inward vision blinds one to the external world. But without outward vision, without constant attention to humdrum detail, the struggle against attrition and entropy (which sap the base of all structures in the universe) is impossible. In theory, single-minded concentration on administrative duty on the functionaries' part would ensure the defeat of dust, ensure that no file would ever be hopelessly misplaced, no corridor below be allowed to collapse, no gross errors involving the processing of Arrivals be allowed to occur. Such, alas, is not the case."

Advocate makes a broad concessive gesture, again endangering his stability.

"I anticipate your question. Are there no sanctions, you wonder, for neglect of administrative duties? I reply: sanctions exist of course. This is a place of sanctions. Flagrant errors or omissions are sanctioned, severely sanctioned, by demotion and attendant loss of memory-bits, an excruciatingly painful suppression like the tearing away of flesh. But... but..."

Advocate breaks off, shoots fearful gazes to the left, to the right and above. He leans forward over the table and whispers: "It is clear that the number of memory bits possessed and with it the number of combinatory possibilities – and so the temptation of the inner gaze! – is directly proportional to the functionary's rank. But, assert some – how true this is I cannot or dare not say – here, as in all organizational structures, impunity is directly proportional to power. And at the higher decision-making levels (some dare to claim at the very highest level) omissions and errors, unsanctioned, have dire consequences. How, I ask you, can these high-placed functionaries possibly make judicious administrative decisions if they persist in walking the inner corridors, their vision focused on cryptic images like... like..."

Advocate stiffens. His eyeballs roll upward giving him the blank-eyed aspect of a statue. He whispers hoarsely: "... like... like... an evening cloud shaped like a knife, a grief-stricken female face, a high gray wall surrounding uniformed inmates, a lightning-blasted oak, a charging bull, a window open on a rose garden and the naked diseased woman's inviting voice behind, what woman, what woman? and vultures circling down on what dead prey? and, oh, the children, great-eyed with fear herded into the cattle cars, was I powerless witness or heartless participant?"

Advocate stands there like a blind seer, arms outstretched. He goes on and on in a monotonous drone for long minutes, undistracted by the audible restlessness of his audience, the creaking chairs and murmured protests.

Finally he breaks off the senseless jumbled catalogue. Outward sight returns to his blank eyes. He stares in bewilderment at the Five and the Common Room as if seeing them for the first time.

He mutters a dismissive: "Yes, yes, I wish to thank you for your kind attention."

Seymour and Louis and Margaret protest violently at this dismissal after nothing, nothing at all.

Advocate blinks heavily, peers at the Five one by one, then down at the papers on the table.

"Of course, of course, to be sure, the New Arrivals. Allow me to welcome you to the Préfecture de Police. I am both happy and honored..."

"You already welcomed us to the Préfecture de Police an hour ago," says Seymour. "And we're not New Arrivals, we're Old Arrivals."

"And, my God, getting older and older all the time," says Margaret.

"God? Time?" Advocate mutters.

Recognition and memory return. Advocate's focus is wholly outward now. He snaps into brisk efficiency and informs his clients that prior to a private interview with each of them in order to draw up elements of their defense, he is at their entire disposal to reply, to the best of his ability, to queries of collective interest, assuming they have such queries.

Oh they have, they have. The same questions are often phrased differently by the Five. Advocate sits down and notes them, in reduced form, in a spidery hand.

What are our chances of being transferred and when will the decision be reached? (M. Williams, L. Forster, S. Stein, M. Pilsudski, translated by H. Ricchi.)

This is Hell, isn't it? (S. Stein).

What did I do to deserve Hell? (S. Stein, M. Williams.)

If transferred will we be middle-aged or, worse, old and perhaps even senile? (M. Williams, L. Forster, S. Stein.)

If transferred will we meet certain loved ones we once knew out there? (M. Williams, L. Forster, S. Stein, M. Pilsudski, translated by H. Ricchi.)

Why do you all wear rubber gloves in our presence? (S. Stein.)

Why are there no novels here? (H. Ricchi.)

Advocate places his pen on the table. Pursing his lips, he stares down at the sheet.

"Allow me, if you will, to dispose of the more minor of your questions. Regarding books: a library with a sizable selection of volumes in French and English was once at the disposal of the Administratively Suspended. The collection has been inexplicably dispersed, no one knows where. Just as there was once a cinema, a well-equipped gymnasium, decent hot meals served with wine. Why these amenities are no longer available is not clear."

Advocate now addresses Question Four, no minor question: their age in the event of transfer.

Margaret interrupts him tearfully. "Who wants to go out there old?"

"Ah, on any terms, my dear, many people would." Advocate brushes dandruff from his shoulder. "Even if eighty, to be able to sit in sunshine eating plums and watching breakers and gulls for only a fraction of a heartbeat. Or even ninety and deaf, toothless and blind and vacuous, to be able to smell plums and feel the hot sun. One learns painfully to moderate one's expectations. But such moderation, it is true, does not concern you. Your demands have no reason to be moderate."

Advocate now explains in elaborate metaphoric terms what they already know and don't need explaining: that upon arrival in the Préfecture their stopped clock had been rewound and the hands set back to an advantageous early time. He holds up a warning forefinger and informs the Five that they age here as they had aged out there.

They don't need to be told that either. But what follows they hadn't known, had never dared to imagine.

"But when you are transferred to the outside world (as I sincerely trust you will, all my efforts are bent to that end), the biological clock – if I may be allowed to pursue the metaphor – will be set back to the age conferred upon you when you arrived here, in accordance with your sojourn date."

It's the first bit of good news in decades for four of the Five. Their joy isn't dampened by Advocate's information that once they are transferred to the world outside the aging process will go on, ceaselessly. The rewound clock will tick on and on as before, each tick marking loss of vital stored-up energy. The hands will chase each other again. One day the spring will go limp, the ticking will stop and the hands halt, for good this time.

That doesn't bother them. They aren't out for immortality. Seymour is surprised at Advocate's clock metaphor in this place without clocks or sense of time.

"As to Question Two, (will you, in the event of transfer, meet certain beloved individuals known in the former existence), I am happily in a position to state unequivocally: yes, absolutely yes, this meeting is guaranteed, programmed even."

Oh they feel so much better, nearly all of them.

Advocate continues. "Question Four: is this place Hell?"

His shaggy white eyebrows knit with the intensity of his reflection.

"Hell: the locus of Divine Punishment for sins committed in the previous existence. That punishment is part of the Divine Scheme, how could I, of all people, possibly deny that blatant fact? But the dull gray Préfecture scarcely corresponds, I think, to the classic image of Inferno. Where is the colorful animation, where is the warmth generated by eternal flames of lovely red? Or if the flames of burning brimstone, lovely blue? Where are the notorious female sinners, their unclad bodies in attractive postures of torment?"

Advocate shakes his head sadly and begins assembling his papers. "I believe I have touched upon all of your questions."

No, no, the principal one, they protest in chorus, remains unanswered: what are their chances of being transferred and when will the decision be reached?

Advocate ponders theatrically and finally pronounces: "The decision-making process is, as you see, underway. A favorable ruling is by no means absolutely excluded. That is, for those Arrivals for whom administrative records exist proving prior residence in Paris."

Max intercepts the dubious glance Advocate shoots his way.

"Whaddideesay?" Max asks Helen. "He said something about me, didn't he?"

"No, nothing at all about you, Max. He says there's a good chance we'll all be transferred."

A very kind and very poor translation, Seymour thinks.

Advocate beams feebly. "Having answered all your queries, to your satisfaction, I trust, I shall shortly proceed to a private interview with..." He shuffles through the pile, clicking his tongue with impatience, and finally chooses a sheet. He peers at it and resumes. "Yes, a private interview with, hem, Madame Ricchi and... er... Mademoiselle Williams and... and... ah... Messrs. Stein and Forster."

Seymour wonders what invention Helen will come up with to explain why Advocate hasn't bothered placing Max on the list of Suspended Arrivals to be defended.

He's on the point of reminding Advocate that he hadn't answered his question about the rubber gloves when the door opens and Sadie, who must have been listening at it, orders the Five to return to their sleeping quarters and await their turn to be interviewed.

Chapter 31

Systems Of Defense

Hours later, Sadie yanks open the men's door and barks: "Number Three!"

Nobody budges. After all this time they still don't remember their single-digit administrative identity. It must have been easier in Nazi concentration camps, Seymour reflects, the number tattooed on your forearm for convenient reference.

"You!" she commands, pointing at Louis Forster.

Louis sits down opposite Advocate, rehearsing in his mind his defense for his unforgivable behavior in Paris back then. He'd been working on it for decades. Once he's transferred, he means to say, he'll make up for everything, delete all those wrong things done back then, by proposing to Louise over the bouquet which will be for her and no one else and there won't be a hotel room till after the marriage.

But before he can so much as open his mouth, Advocate informs him, to his astonishment, that his behavior in Paris was irreproachable and his past elsewhere heroic but that the... er... how shall we put it?... the alleged irregular activities engaged in publicly with (he pokes about in the cards) ah, yes, allegedly, with Mademoiselle Williams, Margaret, constitutes, if the accusation is founded, a grave moral breach, in the eyes of the Administration.

In the eyes of the Administration, he repeats, winking at Louis with a tolerant rheumy wink of I-was-young-once-too-in-a-better-place-than-this complicity. And unfortunately there were at least a dozen witnesses. Could Mr... um... Mr Forster perhaps, in the interest of his defense, describe in detail the alleged action involving himself and Mademoiselle Williams?

Unthinkable. Louis can't possibly do that. He doesn't remember anything, he says, although he does, he does, all the time. Again he takes the blame on himself. He must have forced her to do what she did although he can't remember what it was she did and he did. He didn't know what he was doing. He didn't remember anything.

Advocate purses his lips.

"Yes, of course. We shall plead temporary mental aberration due to the stress of transfer and of course emphasize your heroic past in Cuba and the Philippines as well as your irreproachable behavior in Paris. Thank you."

Seymour Stein is next. As soon as he sits down opposite Advocate he stammers out a long-rehearsed justification of his wrongdoing. He explains why he'd left France and Marie-Claude, with every intention of returning but his fiancée – practically his fiancée – had never answered his letters, no fewer than six of them. In a sense he was the one who had been abandoned. It was true that perhaps it had been a mistake, in his very first letter, to have told her the way to postpone the baby and the address where it could be done.

Advocate peers down at the sheet of paper. He opens his rubbered hands in a gesture of regretful helplessness in the matter. No charges concerning this obscure personal matter had been brought against Monsieur Stein. The matter, then, is irrelevant to their present concern. What has to be disproved or relativized is the five-week middleman job waiting for distressed female clients in the rear of a café. (His tax evasion is a venial offense.)

Seymour tells the Advocate that an Irish teaching colleague had thrown the job his way at a time he was dead broke. The operator preferred foreigners for the middleman function. Foreigners could be expelled if they were caught so they were less likely to blab. Seymour tries to justify his role by hunger and, on an impersonal historical scale, the later legality of the intervention (even reimbursed by the Sécurité Sociale) and by the cruelty of forcing use of clothes hangers and forks upon the distressed women, amateur jobs often resulting in fatal infection.

But all the while that he tries to justify his involvement with the angel-maker he thinks of how they're accusing him of the wrong thing, like a man who cuts his parents' throats and is brought to trial for having stolen the fatal knife.

Advocate seems unimpressed by Seymour's arguments. He screws his eyes up to the ceiling, ponders and then outlines a possible defense.

"You knew a woman back in America (or perhaps here in France) who exited in atrocious agony, victim of an amateurish surgical intervention. It left a permanent psychological scar on you. You accepted the job largely out of altruism, to spare other women that same horrible fate."

"No," says Seymour, "I never knew any such woman."

"Allow me to suggest that, in the interest of your defense, it would be strongly advisable for you to have known this unfortunate woman, Madeleine, shall we call her?"

When Seymour leaves the Common Room Sadie jerks open the women's door and commands: "Number Two!"

Margaret, pale and trembling, steps out into the corridor. Sadie scowls at her.

"Are you deaf? I said Number Two. You are Number One."

She strides to the bed where Helen is seated and commands: "Number Two!"

No reaction.

"Number two!" Sadie repeats in an even sterner voice.

"Are you talking to me? My name isn't Number Two. My name is Mrs Ricchi."

She goes on reading.

"Your advocate is waiting for you. I presume that you desire transfer."

"I desire nothing."

She turns a page and bends her head over it.

Seymour, who overhears the exchange, wonders if by "I desire nothing" Helen means to express superior detachment or her desire for the nothing of exit.

"This is pure obstruction," says Sadie. "I will summon you again shortly, for the very last time." She turns her back on Number Two and calls out: "Number One!"

Like Louis and Seymour, Margaret thinks she's being accused of the wrong things when Advocate asks her to justify minor acts like borrowing things in shops and posing for "naughty postcards" (he even wonders if she could describe them in order for him to determine the exact degree of naughtiness). He doesn't say a word about her leaving Jean, not a word about his threat of suicide, perhaps carried out, and if so, indirect murder on her part.

What Advocate is interested in, very interested in, is the alleged irregular activities engaged in publicly with Monsieur Forster, Louis. They constitute, if the accusation is founded, a grave moral breach in the eyes of the administration.

In the eyes of the administration, he repeats, tolerantly. Unfortunately there were at least a dozen alleged witnesses. Could Mademoiselle Williams, in the interest of her defense, describe in detail the alleged action involving herself with Monsieur Forster, Louis?

Margaret plunges her face into her palms. Barely audible, she mumbles that if there were all those witnesses then it must have happened, whatever it was she did and he did, she can't remember what it was, but it was her fault, not his, she was sure of that. She starts weeping.

Advocate stretches out a consoling hand. At the last moment he pulls it back and contents himself with safer verbal consolation.

"We shall plead temporary mental aberration due to the stress of scandalously incompetent transfer. One last thing now, my dear. Could you possibly try to justify your alleged nudity in broad daylight in the Boulevard Saint Michel fountain in the early afternoon of July 23, 1937?"

"I just remember I'd had a lot of wine and it was a hot day so I took off my shoes and stockings and waded in the fountain."

"As who would not have done in such circumstances. The accusation, though, is of total nudity. Could you describe in detail, my child, the stages of disrobing and the justification for each of these stages?"

"Well, like I said, it was a hot day and they were all applauding."

"'They'?"

"The people in front of the fountain."

"How many people?"

"A few dozen at the beginning. Maybe a hundred or so at the end."

"I can well imagine the scene. The police report speaks of a quasi-riot. And the unruly mob doubtlessly incited you to continue disrobing, perhaps threatening you if you refused, we shall say. Yes, excellent, excellent. An act committed under duress and constraint. What garment followed the stockings, my child?"

"My skirt, I think. It was wet anyhow."

"And then?"

"My blouse."

"Which you slowly unbuttoned?"

"It was an off-the-shoulder blouse, I think."

"Which you slowly pulled over your head, then. Next, I imagine, you slowly divested yourself of your... ah... bra?"

"No, Maître, I never wore a bra in those days."

"Understandably. And then, finally, finally, you slowly, very slowly, reluctantly but under constraint, slowly divested yourself of your... ah... panties."

"No, Maître, I didn't."

"But this changes everything! Everything! It was not total nudity then. Even though, to be sure, the flimsy material of the undergarment in question, wet and so translucent, must have clung revealingly and... But technically not total nudity. So, then, you modestly retained your... ah... panties."

"No, Maître, I never wore panties in those days either."

She stammers that in a tiny voice and blushes deep gray.

"But I do now, Maître, I swear I do. I've completely changed, oh please please tell the Administrative Review Board that, Maître. Whenever I talked to Louis Forster it was about religion. He taught me prayers. I made a solemn vow to God to be pure and I have been pure for twenty-five years, saving myself for Jean Hussier after we marry. Why I've even refused to dance for the Prefect, maybe a hundred times I've refused, even though he says that if I dance I'll be transferred."

Advocate stares down at the card, stares and stares. He doesn't even blink. Finally he says: "My dear child, would you kindly repeat what you have just said?"

"Louis and I talked about religion and that's all."

"More power to both of you for such commendable restraint. I was referring, however, to the invitation to dance, on the part of the Prefect if I understood correctly, which is not certain."

"He keeps on asking me. He used to, that is. I used to meet him in the corridors. Unless it's a dream. I have these awfully funny dreams."

"Surely a dream, my dear. Not even the Prefect would dare... A minor question: did the Prefect (in the dream, of course) say 'for' or 'with'? 'Dance for me' or 'Dance with me'?

"He said all the time, 'Dance for me.'"

"A foolish question on my part. 'Dance for me' would in any case quickly become 'Dance with me.' The climactic dance. Unthinkable. A dream beyond doubt."

Advocate takes a blank sheet and starts writing intensely. He breaks off and looks up.

"Still another idle question, my dear. Were you never – in your dreams, of course – tempted, in exchange for transfer, to... ah... accede to the Prefect's invitation? To dance for him? Perhaps even with him? A short dance here for youth and a new lifetime out there?"

"Oh yes, Maître, tempted every time. But not just for me. Tempted for the others too. I'd do so many good things for suffering people out there. And for the suffering people here. I'd ask for Louis to be transferred and Seymour and Helen and Max too. But it might be a trap, I thought. I thought: maybe I'm being tested. I prayed to God all the time to give me a sign. I still do."

"And what, if I may ask, do your fellow Administratively Suspended advise you to do?"

"Oh they don't know about it. I never told any of the others about it. I don't know why not but I didn't."

Advocate nods and returns to his sheet for a minute. He lays his pen down and smiles at Margaret intensely.

"You may go now, my dear child. And thank you for everything."

It's Helen's turn, for the second time. Sadie barks out her number. There's no response. The women's room is empty.

Number Two is jeopardizing the operation of Administrative Review for all concerned, says Sadie.

At that, the others scatter in the corridors and call "Helen! Helen!" despite the terrible echo. Several times Seymour shouts at the top of his lungs: "Goddam it, Helen, you're jeopardizing the operation of Administrative Review for all concerned!" He gets no answer. None of them do. They return.

Number Two has seriously jeopardized the operation of Administrative Review for all concerned, Sadie tells them, with apparent satisfaction.

A few minutes later Hedgehog and Philippe come back with the wheelchair. Advocate is wheeled away, scribbling intensely. Just before the wheelchair turns the corner, the wind rises and a few papers fly away. Hedgehog doesn't notice them.

Seymour trots down the corridor and picks them up. He wants to cry: "Maître, Maître, your papers!" Maybe he would be rewarded by special eloquence before the Administrative Review Board for the gesture. But by the time Seymour gets to the corner, the wheelchair has disappeared. He folds the papers and puts them in his pocket.

Hours later Helen returns to the Common Room where the others are staring in deep depression at their particular version of Paris, so close and so distant.

They're furious at her. She's jeopardized the operation of Administrative Review for the rest of them, they say.

There's nothing to jeopardize, she says and goes into her room.

Lying on his bed, Seymour remembers the two papers Advocate had lost. He pulls them out of his pocket and stares at them. One is covered with doodles of naked faceless women with prominent nipples and muffs, probably done while pretending to listen to his clients' stories.

The second sheet is covered by an urgent scrawl.

Attention of Sub-Prefect Marchini

Suspicions verified. Number Four object of dance-ploy on the part of H. as with Number Three of April 1922 batch. This time we must maneuver correctly. An opportunity that may never again present itself. Suggest following strategy: contact the other...

The sentence breaks off in suspenseful suspension at the bottom of the sheet. It probably continues on another sheet, maybe the one Advocate was furiously scribbling on when the wheelchair disappeared around the corner.

So what Advocate advocates remains (for the time being) a mystery.

Clearly it's some sort of a plot.

At long last, some may think.

Chapter 32

Four Now

The day Advocate staggered into their half-lives the shop windows outside had been full of tinsel. So his coming, like a besotted mage, had been the greatest of Christmas presents. Good or bad, a foreseeable end to Administrative Suspension.

"The decision-making process is, as you see, under way," he'd said.

Even a negative decision, they'd ended by convincing themselves, would be better than a continuation of the unbearable wait. Most of them assume the decision will be reached in a matter of days, a week at the most, if Helen's refusal to cooperate hadn't jeopardized things.

Days go by, then weeks, never so slowly.

They glare at Helen and hardly talk to her.

"When are things going to start happening here?" the men say endlessly.

Now they're into seasons of waiting, frustrated bored spectators of what they've witnessed over thirty times already from the wrong side of the glass.

For Max the same timeless empty streets.

For the others, the same old year, 1900, 1937, 1951, being celebrated as new by the same imbecilic drunken crowd. Monomaniac trees breaking into green again. Same summer lovers, made faithful by repetition, strolling alongside the Seine. Same Bastille Day fireworks (what's to celebrate?) with their colored arabesques known by heart.

Everything known by heart, like the shape of the puddle of blood the dead girl is lying in and even the license-plate of the Citroën Traction that killed her (HL48275) or the crowds scanned down to the last face and never the right face, so why go on scanning?

Can't stand it, can't stand it anymore. Can't stand you either anymore, or you or you or you. Mutual, mutual, returned with interest, compounded quarterly. They'd forced themselves to tolerate each other during that long wait. But now within sight of an end to it one way or the other they can't control their hostility.

Max's snores and farts keep Seymour awake. He's lived with it for decades but now it becomes intolerable and one night he heaves shoes at it. Max heaves shoes back and catches Louis on the side of the head with one of them. It degenerates into a free-for-all.

Helen tries to intervene as usual. The three men stop grappling and turn on her. It's all your fault, they yell. Helen doesn't answer. She returns to her room where Margaret yells that it's all her fault. Helen doesn't answer. She returns to bed, presses the wax plugs in her ears and turns to the wall. Margaret's sobs get through to her anyhow, for hours.

Religion (or lack of it) becomes an explosive issue here as out there. Max calls Seymour a Jew bastard at the slightest pretext. Louis tries to convert Seymour to fundamentalist Christianity. Seymour ends by shouting that he's fed up with religion, any religion, all religion, coming out of his ears. Louis knocks him down and looks aghast at the unchristian thing he's done. They wait for Helen to reestablish peace. But by this time Helen has given up intervening. The men resent her new indifference and let her know it.

Religion again when Louis and Max and Margaret find another reason for blaming Helen. Pray, pray, for God's sake and for our sake. She refuses to get down on her knees. Atheist, they cry, an atheist like you doesn't deserve transfer. Why you who don't pray and not us who do?

Time creeps on ponderously like a glacier.

Each time they awake, the three men say, more and more dully: "When are things going to start happening here?"

Suddenly things start happening, but not the way they'd hoped. One night deep concussions wake them up. They rush out into the windy corridor, scantily clad, even Margaret. Her pajama-blouse is unbuttoned and a tremendous gust unveils the splendor of her breasts, last seen by Louis on the day of resurrection so long ago, no such splendor seen in this place since. For a dazzled second, till her hands eclipse that splendor, he forgets what's brought him out into the midnight corridor.

Nothing more happens and they return to bed. Louis can't sleep.

In the morning they see a long fine crack in the wall opposite their rooms and they remember the collapsed floors they'd seen way below long ago. Will Advocate come before their own floor disintegrates?

One day no meals are served. The next day, Gentille shows up tearfully with her trays. Something went wrong in the kitchens, she can't remember what.

Then the toilets in their WC back up. Impossible to negotiate their corridor, almost impossible to breathe. Finally a team of cleaning women and two plumbers lift the stinky siege.

A day later the bulbs start expiring. It's not the familiar death-bed gasps of a solitary bulb, but all of the bulbs in the Living Quarters and the corridors, mass demise, gasping for current and then out and the Five stand in absolute darkness.

For the first second, Margaret takes it for private definitive darkness, exit, the Administrative Review Board has met and decided. Terrorized, she appeals, not to God but to the Prefect, for a stay of execution, she'll dance for and with him and even more, anything for light.

Seconds later, light returns.

She thinks her promise has been heard. She's deeply grateful. Grateful and can't help thinking of greater subjects for gratitude: real light, sunlight on her face. But she's frightened now at the price and steps back from it when she realizes the blackout had been collective and reversible.

Again, Gentille doesn't show up with their meals, this time two straight days. They feel giddy. They'd never imagined they could long for soggy grated cat-puke carrots.

Finally they hear the familiar squeal of Gentille's food cart in the corridor. The girl, as close to tears as she can get, stammers a confused story of total confusion in the kitchens. Four of the Five throw themselves at the food and almost come to blows over whose tray is whose. "Aren't you going to eat?" they ask Helen between mouthfuls. She says she's not hungry. They stop chewing and gulping for a second. They're offended at this additional proof of her superiority. Then they go back to chewing and gulping.

A few minutes later on her bed Helen can hear them squabbling over her tray of food.

That night Helen wakes up suddenly. She doesn't hear Margaret's heavy breathing. Maybe that's what woke her. She calls. Getting no answer she switches on the light. Margaret's cot is empty. She steps outside and sees Margaret turning at the far end of the corridor. Helen follows her down a tangle of corridors. Margaret has the rigid gait and the outstretched arms of the sleepwalker. She halts at the frontier of a dark zone of dead bulbs.

Drawing closer Helen hears Margaret's imploring voice and thinks she can make out in the unlighted zone a shadowy figure darker than the surrounding shadows.

As Margaret advances into the darkness, Helen catches up and places her hand on her arm.

"Margaret, wake up."

The shadowy figure has disappeared, if it had really been there in the first place. Margaret stares at Helen with furious widening eyes, breaks free and pushes Helen violently away. Helen staggers back. Her head bangs against the wall.

When she picks herself up she sees Margaret, past the zone of darkness now, running down the corridor and shouting, "Come back! I will, I will!" and arousing the babbling echoes, "...ill...ill...ill..."

Helen touches her head. Her fingers are gray with blood. She returns to her room.

From the other side of the partition she hears Louis tossing in his cot and mumbling contrition.

Max starts howling his death howl.

Seymour yells at Max to stop howling for holy Christ's sake.

Louis shouts that this is the last time Stein will ever take the name of the Lord in vain.

Sounds of a scuffle, breakage, cries.

Thumps like a throat-wielded head systematically banged against the floor.

Helen removes the top sheet from her bed and ties it into a sling, which she passes over her head onto her shoulder. She fills the sling with her toilet affairs, clothes, bottles of water, a volume of parliamentary debates, February-May 1903. She would have taken food but her tray is in the brawling men's room and anyhow they'd probably devoured everything by now.

She rolls the blanket and the bottom sheet in the thin mattress. She embraces the mattress in her thin arms, clutching the pillow in her left hand. Out in the corridor now, she can hear Seymour's strangled voice between bangs crying her name for help. She moves away from the Living Quarters.

Hours later Margaret returns to the women's room. She stares at Helen's cot and then goes behind the toilet screen. She hammers on the partition and cries to the men to come, quick.

Badly battered, Max and Seymour and Louis burst into the room. Margaret points dramatically at the bare cot with the sagging metal mesh. She wails that it's not just the bed-clothes, her toothbrush and her comb and her towel and the book she was reading, they're all gone too, all her stuff is gone, she's gone too and for good. Oh God, I'm alone now. She's been transferred. She let herself be transferred and didn't even s-say g-goodbye to me.

She stumbles out into the corridor and shouts: "Helen! Helen! Come back sweetheart!"

As though, Seymour reflects, if it were true that she'd been transferred and that she could hear Margaret's ghostly voice from that unimaginable distance she'd allow herself to be distracted from the real things out there.

Margaret goes on shouting "Helen! Helen!" The echo, as usual, gives her "Hell...In... Hell... In...Hell..." At that Margaret breaks down, throws herself into Louis' arms and sobs, "H-Hell for us, not for Helen, she's been transferred out there and she never even p-prayed, it's unfair, unfair..."

Louis feels her firm breasts heaving against the region of his solar plexus. He shamefully reacts to it but how can he reject her? She's so badly in need of consolation.

Seymour consoles her too. He strokes her head and her long wild marvelous hair, adding calming words to the effect that if Helen had been transferred she wouldn't have taken keepsakes like a piss-stained mattress with her. If she took it and all her things it was to set up in another room far from them because... because they'd all behaved like bastards to her, me the worst of all.

None of them protest. For a few seconds tacit acknowledge-ment of their collective guilt reconciles the men who had just been battering one another.

"My God, she hasn't eaten for three days now," Margaret cries. "We've got to find her and bring her food."

"What food?" says Seymour. "We ate all of the food, including her food."

Louis breaks free of Margaret and they all start quarreling about whose idea it had been in the first place to eat Helen's food.

Finally Seymour says: "Let's stop fighting. Helen wouldn't have liked us to fight like this."

At Seymour's mortuary tense, Margaret bursts into tears again. "She's going to starve to death. Maybe she's dead already."

"No, wait, listen," says Seymour, trying to sound convinced by his argument. "She must have made an arrangement for Gentille to bring her food. So Gentille knows the room she's in. We'll go there tomorrow and apologize."

The others pretend to be convinced and they go to bed.

Hours later, Gentille rolls her food-cart into the women's room, awakening Margaret. The girl sees the bare cot and exclaims "O! O!" in shocked surprise. She goes on exclaiming "O! O!" in the men's room.

So the Four know they'll have to find Helen on their own if they want to be Five again.

They mold their food into elephant balls, put new batteries in their flashlights and set out in different directions.

Chapter 33

Two Ways Out

Awakens, huddled on the mattress in a dark stretch of corridor. Barely has the strength to force her gummy eyelids open. Has a confused memory of what seems years of marching down corridors, high-ceilinged corridors, low-ceilinged corridors, stagnant silent corridors, corridors swept by sudden howling gales that buffet her and her sail-like bed-things from wall to wall. All those staircases, too, craning her neck over the end of the rolled-up mattress but sometimes missing a step (or the step itself missing), pitching forward and surrendering to sleep in the unimproved posture of fall.

Despite all those corridors and staircases, though, maybe she'd put no distance between herself and the others, maybe circling back towards her point of departure, because over and over she'd heard, or imagined she'd heard, the terrible fragmented echo of their pursuing voices calling her name.

She struggles to her feet now and rolls up the bed things. When she picks up the pillow, more feathers seep out from the big rent made by a splintered banister at the very beginning of her flight. The pillow is practically empty by now.

Stumbling out of the zone of darkness she observes with relief that the walls are free of the distinctive signs of the Five (Louis' two linked circles, Margaret's heart, Seymour's child face with dot-eyes, Max's doughnut, her own H). So she's far from them after all, in an unexplored part of the Prefecture, for there are none of the signs of their suspended predecessors either.

No, not unexplored. On a further wall she makes out the familiar hand-printed admonition, the truth of which she'd long been convinced of: OUT IS A DOUBLE CROSS.

The corridor turns. Ahead, she sees two great crossed timbers barring the way. She has a faint memory of this. A dream? Something recounted by somebody long ago? On one of the timbers words in dripping tar warn of danger and forbid access.

Despite (or because of) the warning, she squeezes through into a zone of destruction. The walls are badly cracked. The floor is littered deep with plaster dumped by the ruined sagging ceiling. Doors are askew on a single hinge. Strangely, the wickered bulbs are unaffected by this destruction and illuminate it. Ahead there's a replica of the first crossed timbers. It comes as no surprise. Picking her way through the rubble, she reaches it and reads the same tarred warning, this one with extra exclamation marks.

Again she's impelled to go beyond this second, even more imperious, warning, as though to reconstruct the half-forgotten dream or recover all of the long-ago account of this place.

She finds herself standing precariously in the midst of much worse destruction. It's incredible that the fragile bulbs had survived to shine on what looks like the aftermath of an aerial bombardment: blasted ceiling, gaping cracks in the walls, the debris-littered floor buckled in places like geological strata. She struggles forward and stops at a great chasm with a big lopsided staircase full of rubble. It plunges down and down past the light into darkness. Just looking down at it makes her dizzy.

Her foot displaces a brick. It tumbles into the dark chasm. Five seconds later the faint impact fifty feet below sets off chaos above. The ground trembles. Debris starts raining down. Helen deploys the mattress and hoists it on her head for protection. Her foot slips and starts a minor avalanche. Blinded by the drooping mattress she teeters and falls forward on the first staircase steps.

The mattress cushions the shock, a positive point. But then it slides bumpily down the stairs like a sled. She grips the sides as it gains momentum. The broken steps blur with her acceleration. They vanish as she plunges into the zone of darkness.

The mattress, like a magic carpet, takes off and she sails into the dark void and sinks down, knowing that this is the long-desired exit. She ought to be glad. Instead, she has visions of unrelated things enjoyed in a previous lifetime: yellow tulips, sledding in Québec, making love with Richard in the honeymoon hotel room with pictures of soaring birds on the pale blue walls, the Seine at sunrise, things that of course she'd already lost. But she can't help reacting to their second, definitive, loss as memories.

Her five-second scream is cut off abruptly by arrival below, not far from the badly fragmented brick.

Margaret is the one who finds Helen, poorly guided to her by the feathers that had leaked out of the rent pillowcase. Pebbles, the classic resort in labyrinths, would have done a better job than feathers. Pebbles are heavy and stay put even in drafty not to say gale-swept corridors. But feathers, not pebbles, are what you find in pillowcases. So Margaret has to make do with feathers.

Finally, days later, on the point of collapse, Margaret follows the last of them. She goes past the hand-printed warning that out is a double-cross and soon sees what Helen had twice seen blocking the way. Like Helen, she ventures past the timbers into growing ruin. She halts at the broken staircase that Helen had seen.

But she sees far below what Helen couldn't possibly have seen (except as sinister prescience): a pool of light from a naked dangling bulb and in the center of the pool of light, on a vast heap of books, papers and files splattered by the peculiar shade of gray that blood has here, Helen, doll-size seen from that height, splattered with blood too and motionless, slouched forward, her face hidden.

Margaret's scream is a whisper. She's lost her voice crying out Helen's name for days in all those corridors and staircases. Soon she even loses the whispered screams.

Feathers had guided her to Helen's fall. The same feathers guide her back, half-mad, to the others. Louis immediately dials 000 on the phone reserved for emergencies. A crackling female voice says something unintelligible and the line goes dead. Louis tries again and again, then Seymour, then Max, again and again. Max cries repeatedly: "It's an emergency, goddam you." Finally, bawling, he punches the phone all his might, even though such willful destruction of State property can cost him thirty points. The pain distracts him from his grief for a while.

The Four set out with ropes, an improvised stretcher and food too, enough for Five, more as a gesture than out of necessity. Margaret had estimated the fall to have been a hundred feet and ending with gallons and gallons of blood.

The Four too go past the two crossed timbers and see her far below as Margaret had seen her; her back to them, slouched forward motionless, face concealed, on the mattress crowning a great heap of files with dozens of books and with blood on her and on the files and papers but not on the books.

They cry her name but get no response except the terrible echo her name has given them for all of this lifetime.

They accuse themselves of having driven her to this bloody death. They weep and eulogize, evoking her qualities. Seymour chokes up when he remembers that he'd almost fallen in love with her. At least he'd tried to. He wants to console the others and himself by saying that now she's where she'd always wanted to be but he chokes up on that to.

They can't leave her there. Louis is about to attach the rope to a broken pillar when they see Helen's hand rise and push aside a dangling lock of gray hair.

Joyous, they know that she's alive but ignoring them as punishment.

Guilty, they cry apologies.

Helen, answer us.

Answer us, Helen.

Please, please.

Finally, her head jerks up as if hearing them for the first time. She turns around and looks up. Her face is strangely luminous beneath the blood and the dirt. She gives a little wave and returns to her nearsighted crouch over the book on her lap. They can see it now.

They yell down to her. Are you all right? All that blood. She looks up at them again with, perhaps, an expression of annoyance. In a tiny abstracted voice she says: a long fall but cushioned by the mattress and all these files, so nothing worse than a very bad nose bleed and maybe a sprained ankle. Could they throw down something to eat? Did they bring her reading glasses, maybe? She hadn't expected to find these marvelous books.

She returns to the book.

They toss down elephant balls. One of them lands a few feet from her with a plop on an open book. They hear her little cry of annoyance and see her limp over to the book and carefully clean the soiled pages. Then she devours the flattened elephant ball. She limps over to the other flattened elephant balls and devours them.

She returns to the book she'd been reading.

Louis secures the rope and goes down to her hand under hand. The others above see his eloquent gestures of persuasion. She doesn't seem anxious to go up to them. They call down to her, coaxing and imploring.

Finally she slings the pouch over her shoulder and fills it with carefully selected books. It takes her a long time to pick and choose. The others hear Louis promise he'll return for all the other books.

He ties the rope around her waist and climbs up to the others. Weeping and laughing, they all heave her up out of the depths.

They kiss and hug her but gently as though she could break like glass. She's covered with dirt. When she eagerly shows them the books, dirt pours off them. They wonder at it. Oh the dirt, she says. Yes, in all the rooms she'd visited, the books had roughly concealed great heaps of dirt. She starts talking about those books: complete sets of Balzac and Dickens and Victor Hugo and...

They interrupt her. Of course it's the dirt that interests them, all that pay dirt in all those rooms.

Yes, she says, impatient at the interruption, the tunnel they'd been looking for a long time ago must be somewhere in that corridor, of course it's...

She breaks off. She can't bring herself to extinguish their shining faces – Margaret's above all – with "it's a trap." She completes her sentence with a lamely inadequate "... of course it's very nice."

She returns to the important thing. So not only the complete works of Balzac and Dickens and Victor Hugo, but also poetry anthologies and, greatest of all, the complete plays of Shakespeare, a scholarly annotated edition.

They (the Four) badly want to explore the depths, but they're short of food and anyhow they'll need tools and rope ladders for the job. They rein in their impatience and turn back to the Living Quarters, bearing Helen on the stretcher like an injured queen.

She tries to go on reading Dickens. With the jolts and the dim light she can salvage no more than three or four words at a time. They urge her to rest her eyes. They can't understand that any moment now the trap – her own particular custom-designed trap – could spring and all those pages go blank, or she would awaken, tortured, out of the marvelous dream.

At one turn of a corridor they see on a wall the familiar words: OUT IS A DOUBLE CROSS.

No dour warning now but fabulous promise, what it had taken them a whole second lifetime to comprehend: the coded allusion to one of the rare landmarks in the maze, those two crossed timbers and to the way out located nearby.

Helen gives up trying to read. Anyhow, she's stored up all those images, more real than the corridors jerking past, more real, even, than what the Common Room window shows. She closes her eyes and sees, as if she were there, the gleaming cobblestones and the fog-wreathed gas lamps of London. She grips the book, her precious private portable way out.

That night, Margaret wakes up and notices a muffled light coming from the corner of the room. She gets up and sees that Helen is reading under the blanket with a flashlight. Approaching, she stumbles and nearly sprawls over the books on the floor. She caresses the outline of Helen's back.

"Just a minute," comes Helen's muffled abstracted voice.

It's a long minute. Margaret, practically naked, shivers and sneezes. At that, Helen switches off the flashlight and welcomes her, welcomes her very warmly, but the books she's taken to bed with her get in the way a little.

After, side by side, Margaret is afraid of the consequences.

"We mustn't ever again, Helen. That was the second time. There mustn't be a third time, Helen."

"All right," says Helen, with no more than a second's pause.

Margaret feels like weeping. She returns to her cot.

After a few seconds the muffled light comes back on under Helen's blanket.

The next day the four of them mold elephant balls and leave Helen in bed with her sprained ankle and her books.

With the long rope ladders Louis had spent the night knotting they descend into the depths. They discover rooms filled with great mounds of earth concealed by files and more novels. Grubbing in the dirt they come across blackened Roman coins and fragments of bones, possibly not human.

Finally they encounter dim footprints, maybe decades old, drowning in dust. They lead, one-way, to a door. On both sides a long-ago hand has scratched tiny double crosses, the final coded promise of escape on the other side of the door.

But how do they get to that other side? The door is massive steel, like a bank vault and the treasure it holds guarded by a clearly tamper-proof lock.

They stand there, stymied, until Louis says: "No problem, Stein. The girl who cleans the keys. Your sweetie-pie. Get your sweetie-pie to give us the key  
to..."

He steps back and wipes the dust off the number. "The key to Room 147."

That number sounds vaguely familiar to Seymour. But he can't pin it down.

He objects that Stupid is no sweetie-pie of his. He hasn't said a word to her for years. Nobody has, first out of kindness and then out of habit.

"You better start in now," says Max.

Chapter 34

The Two Keys

Willows outside are filling with green mist, so early April, when Seymour sets to work on coaxing the key to Room 147 from the cleaning girl. He's careful to wear his own key on a string outside his turtleneck sweater.

First he has to reconstruct their old relationship, like a survivor in a bomb-blasted city digging up serviceable bricks from the rubble of once-home to start all over again. Of course the relationship can't begin the way it had begun long ago. She's unlikely to upset a second pail of dirty water over his leg. She maintains too much distance from him now. But his renaming of her happens the same way as the original naming except that it takes much longer for her to acknowledge it.

She's on her knees, scrubbing the floor in mournful slow motion in the corridor opposite the men's room. Seymour stands on the threshold of the empty room. To leave the field free, the other men disappear now whenever she comes.

"Bonjour, Gentille."

She goes on scrubbing. She goes on scrubbing even when he repeats his greeting four or five times. It's like trying to get a reaction from the cots and the chest of drawers.

The following week he repeats the attempt. He tries again and again, week after week.

Except for Helen, the others harry Seymour for quick results. Helen doesn't know about the key strategy. They suspect that she'd disapprove if she found out. But she's not likely to find out. Helen has lost contact with the world outside printed pages. She doesn't even glance at window-framed Paris any more.

The chestnut trees outside are bearing candelabrums of white blossoms, so May, when the cleaning girl finally reacts to his patient "Bonjour, Gentille." She raises her head painfully and looks around for someone called "Gentille." It's true he hasn't called her that or anything else for years and her memory is terrible.

He repeats her name. Now she looks at him quickly and then down at the scrubbing brush. She seems to be making a terrific effort with her lips as though to break catgut stitches. Finally she whispers to the scrubbing brush: "Bonjour, Monsieur Saymore." Her memory isn't as bad as he'd thought. Then she grabs up her cleaning tools and flees.

The next day she pushes the food cart in like an automaton. She doesn't look at him. She doesn't reply to his greeting. Her lips move soundlessly, though. He thanks her for all that chocolate she used to bring him and hasn't for years. She still doesn't answer.

He keeps it up. She ends by a tight-lipped whispered "Bonjour, Monsieur Saymore" to the tray or the scrubbing brush each time he greets her with his "Bonjour, Gentille."

One day he finds a big lump of chocolate hidden under the hash. The chocolate is even moldier than before but it's a good sign. He gets rid of it in the WC.

Roses are blooming in the public gardens, so June, when she starts fearfully greeting him on sight.

Shortly after July Fourteenth rockets she begins telling him things she'd told him a hundred times years before. She recites the nicknames of the functionaries as if it's news to him: "Hedgehog", "Pédale", "Nasty", "Little Napoleon", etc. She tells him again and again about the ban on direct prayer and gazing out of the windows, about the hopelessness of love here.

He hardly listens to all that. But he listens very closely and with growing tension each time she recites her catalogue of chores: scrubbing the corridor floors, cleaning the toilets, doing the guest rooms, pushing the food carts, washing mountains of dishes.

She doesn't mention the big thing. Seymour doesn't dare allude to it and raise suspicions in her mind. Maybe she'd lost that chore and no longer has access to Turnkey's monstrous collection of keys. He feels faint at the thought.

There's another big thing she doesn't mention, a second big thing necessary, he thinks, for the success of the operation. He dares bring that particular subject up. One day he asks her if she still sees the sea in the window. She looks blank and asks: "What sea, Monsieur Saymore?"

She'd lost her sea, a vast thing to lose.

Not basically out of altruism, he tries to help her recover it. She'd once shared her poor scraps of memory of the sea with him. Couldn't the sharer of a deleted image reinstall it a little? He describes what she'd told him. Each time he evokes the village with the name of a saint in it, dunes and a lighthouse and sails on the horizon, she stares past him and then goes back to work, saying nothing.

But one day she stands on tiptoe in front of the wine-stained wall map of France, her face almost touching it, and starts scrutinizing the long Channel and Atlantic coastline. Her face and her body follow the plunge of the coastline from Finistère down to the Pyrenees. As she goes past Lorient, Nantes, La Rochelle, Bordeaux and finally reaches Biarritz and the Spanish border, her knees slowly flex. It's like a slow-motion preliminary to forbidden prayer.

"Are you looking for something, Gentille?"

"I lost something, Monsieur Saymore. Sometimes I remember remembering what it is, a little. But my head hurts so bad when I do."

Fingering the key about his neck, he tells her that it's her seaside village of course, the village with the name of a saint he'd drawn on a wall for her, the sea and the dunes and the lighthouse and the sails on the horizon, doesn't she remember? It's all in Room 1265.

He hopes she'll ask to see it again but she doesn't. She looks scared.

Maybe she has bad associations with that room or with the corridor outside it. Clump-jangle. Clump-jangle.

A few days after, Gentille complains about her work again. Finally Seymour dares ask the big question. He's rewarded.

"Oh yes, Monsieur Saymore, the keys. The keys are almost as bad as all those dirty dishes. Skull has hundreds of rooms and the keys hang on the walls from top to bottom, thousands of keys in every room and hundreds and hundreds of rooms. I have to climb a tall tall ladder to clean the high keys. I get dizzy. One day I'll fall. And when I finish dusting the last keys the first ones are dusty again. It's like the toilets and the corridors. Nothing ever stays clean."

But when Seymour asks her to lend him one of the keys, number 147, she turns her back on him, snatches up her pail and cleaning things and quickly leaves the room she's only half cleaned.

The next day, he says (forgetting that she has no sense of time) that the loan of the key to Room 147 would be for an hour or so, no longer. Nobody would ever know. Please.

It's the first time he's ever said please to her. She seems aware of the tremendous honor. She doesn't run away this time. She stares down at the floor and it tumbles out breathlessly: "No no Monsieur Saymore I couldn't do that Skull finds out everything he'd report me and I'd be punished again the Black Men would take me to the Hospital it hurts worse than having a tooth pulled and without a I don't remember the word a kind of needle so it won't hurt so bad they pull things out of your head and no needle O it hurts I don't want to lose the lighthouse and the sail on the horizon again."

It's a critical moment. Won't she remember that the lighthouse and the sail and lots of other precious things are stored safely outside her vulnerable brain, on the drawing in Seymour's room? Won't she ask again if she can accompany him to Room 1265 and look at the sea he'd drawn for her?

Seymour fingers his key, ready to hold it up, intricately indented like the Brittany coast, ready to say yes, Room 1265 against Room 147, his key against her key. It sounds like a fair swop, but of course it's not. His key opens on an incompetent sketch of an imagined sea. Her key opens on renewed life.

It doesn't happen that way. She goes wildly beyond his poor key. Like him, after all, she wants renewed life too.

"Take me with you, Monsieur Saymore."

Stammering that insanity, she goes over to the wall map, jabs her finger at it and stammers other things he can hardly make out with her gasped torrent of words. She seems to be begging him to accompany her, not to the room with the sketch of the sea, but to the real sea itself, to look for it with her, protecting her by his presence, exploring the coastline carefully, on foot, from Belgium to Spain, every indentation, every island, every estuary and fiord.

Seymour panics at the thought of it. He cries out stupidly: no, impossible, impossible. He pulls the key free from his neck. "Take it, you can have it." He throws it on the floor, unconditionally surrendering the one-dimensional sea of Room 1265, maybe in the hope that she'll be satisfied with that after all. He practically runs out of the room.

Why did he react like that? he'll wonder later. It was senseless.

When he returns a few hours later she's gone and the key is still lying on the floor. Max and Louis are there. Max almost lynches him when he tells them the story, part of the story, just that she wants to go with them outside, not the craziness of exploring 2000 kilometers of coast with him there.

"You said no, you dumb bastard?" Max bellows.

At the uproar, Margaret comes in. "Oh no, you didn't, Seymour, you didn't say no to her!"

Louis takes charge. "Say yes next time Stein, you hear? Say we'll take her. 'Course we won't." Louis adds that it's double good news. First, it means that she can get at the key. Second, if she wants to come with them – but of course they won't let her – it means that the door to Room 147 opens on the real tunnel and she knows that.

The Lord has answered our prayers, Louis says. He sinks to his knees and thanks Him at length.

Seymour keeps on asking for the key. But on his terms, not hers: limited escape for her via his key and the drawing it unlocks, not total escape through the tunnel with them. Why doesn't he say yes to her on any terms as Louis had ordered him to? Because this might be one of the traps? Punishment of his own making? Say yes to her and be condemned to trudge an endless coast with this zombie, himself a zombie? Or is it that he's unwilling to slam the steel door in her face at the last moment after that great promise?

Without mentioning her terms any more (she's no bargainer) Gentille keeps on saying no, begging his pardon in a stammer.

Seymour stops talking to her. He ignores her "Bonjour, Monsieur Saymore" when she comes in and doesn't answer her timid "Au revoir, Monsieur Saymore" when she leaves. He gets wild amounts of chocolate with each meal, including breakfast. He leaves them untouched on the tray. He feels terrible hurting her like that but she's holding back the key that opens a door on real life.

One day, instead of gathering up the dirty dishes, she sits down on the floor alongside the cart and her body shakes and shakes. She hasn't got the safety valve of tears so it goes on and on. Seymour's on the point of saying: don't try to cry, Gentille, of course I'll take you with me and of course we'll explore the coast line together for that village with the name of a saint in it.

But before he can lure her with that lie she looks up at him and says, yes, she'll give him the key to Room 147 just as soon as she can. She doesn't mention accompanying them. She doesn't even ask for the key to the room with the sketched sea. Seymour feels lousy at his total triumph.

Then it wears off and he feels a great surge of energy. He has to expend it or burst. He starts jogging then running down the corridors, maybe for the last time. He has a vision of Marie-Claude's street as he'd never been able to imagine it here, with a wealth of new-remembered details. A fat cat on a windowsill. A Delft clock with canals and a windmill in the antique dealer's window. A wall covered with graffiti: arrow-pierced hearts with entwined initials, a pencilled scribble, "Marie, je t'aime!!!" and a gigantic red phallus aimed like a Nazi V2 rocket at a high-placed constellation of stars in yellow crayon.

Lots of other things, a torrent of things for the slightest of which, before, he'd have got up in the middle of the night and trudged down miles of corridors to add it to the wall drawing he'd been laboring over for decades.

It doesn't matter now. He'll never go to that drab copy again. The original is awaiting him.

When he reaches the Living Quarters he waits for the others to gather in the Common Room in front of the window on Paris and announces the great news in a casual voice for greater impact: "Gentille says yes. She says she'll give me the key to Room 147."

Strange coincidence, before the others have time to react (with tears or cheers) Philippe minces in with his petulant tragic mask and informs them that Advocate will be arriving any minute now with great news.

"Great news for you," he says, staring at Louis. "Terrible news for me. Try to think of me back here a little," he says to Louis. "While you are savoring a dozen 00 Marenne oysters. With a minced shallot and vinegar sauce."

So it turns out that they won't need Gentille's key after all. They won't have to try to escape illicitly from this place and suffer the stipulated fatal consequences if they fail. An official door is about to open for them on the world of color and love that they can see, startlingly close it seems to them now, through the window.

Even Helen looks eager, jolted out of her world of books. It's an extremely encouraging sign for the others.

Chapter 35

Prelude To Transfer

Advocate finally comes to the Common Room where the Five have been waiting for hours at the table. He advances toward them, lopsided with a heavy clinking shopping bag. He strains it up onto the table, sluggishly rubs his hands with satisfaction and then like a magician solemnly produces six glasses, a bottle-opener and finally six bottles of beer.

Alcohol! It's a sudden materialization in this dusty space of a precious attribute of the world outside. Not alcohol for the sake of alcohol, but alcohol for the sake of celebration. Only one thing here deserves celebration: an end to here. Those celebrant bottles with the green label confirm, they think, Philippe's hint that they're on the verge of liberation. At that thought, they're on the verge of tears.

"I have excellent news," says Advocate, superfluously. He really tries to force his stiff features into happiness for them. "The Administrative Board has deliberated on your cases," he says, carefully avoiding looking at Max. He pauses to give emphasis to the great thing to come.

"I have pled your cases with more than usual eloquence. After careful deliberation, the Administrative Board has not rejected your petition for transfer."

They feel like shouting with joy. Even Helen, who lets her guard down for once.

All this suffering is behind them.

But the letdown is atrocious when Advocate tells them that the first Administrative Board has declared its incompetence and has submitted their case to a second Administrative Board.

A long stunned silence. Most of them are still on the verge of tears, of grief now. Not Seymour, though. He has another way out the others seem to have forgotten. Sarcastically, he asks how many Administrative Boards there are in all. Five hundred, maybe?

When Advocate assures him that there are no more than twenty Administrative Boards the others feel like going beyond the verge of tears. Margaret does go beyond it.

"But!" Advocate exclaims, painfully producing a joyous grimace. He opens his arthritic rubbered hands as though revealing a tiny precious gift, a five-carat diamond of consolation. But! But!! They will soon be outside, for one whole day. A compatibility test is automatically run on the Administratively Suspended once the primary Board has not rendered a negative judgment. Possibly more than one trial run if the results of the first, duly analyzed, leave room for doubt.

Joy, a little battered and bedraggled now, returns. One whole day outside! Then an alarming thought occurs to them. What if we're not compatible, Maître? they naturally want to know. Advocate assures them that there will be practically no pain involved in the regrettable case of incompatibility.

He changes the focus of the discussion. They will emerge wherever they like in Paris, intra muros, of course. Good Americans, in the opening stages of the process, go back strictly to the Paris of the twenty arrondissements. They must imagine very strongly the place and they will materialize there. It is useless imagining the Riviera with its white beaches or Brittany with its bracing cold breakers or... Advocate breaks off his pathetic private enumerations.

"I strongly recommend safe neutral things like Napoleon's Tomb or the Eiffel Tower."

Also this, he says. He pauses and stares at them solemnly. His bony forefinger wags warningly. No attempt to realize a face-to-face meeting with a once familiar individual will be successful during the trial run. On the contrary, such an attempt might well have negative results, radically negative. Events in the trial run are endowed with a certain, shall we say, plasticity. Hidden fears and unavowable desires might well shape that plastic material, resulting in... But enough. I trust you grasp my meaning. A word to the wise! ( _A bon entendeur, salut!_ ) He uncaps the bottles and fills the six glasses with mostly sad-looking foam.

They tilt their glasses to get the beer beneath the foam onto their tongues and down their parched throats, prelude to out there. Max spits it back into the glass. Seymour grimaces and stares at the green label with the small print sans alcool. Of course no alcohol in it. So little to celebrate. He goes back to the teetotaler's beer and tries hard to imagine real beer with its 6% charge of gaiety. The stuff really tastes awful, like everything else in this place.

But he's hours away from that real beer and (if in season) Marenne OO oysters imbedded in seaweed, and, better than all those after all trivial things, imbedded himself (O! O!) in his sweet darling precious Marie-Claude and joining in her love-cries. Already, Seymour has forgotten Advocate's warning.

Louis and Seymour and Helen stare at each another as the idea simultaneously occurs to them. It will be no trial run, whatever Advocate says. At the risk of punitive void, once out there they will stay out there. No punishment could be greater than return here. Margaret, like them, has no intention to return but she'd determined to do it in a legalistic way. She intends to materialize in a celebrated church to pray to God for permission to be a permanent resident in the real world and devote herself to good deeds there.

They feel sorry for poor Max. Advocate had privately informed them that Max would not be participating in the trial run. There can be no return to a place one has never been, he explains. So they're leaving him behind forever, for their determination never to return has strengthened.

Max doesn't know that, of course. As it is, he takes what he thinks is short-time solitude very badly. The flics have to overpower him and lock him up. He bangs on the door for hours and yells that he wants to go with them. Then, slumped exhausted on the floor, he whispers through the door-crack with what's left of his voice: hey, you'll all be coming back soon, won't you? I don't mean in a week. Tomorrow, I mean. I don't wanna be alone here a week.

They hypocritically comfort him by saying they'll be back soon. If not tomorrow the day after maybe. It's just a trial run. Then they'll try the key way out, the cleaning girl's key to the tunnel in Room 147. Max calms down at that. He asks them to bring back a map of the Paris area so he can locate the airport, also a case of cold beer, real beer with kick to it, and ten pizzas, mushroom, cheese and anchovy, real Italian pizzas, not fancy phony French ones.

They promise, guiltily. The flics unlock him. Helen almost spoils things by kissing Max on the cheek violently, her face screwed up against tears, and telling him to take care of himself.

When Max leaves the Common Room (to explore new rooms for maps and a functioning compass and maybe to weep unobserved), Margaret, basically a sentimental person, suggests that they should all meet the next day at 10:00 pm at the Arc de Triomphe or some other well-known place like that and tell each other how it had gone for them.

Helen reminds her that they wouldn't be in the same Paris. Decades would separate them.

"I'll never see you again? Ever?" says Margaret in a weak voice, her plural "you" actually singular and aimed at Louis as they all realize except for Louis himself. She sees Louis as he was and soon will be again, young and marvelously muscled.

"Louis, we'll never see each other again?" says Margaret in a tiny voice, coming out with it.

Louis mumbles something non-committal. By this time there's no room for anybody else in his mind except Louise in her flower shop.

Seymour looks around for more consolation for Margaret. "Maybe he'll catch up with you," he says, but it's no consolation. By 1937, if he gets that far, Louis will be sixty-two years old.

Anyhow, Seymour has it all wrong. By the time (thirty-seven years) he gets to the Paris of 1937, Margaret, also sixty-two, will be in the Paris of 1974.

Now Seymour remembers that he won't be alone in his Paris of 1951. More out of politeness than real desire for it he says to Helen: "We could maybe make an appointment somewhere tomorrow or, say, the week after."

"We might," says Helen indifferently.

Seymour realizes that there's no room for anybody else in her mind except Richard. Just as, basically, there's no room in his own mind for anybody else except Marie-Claude. Still, he can't help feeling a little offended that Helen didn't conceal it as he, out of elementary politeness, had.

Early next morning Sadie claps her hands and barks out their numbers, all but Max's zero. He goes on snoring, so the omission doesn't matter to him yet. She orders them out into the corridor where Advocate, Turnkey and Sub-Prefect Marchini are waiting. Sub-Prefect Marchini's gunmetal features are cast in the familiar expression of imperious pride despite (or perhaps to offset it) the further dilapidation of his uniform. Only two brass buttons are left now and they dangle badly.

They start a long march. Nobody speaks. Turning into another corridor they see at the end of it, facing them, Gentille. She's on her knees alongside her pail, scrubbing fiercely. She must have heard Turnkey's clump-jangle, clump-jangle long before he loped into sight. She lunges forward again and again with her brush. The movement flattens her down to the floor into what seem to be groveling kowtows to the advancing figures of authority. The group goes past her. Seymour lags behind. He turns around.

As though she'd expected him to turn around to her, she'd turned around herself, no longer kowtowing but erect on her knees, somehow triumphant, with her left fist held high like a demonstrating militant, her right forefinger pointing to her fist, to what her fist contains.

He shakes his head and turns his back on her and her key, needless now. Then he remembers, turns around again and throws his own key at her. It looks like a mock lapidation but he means it as a consolation present of a one-dimensional black-and-white sea. He joins the others.

They go down the long corridors in silence for another mile or so. They halt at one of the steel doors. Turnkey unlocks a panel and presses a button. A distant clatter starts up, grows in intensity and then grinds to a halt behind the steel door. Turnkey locks the panel, chooses another key on his great ring and unlocks the door. It opens on a dusty rusty ruin of an elevator that looks like Elisha Otis' first experimental model. The Four are segregated in one corner of it.

Turnkey locks the steel door from inside. Like a vertical navigator, he moves the brass floor-selector switch. A distant whine. The elevator jolts down with a screech. The single feeble overhead bulb expires, plunging them into total darkness. The cabin sways, creaks, groans, bucks, accelerates alarmingly. Then it stops so abruptly that they are almost flung to their knees.

"Unpardonable neglect," mutters Advocate in the dark.

"Elevator maintenance, like so much else, lies outside my area of competence," retorts Sub-Prefect Marchini with his hair-trigger Corsican touchiness.

Advocate placates him. "Of course, of course, here and in so many other areas, alas."

They file out of the elevator, still in strict segregation. Turnkey locks the door behind them. They trudge a mile until they reach another steel door bearing the warning Entry Strictly Forbidden For All But Authorized Personnel! Turnkey unlocks a long sliding panel on one side of the door. He pushes it open slowly on a panoramic view of a huge disorderly workshop. Seymour guesses at a trick peep-through mirror of the sort featured in classy Parisian bordellos. Two small fitted loudspeakers, obviously wired to hidden mikes, provide sound.

Sadie utters a scandalized gasp at the sight of four cement-faced men in overalls seated around a table playing cards. Self-rolled cigarettes are wedged in the corners of their hard-bitten mouths. Glasses and two bottles of wine stand on the table. One of the men slaps down his hand triumphantly and takes a long swallow of wine on the other side of the cigarette. His partner looks triumphant too. The other pair protest violently. It's about to degenerate into a drunken brawl when a voice yells out from another room with a half-open door: "Hey, can it out there! I already told you I need a Number 6 wrench. Move your ass, one of you."

The four men start arguing who should do it. Finally one of them gets up and lurches across the room, kicking out of the way nuts and bolts and scraps of metal and empty wine bottles. He stops before a wall covered with hundreds of tools and makes a fast grab for a wrench. His elbow unhooks other tools, which clatter to the floor. He ignores them and stumbles over to the half-opened door.

"Catch!" he mumbles and tosses the wrench inside. There's an instant smash and a muffled curse.

"Dumb bastard ( _espèce de connard_ ). You took out the XL3 condenser. No more spares either. And with a transfer coming up."

The Four look at one another in disbelief. Sadie gives another of her sharp scandalized gasps as though an elbow has been jammed into her solar plexus.

"My God," says Margaret, weepily.

"Another farce," says Helen.

"It has come to this," murmurs Advocate, shaking his white head.

"Transfer too lies beyond my area of competence," says Sub-Prefect Marchini.

"As well I know," says Advocate. "Alas, alas."

The enraged voice inside resumes.

"And, hey, this ain't a Number 6 wrench like I said. It's a number 9 wrench. You do everything upside down, shit-head."

"Wait a second," says Louis. "These here lushes are the ones supposed to transfer us? That the idea?"

"Transfer proceedings will be undertaken only after the technicians have returned to a reasonably normal state," says Advocate.

Her eyes bulging with outrage, Sadie obtains from Sub-Prefect Marchini permission to intervene and establish order. The secret spectators behind glass see her storm into the room and halt, arms akimbo, before the four men at the table.

"What are you doing! Cease immediately! Drinking and smoking are strictly forbidden, as you well know. You will be reported."

Choosing a card from the pack and without looking at her, one of the men says without passion: "Go fuck yourself, you old sow. ( _Eh, va te faire foutre, vieille connasse_.) You report us and we'll go on strike. Who else knows how to handle the transfers? You, maybe?"

"It is true," murmurs the Sub-Prefect in a strangely triumphant voice. "No technicians have been formed to replace these. Criminal negligence."

Sadie cries: " _ZTV3!_ ZTV3!" It appears to be the supreme punishment.

Another card-player blows smoke at her. "Go away."

She cries "ZTV3! ZTV3!" again, leaves the room and joins the others, rigid with fury.

Advocate and Turnkey lead the Four to two nearby rooms. As Louis and Seymour enter theirs, they can hear Helen's protests. She wants to return to the Living Quarters and her books. Her lack of faith in the forthcoming operation disheartens the two men that much more.

The shabby room principally contains a stony-faced rubber-gloved old nurse, four medical-style wheeled couches and the banner Welcome to Paris! tacked to a wall. The nurse takes command. Her first command involves a shower. The cubicle is raw concrete, the water rusty, niggardly and lukewarm, the hospital-style soap harsh, but it's their first real shower in this lifetime.

After, they're issued a freshly ironed change of clothes, a passport and a wallet. Turnkey drones out the contents of the wallets and they must sign the checklist for each item. For Seymour it's a carnet of yellow second-class metro tickets, violet bus tickets, 40,000 inflated francs (about $110 at the 1951 exchange rate), a temporary resident carte de séjour, three packs of Belgian condoms of the brand Le Costaud, three to a pack, so nine in all, flattering for a twenty-four hour sojourn.

The nurse makes them drink a foaming liquid that looks like Advocate's beer. It doesn't taste any worse. She commands them to lie down on one of the medical-style couches. "The women now," she says and leaves.

Advocate sits alongside Seymour's couch. The setup reminds him of his $40-an-hour visits to his first analyst in New York with Weinberg, pencil poised over his pad, waiting for a recital of diffused anguish. Except that now his anguish is keenly focused.

"Listen, Maître, I'm scared stiff. Those drunk technicians of yours. I want to land up in Paris, France not in Paris, Texas or on the moon, almost as bad."

"I assure you that, assuming compatibility, all will go smoothly. Sub-Prefect Marchini himself is overlooking the operation although this lies beyond his sphere of competence and could have grave consequences for him. He has your best interests at heart."

"Why don't you get rid of those rummies?"

"Only Prefect d'Aubier de Hautecloque exercises authority, direct and undelegated, over the transfer technicians."

"Okay, so why doesn't the Prefect get rid of them?"

A long silence. Seymour is beginning to feel drowsy. The medicine? The contagion of Louis' snores from the other couch? Finally Advocate replies. "A pertinent question, Mr Forster..."

"Mr Stein," Seymour mumbles. Really drowsy.

"To be sure. A pertinent question, Mr Stein, one of many asked by many, but under their breath. I am but quoting their questions now. Questions such as: why are the very foundations of the Préfecture allowed to collapse? Why are so many glaring errors of transfer allowed to happen? Why are whole roomfuls of vital files allowed to disappear? Why – but the catalogue is endless."

"Okay, so why don't you get rid of the Prefect?"

"Only the Supreme Echelon is empowered to do that, empowers Himself to do that, I should say."

Seymour suppresses a yawn. "Okay, so why doesn't he? I mean, why doesn't He?"

Advocate darts fearful glances right and left and up. He leans toward Seymour and whispers: "Ah, do not question all the uncorrected irregularities and seeming injustices of the world, lest you be questioned yourself by the Voice out of the Whirlwind or worse, much worse, befall you."

Seymour can't suppress a long jaw-cracking yawn. He excuses himself and asks why they don't contact the Supreme Echelon and tell Him that the Prefect's doing a lousy job.

"To do so would be to short-circuit the hierarchal chain of command. The sanction for that can be terrifying. Only the Prefect himself is empowered to establish direct contact with the Supreme Echelon."

"That's a... a... crazy setup. He won't... denounce himself and... and... the Supreme Echelon... lets him... do... do... whatever... he... likes..."

Teetering on the brink of sleep, Seymour hears Advocate's distant voice saying that no, the Supreme Echelon would not condone all acts on the part of the individual concerned. There is one particular act which would rouse the Supreme Echelon to ire and cause Him to intervene forcefully and remove the prefectoral incumbent, that act being...

He breaks off, probably for dramatic effect, but he's lost his audience by now. Seymour has floated into darkness and doesn't hear the Advocate's revelation of the heinous act.

When Seymour awakens, his wheeled couch is being pushed down an erratically lighted corridor. Ahead, he can see lower-echelon functionaries pushing Louis, Helen and Margaret in the direction of what they hope will be successful transfer. They have misgivings, though.

Chapter 36

Out There

Except for Louis, who exited in 1927, they expect fancy machines, sparks, coils, switches and similar B-series props. They expect to be placed in a crystal cylinder and to be teleported to the world outside, the familiar Hollywood-TV rigmarole.

But it isn't at all like that. They're sent out in a gadgetless dry bureaucratic fashion. Long-winded fine print in triplicate disclaims all administrative responsibility for any accidents that might befall the Transferred during the trial run. I affirm that I have read and understood the above. Signature.

They don't bother reading the eight paragraphs. They sign, their hands trembling with excitement and fear. The little libidinous man with the filthy beret, Henri, bangs the first of the four sheets with a rubber stamp. The sheet is unimpressed by his repeated bangs. He has to rummage about for another, freshly inked, stamp-pad before he can impressively bang the forms plus their two carbon copies. With the final bang the rubber stamp splinters.

These technical hitches, although minor, aggravate the malaise of the Four Administratively Suspended.

Henri drops the rubber stamp fragments into a wastepaper basket and looks around fearfully. In a whisper he begs Seymour to bring back a Camembert, nice and runny. He'll do him lots of little favors in return. Seymour promises and seconds later forgets his promise. Who needs favors in return in a place he'll never be returning to?

Turnkey, accompanied by Henri, leads the four of them through another maze of corridors. They stop before a padlocked iron door. Turnkey carefully shields the lock from them with his gaunt body. He clicks the combination, scrambles it thoroughly and pushes the door open.

They find themselves in another corridor with a series of nondescript numbered doors. Seymour has been informed three times that his door is number 6 but, like the drunk technician, he confuses it with number 9, Louis' door, and Louis vice-versa, maybe because their minds are topsy-turvy too. Turnkey sternly corrects them. Attempted period-exchange is another offense punishable by instant exit.

It was a mistake, they explain, and of course that's true. Louis doesn't want meaningless future 1951 and Seymour doesn't want antediluvian 1900, twenty-seven years before the birth of his sweetheart. Period-exchanges are strictly forbidden and are punished by immediate exit, Turnkey repeats, like a carbon copy duplicate of an administrative document.

Before he turns his back on them, Turnkey commands: "When you hear a buzz you will open the second door, step out and you will be there. Failure to step out within ten seconds of the buzz will result in instant exit."

The little man with the filthy beret repeats his request for a ripe Camembert. Seymour again says he'll try and for the second time instantly forgets his promise.

He steps inside a tiny bare cubicle with a wooden seat facing another shabby door with no knob on it. A bolt is shot in the door behind him. It's exactly like the setup in a hospital, waiting to be summoned by a buzz for an X-ray. He sits down and waits, concentrating, as instructed, on where he wants to be and it's not Napoleon's Tomb or Eiffel's Tower. Waits and waits, thinking intensely of it, trying to summon up the original color. Waits so long that he dozes off and dreams of that place he wants to be and now is, in unsatisfactory black-and-white.

A buzz wakes him up. The knobless door is ajar.

Preparing his eyes for the dazzle of color in his darling's street, Seymour pushes the door open and steps out into a rocking world of intense cold, gray blur and crazy perspective. The planes are cockeyed like a cubist painting and shifting.

He looks about for focus and stability and finds a little of that at his feet. He's standing on what seems to be a floor plan of a church. No, not a church, simply a hopscotch diagram, what the French call a marelle, childishly chalked on the sidewalk.

He staggers forward a step. The rubbery buildings shrink squat as toads and then leap up into beanstalks. Dizzy, Seymour halts to make it stop. If he's careful not to budge his head everything settles into static distortion. It's as though he were imprisoned in a huge sphere of deformed glass.

He'd viewed Paris through glass during all of his second lifetime in the phantom Prefecture but at least the glass there had been clear. The glass here must be ribbed and pitted and scratched and full of flaws and milky swarms of tiny imprisoned bubbles, covered with burst blisters that magnify or minimize objects.

Why glass here, outside? How is that possible? How can his feet propel him if he's standing inside a glass sphere?

He reaches out to feel it. His hands encounter void. With that void comes a terrible thought involving greater void.

The crazy distortions he sees must be the result of inner warp, fatal symptoms of that possible incompatibility with the outside world that Advocate had referred to. Which means he's on the verge of exit, the permanent void he's all too compatible with.

Sudden intense pain rescues him from it. Practically no pain is involved in exit, Advocate had assured them. Seymour moans and tries to be thankful for the torture of interstellar cold biting him all over like bloodthirsty piranhas.

Quick, sunshine, sunshine. He staggers out of the biting shade into a cannibal Congo sun. More blessed unbearable pain. He thinks he smells singed hair. He forces himself back into the contrary agony of shade.

Soon he learns to zigzag into quick mutually nullifying alternations of roast and deep-freeze. Out here for only a minute, he's already devised a better-than-nothing technique for living with pain.

But where is out here? He's certain it's not the celebrated Tomb or Tower. Is it the longed-for street where his ponytailed sweetheart lived, still lives? He thinks he's standing a little beyond a heaving corner building. If it's the Rue du Regard in the 6th arrondissement then that buckling shop window over there must be full of familiar antiques.

He struggles over to it. The displayed objects are distorted and out of focus. He pictures his black-and-white wall drawing of the contents of that window and tries to superimpose them on those blobs.

Isn't that blurred circle there the decorative dish with the peasant lass and the border of thirty-odd roses? But if so, shouldn't those roses show up, even blurred, as a red circle? There's no color there. There or anywhere else. He looks up at a sky that should be blue, what with ferocious sunshine a few steps away. The sky is dark gray.

He zigzags forward. Magnified by a flaw, a giant fish leaps at him, jagged jaws agape. It vanishes back into blur. It's frightening but a good sign. He mentally refers to his wall-drawing again. Yes, the fish store is next to the antique shop.

He relies totally on his memory of the wall drawing to guide him now. There, isn't that the crèmerie? A freak flaw of correct vision confirms it with those circular boxes of Brie and Camembert.

Next to the crèmerie, even though he can't make out daffodil-yellow or pansy-blue or rose-pink in the fog, that must be the flower shop. Now in another split-second of narrow-angled clarity he gets further encouraging confirmation: a bouquet of white roses and he mysteriously knows it's the very bouquet he'd offered his sweetheart's marvelous mother one day back then, a back then that is now.

And there, the penultimate landmark, a big shop-sign. It has to be the horsemeat butcher's golden horse head even if it's wobbly, battleship gray and looks more like a hippopotamus head than a horse head. But the French don't eat hippo steaks. Focus and perspective improve a little. Yes, unmistakably, the horse head neighing down at the pavement.

And next to it, at last, after so long, separated a lifetime from it, the porte-cochere like the entrance to a fortress, badly distorted but unmistakable. Behind it, he knows, is the paved courtyard and the shop with the faded scrolled Tailleur pour Messieurs et Dames and maybe his sweetheart waiting for him in front of it.

He peers at the door and recognizes the pattern of scratches. Everything is intact like the neighing horse head and the bouquet of white roses. Why marvel at it, though? No time has gone by. He himself had gone by, unfaithful to it in his first lifetime, but back to it now, back to that original time, everything ageless like the things in the mid-century street, no time for the white roses in the florist's window to lose a single petal.

His rigid finger approaches the door button. Poorly focused, it resembles an excited nipple.

Instead of contact and the massive door clicking free in welcome, he finds himself back to starting point, standing on what he'd taken for the chalked church diagram. But the cold isn't as intense. The focus is better. The buildings don't heave as badly. There's a hint of color now. Technical adjustments back there must be improving things here. Finally, he's grateful for the replay. He wants Marie-Claude sharply focused and in color.

He moves forward in the sharpening Rue du Regard, happy at the sight of the peasant lass bordered by almost-red roses. He goes past unmistakable eels and heaped mussels with sprigs of almost-green parsley. The happy cows on the Camembert lids are visible. Now the golden horse head, not quite true gold yet. Now the porte-cochere.

He touches the doorbell. The heavy door buzzes open a fraction of an inch.

Push it and he's certain to see her there framed in the doorway with her shiny ponytail and large brown eyes and gold crucifix and her modest blouse with a round white high-buttoned collar, long satiny white sleeves buttoned at the wrists, the bodice covered with black lace.

He reaches out and finds himself back to the marelle again with no technical justification for it this time. Color and focus are no better. If anything, a little worse.

It goes on and on like that. He hears the responsive buzz of the bell and the liberating click of the lock. His hand moves toward the massive door to push it open on her and he's returned to the marelle. Then he pitches forward again in diminishing hope past the blurred antique shop and fish store and crèmerie and flower shop and horse head to the door clicking open. Then back again in despair to the Marelle.

Finally he decides to stop. He discovers he can't, no way to stop the torturing shuttle. He's lost control over his body except for a few seconds of freedom in the marelle. He tries to keep standing there. But it's as though invisible strings are attached to his limbs and a giant hand manipulating him into jerky puppet movements forward: antique shop, fish store, boxes of cheese, white bouquet of roses, horse head, button, door clicking open, back to the marelle.

At what must be the thousandth repetition, going past the _crèmerie_ , less distorted on this trip, he has a confused memory that somebody back there will do him a favor if he brings back a nice ripe Camembert. Do me a favor, do me a favor now, let the door open for me. He grabs the round wooden box with a cow on the lid.

No favor. The pendular journey to nowhere and back goes on and on. Before the door he tries to cry out to his sweetheart: open the door, open the door, I can't do it. His voice is tiny and squeaky, the ghost of a voice. The voice of a ghost?

Everything starts flickering like a silent film. The time-compressed alternations of night and day? It seems to him that days then whole seasons are going by in acceleration as he shuttles back and forth from the marelle to his sweetheart's door. He imagines forsythias blooming yellow in public squares and fading; July rockets bursting and fading too; riverside trees rusting; shop-windows celebrant with tinsel. The neighing horse head comes and goes like an unmerry-go-round horse.

When he pictures the tipsy imbecilic crowd celebrating the same old New Year another idea occurs to him (it's about time): a way to stop the unmerry-go-round. The idea begins with questions.

Why is he always plunked down on the marelle?

Why is he always granted two seconds of control over his limbs before the twitching strings force him forward?

Doesn't it have a hidden meaning?

By now he knows the marelle by heart. First, corresponding to the entrance of a church, the half-moon marked Terre on which he stands for two free seconds before the puppet strings yank him away. Then the row of single numbered squares (1, 2, 3) forming the nave. Then two numbered squares (4, 5) side-by-side forming the arm of the cross, the transept. And then the apse, the part of the church with the altar where the holy mysteries are performed, capped by an arc marked Enfer (Hell) bordering dangerously on another arc, even narrower, marked Ciel (Heaven)

What are the rules of the game? He recalls an old photo of his sweetheart, heartbreaking at seven, in a summer frock, hopping serious-faced on her left foot on the _Ciel_ segment of a _marelle_ , her thin bare arms flung out gracefully for balance. He distinctly remembers having kissed the photo, seventeen years later, and saying to her: "I wish I had known you then." But half a century after, he can't salvage her explanations of the rules. All he recalls is that you have to hop from square to square without touching a line, skip over Hell and end up in Heaven.

Jerked away again, his two seconds of free will on Terre over, pulled past twisted blurred antiques, eels, cheese, bouquets, etc, he thinks he understands that if he can hop correctly in all of the numbered squares without touching a line, skip over Enfer and land in Ciel, somehow he'll be rewarded by the door opening to him on Marie-Claude, prelude to the supreme reward of Marie-Claude herself opening to him. It's like a parody of one of those redoubtable challenges testing the mettle of a mythological hero with a princess as recompense. But instead of coping with multi-headed dragons or endless shitty stables, he, Seymour Stein, no mythological hero, is supposed to hop successfully on a marelle.

In a way, though, it's a more daunting challenge than dragon slaying. The squares, as he can see, had been obviously traced by a child's hand, to fit a child's small agile foot. With his number 12 gunboats, he'd have no more than a fraction of an inch leeway between the lines. And he's weak and dizzy. What's the price of failure? He'll soon find out.

His features intent, elbows jutting out like chicken-wings, gripping the Camembert, he launches one-footed onto Square 1.

Miracle! Success!

Arms flailing to maintain balance, he aims himself at Square 2.

Waterloo.

He's yanked away from the marelle.

Back, he hops and hops and is yanked and yanked.

He tries hundreds, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of times but he never gets further than Square 3, not until the miraculous apparition.

That happens maybe years later, for seasons have gone by, he thinks, marked by the changing bouquets of the flower shop as he hops and hops, shuttles and shuttles, Square 2, April daffodils, hop hop, Square 1, the door, Square 3, May tulips, hop hop the door, the horse head round and round, Square 1, hop hop, June roses, high summer, no Rs in the months, no more oysters in the fish store, hop hop, Square 2, All Saints Day chrysanthemums, hop hop, door, holly-wreaths now, the door, always the same, the door he can never open, hop hop hop hop, no hope, hope, hope.

Finally, blubbering and delirious in front of that heaving door, he begs Marie-Claude to help him, meaning by Marie-Claude his firm-breasted sweetheart on the other side of the door, meaning by help that she should open it for him.

That doesn't happen.

But back on the marelle he feels the presence of the earlier version of her, his bare-armed seven-year-old darling. Now he actually sees her (the old photo real) standing on Square 2 looking over her shoulder at him stranded on Terre. She leads him on, encouraging him by her example, hopping expertly from square to square. Miraculously he follows in her sure footstep.

She stands graceful and triumphantly one-footed in the safe middle of Ciel, smiling at him, urging him on.

In his hurry to join her (but will there be room for the two of them in Ciel?) he slips, on sudden dog-shit probably, and sprawls, body violating all those lines, his palms and face squarely in Enfer.

He calls out to her to help him but she's gone, her task completed, he understands, having lured him into _Enfer_ with the perspective of reunion with her in _Ciel_.

With that realization he suffers dissociation. One Seymour Stein remains prostrated on the Marelle while another Seymour Stein, the unwilling half-block commuter, is yanked to his feet and manipulated into the pendulum journey again.

He realizes that there'll be no end to the approach to the massive door, which will never open on her. He realizes that Advocate has lied, the Review Board has ruled on his case and that he's been exited, not to blessed void, but to Hell. After a quarter of a century in the antechamber to it he's squarely in the inner circle of Hell, a private Hell of course, as all Hells must be, no communal bonfire affair, but custom-tailored to the solitary sinner.

He understands now why he's made to see the street as through distorted glass and will go on seeing it that way for all eternity. Yes, the warp is inner, producing a hyperbolic metaphor of his distorted vision of things back in that distant first life when he'd sacrificed his flesh-and-blood darling for shrunken black-and-white reproductions processed through glass three times: her image belittled and reversed by the Zeiss-Tessar f3.5 lens of the Voigtländer reflex, bounced off the flip-up mirror onto the ground-glass view-finder. He'd left the real Marie-Claude in France to try to peddle her one-dimensional and colorless to publishers in New York and had lost her that way. In his memory she'd been reduced to a dead faded butterfly beneath glass.

The cold intensifies, turns fluid like liquid nitrogen, penetrating him to the bone. Absolute zero for an absolute zero. At any moment won't he freeze into a vitreous statue of futility, topple and smash into a thousand glass fragments?

While one Seymour Stein shuttles to and fro, the Seymour Stein sprawled facedown on the marelle rolls over on his back and appeals to the empty gray sky for mercy.

An instant merciless voice booms from above. "YOU!"

It is the Almighty Himself, about to give vent to His ire and pronounce judgment on him. Seymour quakes as the celestial voice thunders:

"You! YOU dumb bastard. You've fucked it up!"

Oh he knows that, knows that! Fucked up everything in his first life and this one too. But isn't that peculiar language for the Almighty? And conveyed by a proletarian Paris accent.

Now another voice, truly Godlike in intonation despite a pronounced Corsican accent: "Imbécile! Crétin! You are exiting them! Bring them back instantly!"

In extreme mental confusion, Seymour Stein wants to tell the Almighty that yes, he's an imbecile and a cretin and worse and that yes he fucks up everything, always has, but that he's not exiting anybody, isn't guilty of that at least, has no power or will to do that, no cruel power or will either to bring anybody, not even his worst enemy, back from the enviable dead.

Before he can voice his defense he's dunked into void.

Chapter 37

Dead Flies

When Seymour Stein opens his eyes he's still flat on his back, not freezing on a marelle in a distorted street as in that terrible dream, but lying on the medical wheeled couch in a big bare room. Somewhere a leaking faucet goes pong... pong... pong at long regular intervals. A dream, he keeps telling himself until he becomes aware of the throbbing ache of his right ankle and the box of Camembert he's gripping. It stinks.

Next to him are three wheeled couches with the other voyagers on their backs. He listens first to Margaret and then to Louis telling their story in a whisper as flat and gray as the cracked ceiling they seem to be telling it to. They tell it with long pauses, the silence measured by a pong, sometimes two. There's no grief or terror in their matter-of-fact account. It's as though they'd been drained of all emotion out there or stunned out of it. Seymour is able to supply the missing grief and terror to their stories which are basically his own, just the object of desire differing.

For Louis it's the flower shop in a street whose name he's forgotten and had never been able to pronounce, with a bouquet to be bought again but for a new recipient, the slim honey-blonde seller of it. For Margaret, past the sooty spires and gargoyles and flying buttresses of Notre Dame, the sacred sanctum where prayers are pronounced and heard.

For both, as for Seymour, there's the terrible cold, the terrible heat, everything twisty and heaving and blurred and the approach, past hard-to-recognize landmarks, to the flower shop door for Louis, to the portal of the cathedral for Margaret. For both, too, the last-second denial of entry happening hundreds of thousands of times with the sense of seasons coming and going.

But unlike Seymour's incidental flower shop, there's nothing to mark the change of seasons in Louis' essential flower shop. No May tulips followed by June roses. Nothing but persistent All Saints' Day chrysanthemums and ornate funeral wreaths that hide Louise from him.

Both Margaret and Louis, like Seymour, had heard the great voice in the sky putting an end to it all.

Louis stops with that. The slow drips go on. Seymour feels he'll be purged of it if he tells. Louis and Margaret must have felt that too. So he tells his version of the common experience to the ceiling. He omits the humiliation of hopping on the marelle and the terminal slip on dog-shit and sprawl into Enfer. When he finishes he feels a tiny bit better.

They wait for Helen to tell.

Instead, the leaky faucet goes on measuring the silence. They're sure that the world outside had been normal for her. They're sure that she hadn't been pulled back from her great encounter. She doesn't want to pain them by telling them about it. That pains them even more, proof of the unbearable goodness that had earned her that encounter, emphasizing their own unworthiness.

Still, they long to hear about happiness, even enviable third-person happiness. They nag her in exhausted voices. Finally she does tell about it, in the same exhausted voice as theirs.

She'd done what Advocate had advised them to do, concentrate on a well-known public building. Her choice had been the Bibliothèque Nationale, the National Library with its million-odd volumes in the Rue de Richelieu. It hadn't been a good trip, but then she hadn't expected it to be. Everything was twisted and blurred and shifting. There was no color. But for where she wanted to go color didn't matter. The printed page is black and white. Each time she approached the entrance, though, she was snatched back. That didn't matter much either. In any case you needed a special pass to use the library facilities and the bureaucrats in this place hadn't supplied her with one. Didn't matter, she had plenty of books here, no need to go out there for books. Being pulled back and forth all that time had been annoying but she hadn't hoped for anything better, had expected much worse.

The stony-faced rubber-gloved old nurse marches in, gripping a tray with four glasses of a foaming liquid. She hands them out. "Drink!"

They're being sent out a second time. They feebly refuse to drink.

"Drink!" the nurse commands. That granite voice and face overpowers their resistance. Propped up on a shaky elbow, they drink and then sink back to a prone position, eyes closed. The nurse snatches the glasses out of their hand, already numb, and leaves.

The mellow fragrance of cognac slowly mitigates the astringent smell of the medicine they've just absorbed.

" _Mes enfants, mes enfants, mes pauvres enfants_!"

They force their eyes open on Advocate standing unsteadily at the foot of their couches, hair dramatically white above his black gown. His rigid mask tries for an expression of pity. His ample black sleeves flap with a wide-armed gesture of woe that imperils his stability.

To their drowsy brains his voice seems to come from far off as he recounts their narrow escape from total and permanent extinction. Wagging a bony forefinger, he admonishes them gently. Part of the responsibility for the fiasco lay with them. They had been warned and yet all of them had attempted a meeting with a previously known individual. Useless to deny the fact. They had been monitored.

This (he goes on) in no way extenuates the outrageous circumstances of transfer, due to the drunken blunders of the transfer technicians. The Four owe continued existence to Sub-Prefect Marchini. Observing how badly transfer was proceeding, Sub-Prefect Marchini had endeavored over and over to contact Prefect d'Aubier de Hautecloque. In vain.

Naturally, in vain. For who, walking the inner corridors, can hear the ringing of a phone? Or the collapse of foundations? Or the collapse of the very universe?

Sub-Prefect Marchini took it upon himself, then, to intervene, at terrible hazard to himself, and rescue them from undeserved void. Sub-Prefect Marchini has always had their best interests at heart. How often has Sub-Prefect Marchini not confided that were he in charge, all four of the legitimate Suspended Arrivals would have been transferred – as you say – "long ago".

Advocate's image and voice grow faint, prelude to a second transfer, they understand. Their minds are woozy but they're able to mutter implorations not to be sent out a second time now and for years again, spare them that torture.

They hear, from an even greater distance, Advocate's soothing assurance that there is no question of a second trial transfer on the heels of the first. He corrects their error. This first abortive transfer had not lasted for – as you say – "years." They had been dispatched shortly before lunch. Soon dinner will be served. Hash, alash... er... alas. How often has not Sub-Prefect Marchini expressed his indignation at the miserable fare meted out like punishment to the Administratively Suspended, adding that if he were in charge, hash would be replaced by juicy tender beefsteak and fluffy mashed potatoes.

But of course such menu transformations could hardly interest them. For in the event of Sub-Prefect Marchini being in charge (and, who knows? this may one day occur, sooner than they think) they would immediately be transferred, perhaps as a start to a four-star restaurant and would partake of noble fare, perhaps bouillabaisse or...

Advocate breaks off as lower-echelon functionaries enter the room.

"More of this later," he whispers and leaves.

The functionaries start wheeling the Four out. Seymour is the last to go. Henri with his filthy beret moronically pulled down to his eyes sidles into the room and in passing snatches the box of Camembert out of Seymour's hand.

He claws off the lid. The stink is overpowering. Thousands of maggots pour onto the floor. They instantly metamorphose into fat flies that rise in a whining black swarm. They buzz about for a second and then fall back to the floor mummified.

Henri looks about fearfully and then sinks to his knees as in prayer. Seymour's last image, before darkness, is of Henri gathering up the flies and bearing them to his salivating mouth.

When Seymour emerges from the darkness hours later in the Living Quarters that image seems to be imprinted on the dingy ceiling above his bed. He can't help thinking that the scene has profound relevance to all of them. But it doesn't really bother him. Like the others (except for Max) he's indifferent to everything.

Chapter 38

No! No!

Like the numbing shock that follows severe trauma, total indifference insulates the Four from further pain.

Passive, they let Max bear-hug them and apologize in tears for having thought they'd been bull-shitting him. He was sure they'd gone for good instead of just the couple of hours it had turned out to be. He'd looked out of the window for them but the streets were empty the way they always were.

Like a high-school teacher correcting a student, no drama or pathos to it, Helen interrupts Max, saying: not hours but years and the streets had been full of people, hundreds of miles of streets, millions of people. Hearing that, Seymour and Louis and Margaret suspect that Helen's story of the National Library had been an invention. For all her superior words, like them she hadn't been able to resist the baited hook of hope. She'd tried to establish contact but had no one particular street as a target. All the streets of Paris and their crowds had been possibilities in the renewed search for Richard. Out of pride, they imagine, she hadn't wanted to admit it.

Max wants to know how it had been out there. Had they remembered to bring back pizza and real beer? They reply: "No time," or "Forgot" or (Seymour) "Things spoil." They don't even bother shrugging when he reminds them of the tunnel and that Dummy has the key to that way out. They'd been out and knew what it was like.

The cleaning-girl is mute and scared. Her one gesture of contact occurs when she tries to hand back the key that Seymour had thrown at her on his way out, he'd thought, for good. He tells her she can keep it. Room 1265 and its walls are all hers now. He won't be going back there to the drawing. He's not interested in the other key either. He knows what it opens on.

Anyhow she doesn't talk about that key. She doesn't talk about anything to them. Had something happened, involving another threat of punishment? It's of no importance to them. Nothing is.

They spend most of their time on their backs, staring up at the ceiling. Their minds come close to achieving the same blankness. Here and out there don't matter to them any more. The armchairs in the Common Room don't tempt them. Their brains disarm the treacherous window on Paris to a one-dimensional picture hanging for decades on the wall, so familiar that it doesn't register any more.

Probably a week after their return (they can't tell since they don't look out of the window any more) they hear and feel the booming of collapsing staircases below, never so violent. The bulbs stutter darkness and light. Chaos is drawing closer, they understand. Let it. They can't even muster the energy to worry about Max who is wandering somewhere in the suddenly dangerous corridors.

Fine cracks develop in the ceiling they're staring up at. They close their eyes against the plaster dust drifting down but they don't bother moving. They imagine that their passionless whitening faces resemble funerary statues.

An hour or so later, Advocate totters into their room. They haven't budged and don't budge now except for their eyeballs which roll an indifferent millimeter in his direction. With his long-sleeved arms flapping about for balance he resembles a blast-beruffled wounded old raven. His long white hair and his jabot are in disarray. His black gown is tattered and covered with plaster dust. He sinks into a chair, struggles for breath and finally pronounces in a wheeze almost covered by the rumbling of destruction below: "Chaos, chaos, who will deliver us from chaos?"

A powerful fragrance of cognac accompanies the rhetorical question. Stewed to the gills, he must have collapsed on a staircase, they think. It turns out that it was the staircase itself that had collapsed, under him, followed by the ceiling above him. It had crowned him with half a ton of plaster. Hands trembling, Advocate goes on with his outraged recital of chaos drawing ever closer to the Administrative Center.

All this – to say nothing of the quasi-fiasco of the transfer trial run – imputable to the negligence of a certain high-placed individual. Only intervention on Supreme Echelon Level (Advocate whispers the term fearfully) and appointment of a more able and conscientious individual in his place could remedy the disastrous situation.

But the Supreme Echelon, say certain blasphemers (Advocate's voice drops to a barely audible whisper), seems to have forgotten their existence. The most blasphemous of these blasphemers claim (I am but citing them) that the Supreme Echelon too constantly walks the inner corridors, indifferent to massacres, tidal waves, epidemics, famine, tortures and the great-eyed children herded into the cattle-cars. No staying hand for these things, that Hand that once parted the waters of the Red Sea and chastised evildoers is now inert, they (not I! not I!) say.

The most radical of these extreme blasphemers hold that we are but thoughts in the Supreme Mind and as that mind loses its grasp, we fade, our universe disintegrates, prey to rust and dust and rot and void.

Advocate pauses. Louis' snores indicate that he has lost half of his audience. He resumes in a fearful whisper.

One thing alone could call the Supreme Echelon's attention to the lamentable state of affairs here: violation of the supreme prohibition; intimate contact between the functionaries and the Materialized. Now, the highly placed individual who is the subject of our discussion had once been suspected, strongly suspected, of precisely this transgression involving an admittedly ravishing platinum blonde starlet. There is strong indication that a certain member of Batch MLX 59833 is the object of similar attentions, which she has always spurned.

If another such transgression were to occur would this not come to the Supreme Echelon's faltering attention? Would this not arouse the Supreme Echelon's ire? Would not the present occupant of power be divested of that power and that power be wielded by a person who (Advocate pauses dramatically and stares at Seymour) had only a short time ago confided his intention, should he occupy that position, to transfer four of the Five to the space outside?

Advocate's discourse now becomes almost totally obscure, bogged down in subordinate clauses, clothed in elaborate senseless metaphors. Approaching the subject he veers away from it, like a finger snatched away from the intense halo of something incandescent; orbiting in on that white-hot subject, then veering away into the safely tepid outskirts of it. Everything is implicitness, indirection, ornate with euphemisms.

A violent concussion. Fragments of plaster rain down on Advocate's head. He breaks off in the middle of a verbose sentence and looks about fearfully. He struggles to his feet and departs, muttering: "A word to the wise, n'est-ce pas?"

A minute after Advocate's departure, Max returns, ghostly with plaster dust. He starts brushing himself off, a swearing white cloud.

Louis' snores quicken to snorts. He cries out and awakens wide eyed to the ceiling.

"Bad dream, Louis?" says Seymour indifferently.

"Thought I was still out there."

"Relief to wake up here, huh?"

"Wake up here, wake up there, no relief wakin' up anywhere. Advocate's gone? Could you make out what he was drivin' at?"

"Think so. He wants us to pimp for him and the Sub-Prefect."

"Watch your language, Stein. How so, to... what you said?"

"Wants us to try to convince Margaret to let the Prefect... um... possess her carnally. If we do and she does, we'll all be transferred for real out there. That's what he says."

"Who the dickens does he take us for? For... that word you said? Anyhow, who wants to go out there?"

Max stops brushing himself. He stares at them and yells: "I sure as hell do. You mean if Maggie lets the Prefect screw her we'll all be transferred? And she says no? Screwed like a blind weasel back then and she says no now? Transfer for all of us out there just for a quick bang and she says no? She can't do this to us."

"You watch your language, Pilsudski," says Louis.

"The Paris they transfer us to isn't all that great, Max," says Seymour. "It's not worth a... um... a carnal relationship."

"Paris? Who gives a shit about Paris?"

"Forgot about that. Not Paris, Las Vegas. I was in Las Vegas once. If you forced me to choose between the two I wonder if I wouldn't pick Las Vegas, that's how bad it was out there in Paris."

Advocate totters back into the room, smiting his forehead. He apologizes profusely for having allowed the main purpose of his visit to slip his mind. He had meant to inform them that, Sub-Prefect Marchini having impounded all the bottles in the Transfer Center, the second transfer trial run is certain to be more successful than the first.

That rouses the recumbent men out of apathy. They sit bolt upright.

Louis exclaims: "Second trial run?"

"Quite so. A second trial run is statutory procedure in the case of a defective initial trial run."

"When?" says Seymour. He fears some inhumanly close date like next month. It would take them more than three months to recover from the first trial run.

"Shortly following lunch. Hash is not on the menu, I am happy to inform you."

"Lunch? You can't mean today?"

"Quite so. As you say, 'today'."

"Oh no!"

"No, no, no!"

For Max all those violent Non's (just about the one thing he can understand in French) can only mean that Advocate's come back for another try at talking Louis and Stein into getting Maggie to screw them all out of this place. And they yell "No" to that, the shitheads.

Max decides to convince Maggie himself. He leaves the room with the others still hollering like Advocate wanted to cut their balls off.

Max stops before the women's door. He hears Helen's voice inside. She's sure to say "No" too. Have to get Maggie alone. Anyhow, have to find the right words. Max starts trotting down the corridor, in search of them.

Seymour and Louis go on with their No's.

Advocate opens his rubber-clad hands in a gesture of helplessness.

"I fear, sincerely fear, that you have no choice in the matter. May I suggest that this time you resist temptation and concentrate on well-known Parisian monuments, for example, the Eiffel Tower or Napoleon's Tomb? Restrict yourselves to neutral mindless registering of things seen. Remain strictly on the surface of phenomena. Make of your minds a shiny blank, mirrors to throw back things seen and experienced. Allow nothing to penetrate and fester within. Otherwise, I fear, you shall once again be the artisan of your woes. But how I go on! Now I must inform the ladies."

They go on shouting "No" at the door that closes behind Advocate. They're not on their backs now and they're no longer insulated against pain. Not again, Louis mutters. Not years out there again. They said hours but it had been years.

Yes, years, not hours, says Seymour, and what years, he hadn't told the worst. He tells it now. Forced for years into skipping on a hopscotch drawing and his sweetheart behind the door sadistically throwing out an early version of herself, a bare-armed little girl, luring him into flopping on dog-shit into hell, not that, not ever again.

They sit down heavily on the edge of their cots. From the other side of the partition they can hear the two women crying out "No! No!" and then Margaret sobbing. Advocate must have delivered the tidings.

As though awaiting a signal to storm an enemy position, Louis leans forward in a tense muscled crouch. He stares intently ahead at the wall with its scrawled inscriptions, at one particular inscription.

"That's another one of their traps," says Seymour, following his gaze. "It's the real meaning after all. What we thought at the beginning. You're double-crossed if you go out."

They start arguing about it. Seymour says that at best the tunnel behind Room 147 (assuming there is a tunnel behind it) would turn out to be like that other tunnel long ago that ended up in the toilets. At worst it would really lead them out but out in the Paris they'd been tortured with during the first trial run and would be again in a few minutes.

"It's a chance to take," says Louis. He dictates the strategy. They would all hide in one of the corridor rooms on Dummy's path from the kitchen to the Living Quarters. When she went past they'd tell her to give them the key, tell her they'd take her with them, promise her anything, the moon even. No problem. She'd already agreed. They'd lay low till she came with it.

"No time to waste. Have to tell the women to get ready."

Louis leaps to his feet, strides to the door, yanks it open, steps halfway outside. He freezes in that attitude. He retreats back into the room.

"Four of them Black Men. Two at each end of the corridor. With clubs that can smash you to bits."

Soon after, Gentille wheels in lunch, sets the trays down in silence and flees.

They stare down at what their dish contains despite Advocate's assurance to the contrary. Hash augurs ill, they think, for his other assurance, that the second trial transfer would go more smoothly than the first.

Maybe an hour later, Advocate returns to their room, in the company of Sadie, Turnkey, Sub-Prefect Marchini and the four Exiters. The Four say no again, just for the record. They offer no physical resistance, useless in any case. They are going out again, no choice in the matter. Their one consolation is that they have no more illusions about what they'll find outside. Won't that lessen the pain, a little?

Max starts trotting, then running back to the Living Quarters. He knows what he's going to say to Maggie and how to say it and he has to say it right away.

But when he gets to the Living Quarters he has nobody to say it to. The women's room is empty. The men's room is empty. Breaking the silence of the corridor, he shouts their names. The only sound outside of his own voice repeating Stein, Maggie, Louis, Helen, the names in diminishing echo, is a distant clump-jangle, clump-jangle.

What's happened? Have they been exited? Transferred? All by himself here, not for hours like the last time, but for all time? Max returns to his room (all his now) and lies down in a huddle on his cot.

Minutes later Dummy, her face tragic, rolls in the cart with a single tray on it. At the sight of that solitary tray, unbearable confirmation, Max struggles out of bed and advances on her. She shrinks back.

"Gimme the key."

Stares at him. Doesn't understand. Dummy. What's the French for 'key'? All he knows how to say in French is "Excuse me, Monsieur or Madame or Mademoiselle, where is the airport?" But to be able to say that usefully he needs the key.

"The key, the key, key, key, key," he yells at her.

Max can't know that the word comes across to her as qui, qui, qui: who? who? who? She thinks he's referring to the missing trays, and so to the missing Suspended Arrivals, missing for good, she thinks. She brings out in a trembling whisper: "Madame Ricchi, Madame Williams, Monsieur Forster and O! Monsieur Saymore, Monsieur Saymore: all transferred."

Max doesn't understand. He bellows in her face, spraying her with saliva: "Gimme the key, goddam you!"

She panics and starts for the door. She must have it on her. He grabs her arm above the rubber glove and freezes and goes blank.

Who?

Where?

Dump of a room.

Skinny girl with a funny expression.

Sudden loud clump-jangle, clump-jangle.

Door bursts open.

Mean-faced lipless woman. Two cops, funny uniforms. Tall tall bald skinny guy in a grey smock, keys hanging from his belt.

What's going on here? Where's here? The cops drag the girl under the light bulb. One of them twists her arms behind her back. The other grabs her hair and pulls her head back. Baldie fiddles with her eyelid. Cinder in her eye? Stares into her eye. Steps back.

Says: "Positif." Not English. What's it all about?

Cops march the girl out of the room. Baldie and the mean-faced woman follow them. Nobody pays attention to him. He (who is "he"?) staggers over to a rusty cot and collapses, head splitting.

When he awakens it all comes back and he knows where he is and who he is. He, Max Pilsudski, risen uselessly from the dead, isn't happy at the recovered knowledge. Then he remembers the key to the way out, the key to the steel door of Room 147 and the tunnel behind it.

He goes out into the corridor, turns left and starts jogging. When he gets to the first crossing of corridors he halts, not knowing the direction to take to find Dummy and the key to the tunnel out of all this.

***

Part Four

### The Most High

Chapter 39

Searching

The bolt shoots home like a rifle in his back.

Once again Seymour Stein finds himself imprisoned in the cramped space of Cubicle 6. With almost no hope it will happen, he wants the knobless door to buzz open on something safe this time. Forget the Rue du Regard with its torturing distortions and deprivations, try to forget it. Concentrate on one of Advocate's recommended landmarks.

Napoleon's tomb? Tombs have bad associations. So, like a dutiful tourist, Seymour mentally contemplates the Eiffel Tower for maybe half an hour. He ends by finding the prospect boring and can't resist a dangerous sneak revisit to a marvelous hotel room memory of his darling. A second there and he returns to the safe tower. Persistence of vision, though, operates even for the mind's retina and he can't help transporting her in double exposure to Eiffel's erect structure in the blushing nude posture he'd coaxed her into long ago.

A prudish girl like her in such a private attitude in that most public of places? Absurd. Perilous too, Advocate had warned. Seymour manages to efface her from the tower, just in time.

The door buzzes open.

Ten seconds to leave, Turnkey had warned, otherwise exit. Seymour's tempted but at the seventh second steps out, fast.

Steps out into swirling mist that hides everything except the grass he's standing in, close trees looming spectrally and the low sun reduced to a faint red disk. He thinks he's in one of the two big public parks of Paris at dawn: the Bois de Vincennes or the Bois de Boulogne.

The sun asserts power. The mist thins and now rises like a tattered curtain, revealing things incompatible with civilized public parks. From his sloping meadow he can see green forest to the horizon. A stone's throw away, a slow broad muddy river pushes past him. Just opposite is a long island covered to the shores with tremendous trees except for a clearing with a miserable huddle of skin-and-branch huts. A crude raft lies pulled half way up the muddy beach. Wooden stakes impale two shattered skulls.

Seymour lets himself down in the grass. He stares at the bugs and the flowers, thankful that at least the grass and the bugs and the flowers are the same. He waits patiently for the voice in the sky to do something about the things that aren't the same.

He knows exactly where he is. He knows the name (the later name) of that island. How does he know it? How can he be sure? He knows. He's sure, sure it's the Île de la Cité, the historical heart of Paris, and the river the river Seine, of course.

But even the names (like himself here in his 1950 turtleneck sweater and corduroy pants) are anachronisms, because the French language is unborn. By what guttural phonemes do the hut-dwellers name the island and the river?

What he sees is clearly prior to the lithographed illustrations he recalls from the 1950 edition of the Michelin Guide de Paris: the stone walls, baths and forum of the Romans, prior to the palisades of the Celtic tribe of the Parisii in the 3rd Century BC. To say nothing of the later things he'd visited there so often with Marie-Claude and so didn't need a guidebook for: Notre Dame, the flower and the bird markets, the Conciergerie, those future things and that future girl maybe only a few hundred yards from where he sits, now weeping, separated from her by thousands of years and death.

He goes on waiting for the voice in the sky to pull him out of this useless time.

From the sky comes no voice but tragic hoarse cries and the ghostly sound of wings working the air. Above, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of long-necked cranes or storks or geese in V formations flap by. They have a place to go, somewhere in the direction of the sun. They keep coming, arising like smoke from the green horizon behind him, honking overhead, disappearing beyond the green horizon before him. Seymour stretches out on his back and stares up at their endless passage, which darkens the sky.

When he awakens the sun is higher. Stragglers are flapping by overhead. In the island clearing, in front of the miserable huts, dirty wild-haired Proto-Parisians in tattered skins are gathered about a fire. They have fire at least. It's more than he has.

How will he ever survive here without fire? For he realizes now that he's stranded for good in this time by the fault of those sozzled transfer technicians (or by dead-sober malevolence on a much higher level?). There'll be no voice in the sky to summon him back. He's like a relay satellite intended for earth orbit but launched with exaggerated thrust and now, beyond recall, captured by a distant icy planet.

Stranded for life here. A life bound to be nasty, brutish and very short. Unless the tribe takes him in. Would they? If so, take him in how? The two staked skulls stare back at him. He tries to make out what the Proto-Parisians are devouring.

What marvels does he possess to impress them into better than digestive welcome? Passive heir to the technology of the 20th century, he's stripped of the inheritance here. At the Prefecture they hadn't even issued a penknife. So how can he stagger these stone-age savages with the sharp miracle of steel? No cigarette lighter either to wow them with flame at the twitch of a thumb. He does have bank notes. But those tokens of an advanced economy would be no more than exotic toilet paper for them. The bus and metro tickets, additional tokens of triumphant technology, are too small for even that use. The nine Belgian condoms of the brand Le Costaud? Blow them up into balloons for their kids? Didn't they already do that with fish bladders?

He doesn't even have comic-book knowledge of an imminent eclipse to extinguish the sun with phony incantations and make them kneel to him by commanding it back.

A solitary goose (or crane or stork) labors across the sky, miles and miles from the nearest yearned-for communal V. It honks with a profound melancholy that echoes in Seymour's heart. He badly misses the others, even dumb Max, maybe 20,000 years distant.

Wait. Hadn't the same drunken time blunder been committed on them too? Helen shares his 1951 time, so maybe, probably, certainly, she shares this prehistoric time too. She's not 20,000 years away but here, maybe just a hundred yards away in the forest, probably, certainly searching for him.

Stupidly, he shouts her name. The Proto-Parisians squatting about their fire leap up, point at him, grab fire-hardened spears and Neolithic axes. They run to the raft, drag it into the river and four of them scramble aboard. A snarling broken-toothed hungry-looking savage poles it toward the shore.

Seymour stumbles toward the trees, yelling: "Helen! Helen!"

Helen sits blank in the silence of Cubicle 3. She's driven out of her mind the dangerous split-second image of the Luxembourg Gardens with the splashing fountain and Richard restless by her side. Out of her mind too (she thinks) the even more dangerous honeymoon hotel room with pictures of soaring birds hanging on the pale-blue walls. Knowing that choice is suffering, she's chosen no landing point out there.

The door buzzes open. Stepping out, she remembers, too late, that she could have ignored the buzz and kept sitting beyond ten seconds for the only landing point she really wants.

The unwanted landing point proves to be a noisy crowded street.

She pulls back against a shabby hotel, prepared for chaos, freezing shade and broiling sun and enforced breasting of crowds for years like the last time out.

Instead, everything is right. The costumes and cars and advertising posters are mid-century. Everything is clearly focused and stable. There's the first genuine sun on her face in this second lifetime, a dangerous joy: resist it. The colors are true, the sky correctly blue, the shrubbery in the square correctly green: resist them. The faces in the passing crowd must be clear and stable too but she's careful not to look at those faces, not to let herself get caught and swept away for years in the currents and eddies of wrong faces. Not again.

She negotiates it intelligently this time. Turning her back on the lure of direct sky and sunshine she slips into the hotel.

The door closes behind her, shutting off the street noises. The transition from sunshine to gloom is so violent that it takes her a while to make out the old man behind the reception desk myopically bent over a newspaper under a green-shaded lamp. Next to his frayed elbow is a gutted stub of candle in a chipped saucer and a box of matches.

At her third cough, he finally looks up. Hardly greeting her, he takes her carte de séjour and copies things from it into the big register. The pigeonholes behind him are empty. The guests receive no mail. Are there guests, outside of very transient prostitutes and their customers, in such a run-down place? All thirty of the massive bronze keys dangle from the numbered hooks.

Just as she finishes signing in, the lights go out. More strikes, the old receptionist mutters, lighting the candle. A second after, the electric lights blink back on. Strikes, strikes, strikes, he mutters, staring at the green-shaded lamp for a minute. Finally he blows the candle out, hands her the key to Room 408, points to the dim staircase and returns to his newspaper.

She spirals up the dirty staircase. Each dimly lit floor is empty. When she reaches the fourth floor the lights go out again. In the absolute darkness she gropes from door to door. They refuse her key. She loses count of the number of intractable doors, sure she's blindly tested fifty keyholes on just this one floor. Yet there are only thirty keys in all. She begins to understand.

Finally one of the locks yields. She knows what to expect. She turns the knob, prepared for a dim Prefecture corridor.

The door opens blindingly on a sun-filled room. She gropes, this time from excess of light, to the open window, pushes it shut, draws the heavy drapes, walks over to the big bed with two pillows and lies down in the gloom. She stares up at the ceiling as she'd done for so long back in the Prefecture prison, waiting for an end to Administrative Suspension. Here she waits, beyond temptation, for an end to the second trial run. Better yet, for incompatibility and an end to everything.

She closes her eyes and dozes off.

When she awakens, a thin ray of sunshine, eluding the drapes, illuminates the room. At the sight of framed soaring birds on pale blue walls she struggles upright. From the street she thinks she can hear a long-lost voice: "Helen! Helen!"

Louis stands there beneath blue sky in the first tame sunshine of his second life. Even before his eyes focused, harness jangling and the clopping of hooves and stable fragrance had announced the right time, confirmed now by those elegant carriages and the double-decker horse-drawn omnibus with the words on it ("Madeleine-Bastille") telling him it's the right city, if not exactly the right neighborhood.

The passing crowd, too, tells him the time is right. He hardly glances at the soldiers with flowery epaulettes and cone-shaped short-brimmed caps like operetta soldiers or at black-clad gentlemen with elegantly pommeled walking sticks. The young women are what he looks at with their long-sleeved high-necked blouses, their voluminous pleated skirts cascading down to their shoes, their long hair swept up past their pretty denuded ears and done up in a big flat crowning knot, sometimes concealed by a great flowered hat.

Flowers.

Louis looks longingly at their faces. But of course she can't be here.

Where is here? In Cubicle 9 he'd concentrated on the Embassy, the most important of Paris landmarks because even though he doesn't remember the name of her flower-shop or the name of the street it was located in (is located in, is: past is present again), he'd known the way to it from the Embassy. A century after, his feet would remember.

He turns to passersby for guidance but discovers that his question can only come out in English. He's left his miraculously acquired post-mortem French behind him. The French he'd swum in like a fish back in the Prefecture has become thick opaque ice now, absolutely impenetrable, the way it had been in his first lifetime in 1900 when all he'd known how to say (taught by her) was "Tu es jolie, Louise" and "Je t'aime, Louise." He couldn't say that to these strangers. They shrug and blink apologetically when he says, very slowly in clear mid-western English, "Where is the Embassy, please?" ("The Embassy," he says, not "The American Embassy" as though there could only be one Embassy that matters in Paris).

He wanders about, sweating in the hot sun, asking and asking and getting more blank looks and shrugs.

Finally he recalls that, of course, he has a landmark to guide him, a holy skyline two-in-one landmark: the spire of the American Church in Paris where he'd thank the Lord not only for this steady blue sky and sunshine but also and mainly because if he finds that right church he'll know the way to the Embassy and then to her flower shop.

But the spire of the Victorian Gothic American Church in Paris (consecrated in 1887) apes the older authentic spires of Paris, over a hundred of them. The law of probabilities sabotages his quest. Louis wanders toward spire after spire. Each broadens into another wrong church with stone saints and black priests. He goes back to asking, over and over, "The American Church in Paris, please" and continues to get blank looks and shrugs or incomprehensible replies.

Hours pass. His head is aching badly from the sun, his feet aching from the miles of streets and avenues leading to dozens of wrong churches. He's about to try another unlikely spire when he remembers that, of course, the American Church in Paris is riverside. All he has to do, then, is find the river and stand in the middle of a bridge and he'll be sure to see, upstream or downstream, the spire of the right church that will lead him to the Embassy and then to the flower shop and Louise and allow him to use his two surviving phrases in French.

His new question is easier to understand, he thinks, than "The Embassy," way easier than "The American Church in Paris" but he gets the same uncomprehending or incomprehensible response to "River? River?" When he makes swimming motions with his arms they stare at him queerly and shake their heads.

He'll have to find the river on his own. He knows it winds through the middle of Paris. If he follows a sloping street he's sure to find it, sure to find a bridge and from the bridge see the spire of the right church and from the right church find the Embassy and from the Embassy find the street with the flower shop between the toy shop and the corset shop and finally he'll be able to say: "Tu es jolie, Louise. _Je t'aime, Louise_." In his pocket he fingers the gold ring he'd found long ago in the muck of a tunnel that led nowhere.

He wanders about, blind to everything but the pitch of the streets. He finds no lasting pitch to any of them. Finally, dizzy from all that sun on his bare head after a lifetime of shade, he drags himself (slightly uphill, so the wrong way, but he's dead tired) into an elegant public garden with pruned trees and a splashing fountain and ornate wrought-iron chairs. Nurses with white aprons and perilously perched straw hats sit next to baby carriages. Well-behaved children in sailor suits with high dark stockings and vast straw hats roll hoops. In growing confusion, Louis chooses an iron chair in the shade of a linden and sits down heavily.

Opposite him in another iron chair an elegantly attired old gentleman with a flowery white beard is quietly snoring. He wears a pince-nez and a straw hat with a black band. His buttonhole displays a decoration resembling a miniature red fez. The overall impression of dignity is marred by his shiny black shoes, which stand unlaced to one side of his stocking feet.

Louis is on the point of following suit and liberating his own aching feet when a big white splotch silently appears on the old man's left shoe.

The old gentleman reacts instantly. His head jerks back, beard jutting out aggressively. His pince-nez catches the light of the sky in a twin glare as though the lenses were emitting rays. A few seconds later a pigeon plops down in front of his stocking feet and doesn't move. The old gentleman stares down at it vindictively and mutters: "Pigeons, pigeons, bad mistake. Doves yes, certainly doves, but not pigeons, terrible mistake."

Strangely, Louis understands the irascible old gentleman perfectly, yet he can't say he'd spoken in English, or in French, for that matter. Whatever, if Louis understands he'll be understood. He knows he wants to ask a question. But his head is aching and whirling so badly that all he can recall is the quest for a sloping street.

Why though?

He makes a terrific effort and remembers the quest for a river, but can't go beyond it. He doesn't know why he wants the river, can't remember it's for a bridge to see the right spire to get to the Embassy to get to the street with the flower shop between the toyshop and the corset shop to give his sweetheart the gold ring.

He gets up with difficulty and approaches. The splotch of white has strangely vanished from the old gentleman's left shoe. There's a peculiar smell of incense, struck sulfur matches and burned feathers. His dizziness worsens. He's barely able to bring out: "Sir, please, where is the river?"

"The liver? Where is the liver? Where I placed it, of course, in the upper left-hand side of the thorax, between the pancreas and the lung."

Louis repeats his question much louder: "River, sir, river, where is the river?"

"Why are you shouting? River. The river. Why didn't you speak up and say so in the first place instead of mumbling?" The irascible old gentleman glares at Louis and then points at the exit.

"Upon leaving the park, as you shall do immediately, you will turn right, then right again and a third time right. Then you will continue straight on, never left, never right, but straight on until you reach the river. Do you understand?"

Louis nods fearfully. It seems more like a command than information.

"Straight on, straight on, deviating neither to the left nor to the right. The way is sometimes narrow but is true."

The old gentleman makes a dismissive gesture and closes his eyes.

Unsteady on his feet, head whirling, Louis longs to return to his iron chair but doesn't dare disobey the injunction. "Thank you, sir, thank you, thank you," he stammers to the snoring old gentleman and leaves the elegant public garden, trying to recall why it's so important for him to get down to the river.

In Cubicle 3, time running out, Margaret tries again to conjure up Notre Dame Cathedral, the most celebrated and holy of Parisian landmarks. As once before, she manages the postcard outside, those sooty spires and gargoyles and flying buttresses, but inside is what she wants, to implore the Lord for permanent release from the Prefecture.

The image of inside doesn't come. It's been so long since she visited a church that the wellspring of sacred images has dried up. She's sure she is going to be subjected to more distortion and torture.

But when the door buzzes open she steps out of bureaucratic dust and gloom into religious dust and gloom, soaring arches, incense, niched saints, stained-glass windows, soft organ chords.

The presence of the Lord is overwhelming. Eyes brimming, she halts abruptly and sinks to her knees. Before she can formulate her supplicating question(s) somebody barges into her from behind and sends her sprawling. A testy quavering voice admonishes: "Woman, signal your intention to stop and kneel. Moreover, the nave is not a kneeling station. There are any number of appropriate kneeling stations here."

She picks herself up, robbed of God's presence by the impact and the trivial scolding voice. She sees a white-bearded old man, still muttering, rubbing his thigh, and hobbling into a side pew.

Margaret quits the nave and poses her questions to the Lord in various appropriate side-aisle stations, kneeling before stone saints, before Christ on his Cross, before banks of lighted tapers dedicated to the blue and white effigy of the Mother of God. She (Margaret) doesn't dare hope for vocal manifestation of the Divine. She's unworthy of such direct communication, she knows. Moreover, she imagines that God can only vocalize in thunder. Dreaded "No!" to her question lends itself more naturally to that mode of expression than yearned-for "Yes."

Instead, the message would be transmitted by subtle signs. Perhaps the hint of a smile on the plaster lips of the Mother of God. Or a softening of the suffering expression of Her Son on the Cross, of the stony expression of the saints. Or a heavenward leap of those static taper flames. She might even be picked out by a sudden beam of religiously colored light – violet or purple – from the stained-glass window, the organ swelling into a crashing triumphant chord.

Any of these signs would signify "Yes" to the question, "May I stay out here in Paris, not be pulled back to the Prefecture?" and, failing response to that question, "Yes" to the next-best question, "Should I dance for the Prefect? Dance in order to allow Seymour and Max and Helen and Louis to be transferred into happiness and myself too transferred, not for selfish happiness but to minister in black to the little monsters, the halt, the blind, the dying, to save Jean Hussier from despair? Should I dance for the Prefect for these self-sacrificing things and more, much more?"

She poses these questions in ardent whispers over and over in station after station. The saintly visages remain petrified. There's no alteration to the lips of the Mother of God, no abatement of the expression of suffering of her Son. The organ goes on muttering to itself. The taper flames don't budge. No colored beam transfigures her.

Margaret turns back to the nave in search of the brutally interrupted sense of Divine Presence. She glances fearfully behind her. Seeing no one, she sinks to her knees and repeats her imploring questions. She gets no response. No sign, no voice, no sound except for the introspective organ and a faint snoring from a slumped figure in a pew.

The organ hushes. Back turned on the tapers and the stained glass window, she breathes in choking dust. That and the silence and dank gloom reminds her unbearably of the Prefecture. Hungering for sunshine, she arises and walks toward the padded door. A bejeweled lady pulls it open from outside and for a second Margaret sees behind her a fountain with a jet of water splashing into the brimming bronze basin and a tree green against blue sky with a pigeon alighting on a branch, spread wings backlit and incandescent.

The door closes behind the elegant lady. She halts before a poor box with photos of gnawed lepers, fumbles in her purse and extracts a coin, which she holds benevolently over the box, her small finger crooked as at tea. The coin tinkles into the box and she enters the merited space of piety.

At the sight, Margaret, in another illumination, understands her recent failure. Her promises of selfless acts are just words, undeserving of reply. She's being tested and tried here and now for acts, not words.

Margaret acts. She slips a fifty-franc note into the box, one thousand times the expensively dressed woman's stingy five-centime contribution. The residual faces of the lepers on the photos acknowledge nothing, naturally. Margaret longs to do good to gratefully responsive flesh-and-blood sufferers outside. She pulls out of her bag the remaining banknotes and pushes the padded door open.

Out of the traffic cacophony three automobile horns emerge and collaborate on a triumphant triad as Margaret Williams is transfigured by sunlight into real life for the first time since death. She feels gloriously naked, clothed in nothing but sunshine. It caresses her offered body to a glow, quickens her blood, surely red now, past her inner ear with the sound of the sea.

At the sight of the striking young woman standing on the church steps with her lovely radiant face and fiery hair and breasts straining against tight silk, a passing young man immobilizes into a statue. The handsome statue smiles at her.

Frightened at that wrong sign which dangerously defines where she is as a space of desire instead of a space of sacrifice, Margaret censors her heart. Scowling at the handsome young man and clutching the banknotes, she steps out of the sunshine into shade.

Margaret wanders about in search of visible suffering, easy to find, she imagines, in the depression-stricken Paris of 1937. She encounters nothing but block after block of cruel opulence: powerful motorcars, distinguished façades, elegant understated shop-windows, and, in perfect harmony with all this, impeccably smart men and stylish women.

Finally she catches sight of an authentic sufferer, thank God for that. Twisted and shabby between crutches, the cripple swings himself with incredible speed away from her. Margaret breaks into a stuttering high-heeled run down the strangely familiar street, trying to narrow the gap between her and the indispensable object of charity.

The gap widens. She halts, bends down and removes her hobbling shoes. She runs much faster now in her stocking feet, holding the shoes in one hand and the banknotes in the other, but still outstripped by the piston-strokes of those overcompensated arms. Stared at by the pitilessly well-dressed passersby, she cries out (in English for she's reverted back to pre-mortem ignorance of French): "Stop! Stop!"

Margaret trips and sprawls. By the time she picks herself up, panting, the cripple has disappeared. She sobs "Where are you, goddam you?" and resumes her pursuit of salvation with bleeding palms and soles and wild red hair.

She reaches a side street and sees the cripple there, working himself into a tiny wooden stall, a lottery stall, next to, oh God, can it be l'Assiette Bleue? The white-and-blue corner plaques confirm that she's standing in the Rue de l'Assumption, looking down the Rue du Docteur Blanche, at the four-star restaurant where Jean had taken her so often back then, at the corner of his tiny street, the Rue Mallet Stevens with the elegant private two-story dwelling and its quietly superior flower-beds and wrought-iron railing.

A sign! A sign from the All High! She slips her shoes back on and stutters up the Rue du Docteur Blanche to the lottery stall, crudely decorated with garish stars, ringed planets and smiling suns. There's also a Wheel of Fortune. She almost throws the wad of bank notes at the wizened cripple, exclaiming "For you, for you, God bless you!" and then runs past the restaurant and turns into a mistake, an impossibly long street with no sign of an elegant private two-story dwelling and its quietly superior flower-beds and wrought-iron railing.

The blue-and-white corner plaque says Rue de l'Yvette. But that's not possible. The Rue de l'Yvette is the street after Jean's street.

What's happened to the Rue Mallet Stevens, Jean's street?

The cripple leans out of his stall, brandishing lottery tickets and yelling incomprehensible things at her as she hurries away in bewildered search of the missing street.

Chapter 40

What They Find

Seymour can hear the grunts of his pursuers as he stumbles into the gloomy cover of the first trees, wasting precious breath – each possibly his last – calling for frail and perhaps unborn Helen to rescue him. He flounders forward through the knee-deep confusion of decaying branches. Brambles tear his face. A giant spider web blinds him. He trips on a root and pitches forward into stunning encounter with a tree-trunk. Clasping it, he sinks to his knees in the rotten branches. The guttural jubilation behind him fades and so does the light above him. The smell of rot is the last sensation he holds onto before he sinks into blackness.

When Seymour emerges, he's still on his knees, embracing, but embracing the protective iron corset of a curbside sapling instead of the great tree that had nearly brained him. The roar of traffic is in his ears instead of his pursuers' murderous jubilation. He understands that the drunken transfer technicians had snatched him forward in the nick of time.

Brushing ancient spider webs out of his eyes, expelling rotten air from his lungs, Seymour pulls himself erect. He wipes blood, red, not gray, off his face. The passersby are dressed in mid-century fashion. Mid-century Renaults and Citroëns rattle past. He limps over to the newspaper kiosk for confirmation. In the headlines of the France-Soir of June 5, 1951 the Chinese are still counterattacking in Korea, the Viet Cong infiltrating in Indochina.

Seymour takes a few steps forward and finds himself once again at the corner of the Rue du Regard as at the first trial run, but everything steady and sharply focused, blue sky and friendly sunshine this time.

Even so, a born worrier to the day of his death and resurrected that way, Seymour advances cautiously, fearing that at any moment those buildings will start buckling, the sun blow-torch him, the shade deep-freeze him, the peaceful mackerels in the fish shop loom at him like sharks, jaws agape. So he stares down at the sidewalk. There's no marelle scrawled on it, a positive point, but he's prepared for the sidewalk to fissure and swallow him up.

Buildings, sun, fish and sidewalk behave normally. Seymour walks on until the golden horse head registers in the corner of his eye. He halts and turns, facing the porte-cochere. He advances his finger slowly and presses the button. The door clicks free. "Yes, I know what will happen now," he says out loud as he reaches out, expecting to be snatched back to starting point, the way it had happened the first time out.

It doesn't happen this time. He's able to push the door wide open. He steps over the metal threshold into the courtyard of her building, finally, after all that time.

Helen props herself up painfully in the double bed in the big hotel room with light blue walls and pictures of soaring birds. At the same moment that she notices the imprint of a head in the pillow next to hers, she hears, thinks she hears, in meaningful English, "Helen! Helen!" but maybe, in meaningless French, "Hélène! Hélène!" the young man's voice muffled by the closed window and drawn drapes. She resists for as long as she can and finally gets up and goes over to the window, noticing only then that she's naked and strangely feeble and aching in every joint.

She struggles with the drapes and pulls the window open on opaque white fog. There's no sound for a minute. Then the young man's voice floats up from the invisible street below, repeating either "Helen" or calling to some unknown wrong "Hélène" and in that case the young man is also unknown and wrong. Now unintelligible words come to her: English or French? She chooses it to be English and thinks: he wants the wallet, but I won't throw it down and have him vanish again. "Come back up!" she cries, but the fog distorts her voice to a squeak.

She hobbles painfully into the familiar big blue-tiled bathroom. On one side of the washbasin lies a rectangular object twisted and crevassed with age and next to it, two balls of fuzzy white mold. Just as she perceives her image in the mirror, her hair white like the decayed spat-out pills and her appalled face, twisted and crevassed with age like his wallet, she hears booming feet, taking the steps three by three, tireless, flight after flight.

He's reached her corridor. Helen totters out of the bathroom and looks about but can't locate clothing to cover her decrepit nudity, can't locate the key to lock the door against his vision of it. Hearing his approaching footsteps, she pushes against the table to barricade the door. She hasn't the strength. She drags a chair over and clumsily jams it beneath the doorknob.

The footsteps have stopped. He must be standing in front of the door, reaching for the doorknob. The flimsy chair won't keep him out. She huddles in the corner close to the open window.

"I'm Hélène, not Helen," she tries to cry in French. "You have the wrong room." Her cry is an inaudible squeak.

She thinks she can see the doorknob turning.

Three right turns and now Louis trudges straight on, as instructed, in search of something vital he can't remember. By this time, the accelerating spin of his mind has flung out one by one almost all the elements of his original quest. He's lost the river, the bridge, the church spire, the Embassy, and what all of these secondary things lead up to, the flower shop and his darling. All he has left is the yearning to find a sloping street and run down it toward obscure but tremendous joy.

But the street he's been enjoined to follow (who by and why?: now he loses that too) gradually starts rising, keeps on rising through neighborhoods of growing squalor and stench, taking him away from that mysterious happiness that clearly lies in the opposite direction.

Louis lets himself down on a bench and waits for the dizziness to stop and for memory to seep back. Instead, the whirl accelerates and he loses more things: what this foreign city is and what he's doing in it and finally who he is. All he has left is the knowledge that joy lies in the opposite direction, in a neighborhood of calm elegance. This street with its garbage-cluttered gutters and disjointed paving stones can't possibly lead to it.

Still, he gets up and resumes the imposed path past decaying tenements and disused sooty factories with tall brick chimneys and smashed windows, confused by the din of hammers on metal, the clopping of hooves, the thunder of great barrels rolling down cobble-stoned alleyways. He passes dumping grounds with rag pickers' hovels and picketed goats browsing rare grass among broken bricks and bottles. Now heavily mustached hip-booted men poking and raking knee-deep in a narrow shallow stinking canal which Louis can't know is actually a river, the Bièvre, subterranean for most of its course through Paris.

In a sordid courtyard a bearded old man in a bowler hat is cranking out wheezing sour music from a hurdy-gurdy. Next to him a tiny ragged woman sings raucously, of love it must be, because she clutches the area of her heart regularly with an ecstatic gap-toothed smile.

Louis goes past them and encounters a pockmarked old woman with wild waist-long white hair. In the crook of her arm lie withered flowers she must have salvaged from a nearby garbage heap.

" _Des fleurs, des fleurs, Monsieur, Achetez-moi mes belles fleurs_!"

At the sight of those flowers, with the love lament going on behind him, it all comes back to him; the slope to the river, the bridge, the view from it of the spire of the right church, the way from the church to the Embassy, the way from the Embassy to the street with fresh flowers in the windows and his sweetheart inside. All of that lies downhill in the opposite direction. The irascible old man could only have purposely misguided him.

He leaves the street, turning down a sloping alleyway.

Then, turning a corner, miraculously, no need for the river, the bridge, the church, the Embassy, there it is, calm and elegant: Louise's street.

Finally, after all that time, Seymour stands in the courtyard with an unfamiliar gray cat staring at the armless blank-eyed Roman goddess in the shop with the sign Moulage d'Art, and the bikes leaning against the scaly walls between the picture framer's and the plumber's and a bronze-caster.

Bronze-caster? Seymour doesn't remember a bronze-caster in that 1951 courtyard. And where is her father's tailor-shop? Isn't the bronze-caster where the tailor shop had been? He crosses the courtyard, careful not to trip over the disjointed paving stones. That hasn't changed.

The concierge's lodge is familiar too. The hinged door opens, though, on an unfamiliar face. Where is Madame Maurice, the shapeless old concierge? This one is middle-aged and skinny with a snapping-turtle mouth, washed-out blue eyes and sharp cheekbones. She has a feather duster in her hand.

"Vous cherchez?" she says, professionally suspicious like all Parisian concierges. She looks blank when he says: "Mr and Mrs Laurier." He has to spell the name. She says there's no Laurier here, he must have the wrong building. She begins to close the hinged door. No, he says and gives her the number: Seventy-one. The wrong street then, she retorts. He gives her that too: "Number Seventy-one Rue du Regard." Snappish: "I've been here thirty years and there's never been anybody named Laurier in this building."

The wrong concierge closes the little hinged window. Back turned to him, she starts dusting an unfamiliar bouquet of plastic flowers.

Seymour sneaks past and spirals up the gloomy cabbage-smelling staircase to the fourth floor and the familiar dark varnished door. He knocks and waits. Knocks and waits and finally tries the knob and pushes the door open and enters the gloom of the empty apartment.

Not a stick of furniture. Not even a single lightbulb. The gilt-framed mirror over the mantelpiece is gone, a memory of it in the form of a pale square on the dingy wall. The floor creaks as he advances in dimness from room to room. In her bedroom the slats of the closed shutters censor sunshine to faint lines on the dusty floor.

Seymour returns to the living room. He tugs at the window, shoves the shutters open and looks down at the courtyard with the bronze-caster that usurps the place of her father's tailor shop. From the window across the way, an out-of-tune piano accompanies a sour contralto. He recognizes Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte.

To the Distant Beloved.

At that corny ironic stage trick Seymour revolts against the role he's been forced to play in this third-rate theatre of cruelty and the absurd, the unimaginative expressionistic setting of the dusty empty apartment, not to mention all of the rest of it in the Prefecture: those endless corridors and the sadistic tunnel, the tantalizing year wheeling about endlessly in the window.

In a Beethovenesque gesture of defiance (equally corny), Seymour leans perilously out of the fourth-story window and shakes his fist at the sky, at the cruel, absurd and absolutely untalented Author/Producer/Director/Set-Designer and shouts: "Goddam you! Give me Marie-Claude, goddam you!"

With that unprecedented gesture and cry of defiance, it all collapses, as though he'd smashed the flimsy stage setting to bits.

The piano breaks off on a corny dissonant chord.

The spotlight sun fades.

The street setting fades.

An die ferne Geliebte, never so distant, never so beloved, fades.

In atrocious pain, Seymour Stein starts fading too.

What's left of him before the open window realizes that this isn't another time-transfer but total extinction. He clutches at the idea that his imminent void is somehow connected with the void of the apartment and that if he can fill that void behind he'll stave off the void ahead.

He squeezes his eyes shut and combats extinction with a rage of memory.

He remembers the gilt-framed mantelpiece mirror, down to the very patterns of the tarnish. Remembers the black marble mantelpiece beneath the mirror with the perfectly centered bronze lion dying nobly and on each side of the lion the late 19th century family photographs and remembers those stark unsmiling ancestral faces, all of them, and there, yes, his sweetheart at eleven, veiled in Confirmation white like a tiny prepubescent bride.

Behind his closed lids, he goes on abolishing the void, his own and the room's.

He remembers the massive cherry-wood table set for dinner with his chair and his personal napkin in the wooden ring and above the table the complicated oak chandelier with three thrifty low-watt candle-shaped bulbs with artificial wax-drops on the white holders.

Remembers the cylindrical waist-high stove with the pipe running into the lowered iron curtain of the fireplace and alongside it the metal tray with old newspapers and kindling wood and the battered coal-pail.

Remembers the pattern of the lace on the windows and the faded wallpaper repeating a shepherd blowing into a flute beneath a weeping willow.

Remembers her father's oil paintings massed on a wall from floor to ceiling. In stupefying total recall, standing before the window, eyes shut, he summons up every one of those uninspired rural scenes.

The task of mental resurrection completed, Seymour Stein opens his eyes.

The windowpanes, minutes ago starkly blank, are now covered with lace, the familiar pattern. To make sure it's real he touches it. Through that real lace he stares at the courtyard below and sees her father's tailor shop where the imposter bronze-caster's workshop had stood. The cat, no longer gray but correctly black, is sitting before it.

In his joy, Seymour relaxes his tremendous mental effort. The courtyard goes glaring blank like a movie screen with the film broken in the projector. He feels that he'll go blank too unless he counterattacks with memory again. He does. The courtyard returns after what seems like a second of absence. But outside time isn't inside time because the black cat is gone and one of the bikes too and shadows have shifted.

The lace is back on the windowpanes so the rest of the apartment must be back too. Seymour turns around and yes, the 1951 apartment is there, maybe fewer paintings on the wall and the photo of his little darling gone from the mantelpiece and the wall-paper brighter, but otherwise practically identical to his memory of it.

He hears a key turning in a lock and the front door opening and closing. Soft footsteps in the corridor approach the living room.

In the doorway stands a little girl of seven or eight with thin graceful bare arms and a school satchel on her back and now wide-eyed and stepping back as he approaches and casts himself on his knees before her, having recognized his darling and he understands the missing photograph of her in white Confirmation veils four impossible years later, and the missing later oil paintings and the rejuvenation of the wall paper.

Not the early fifties but the mid-thirties, another trick on both of us. O Marie-Claude, don't be frightened, it's me, it will be me, Seymour, in fifteen years, I'll never leave you then.

He reaches out for her.

Her scream and "Momma! Momma!" is cut off, the room is cut off. Seymour's personal screen goes glaring blank again.

Louis steps into the street, her street, no doubt about it. There, at one end, the church with stone demons pitchforking naked stone sinners above the entrance. At the other end, the square with the green bronze general with raised sword. Her flower shop, he knows, stands between a toyshop and a corset shop. Approaching, he recognizes them too, but not what stands between them.

He wants to step away but can't help approaching the not flower shop with the ornate legend POMPES FUNEBRES which he doesn't understand but does slowly understand what he sees in the window: crosses of all sizes, marble angels, porcelain flowers, bronze wreathes, black marble plaques with names and birth and death dates and short phrases he doesn't comprehend except for recurrent topsy-turvy "regrets éternels."

Bewildered, he turns to the flanking shops, wanting to ask what has happened to the flower shop. In the toyshop rows of porcelain dolls lie in their open boxes with staring eyes and he can't enter. In the other shop, stands a massacre of headless, armless, hourglass-shaped corseted dummies and he can't enter.

He returns to the other, wrong, shop. He wants to enter and ask, but he sees in the window, somehow fixed in the stone, sample photographs of the beloved departed, the old man with drooping mustaches, the solemn child, and there, that third photo, with the date 1881-1901: that smiling face, that name graven in the speckled granite for all time.

Again she tries to cry in French. "I'm Hélène, not Helen. You have the wrong room." Again her cry is an inaudible squeak. The footsteps in the corridor resume for a second and then she hears a knock on the neighboring door, the door opening, a young woman's cry of joy, the young man's exclamation "Hélène!" the door closing and soon her shameless love-whimpers that clamped ears can't keep out.

Finally, to put an end to it, Helen (laying no claim to the name Hélène) starts crawling over to the fourth-story window wide open on white fog, crawls nearer and nearer.

An hour of street after wrong street, aching ankles, aching heart, and then the idea occurs to Margaret: a map of Paris to find the right street. She finally locates a bookshop on the other side of the Avenue Mozart. She waits, alongside a well-dressed white-bearded old man, at the pedestrian crossing. When the traffic light changes, she steps off the curb.

The light is green but suddenly a big low-slung black car hurtles toward the red light, impossible at that speed to brake to a stop.

Margaret tries to run. Her left high-heel twists. She catapults forward. Her bleeding palms, outflung, catch the old man in the small of the back, propelling him out of the path of the swerving car. Sprawling, she replaces him in the fatal spot. It could easily be taken for a gesture of supreme self-sacrifice, instead of the consequence of a defective heel.

The black car is upon her.

Louis can see his warped reflection in the window of the unbearable shop, hunched and trembling for the first time in his two lives. That too is unbearable. Scenes of past valor come to him. It's as if he hears a distant bugle commanding his body to stop trembling. He admonishes that disgraced image of himself:

"This ain't her street. That ain't her. That ain't me. That old man was the devil. Her street can't be up this high. It's down by the river. Can't fool me."

He straightens up, walks away from the street and goes down an avenue toward the river. Four times, in different arrondissements, he encounters the street with the toyshop and the corset shop and between them that other shop. He walks past the street each time, never once breaking into a run. Finally he reaches the right river, the Seine. He walks with dignity to the middle of the bridge and starts scanning upstream for a spire. It's then that he's pulled into darkness.

Seymour returns from blankness fleeing down the staircase and behind him a thunder of pursuing feet with voices clamoring his infamy. "The child! Little Marie-Claude! Monster! Stop him!" At the foot of the stairs, blocking the way out is the butcher with a cleaver. Seymour trips and sprawls. They are upon him.

His screen goes glaring blank and then starts darkening.

Darkening, darkening.

Seymour Stein makes no effort to resist extinction.

Chapter 41

Back Again

Of the four who had gone outside, two return, emerging vaguely, side by side on their medical wheeled couch in the white room with the granite-faced old nurse and the dripping faucet. It's not for long. They have a confused awareness, as in a dream, of resisting the foaming bitter liquid the nurse forces on them. They're sure it's a prelude to a third, inconceivably worse, trial run and now, as they start fading, they think of the other meanings of "trial": judgment and suffering.

They awaken, still side by side, in the men's room of the Living Quarters, in a state of advanced dilapidation: themselves, of course, but also the room. The electric wiring has miraculously survived and the naked bulb sheds weak light on the rubble-littered floor, the fissured walls, the bulging ruins of the ceiling shored up by stout props. Five cots have been shoved together in a cleared corner. The rumble of wheelbarrows and hammer blows come from the women's room on the other side of the partition.

Not Gentille but the silent bitter-mouthed female functionary brings them their meals, at irregular intervals, some days not at all. Perfectly indifferent to that as to everything else, they stare up at the ruined ceiling and try to maintain their minds in a neutral area of blankness. But when they sleep they find themselves out there again.

Over and over they hear Max, laughing or crying or both, and asking them where they'd been all this time, trees green when they'd left, bare now. Unless it was a dream. Kept the light burning all the time, scared of the dark like a kid. Had to change the bulb twice so maybe it was a year alone here. Unless it was a dream. Where'd they been all this time if it hadn't been a dream?

They don't answer, can't. Words are like huge boulders they can't budge. They catch scraps of Max's confused story of how it had been for him here, something about Dummy and the key, how he tried to take it from her but something funny happened to him when he did and then Sadie and the cops and Turnkey showed up and took her away and so the key too and he has to find her to get the key to the tunnel out of here and they have to help him do it instead of laying there on their backs.

They keep on lying on their backs, ignoring his pleas. They'd been outside twice already.

Max is gone most of the time. When he returns he says nothing or actually says it: "Nothing." Often, in his sleep Max cries out "Bess, honey, I don't want no flowers, wait up for me," and "The key, goddam you, the key!"

They don't wonder about the two others who'd been sent out and who haven't returned although Max asks about them all the time. They ignore everything, even each other except when Louis cries out repeatedly in his sleep "That ain't her in the granite!" and "The river!" and "Where's the spire?" At the hundredth repetition, Helen reaches over and shakes him awake, which is what Louis does to Helen at the hundredth repetition of "Don't come in, I'm Hélène" and "Come in, I'm Helen."

Max tries to pull them out of it. With the three of them exploring the corridors chances were three times better that he'd be able to locate Dummy and the key. So he carts the books in from the women's room, a whole armful, spine-loose and dribbling plaster dust. He places them alongside Helen's static face. He goes to Louis' armory and gets the crossbow with a boot-quiver of bolts and lays it on Louis' bed near his static face. Neither of them budges.

One day Advocate picks his way between mounds of rubble to their cots. Glancing up at quick intervals at the bulging ceiling, he upbraids them for their persistence in yielding to desire during the trial runs, opening the door on terrible things. Had he not warned them that hidden fears and unavowable desires might well shape the events of trial run? They had been the authors of their own woe, he says. Thanks again to Sub-Prefect Marchini, they had been retrieved in extremis, the narrowest of escapes, not the case, though, for Monsieur Stein and, alas, alas, Mademoiselle Williams, perhaps already exited, a disaster, pure disaster. How can the accelerating chaos be staved off without Mademoiselle Williams? He wrings his hands.

They don't react to his words. They close their eyes. When they open them Advocate is gone.

The following day or week, two husky functionaries drag Seymour Stein into the men's room, their rubber-gloved hands hooked under his armpits, their frozen faces carefully averted from his head which lolls on his chest with each of their steps. His useless feet make trails in the plaster rubble. His head is swathed in bandages. Both eyes are badly blackened and his nose and lips are swollen. He looks like a suspect returned from a torture session with a stop-off for patching up in view of later sessions.

The functionaries drop Seymour like a sack of potatoes on a cot. He curls up facing the wall and says nothing except when he sleeps and then cries it over and over, "I never did that. I couldn't have done that," until Louis reaches over and shakes him out of it.

Finally Max gives up the search for the key and sinks into the same apathy as the others. Nobody moves in the rubble-strewn room. Nobody speaks outside of the terrible dreams.

The hammering on the other side of the partition finally ends and the wheelbarrows rumble away. When the bitter-mouthed functionary who has replaced Gentille comes in with the food she wordlessly stabs her sharp chin at Helen and then at the partition, indicating that Number Two should reintegrate the Women's Room. But Helen remains with the others to awaken them out of their nightmares and to be awakened by them out of hers.

The Common Room window, which they ignore, is glorious with May when, suddenly, they behold Margaret, utterly transformed, standing on the threshold of their ruined room. She illuminates it. She brings to them, somehow, the blue sky and the remembered scent of lilacs of earlier Mays. Her visage and her speech are those of a prophetess.

"Our sufferings will soon be over," she proclaims. "This has been revealed to me."

She kneels alongside each of them and places her hand on their foreheads but not on Seymour Stein's for he turns to the wall at the approach of her hand. That potent loving hand seems to draw the suffering out of the others.

"Tell me," she says, over and over and finally they tell her; about the cruel honeymoon room, about the photo screwed to mortuary granite, about the search for the missing key to the tunnel to outside and dreams of Bess with flowers not for him but for the lovers she receives on his mound. As Margaret draws out the festering experience tears well and spread over their faces. Louis and Helen who have never wept before in this half-life and seldom in their first, real life, weep now and Margaret takes their sufferings upon her, weeping with and for them, having suffered herself, cruelly but no more. Her tears fall on their faces, mingling with theirs, and they are cleansed of it all, quickened back to life, vast peace.

"Louise is not dead," she says to Louis, kissing his wet cheek. "I know that soon you will be reunited with her, young again, your trials over. The promise has been made. Try to remember me sometimes, Louis."

To Helen she says: "I know that you will soon be reunited with Richard and young again, your trials over. I know this because the word has been given, the sacred promise made."

To Max she says: "I know that you will soon be reunited with Bess, young again, and that you will give her the dachshund pup and also, this too I asked for, and the promise made, that you will also give her and she give you a beautiful girl baby: name her Margaret, for me."

She carries over to them the moldy food and chlorinated water they have refused for days and says "Eat and drink" and they eat and drink the delicate fare and cool thirst-quenching liquid and, delivered, fall back into dreams but now of green trees and blue sky and fragrant flowers, a peace beyond the poor power of words.

With soft words and touches Margaret coaxes Seymour away from the wall. Finally, sobbing, he tells her about it and she strokes his poor battered face.

"Of course you are innocent Seymour. Otherwise would the promise have been made to me that you will be transferred back there to your sweetheart? As you knew her, of course, and of course as she knew you."

Seymour too falls into a deep slumber and dreams of green trees and blue skies and fragrant flowers.

But when they awaken to the ruin and drabness of the room and the memory of their trial, Margaret is gone and they no longer believe in the promise supposedly made to her on their behalf. They wonder what strange things had happened to Margaret during the second trial transfer that had allowed her to come back to them with a madly radiant face. They wonder how, even in madness, she could have imagined promises made to her in that space of torture and how they could have, for a short while, believed in those promises themselves.

Chapter 42

Promises

Margaret tries to run from the looming car. Her left high-heel twists and she catapults forward. Her bleeding palms, outflung, catch the frail old man in the small of the back, propelling him out of the path of the suddenly swerving car. In a split-second she sees him staggering into safe downfall, straw hat and spectacles and dentures flying and then she's down herself, sprawling, and replacing him in the fatal spot. It could easily be taken for a gesture of supreme self-sacrifice, instead of the result of a defective heel.

The black car is upon her.

But then past her as though some merciful force had levitated it. She picks herself up unscathed.

Second miracle, the old man too is back on his feet, holding his black-ribboned straw-hat, his spectacles and dentures back in place, white suit strangely impeccable again. His hair, moustache and beard bristle electrically, like a multitude of rays, enlarging his face into a stern white-hot sun as he stares thunderously at the car.

It veers and smashes into a clothing shop window: a massacre and dismemberment of pink dummies. One of them is thrust against the splintered windshield. With her long lashes and simpering bow-lips she's like a soliciting streetwalker poorly equipped for her profession, armless, devoid of nipples and smooth-crotched. But the bloody broken-faced driver is poorly equipped to respond. A crowd gathers.

The old man is suddenly drained of power. He trembles and pants as though he'd undertaken some strenuous task that outstripped his strength. Margaret, deeply grateful for his state, seizes the long-sought opportunity to exercise charity. Maybe he can tell her where Jean's street is. She links her arm in the old man's and guides him to a sidewalk café table. He's paper-light, like a dried-out mummy.

"Please, quickly, a glass of mineral water!" she begs the bald waiter standing on tiptoe next to their table for a better view of the accident. He ignores her, probably doesn't understand English. She begs again, with even greater urgency. He goes on ignoring her.

"Two double-cognacs, four-star Hennessy, VSOP forty years of age immediately!" the old man commands, in English.

The waiter jerks violently as though visited by twenty thousand volts. With fantastic rapidity, like a fast-motion film, he's gone and back again with the two cognacs. He resumes his tiptoed neck-craned position, taking in the shop-window shambles and the growing crowd.

Another waiter trots back from it. "The driver must have had a heart attack," he says to his colleague. "Looked pretty dead to me."

"Of course he is dead," the old man croaks vindictively. "Dead and burning." He starts cackling. He seems to have recovered.

Both waiters look back at the glass-strewn car halfway through the shop-window. There are no flames or smoke.

Now the old man addresses Margaret. His lips are motionless but his voice resounds in her head: "Your act of self-sacrifice, woman, although perfectly superfluous, will be rewarded. You shall witness the glory of My Creation, a spectacle vouchsafed to few."

Behind his thick lenses his eyes enlarge into revolving spiral galaxies of blinding radiance. She squeezes shut her eyes and loses consciousness.

Margaret awakens, eyes still shut, to exultant music coming from all quarters. The volume swells. Breakers of sound assault her. Thousands of trumpets puncture her eardrums. Her bones vibrate to massed trombones. Cellos wrench her bowels. A million-throated angelic choir bursts forth:

T h e h e a v e n s r e l a t e

t h e g l o r y o f G o d .

A n d t h e f i r m a m e n t s h o w s f o r t h

H i s h a n d i w o r k.

Margaret keeps her eyes tightly shut in fear of the dazzle of the announced splendor, the visual equivalent of the deafening jubilation. She imagines the furnace of creation, luminous light-years of gas pregnant with stars and worlds; galactic whirlpools of fire; multitudes of suns glowing ruby-red, topaz-yellow and diamond-blue like an immensely enlarged jeweler's window-display.

The celestial music breaks off. She opens her eyes on black void.

Slowly Margaret makes out a low dim smear of light and a poor scattering of dim stars overhead. Their faint light shows that she is seated uncomfortably on a rocky plain. What has happened to the glory of God? Where is His handiwork? Where is He? Margaret casts herself down in a prayerful attitude. Volcanic cinder lacerates her knees. She implores the Most High to listen and reply to her supplications.

The Most High too would like to know what has become of His Glory and Handiwork, what has happened, since His last visit, to the most impressive spot in His universe. Where are those hosts of stars, those illuminated Nebulas, those pulsing Cepheid variables, those clusters and super clusters of Island-Universes with their lovely outflung spiral arms? Now where multitudes of galaxies rejoiced, reigns near void.

He demands an explanation of the solitary elliptical galaxy, M39871. She bewails:

# O Most High however they may lie and their infamy deny

They have cruelly flown leaving me in grief alone

To sigh and to moan to weep and to groan.

On all sides receding my pleas unheeding

Though reddening with shame me they dared blame

For flight

Crying till out of sight:

Quit us not

O reddening hot

Galaxy M39871 dot.

Disgruntled, the Most High understands that they've burdened Him with yet another radical cosmological definition. That early cozy cosmic egg hadn't been good enough for them. So they'd enlarged His area of activities (manageable though) with the earth-centered universe bounded by star-studded crystalline musical spheres. Couldn't let good enough alone, so revision into their new-fangled fatiguing solar system, pious faggots couldn't dissuade them. Then worse: their Milky Way with its two hundred billion stars and eighty-three million-odd inhabited planets to manage. And then far far worse: inhuman enlargement with their billions of other galaxies. Now, all of it expanding in Doppler red shift, diluting Him even further.

The Most High's cogitations (should He try to herd the errant galaxies back here or return to the Great Good Place and deserved slumber?) are interrupted by a tiny indistinct voice.

Who is that female mumbling on the Class IV planetoid? Of course, the girl. Kneeling. Wants reward, of course, for her self-sacrificing gesture. But what's she saying? Can't make her out. Mumble, mumble. People mumble more and more as time goes on. Time was anywhere in the universe one could hear the last chirp of a dying sparrow. Can't make her out. Seems to want a yes or no answer. They never take no for an answer. Reward her with yes, then.

But the Most High has no time to hear her out for He has decided to pursue the errant galaxies immediately. He makes a great effort and leaves a replicate of Himself in AAAM (Automatic Affirmative Answer Mode), a rare privilege for the beneficiaries. With the general decline of His vital forces He had lost the precious power of efficient ubiquity. How many World-Islands with countless billions of inhabited worlds, each containing billions of anguished individuals of wildly variable shapes, implore answers from non-AAAM replicas which, deaf and dumb, are devoid of the capacity of reply to prayers?

And so Margaret Williams at long last receives pre-programmed answers to great questions that she has rehearsed for decades. Only the answer to the first of those questions is a disappointment, a bitter disappointment:

"Oh Lord, must I return to the Prefecture?" She has to repeat the question twice before the great voice conquers void and replies in thunder: "YES!"

Margaret masters a sob and poses her second question, a supplication:

"O Lord, if I dance for the Prefect, but perhaps more, will I be transferred and be able to do good, save Jean Haussier from the sin of suicide, take the veil as Sister Margaret and minister to the poor little monsters, O Lord, will I be transferred and be able to do all those good things, and so many many more, if I dance, but perhaps more, for the Prefect, O Lord?"

In thunder: "YES!"

"And, oh Lord, if I say yes to the Prefect will not only I but also Seymour Stein be transferred and reunited with Marie-Claude I-forget-her-last-name?"

"YES!"

"And Helen Ricchi be transferred and reunited with Richard?"

"YES!"

"And Louis Forster be transferred and reunited with Louise I-don't-know-her-last-name?"

"YES!"

"And Max Pilsudski be transferred to Las Vegas and reunited with Bess and give her the dachshund pup and also oh, please, please, a little sweet baby girl?"

"YES!"

With that thunderous assent and before Margaret Williams, heart brimming with gratitude, can thank the Most High, she finds herself back, for the last time, in the Prefecture, standing on the threshold of the ruined men's room, her heart filled with pity and joy for the poor recumbent figures who are unaware of the marvelous future that awaits them.

In the Avenue Mozart café the bald waiter comes over with the bill for two double cognacs and finds the table empty and the glasses empty too.

"He forgets all the time," the bald waiter says to his colleague who is new on the job. "Look at this too." He points to a pair of high-buttoned shoes under the table. "Does that all the time. Then he comes back an hour later in his stocking feet for them. He'll pay up then, don't worry. Really belongs in an institution."

Time goes by. Galaxy M39871 and the Class IV planetoid and the faint stars dwindle and finally vanish. The replicate AAAM goes on proclaiming assent to the absolute void.

Chapter 43

Scarecrow

Tattered and ghostly with plaster dust, Advocate staggers into the Men's Room. He bears green-labeled bottles of beer to celebrate the joyful news, stale for them, that Margaret has been rescued, thanks again to Sub-Prefect Marchini. Abandoning metaphor and circumlocution in the urgency of the thing, Advocate points to the partition and announces that when Margaret awakens they must convince her to dance for the Prefect. Advocate too, as Margaret had done (but more convincingly, because bureaucratic process rather than miracle is involved) promises good things outside if they succeed in convincing her to do this little harmless thing. Harmless! Perfectly harmless! Act, before it is too late!

Advocate loses self-control. The Prefecture is teetering on the brink of destruction, he cries.

Office after office menaced by premonitory cracks.

Electric bulbs stricken blind as never before.

Rust, gnawing filing cabinets into lace, sabotaging the typewriters.

Panicked functionaries milling about in the corridors imploring for order, for a firm hand on the tiller to steer them out of these perilous waters. Receiving in answer to their pleas the brutal intervention of the Black Men who beat them back into their disintegrating offices.

Fantastically erroneous materializations: three Croats, two Uzbeks and a skin-clad savage.

Act! Act! Before it is too late! Speak to her! A third trial run is scheduled for you, perhaps this very day, perhaps this very minute, a trial run you may never return from nor ever quit. Act!

They're terrorized at the idea of that third trial, immanent and endless. After Advocate leaves, they ignore the beer and debate the matter.

"Sure, we'll speak to her!" Max cries.

Seymour mumbles: "Why not? Nobody's forcing her."

Helen protests vehemently. Haven't they understood by now that there are no gifts in this place?

That leaves Louis.

Louis stares down at the floor. Finally he says: "Dunno. Dunno. I'll go along with the majority."

Helen is outvoted.

Louis lies down on his cot and says nothing. Max and Seymour go, in solemn delegation, to the women's room, knock on the door and then pull it open. The room is empty.

Days go by. Margaret doesn't return. They jog down the rubble-strewn corridors, Helen too, crying out Margaret's name and getting nothing but echoes in reply.

They decide to question the functionaries. But each time they venture down the two corridors that lead to the Administrative Hub they feel the stabbing pain in their temples that indicates nearby supersonic whistles and hear the clump-jangle, clump-jangle of Turnkey and see a black hulking booted helmeted figure gripping a long supple black club in one hand and wrenching open door after door with the other. When that happens, they flee but imagine they can hear the boots of the insect-eyed Exiter pursuing them for hours until they regain the Living Quarters.

One night, Helen doesn't return.

Seymour, like Louis and Max, capitulates to sleep until detonations, never so violent, pull him out of the recurrent nightmare. He waits, fearfully impatient, for disintegrating floors above to crush him into peace. It doesn't happen and he has to confront the dream with Marie-Claude again.

This time, though, she's in her safely nubile 1951 version and visiting him in his second life. She kneels by his cot in the dark and urges him to convince Margaret to dance for the Prefect and so be able to join her outside. "I will, I will," he says and reaches out for her.

But in the dream it's no longer Marie-Claude kneeling by the cot in the dark but Gentille and he pulls his hand back. She whispers that she's escaped (although escape, like prayer, is a sin), that a big big crack had opened in the hospital prison wall and she'd escaped before they could stick the needle in her head and steal the sea from her again, that she still has the key, the key to Room 147 and the tunnel to escape from the Prefecture for good, I'll be waiting for you there, Monsieur Saymore, I have to leave now, the Black Men are looking for me, goodbye Monsieur Saymore and sleep well but not too long because they'll end up finding me.

Then Marie-Claude returns in the dark next to Seymour's cot (naked he somehow knows) and says: "Room 147, Room 147, Room 147." Seymour reaches out for her again and then wakes up. Hoping that awakening may be part of the dream, he goes on groping in the empty darkness. Bitter, he finally gets up.

Something small and hard falls to the floor. He switches on the light and sees a key lying by the cot.

At that moment, Helen Ricchi finds herself in one of the ruined corridors leading to the Hub. So far she hasn't encountered a single Black Man. The concussions begin again. She can feel the floor tremble. She trembles too and has to squat against the cracked wall until the trembling stops.

When she reaches the Hub, the quakes start up again. She encounters hundreds of scared-looking functionaries milling about in the great circular corridor. They shrink back from her as she goes past. Between concussions, she overhears scraps of their muttered fearful remarks and fitting them together understands that chaos has invaded the offices as never before. Files are crumbling and typewriters rusting before their very eyes. Ceilings are bulging dangerously. What will become of us?

The Prefect's neo-classical office is in semi-ruin. Three of the marble nudes that once upheld the Doric roof of the peristyle have lost their essential arms and the roof sags badly. The giant bronze eagle atop it, insignia of power, is askew and dove-white with plaster dust. One of its wings is bent.

Ahead, she recognizes Sub-Prefect Marchini, imperial in his bedraggled uniform. As he strides past them, the functionaries beg him to intervene, to do something. His metallic voice rings out above the uproar of chaos: "The situation lies beyond my area of competence. I am not the Prefect. I am powerless."

A voice murmurs: " _Vive Préfet Marchini_!"

Another voice murmers: " _Vive Préfet Marchini_!"

Other voices, more frightened than scandalized, hush them up.

The Sub-Prefect, expressionless, strides on.

Helen starts trotting to catch up with him and ask about Margaret. He turns into the Reception Room and once again the lights go out.

In the total darkness, groping slowly forward, arms outstretched, she hears frightened voices.

"Ruin is reaching the upper floors now."

"He's walking the inner corridors again."

"Hasn't got his mind focused on here but on back then."

"He has a long memory supply with the woman as long as she lasts."

"What's to become of us?"

"Pray to have him removed."

"Shh. You know direct prayer is forbidden. All prayers are routed through him."

The lights return. Standing before the shut door of the Reception Room, Helen hears a sharp tonal hubbub. It sounds like a mob of incensed Chinese within. She pulls the door open.

Yes, exactly that: a mob of incensed Chinese, at least thirty of them, a mob of Chinese in a bad scramble of periods, a mob of anachronisms. Some can only be pre-Ming Dynasty Imperial Civil Servants, inscrutable pigtailed mandarins in long silk gowns with great floppy sleeves, clasped hands concealed in them, jade pendants at their waist. There are also bare-chested skin-and-bone coolies with rice-straw paddy hats. Others wear Mao unisex uniforms, certainly blue in the shade of gray that represents blue in the Prefecture, and there, there (Helen's eyes widen in astonishment), isn't that the Helmsman, Chairman Mao himself, bearing aloft in his right hand the celebrated book, doubtless red, that shade of gray? Other Chinamen are dressed in Hong Kong western business suits and have well-fed moon-faces and they look scared: for isn't the man who looks like Mao and probably is Mao haranguing the coolies against them?

Sadie is enraged. "No such gigantic blunder of processing has ever been committed, ever, ever." The Sub-Prefect stands there close to the Empire table with the three telephones, gazing at the milling throng of Asians with a tight little smile.

Sadie empties her lungs into a mute whistle. Helen shrinks aside as a dozen Black Men materialize and march into the Reception room. Using their clubs like cattle prods they jab the Chinese out into the circular corridor. Turnkey takes the largest of the keys on his ring and unlocks a steel door marked 48596. The Exiters prod and club the screaming Asians into the room. The Exiters and Turnkey follow. The door clangs shut on them. The vehement ching-chang-choong goes on for a minute and then is suddenly cut off.

Profound silence ensues. A few seconds later, the Black Men and Turnkey emerge. Turnkey locks the door behind him, sinks to a knee and on his skinny calf scribbles a note in his worn notebook.

The lights blink twice and go out. Helen collides with someone in the dark and feels an icy burning hand on her neck.

She loses everything, where she is and who she is, loses everything except intense pain.

Light now.

Shabby corridor.

Stone-faced man in gray smock opposite. Hand outstretched. Ecstatic expression. Eyes blank like a statue's. My head, my head.

Who is he? Where am I? Who am I?

In the face opposite, real eyes replace the statue-white eyes. Terror replaces the ecstatic expression. He runs away from her. She looks about in bewilderment.

Vast arena. Dark in the middle. Illuminated mile-long circular corridor with doors and corridor openings, hundreds of both. Ornate ruined Graeco-Roman peristyle.

A scarecrow creature stumbles out of it. Her skimpy knit dress exposes blood-streaked thighs no thicker than normal arms, not hers, her abnormal arms are like broomsticks and raised in defense before her wasted terrified face. A profound décolleté exposes jutting collarbones and breasts like wrinkled deflated balloons.

A great dusty white wind sweeps down the corridor. The creature whirls like a dead leaf and collapses on the broken arms of a marble statue.

What is this place? Who is she? Help her up.

But the scarecrow gasps "Don't touch me, O please, lady, please, don't touch me again!" and now a gray-smocked frozen-faced mob runs toward them, crying in French: "Exit her! Exit her!"

Black-uniformed goggle-eyed men like giant insects charge the mob. One of them yanks the scarecrow to its feet. Propels it back through the open door of the ruined peristyle. The mob surges back. Quick, out of harm's way. Here: an open door. Inside, quick, shut the door. My head.

Huge room with churchlike pillars. Chinese caps and jade pendants on the floor. Over there two men, one old with long white hair in a big-sleeved black gown, the other small and imperious in a tattered white uniform, standing before a big Empire table with three telephones, one of them black and gigantic under a glass bell. My head, my head. The old man in black says (in French): "Try again. Surely her state bears clear witness to his act." The man in tattered white says: "For the nineteenth time, then." He grits his teeth, heaves the glass bell up and sets it down on the table. With both hands he lifts the telephone, sinks to his knees and murmurs. Murmurs. Murmurs. "Still no reply," he says finally.

The old man in black says: "With the actress in Batch C2645, intervention was immediate, almost upon first contact."

The man in tattered white says: "All things are running down. He too."

The old man in black says: "Try again."

My head, my head, my head.

She (who is she?) slumps against the wall and loses the little she possesses.

When she awakens the pain is still there but the old man in black and the small man in tattered white are gone. The concussions and the uproar in the corridor have stopped.

In the silence, knowledge starts seeping back.

Slowly she realizes where she is and who she is.

Finally she realizes who the mumbling scarecrow is, who it once had been.
Chapter 44

San Juan Hill

The three men are seated on the edge of their cots. By now the key to Room 147 has gone the round of fists. First the hand it was intended for clenched it stubbornly. Finally Max twisted Seymour's arm, pried the key free and started running down the corridor in the vague direction of the distant lock it fitted. Louis caught up with him. Now it's in the impregnable keep of Louis' big fist. Max begs Louis for it. Louis says over and over that they have to wait for Margaret and Helen before deciding anything. Max goes on begging.

A painful intake of breath makes him break off.

An unknown woman wearing a ghastly plaster mask sways in the doorway. The mask stares at them for long seconds. Then the bearer of the mask disappears.

When she returns with the plaster dust washed off her face, the ghastliness is still there but they recognize her now (barely) and wonder if those billions of hourglass grains of sand haven't coalesced and clobbered her into early old age. Her voice too is old and cracked as she tries to tell them what she'd seen, or rather, what the "not-she" had seen during the time the state had lasted, that state she'd briefly shared with the broomstick scarecrow she recognized later as the husk of Margaret, tottering out of the Prefect's office, recognized it only later, once that mindlessly registering "not-she" reverted to Helen.

They don't understand her confused story. They know that something terrible has happened to her in body and mind (they can see and hear that) and apparently to Margaret as well. But they can't see or hear Margaret. How can they possibly imagine the once-Margaret Helen encountered? Words, even coherent words, aren't equal to the task.

Helen weeps and then shouts at their stupidly inadequate faces. In all those decades together they've never seen her weep or heard her shout. She points a trembling finger at Max and accuses him of having met Margaret in the corridors and told her to dance for the Prefect, the way they'd voted it. "You're a murderer."

Max protests violently.

Her trembling finger points at Seymour. She repeats the accusation. "You're a murderer too."

Seymour protests violently.

Her trembling finger points at Louis and she makes the same accusation.

At the word "murderer" Louis silently stares down at the floor as he'd done when they'd argued about telling Margaret to dance and finally he'd said that he'd go along with the majority vote.

Seymour and Max go on protesting but they feel a certain relief at the wildness of her accusations. It allows them to relativize her description of Margaret. Margaret's alive so how can they be murderers? Anyway, how can dancing or more than dancing kill someone?

But she goes on yelling at them: a functionary had touched her just a second and she'd lost everything at that contact, been drained dry of memory for hours. How long had Margaret been in contact with the Prefect and what sort of contact? How long would it take for Margaret to recover, unless she was already beyond recovery? Don't they understand what contact means here? It drains your mind and then it drains your body, drains you to a husk.

At that, and perhaps too late, they understand what they should have grasped from the moment of their materialization among these zombies with their prophylactic rubber gloves (unless their delay in comprehension was programmed like everything else here): the supreme temptation (and transgression) of contact with the Administratively Suspended to drain off the raw material of memory and reconstruct a past existence at the expense of the contacted, robbed of the substance of mind and body. They understand the treachery of Advocate's assurance of collective reward to make them manipulate Margaret into prostitution with the Prefect ("harmless, perfectly harmless!").

Why hadn't Seymour understood what he does now and recounts: his long-ago contact with Gentille's bare arm and his instant blankness and her terrified ecstasy at winning back forbidden bits of a past sea? Max remembers and tells about going blank, he too, upon contact with Dummy.

Yes, Helen was right; contact in their case had been brief and memory had ebbed back. But with Margaret, the contact would be (already was, and would be again and again) prolonged, total, and deep.

Seymour pictures the Prefect's phallus, immensely long, like the deployed sting of some unimaginable insect, not spewing venom, but like a vampire, draining her of the raw material of memory, so of being, and irreversibly.

Prostrated, Helen and Seymour and Max collapse on their cots.

Louis sits on the edge of his cot, head bowed, arms dangling between his thighs.

Time goes by in silence.

But then collapsing floors below and above boom and timbers snap, boom like artillery, snap like rifles and suddenly Louis is back then and there in valor as, shirtless against the heat, they break out of the jungle into the meadow and dig in against the bullets and shells from the booming snapping entrenched heights until finally the Gatlings speak up and hold down the Spanish fire and the bugle sounds and they rise to their feet like a single man, shouting and charge. A soldier to his left crumples, the bugle goes on sounding, they go on charging, dress on the colors, boys.

He towers above them. Git up, we ain't got time, he orders, shaking them, pulling them up to their feet, telling them that they're going to rescue Margaret, maybe it's too late but maybe not, so they got to try instead of just laying here on their backs. And then the tunnel. Maybe the tunnel don't lead nowhere or to worse than nowhere but maybe to where they want to go, maybe just one chance in a thousand but they got to try. They can't just lay here on their backs.

Chapter 45

The Expedition

To guide their suspended successors to possible freedom, Louis would have liked to mark the number of the tunnel door on the wall, but he knows administrative tar would censor it. Instead, he scrawls, in giant letters: DO NOT GIVE UP HOPE GOD IS WITH YOU.

Then he kneels and prays for Margaret, prays for success in their liberating and punitive venture.

On the way to the Administrative Hub, they stop off at Louis' armory. He chooses and allocates weapons and tools. He thrusts a knife in his belt, slings a loaded crossbow over one shoulder and over the other a quiver extemporized out of an old boot and crammed with needle-sharp steel bolts. In his right hand he grips a long spear, like Seymour and Max.

Even more tightly than the spear, Max grips the key Louis has finally let him have, because he (Louis) will be doing most of the fighting so if something happens to me you'll be able to leave. Basically Max and Seymour are pack animals, bearing on their backs sledgehammer, pick, crowbar, shovel, rope-ladders, flashlights with spare bulbs and batteries plus elephant-balls.

Helen has nothing. She'd insisted on having her arms and back free to carry Margaret. When the men had protested at the impossible burden, she'd replied, terribly, but in her usual self-controlled voice, "She can't weigh more than forty pounds now," and they said nothing.

Four-strong, the column works its way through the rubble of the devastated corridors. Louis' stabbing flashlight beam lights up the long black stretches. The booming is incessant.

Perhaps half a day later, Louis raises his hand, stops and gags the lens of the flashlight with his handkerchief. In the muffled light they move toward the growing tumult ahead. Helen twists her ankle and trails behind.

Finally the men halt and kneel for concealment behind the rubble that obstructs the mouth of the corridor. They recall their long-ago first view, upon materializing, of the Hub: under a dome of darkness the gigantic poorly lighted circular passageway with a drab alternation of hundreds of doors and open corridors running about a black pit a mile in diameter. Obscurity has progressed. The dim stuttering wall lamps are blurs in the dusty howling gale that shrouds most of the passageway. But the little they see allows them to realize the enormity of the challenge.

A dozen yards away, three massive Exiters stand guard before the peristyle of the Prefect's dwelling, the first goal. The transparent shields and the wicked flexible clubs are raised for immediate action and the goggle-eyes scan in a crossfire of vigilance.

Further on, other Exiters are trying to beat back a mob of maddened functionaries waving their arms and crying: "Exit her! Exit her!" The Exiters' black clubs and, worse, the functionaries' perilously bare hands lie between the Four and their second goal: on the other side of the black chasm the distant invisible corridor, Corridor 46, that leads to the tunnel.

Spectral in the dust storm, more functionaries stumble out of their collapsing offices and join the mob. It surges forward. Some, impaled on the barbed and pointed fence that delimits the circular chasm, scream thinly. Plaster fragments rain down from the darkness overhead. "The Dome is collapsing! Exit her! Exit her!" The Exiters tirelessly flail functionaries to their knees but move back under the pressure.

The three Exiters guarding the peristyle now concentrate their vigilance on the nearing rioters, turning their vulnerable backs to the three men. Tersely Louis assigns a target for Max and Seymour. He rises out of crouch and commands: "Now!" Gripping his long spear like a pole-vaulter, he starts running forward. They have to imitate him.

Max's Exiter wheels about at the last moment and receives the spear point with Max's hurtling weight behind it on the shield. He totters back a few steps, then halts. The steel spear bends, straightens out and propels Max sprawling and stunned to the flagstones.

Seymour, running toward the assigned leather back, imagines his spear point visiting entrails and squeamishly squeezes his eyes shut a second before a contact which doesn't take place. He misses the Exiter and barges into a badly cracked marble nude, one of six survivors of the original ten, barely upholding the sagging Doric roof. The nude falls apart under the impact of his violent embrace; the roof sags even more perilously; the massive bronze eagle wrenches half-loose; Seymour drops stunned to the floor.

Louis expertly rams his spear through the third Exiter at the level of the liver and all the way to his joined fists. Both fall, dangerously entangled. The Exiter who had survived Max's amateurish assault strides over and raises his flexible club over Louis' head. Louis has a lightning image of a long-ago wooden dummy exploding under a Force Ten blow. He jerks away. The club smashes a flagstone to pieces an inch from his head.

As the Exiter tries to regain balance Louis rolls over, frees the crossbow, aims and releases the bolt with a musical twang. The keen steel penetrates the Exiter's throat. Thick gray blood spouts out of his open mouth. He crumples.

Before Louis can get to his feet and grab Seymour's spear or reload the crossbow, the last of the three Exiters is upon him, club lifted. The wall lamps go out at that instant. Muttering thanks to God for decreeing darkness, Louis picks himself up. He gropes in the direction of his goal, the peristyle, and collides with a marble nude.

The lights stutter back on, revealing the menacing Exiter a foot away. His club whips like a scythe. Louis dodges and sprawls. The marble nude receives the blow, Force Ten or more, and she explodes into fragments. With the loss of still another pair of supporting arms the roof slumps radically and the massive eagle wrenches loose and topples onto the Exiter just as his club rises above Louis' head. The sharp bronze wing with a ton behind it pierces the helmet and the man's skull, emerging from his jaw like a pharaonic beard.

Surely a sign from the Lord, Louis thinks, stepping over the man's body and the bird's imperial beak.

By this time Max and Seymour are back on their feet. Wrenching the ornate door open, Louis signals to them and they race through the rococo antechamber and burst open the door of the huge neo-classical office with blank-eyed Roman busts in wall-niches and a giant desk. Behind it a locked door. Louis kicks it open on an intimate room with a wealth of drapes. A small circular table set for two is covered with decayed delicacies and fragments of ceiling. A bottle of champagne lies drunkenly on a rotting camembert. Plaster dust shrouds caviar and pâté de foie gras. Crepe-paper flowers blossom from a fluted crystal vase.

A crumpled knit dress and an old-fashioned hand-cranked gramophone with piles of vinyl records lie on the floor next to a space cleared, it can only be, for dancing. To one side of a door, draped on a high-backed chair, is the prefectoral uniform and, leaning against the chair point upward, the unsheathed ceremonial sword.

The door is locked. Louis kicks it open.

Seymour, stumbling behind, sees him cross the threshold, gripping a knife, followed by Max and then hears Louis' drained voice: "Almighty God, Almighty God." And Max, whispering: "Jesus, Jesus." Seymour, approaching the threshold, steels himself against the coming sight of the bed, imagining Margaret naked and drained, a practical skeleton, her brain a voided vault, alongside a sated monstrously bloated naked Prefect, apoplectic with total recall.

Again Louis' "Almighty God, Almighty God" and Max's "Jesus, Jesus" and as if in answer to those pleas, there comes from the room ahead the biblical fragrance of what Seymour can't know is balsam, santal, myrrh, frankincense, stacte, onycha and galbanum.

Now choking brimstone as he advances into the smoke-filled room, nothing visible, thank God. A sizzle like a bad short-circuit almost covers sobs (could that be Louis?), then his eyes are seared by a glare of blue and the room explodes in thunder. Seymour is hurled to the floor and loses consciousness.

Comes to, half-blind with persistent blue, thunder persistent in his ears, dazed, being dragged out of the ruins. The new barbecue stench makes him gag on the names he tries to pronounce but Max keeps dragging him, panting that it's too late for the two back there, they gotta get out of here and fast and now pulling him to his feet and forcing him back the way they had come.

They totter into the rococo waiting room just as Helen hobbles in. Seymour expects her to stop them and ask: "What's happened to Margaret? Where is Louis?" But she limps past, as if the two of them didn't exist, as if she expected nothing better than ignominious flight on the part of the men she'd called murderers.

Stumbling out of the Prefect's dwelling, Seymour and Max work their way, in worsened gloom, through the chaos of the fallen peristyle, the roof fragments and dismembered nudes, skirting the bodies of the Exiter with the steel bolt in his throat, the one with the midriff pierced by the spear and the one with his skull skewered by the bronze eagle's wing.

They emerge into the circular passageway and absolute silence. The booming has stopped. The gale has fallen, the dust settled. No more dome fragments fall from the darkness overhead. The insurrectionary tumult has ceased although in the nearly extinct light of the bulbs they can make out the mass of the motionless functionaries and Exiters who hopelessly block the way to Corridor 46 and the door marked 147 and behind it the possible tunnel to freedom.

Just as the thousands of wall bulbs start brightening they hear movement behind them. The Exiter with the arrow in his throat stirs in his vast puddle of thick gray blood and rises to his feet, as does the spear-pierced one. The third with his ton headpiece of imperial bronze resurrects too out of blood and impossibly arises. All three stand at stiff attention.

Terrorized, Seymour, followed by Max, starts running toward distant Corridor 46 on the other side of the massed functionaries and Exiters. Strangely reconciled now, they stand stock still at attention, statues of obedience, dangerous clubs and even more dangerous bare hands tight to their bodies. Weaving past them, followed by Max, Seymour makes out in the growing light Hedgehog with his bottle-glasses, and Sadie and Philippe and Turnkey, all stiff with allegiance, paying no attention to the suspended duo, as though they were invisible. Functionaries and Exiters face, as at a rising sun, the Reception Room on the threshold of which stands once ragged once Sub-Prefect Marchini.

Prefect Marchini now, subordinate to none but the Most High, resplendent in a spotless white integrally buttoned lavishly braided and medalled uniform. He outshines the brightening bulbs. The functionaries' pale lips move in their expressionless masks as they hail in chorus: "Glory to the Supreme Echelon!" "All delegated power to Prefect Marchini!" Even the functionaries impaled on the barbs and points of the wrought-iron fence join in.

The way is free.

Puffing badly, Max and Seymour race toward Corridor 46. Prefect Marchini's voice echoes behind them: "A new era in the history of the Prefecture has commenced. The work of reconstruction shall begin immediately. Return to your offices."

Advocate's voice reaches them faint and quavering from the other side of the black chasm:

"Monsieur Stein... return... all is well. Return... I implore you... Return... all is well now..."

When they finally reach Corridor 46 Seymour halts, turns about and sees Helen held limp, surely dead, in the arms of an Exiter.

He starts bawling for her and for Louis and for Margaret. Max yells that the Exiters are coming for them, yanks Seymour into the corridor and forces him to run, the way Louis did at the beginning here for both of them in the interest of physical and mental well-being until kind sad Helen came to their rescue and convinced him to stop.

Chapter 46

Out Of The Empire Of Death

In the absolute darkness (not a glimmer of the dead-white quarry walls that surround them, not a glimmer of hope, hope long since discarded like all those dead batteries and digested elephant balls in their wake), Max shakes him out of supposed sleep and whispers hoarsely that he can hear her creeping up on them with her bare hands, can't find his flashlight, he'd use the sledgehammer or the crowbar on her but wouldn't her blood on them be like her hands on them and drain them dry?

Seymour gropes about the wet gravel-strewn ground and finds his flashlight. In the faded circle of illumination they see her a good twenty yards away, as strictly commanded, curled up at the base of a rough-hewn column in apparent sleep.

In the ghostly pallor they can make out the contours of the vast white excavation with dozens of passageway openings. She doesn't move. Nothing moves except water slowly dripping from ceiling stalactites. Seymour snaps the light off. Light has to be economized. They're down to their last batteries.

Max whispers that she isn't asleep, she's faking, like with the key. That key to out was a lot of shit, a trap. Out Is A Double Cross. You can say that again. She's waiting for when we're both asleep or conked out and then she'll come and eat our brains up with her hands. Told you not to let her come. Keep on telling you we got to kill her before she gets to us.

Max's whisper becomes an incomprehensible mumble. Then he starts making drowning throat-sounds as he sinks back into sleep.

Seymour can't join in. Strangely, he hasn't slept a wink in all these days or weeks in the limestone quarries that the door marked 147 had opened on. Once again the images of flight come back. He vaguely remembers, as if it had happened years before, fleeing down the rubble-choked corridors, up and down fissured staircases, perhaps pursued by the Exiters, his feet independent of his grief-stricken brain and automatically turning the right way, Max close behind to catch him each time he collapsed, which he did three times. Loyally (Seymour thought) Max stuck by him, using persuasion and force to get him back on his feet just as he'd done in the lightning-blasted bedroom.

But the third time, Seymour recalls, he'd gasped, sick of everything, "Go on without me," expecting some understated expression of virile affection, getting instead, "How the hell can I? I don't know the way to the tunnel," and Max yanked him to his feet and forced him on until they finally reached Room 147 where they'd found the girl they called Gentille or Dummy slumped against the steel door, her stringy hair hanging in front of her face like a mop, her eyes white with inward focus, her hands dangerously naked.

Once more Seymour hears Max (now snoring away painfully by his side) commanding him to order her away from the door because of course she's not coming. In atonement for his virtual crime of having voted to push Margaret down onto the Prefect's thirsty phallus Seymour had refused to leave Gentille here to be caught by the Black Men.

Of course she's coming, he'd said.

"You crazy?" Max yelled. "She'll stick her hands on us, pump us dry."

Even though he too was scared of those naked hands of hers, Seymour came up with an invention: "She knows the way out, I don't." Keeping his distance, Seymour called out to her.

But, incredibly, Dummy forswore the sea ahead. Refused to go. Not without Monsieur Forster and Madame Williams and Madame Ricchi, Dummy said.

No, not Dummy, not dumbness, but Gentille, total _gentillesse_ , total self-abnegation, totally unattainable by him, Seymour Stein. At that latest confirmation of long-known fact his grief and sense of guilt worsen, then and now, recalling it in the darkness. He couldn't bring himself to say that Louis and Margaret and Helen were dead. He came up with another invention. They'd been transferred and so didn't need a tunnel to get to Paris, he said. Gentille's happiness for them was terrible.

Max's snores strengthen to snorts. He cries out "Bess!" and something about no flowers. After a moment of hard breathing, he shakes Seymour. Let's go, he commands, as though paling stars and dawn birds signaled departure time.

Keeping the prescribed minimum of twenty paces between herself and the men, Gentille goes through the motions of guiding them in the obscure maze. Actually, it's Seymour who is in secret command. But since he has no more idea of where they're going than she has, it's the empty motions of authority for him, too.

Before each corridor crossing and in each of the cave-like excavations with their dozens of passageways she halts and asks submissively, as she's been doing since the beginning of their blind wandering in the quarries, "What shall I do, Monsieur Saymore? Where shall I go now?" and Seymour says, "Straight ahead" or "Left" or "Right," right hand of course because it's never the right direction, just a succession of identical-looking pallid corridors with flint nodules embedded in the walls and opening up on vast worked-out spaces, excavations for the limestone blocks that over the centuries had been incorporated into Paris above.

One day or night Seymour stops and once again expends precious current on the walls in hope of discovering guiding messages from possible predecessors. Max shuffles past him in the narrow passageway, following Gentille's faint glow ahead. Seymour's circle of alarmingly faint light reveals carved confusions, like ideograms or messages in Central Asian alphabets, actually chance configurations created by pickaxes centuries before. Not for the first time he makes out mortuary messages from much earlier predecessors: the fossil remains of fish skeletons, gigantic insects and extinct flowers. Those petrified flower imprints are the nearest to a real flower he'd encountered in his second life, he realizes. He thinks of the crepe-paper flower on the table seen just before the blue explosion.

Louis, boohoo, Maggie, boohoo, boohoo, Helen, boohoo, boohoo, boohoo.

Seymour is still at it when Max goes down with a clatter of crowbar and shovel and groans with pain. He picks something up from the ground, stares at it and strangles with rage. Scrambles to his feet, snatches up the crowbar and hurls it at Gentille. It clatters far short. Grabs the heavy shovel, heaves it over his head, starts after her, goes down again and starts howling. The echo is terrible. Gentille stares at him, uncomprehendingly. It's clear she wants to approach and comfort him but doesn't dare.

Seymour can't get a word out of Max. Blubbering, he holds up the first battery he'd slipped on and then points at the second battery he'd slipped on, those dead batteries they'd discarded long ago, they guess. They've been going around in a circle all this time. She'd planned it that way, Max finally brings out. No, says Seymour, but Max goes back to blubbering. By this time the last batteries in their flashlight are about to give up the ghost. Soon they'll be groping in total darkness. Soon they'll be giving up the ghost too.

But something miraculous happens a minute later as they turn left, following Gentille. Failing instructions she's taken the initiative for the first time at a passage crossing.

Gentille's beam turns yellow and she cries out.

Seymour switches his flashlight on. His beam is yellow too, an anemic straw-yellow, nothing like Van Gough sun-flower yellow, but unmistakably yellow anyhow, and, look, the bulb-filament is red, an anemic earthworm-red, nothing like sun-rise red or poppy red, but a try at red anyhow, so the first colors in their second lives here, except for that annihilating blue flash in the bedroom.

Up ahead Gentille cries out again, a cry of intense pain. She collapses to her knees. Seymour approaches cautiously. He calls Max over. In the beam her face is a medallion of suffering, and at the same time a deceptive affirmation of life. Her mask has lost its post-mortem rigidity and whiteness, look, aren't her lips a little bit red, and maybe her hair too? Her face is the face of a deathly sick person on the way to recovery. But her moans are agonized. It's another reversal of normality, like hearts on the wrong side. Pallor is normal for them, color seems to indicate fatal sickness.

Still moaning, she slowly arises and lurches ahead, ignoring the passages to the right and the left. One of the passageways is badly obstructed with rubble.

The miracle ceases. Her beam is back to gray in the darkness. She stops moaning. Seymour switches on his flashlight. His beam is back to gray in the darkness, the bulb filament gray too. She drags herself into another excavation and stops, facing the dozen passage openings. Her face is back to white rigidity.

"Where shall I go, Monsieur Saymore?" she whispers. "Tell me where to go."

He tells her to take whichever one she likes. She stands there. He has to tell her which one. As she splashes through puddles toward the designated opening, Max orders Seymour to order her to go back to the place where there was color.

"It's bad for her," Seymour says.

"Worry about us," says Max. "Tell her to go back there, for chrissake."

So Seymour tells her to go back there. He neutralizes his participation in the directive by adding, "Unless you don't want to." But Gentille's not accustomed to exercising choice, in this life or in the past one (doesn't Seymour know that?). Dutifully, she turns back out of the excavation as the men stand at a safe distance. They follow her, eyes fixed on the beam.

She reaches the intersection. Yellow comes back. She collapses.

When she finally gets up, Max tells Seymour she should go into the obstructed passageway. Seymour relays the message. In his mind he's reduced his participation to the function of relay. She obeys. Her state briefly worsens. Or improves, depending on the point of view.

But then she emerges from the zone of color and is able to totter to another crossing. Max continues directing things, Seymour relaying his commands, command after command and it goes on and on like that, the beam sometimes yellow, sometimes gray and getting weaker and weaker. She's a remote-controlled Geiger counter to localize color and real life for them.

A few seconds after Max discovers a spider web, so life, she gasps, claws open her blouse and collapses, rolling on her back and writhing. The beam of the flashlight is too weak to go beyond the pale-straw register but she herself is transformed by color into deceptive skin-deep normality, lying there, still now, a lovely eighteen-year-old girl, her staring eyes a fatal blue, her hair a fatal red, her cheeks flushed as though she'd been running on a dune for a view of the sea.

Seymour falls to his knees beside her. He stammers: "Forgive me, Gentille. Touch me, Gentille, take some of me, there's too much of me, don't take it all, though, Gentille, leave me a little."

He holds his trembling hands over her for her to reach out for a transfusion of life, not sure he won't snatch them away if she tries. She doesn't try. She doesn't hear or see him. He lowers his right hand on to her between her small breasts (her flesh is almost warm) and does lose something but not the right things, guilt still festering. He receives a trickle of things, so it's an exchange: he sees a dark squalid room, the lighthouse distorted through a smudged cracked window a hulking figure over the bed and the little girl, hears her voice, "No, Poppa, no, don't hurt me again," hears a woman's distant voice outside crying "Elizabeth!"

The flow ceases. In the circle of pale straw light Elizabeth ceases. Their Geiger counter is dead. But it has accomplished its function. Max at the end of the caved-in corridor shouts: "Come here! We're out!"

Seymour doesn't move or answer. Max rushes over and drags him to the caved-in passage. Yellow light seeps through the chaotic blocks of fallen limestone. They hear a faint functionary voice on the other side: "Closing time! Everybody out!"

Everybody out. Max thrusts the crowbar between the blocks and enlarges the gaps. "I don't want to go," Seymour says. "We don't deserve it." But he has no choice. Max forces him through. "You gotta show me the way to the airport."

"Closing time! Closing time!" the jovial functionary voice calls out again from a great distance. "Don't want to spend the night here, do you?"

No, neither night nor eternity. They break free of the stone fragments, faces matted with spider webs like birth cauls, and emerge into blinding glare.

Max's eyes are the first to adapt to it. Seymour hears a scared "Jesus" and seconds later he too is able to focus on walls lined with tibias and skulls tight-packed from floor to ceiling. Spotlights dramatize them.

Badly scared, Max wants to turn back to their recent corridors. Seymour, joyous, all the things behind him fading in his mind like a nightmare on awakening, has to drag him forward. He explains that they're in the Catacombs, a Paris tourist attraction, he's been there, which means they're practically out already.

Seymour sees with startling clarity what awaits him up there: the great bronze Lion of Belfort and on the other side of the Avenue du Général Leclerc the Denfert-Rochereau metro station with its glass-covered map and its tangle of numbered lines. The way to Marie-Claude comes back, evacuating from his brain Louis and Margaret and Helen and Elizabeth: Line 4, change at Montparnasse (all those subterranean corridors and stairs) for Line 3 and climb up and out at Sèvres-Babylonne, a ten-minute walk to her street, three minutes running.

They start running in the direction of the shuffling feet somewhere ahead, the echoing voices in English, German and Italian, the murmurs, the teenage Bela Lugosi laughter and woo-wooing ghost cries, sneezes, coughs, shrieking laughter. They weave through the maze of damp corridors with their calcium sampling of six million Parisians, thirty generations of them, disinterred in the 18th century from overcrowded pestilential cemeteries.

At one moment they stop, panting and perplexed, at a corridor crossing, not knowing which way to turn. To their right, facing more ramparts of jawless skulls stands a black marble altar with an inscription:

Listen dry bones

Listen to the voice of the Lord

Dry bones, you will live again

A faint echoing scrape of feet comes from the right and they run past the altar, run and run until finally they come to a rectangular opening with brighter light behind it. They step into a broad banal corridor without skulls, the walls covered with graffitied dates and names, the cement floor littered with crumpled paper handkerchiefs and cigarette butts discarded by herds of tourists on the threshold of the guided tour of death.

They're out of it, the two of them, out by the unauthorized way, as the melodramatic inscription over the opening tells Seymour.

# STOP! THIS IS THE EMPIRE OF DEATH

They'd missed the way to the exit. Didn't matter. They were exiting via that entrance, they were emerging from that empire after having already, long ago, entered it the usual way and not as tourists.

But stepping forward, Seymour's heart goes wild; the corridor whirls; he lets himself down, imitating Max. Something held inhumanly taut within during all that time in the quarry snaps. He loses consciousness.

When consciousness returns, Seymour sees Max, color seeping into his cowboy suit, crouched forward between his raised knees in the foetal position that is Seymour's own. Max raises his head, shakes it dazedly and picks himself up. Seymour gets up too. He feels incredibly light, unburdened of all the things behind him. He understands that the fit came from hysteric joy at escape.

"Let's get out of here," he says. "We don't want to be locked in for the night."

They hurry down the corridor and up a long spiral stone staircase and exchange the theatrics of mortality for a space of matter-of-factness occupied by two joking uniformed functionaries with cigarettes pasted in the corners of their lips and a ticket booth with the price of the visit (300 francs).

Strangely, the functionaries pay no attention to the unauthorized exit of the two men, one of them conspicuous in a cowboy outfit. Seymour observes that Max's scarf is bright red now.

Preparing his eyes for colored glare, Seymour pulls the street door open. It takes all his strength to do it. They step out into dull whiteness. The fog is so thick that it conceals the great bronze lion and the Avenue du Général Leclerc with the Denfert-Rochereau station on the other side. It drowns the light of a midday streetlamp. The sun is a vague inflammation.

"The planes'll be grounded," Max mutters. Seymour guides him toward the barely visible curb. They step off it and venture forward alongside another pedestrian reduced to a dark smear.

Blurred headlights loom; a horn blares indignantly; they pull back and feel the wind of the speeding car, crazy, speeding in fog. Seymour imagines the driver at the sudden ghostlike sight of the three of them, jabbing his temple with an outraged forefinger at the craziness of jaywalking in fog.

More blurred headlights loom. They dodge and zigzag their way to the other side of the avenue where they blunder against a mobile metal barrier guarding a blurred stretch of black ditch. Seymour recalls how the French were always tearing up their streets to get at their archaic pipes and wires, imposing long circumnavigations on the pedestrians.

He makes out the dark shapes of other fog-blinded trapped pedestrians trying to bypass the barrier in single file. Seymour steers Max that way and they advance slowly. Why so slowly? "Can you hear the planes?" Max says. All Seymour can hear is the occasional blare of car horns and the slow shuffle of the feet ahead. So slow. Too slow.

"Come on," he says to Max who is looking up at the invisible sky, mouth agape. Seymour steps out of the line and short-circuits it, trotting past the dark figures.

A car roars behind him like a leaping beast of prey. He throws himself aside and sprawls. A deafening roar as though the car had passed over him. Choking from the exhaust fumes, he lies there and sees a procession of dark feet shuffling past, nobody commenting on his miraculous survival, nobody offering him a hand. Dark feet after dark feet but now yellow cowboy boots.

Seymour pulls himself up, unscathed. Not even his palms hurt although they'd borne the brunt of his fall. Max is still gaping at the invisible sky.

They shuffle forward with the others, testing the presence of the barrier now invisible in the thickening fog.

The dark figure ahead turns left and they follow. The barrier ends. A dark wall looms and they stand before a stark giant portal, no metro entrance. Seymour tries to move away but Max grabs him and forces him to follow the vague dark shapes ahead through the entrance.

"The plane's landing," Max bellows in his ear as though trying to outdo close jet engines. The only sound is the soft crunch of feet on gravel.

The fog lifts like a theater curtain.

"Don't take off without me!" Max yells and starts running down the peculiar graveled avenue.

"Come back, Max!" Seymour cries. "It's no airport here!"

47

Demon Lover

Seymour breaks free and runs past the dark procession he'd unknowingly been part of during that misguided time in the fog.

None of the wreath-bearing mourners behind the slow black hearse pay attention to his cries to Max as he runs past the jumble of stones, vertical and horizontal, past the grieving marble angels and all those crosses. He reaches a junction and looks both ways but doesn't see Max, just stones, angels and crosses, a multitude of crosses.

Double cross. Seymour sinks down on a marble bench, trying to exercise free will and deviate from the new script imposed by the cruel, absurd and talentless Author/Producer/Director/Set-Designer. He resists the temptation of flight. He knows that if he runs back, the graveled avenue leading out of this other empire of the dead won't be there.

Seymour refuses the imposed role. No tears, no hysteria. He recalls poor dead Helen's remark about dignity, about not giving them (Him, she should have said) the satisfaction of panic. He knows from experience that revolting against the suddenly revealed net cast over him would constrict him like a fly in a spider-spun shroud.

He's careful not to raise his eyes above the crosses and beyond the dark wall, certain he'd see the top-story windows of the neighboring buildings affording (in flagrant and sadistic violation of the laws of optics) a frontal view of unattainable things: happy close-knit families, a child watering a red geranium on a window sill, slowly loving bedded couples.

Avoid prostration too, the alternate scenario. Deny the Scriptwriter the malevolent joy of viewing him as he is now, slumped forward on the bench, breathing hard, arms dangling between his knees. So Seymour goes through the motions of calm normality. Stands up and strolls to where the central avenue had been. As expected, it's not there. Unbroken dark wall where the portal had been. No panic. The normal reaction of a lost person is to ask.

Seymour stands in the path of a uniformed cemetery functionary pushing a cart full of rotting flowers and wreaths. To spite the sky, he bans any trace of anguish from his voice and asks: "The way out, please?" Seymour expects elaborate misdirection but the man doesn't answer, doesn't halt; the man is upon him and Seymour passes unpleasantly through the man (no man) as through poisonous fog.

For a few seconds he understands: despite their flesh-and-blood appearance, these people are once-people, all of them ghosts (the functionary, the mourners behind the hearse, the once loved-ones sweeping the graves free of dead leaves and offering flowered pots), the only real persons in the phantom-infested cemetery the two of them, Seymour Stein and Max Pilsudski.

Real?

Seymour stands there in a long suspension of movement and breath, remembering the Catacombs functionaries who hadn't noticed their illicit exit, the abnormal resistance of the door, the mourners who had ignored him sprawled on the street after the car that had gone over (say, rather, through) him.

Seymour finally understands who the ghosts are.

Combating metaphysical anguish with technical considerations, he tries to situate the moment of his second death. Fleeing the Hub, refusing to obey the injunction of Advocate to return? Had he been exited then? Or, stepping out of the melodramatic antechamber to the Empire of Death with that snap of something vital within and loss of consciousness: had the warned incompatibility with reality killed them then?

After a while, what's left of Seymour is able to explore the frontiers of his new state. He walks over and tentatively touches a heavy-breasted nude female mourner, stone of course. She resists. If he can go through people, granite is spook-proof. He bends down and tries to pick up a pebble. It's as heavy as a boulder. He's a featherweight in a world of intolerable mass.

Impalpable and soundless, Seymour feels lonely among these mourners, none of them mourning him. He starts exploring the cemetery in search of Max, a quick job, he thinks. He knows they're in the small Montparnasse cemetery, a stone's throw (if he could throw it) from the Catacombs, bounded by the Rue Froidevaux, the Boulevard Raspail, the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, and by a street he can't remember.

The cemetery turns out to be inexplicably vast. In division after division the rest of that day Seymour peers and calls, disturbing no one and getting no reply from the only once-person who could possibly hear him.

He concludes that Max isn't here. Back in the half-life of the Prefecture they'd seen different things through the Common Room window: Max an unpeopled dead city; he, Seymour, the thronged Paris of 1951. Maybe what Max had seen, entering this space, was no cemetery but the airport he'd longed for all that time and claimed he could hear. Maybe he'd boarded the Boeing, bound – he thought – for Las Vegas, joyous till the solicitous hostess with the tray turned her fleshless face to him: more of the Scriptwriter's B-series horror tricks.

So Seymour is all by himself here, with nothing, absolutely nothing, to do. Freed of the dictates of the flesh, Seymour soon learns that his needs have been radically simplified. But that radically complicates the problem of disposing of time.

He tries to escape the cemetery prison and his ghostly condition through sleep but discovers there's no need (so no possibility) of that nightly eclipse. No need or possibility of dressing and undressing with all of those time-filling miniscule actions: buttons buttoned and unbuttoned, zippers zipped and unzipped, laces laced and unlaced. No need, either, for washing or combing or shaving or nail clipping. No need to eat or drink with all the associated actions and states that distract your mind from contemplation of basic nothing: hunger and thirst, satiety, elimination. Nothing to read except for the multi-volumned slabs with their minimal plot of birth and death. And the breasts of the 19th century Eros-Thanatos statuary here have no uplifting effect on him.

The worst incapacity Seymour suffers is impairment of memory, that fabulous refuge. He can remember plenty of impersonal things like nearly all the varieties of Heinz soups, New York Yankee batting-averages and the layout of Paris streets, but very little about his real life before the half-life of the Prefecture. He does remember having known a young woman of central importance to him in this city. He tries to recall her name and face and street. All he salvages is a golden horse head and the rose-encircled image of a peasant girl on a dish.

Seymour tries to come up with ideas to mitigate loneliness. He notes that he isn't tricked out in shroud or ectoplasmic spook attire. He's still in civilian garb: his 1951 turtleneck sweater and corduroy cuffed trousers. Which means that maybe some of the so-called people he sees here are ghosts like himself. It's an ideal place for apparitions with the ghost-rich deposits underfoot. Couldn't one ghost see and fraternize with another? Swap experiences?

So for the rest of the summer he addresses people in the cemetery (from a careful distance) and at night halloos but with no result. It does kill time a little, though.

The leaves on the cemetery trees slowly lose their green.

One dark day a wet gale blows the trees to skeletons. The leaves lie plastered on the walks and tombs. The day after, All Saints' Day, the rush-hour press of mourners bearing potted briars and chrysanthemums aggravates his sense of isolation and he retires to old graves no one visits.

Snow transforms the stark graves but cruelly refuses to shape Seymour out of invisibility into an animated snowman, doesn't even register his footprints as he wanders about his empty white empire.

Sometimes Seymour yields to temptation and follows visitors about in the hope they're street-bound. But they're always grave-bound and he never glimpses the portal.

Seasons wheel by.

One soggy All Saints' Day (perhaps the sixth since he was steered into this stone trap) Seymour has an illumination as he stops in his invisible tracks before a young woman sweeping leaves off a grave. She's the exact image of the rose-encircled girl on the dish. Although photographic paper is a more common support for a likeness than stoneware, he convinces himself that this shapely blue-eyed blonde is the woman that had meant so much to him in his first life.

He approaches her, closer than he'd ever dared to a visitor, and says: "You're so beautiful." She goes on sweeping.

He's greatly relieved that his words, loud to his ears, are inaudible to hers. He doesn't want his (probable) beloved to be the long-sought companionable ghost, partner in an unsubstantial hand-in-hand affair. The relationship can be far more intimate. That's the illumination. Aren't ghosts capable of possession, psychic and maybe more than psychic? Seymour isn't sure he's qualified for the wildly romantic role of incubus, demon lover. But merging with her he'd at least be transported out of the cemetery, stowed away in a disused portion of her brain.

Fusion with a living person, though, supposes careful contact. Fusion hadn't happened with the cemetery functionary because of the (virtual) violence of their encounter. He'd shot through and free of the man's gravitational field. This time he has to manage things with finesse.

Seymour is about to initiate the delicate orbital approach when a young man comes into the plot breathless. He kisses her cheek and, scandalously, she kisses his. Soon they leave together arm in arm. Seymour looks at the forsaken stones. The family name is Fournier. He wishes he could remember his faithless darling's first name.

Seymour spends the rest of that year and most of the next searching for Mademoiselle Fournier. She haunts him. Month after month his desire to be incarnated as her demon lover grows. He tries to salvage scraps of information from his readings on paranormal phenomena. Sometimes doubts trouble him. Can ghosts really be demon-lovers? Don't you have to be a demon to start with? In the hierarchy of supernatural entities ghosts must be at the bottom of the organization chart. Weren't demons high-placed, angels gone bad? Demons were dynamic, while ghosts were too feeble to manage more than the odd apparition. Seymour can't even pull that. So would a transparent entity who could hardly budge a pebble be capable of unleashing uninterrupted midnight-to-dawn orgasms?

Assuming the operation is possible, Seymour is determined to be a well-behaved demonic entity, no unclean spirit to throw his darling into fits and convulsions or make her spout blasphemous obscenities in a rasping guttural croak. Sadism is no part of his love. Anyhow, he doesn't want to call down exorcism rites on him and maybe be humiliatingly expelled, as dybbuks reputedly were, through the victim's great toe or worse.

On the following All Saints' Day, he sees her again, with her cascade of blonde hair and her breast-swollen russet coat and her ritual broom.

Seymour sidles up and delicately passes into her.

He's instantly seized by a mighty centrifugal force, a revolving door that revs up wildly, ejecting him, a whirlwind bum's-rush out, blown a hundred feet away against an unflowered tomb with a violence that would have brained any living creature.

Stretched out in misery, Seymour sees his unattainable probable sweetheart go on sweeping and then the young man comes into the plot breathless, kisses and is kissed and they leave arm in arm.

Seymour looks beyond them for relief, beyond the dark wall at the high windows on the other side of the street and suffers even more cruelly from what he views there.

He starts sobbing.

The miracle happens then as the earth starts speaking to him.

48

Spectral Happiness

Still in the posture of rejection, ear pressed against the damp earth, heart festering with self-pity, Seymour hears the plaint of the neglected dead.

There are no words to it. It's a concentrate of desolate sounds, a cracked bell tolling in fog, the snapping of a cello string, wind weeping in icy branches, dark arctic breakers. They're the lonely sounds of long-neglected dead people. The sounds are dingy white, black, muddled gray and smell musty.

Their slow blind grief lances Seymour's heart of self-pity. He redirects that pity their deep way, aware of his spectral privileges, even in this place, able to see, able to move and make tiny things move. The underprivileged people at his feet are dark and inert. Seymour wants to console them. He deciphers their names beneath the lichen of their cracked cockeyed stones, identifies himself and then addresses them loudly to penetrate the earth and the years they've been in it: Paul, Sylvain, Mathilde, Marie, Germaine, Maurice, Estelle, Louise, Charles.

At first it's not easy engaging in one-way small talk with these strangers. Finally he describes the things he sees on his better side of the cemetery, such as the mixed blue and white of the sky, blackbirds with their saucy yellow bills and sunshine, marvelous even if he casts no shadow in it.

He stops and listens. The desolate sounds modulate into deep organ chords of thankfulness at being remembered and reminded of things they too had enjoyed.

Seymour gets up, drunk with joy at being acknowledged. He seeks out other neglected tombs and repeats the operation. Repeats it day after day, week after week, month after month.

His praise of the little things in and above the cemetery makes them great in his mind. They proclaim their own glory. Among thousands: the grain and cleavage of pebbles and a spider web spun between marble breasts and glittering with dew. Also, the life-stages of leaves from spring bud to the delicate ribs and lace of fall. Clouds come in all creative shapes: drifting continents, profiles, breasts, elaborate 18th century hairdos. There are dominoed ladybugs and paired yellow butterflies announcing August. His close vision dispels the monotony of snowfalls, each flake revealing a unique needle or columnar or star-shaped configuration. He tells them about it all.

So day and night Seymour pronounces their names and bears them tidings from the world above. The sensed gratitude and contentment of these hundreds, then thousands, of once-forgotten people fill him with a calm happiness he's sure he'd never experienced in his former lifetime. He's shed the burden of self.

He hardly notices the living. That has its dangers. Once, intent on reaching a distant plot, he passes through the legs of a seated visitor with no consequences to either, no organs having been involved, he supposes. But he watches his steps after that.

Dedication to these impoverished people develops into never-ending effort, there are so many of them. His activities become even more exhausting after he discovers that what gives them particular happiness is the tribute of flowers. He starts plundering brand-new graves of their grief-stricken floral splurge and redistributes memory to the poor. He takes no more than one flower at a time. Even so, it's a tremendous effort lifting a single chrysanthemum and carting it all the way to a distant section.

Once, a child stares wide-eyed at the rose he's painfully carting. "Momma, look, the flower's floating!" Seymour drops it. "Shh," says the mother and goes on tending the grave.

After that incident Seymour is careful to operate only at night. It wouldn't do to have his levitating floral tributes spotted. He imagines the psychic phenomenon blown up by the popular press and the subsequent invasion, day and night, of reporters and photographers, capped by a publicity-hungry Jesuit trying to exorcise him (was it painful?), not allowing him an instant to get on with the meaningful work for his friends below.

There are other exhausting aspects to his vocation. Particularly challenging are the sunken cracked stones of people with no commemorative plaques or wreaths intact to say their names. Their stones are mute too. To comfort them Seymour has to uncover their identity. Scratching away at the lichen that clogs the memory of the stones, he feels like a coal-miner wielding a pickax. Brushing aside dust-motes from the blurred letters is like shoving rocks. And after all that devoted labor sometimes he finds nothing but blur beneath the lichen. Even the memory of stones fades.

When that happens he has to recite in alphabetical order all the names he'd memorized on all the other stones in the cemetery, marking a long pause for possible response after each name. From Adélaide to Yvette the recital sometimes takes a whole day. But he has all those days ahead of him, years and decades. So have they.

He notes that his strength, never great, wanes with the moon. On moonless nights grappling with dust and lichen makes him feel like he'd washed all the windows of the Empire State Building. But he goes on with the job, much more than a job, a dedication.

The Jewish section of the cemetery poses particular problems. How can he say their names? So many of them are twisted in Hebrew characters he can't decipher. So he recites all the Jewish first names he can remember, the ones that aren't in the other part of the cemetery (Abraham, Aaron, Amos, Benjamin, Gabriel, Golda, Herschele, Hymie, Hannah, Jacob, Judith, Miriam, Moische, Rachel, Rebecca, Sarah, Saul, Simon, Samuel). Before certain monuments dedicated to the unnamed because unnameable Victims of Nazi Barbarity he gets in reply no more than a faint hiss like radio waves from distant stars. It puzzles him until one night he realizes their bodies aren't here, never had been here except alive and then not in this spot, weren't even in their fatal Poland. They are motes of a smoke avatar circling the earth in the upper stratosphere. The messages are faint, confused and numberless. How is it possible to get through to them?

One All Saints' Day, Seymour spots the blonde in the Fournier plot. Time has marked her a little by now, but objectively she's still beautiful. He moves away, perfectly indifferent. He's sure now that he'd never known her in his past life.

Anyhow, the living don't interest him anymore.

Chapter 49

Goodbye

One sunny spring day Seymour is kneeling before a neglected stone, happy with the fragrance of nearby lilacs and trying to communicate it below, when suddenly he finds himself elsewhere, in whiteness, on his back, rigid, heavy as lead and unable to budge. His nostrils are filled with astringency.

At first he thinks he's changed places with the dead below. But they lie boxed in darkness. There's light here, a poor sterile artificial light and no lid over him but a blurred ceiling. He hears a faint murmur of voices and sees blurred faces looming for a second. He thinks: this is my first spook dream. But what he sees has a shabby painful reality to it. Real people often dream spooky dreams, he thinks. Spooks logically dream of real things.

To escape from the dream Seymour imagines himself on his feet, arms stretched up to the sky beyond the ceiling, moving forward, shedding weight and taking off for the lilacs and his deep friends.

He finds himself back to lightness in the cemetery, still kneeling before the stone, casting no shadow in the full moon. Has he lost all those daylight hours in the long dream?

Then the sky fills with booming and colored arabesques and he knows it's Bastille Day, mid-July, so three months from those fragrant April lilacs.

From the ground come the mournful sounds of the dead neglected all that time.

He makes the rounds. Those same sounds come from all of the graves he's so carefully tended for so long. He has to make up for lost time, redo what's been undone. He runs from grave to grave, apologizes, does a terser job on the nature descriptions, often staggers under the burden of two flowers now.

By this time he possesses their names and location in his mind so that in less than two seasons he's reestablished the old contact with them.

But a second time (it's full-leafed summer now) the dream snatches Seymour away from them in the middle of a tending gesture. He finds himself back, heavy as lead, in the white room with the astringent smell and stony faces he can't place looking down at him. Their voices are an incomprehensible drone.

Again, he imagines himself on his feet, arms stretched up to the sky beyond the ceiling, moving forward toward lightness and escape.

The drone fades and then everything else fades and he awakens to the reality of the snow-covered cemetery, months after, in the middle of the tending gesture he'd begun in June above a grave, with the desolate plaint of his dead friends he's neglected again all that time.

Once more, he tries to reestablish the interrupted communication. Some of his friends sulk and fail to respond to his apologies and descriptions. But in another two seasons he's made most of them happy again. He would be happy himself except for fear of another long dream and all his loving labor undone and his friends unhappy once more.

But years of happy exhausting devotion go by without interruption.

Gradually he forgets the long leaden dreams.

Seymour is describing a high summer flight of pigeons to Joseph Lenoir (1842-1864) when, with no warning, the distant blue sky becomes close white ceiling. Now unkind faces hover over him and unkind hands force him into a sitting position, then into a trembling standing position, then forward into a tottering walk. There's a way to escape from the heavy dream but he can't remember what it is.

Hands guide him back to the iron bed. He stares up at the ceiling.

The ceiling fades and now he's being wheeled down corridors, a maze of corridors. He remembers the way to escape and imagines himself standing, arms upflung, moving forward towards freedom.

Seymour returns to the reality of the cemetery but to the wrong side of it, to the street side of the dark wall, the side he'd longed for at the start and doesn't want now. He wants the side where his underground companions are.

It's sunrise. Seymour starts jogging about the cemetery wall looking for the way in, careful to avoid contact with the passersby.

At sunset, though, still seeking, eyes fixed on the wall, he fails to pay attention to the outstretched legs of an old man seated on a bench. Instead of passing through them as he'd once done to legs, he trips and falls heavily, like lead.

The old man glares at him, white beard and moustache bristling. Confused, Seymour apologizes and when the old man responds to the apology (negatively: "If you opened your eyes there would be no need for apologies!") Seymour realizes that he's back to opaque ponderous flesh.

He prays for return to transparency and weightlessness and return to his friends. The force of his yearning is too great and his prayer is answered, beyond reason. He sheds weight and rises. Snatches powerlessly at the dark wall sinking past. Rises past top-story windows. Astonishes flights of pigeons. Ascension accelerates. The cemetery is a pocket-handkerchief, then a postage stamp, then a dot.

"My friends, my dear companions," he cries down to them. "Be patient, I'll be back soon."

But how can they hear him from that distance?

Now: on his back, immobile as though cast in lead. Different room. Different smell. Not astringency now. Smell of paint. Room freshly painted gray. Shower-stall in corner. Plastic curtains. Pattern of gray roses. Low table next to the cot. Bouquet of flowers. False flowers. Gray paper. He thinks of the real flowers he brings to his friends and waits for the dream to end and allow him to do that.

He sees a wine-stained wall map of France and recognizes it as the map of France poor Elizabeth had seemed to pray to searching for a coastal village. Now he recognizes the room, beneath renovation, as the Men's Room in the Living Quarters of the Prefecture in his second life, that pitiful half-life.

A pail bongs outside the door. He gets up painfully and totters over to the door, casting a solid shadow, like a malignant excrescence, in the light of the ceiling globe and opens on Elizabeth at his feet, back from death, as sometimes happens in dreams, back to her drab Gentille disguise, scrubbing the floor. Tears burn his eyes. He forgets that he's acting out a dream and sinks to his knees, to her level.

"Oh Elizabeth, I thought you were dead. I thought I had killed you." His voice is feeble and cracked.

The plaster mask looks up a fearful instant and then confides to the pail: "He doesn't know the rules yet. He doesn't know it's forbidden to talk to New Arrivals."

She grabs her cleaning implements (splashing dirty water over his leg) and runs away, her bony knee bonging and bonging against the pail.

Escape from it. There's a way to escape the nightmare and join his friends but he can't remember how.

Behind the door of the Women's Room water runs into a glass. A few seconds later the glass is set down on a hard surface. Slow footsteps. The complaint of bedsprings.

He goes over to the door and knocks timidly, then louder. Getting no answer, he pushes the door open a few inches. The room is like a tiny chaotic library, all four walls covered with books from floor to ceiling and hundreds of books on the floor, a turmoil of books, crumbling piles of books. On the cot a very old woman with thick reading glasses and wild white hair is propped against the wall, absorbed in a book. He clears his throat. She goes on reading. "Excuse me," he says.

The old woman doesn't respond. She must be deaf. She finishes her page and looks up over her glasses. She squints at him and finally says in a feeble cracked voice: "You must be a suspended New Arrival. The Corsican will be furious. There hasn't been a suspended New Arrival since the overthrow of the old Prefect. This is the Women's Room. The Woman's Room. The Men's Room is the next door to your left."

She waits for him to disappear. He waits for her to disappear along with the room and everything else and for himself to cast off heaviness and go back to the interrupted description of a flight of pigeons, probably not the same, in a later sky, probably not blue (he's prepared for that), to Joseph Lenoir (1842-1864).

Nothing disappears. This is the longest of the heavy dreams. The old woman continues staring at him. "I know you, knew you. You're... Seymour. Seymour I-forget-your-last-name. Nobody told me you came out of it. After all this time."

Again forgetting that this is a dream, he says, "My God, you were Helen," a terrible tense to inflict on someone, even in a dream. But she doesn't seem to care. She seems anxious to return to her book, closed on a place-marking finger. Why doesn't she ask about Max? He starts explaining that after they got out of the tunnel they ended up as ghosts in the Montparnasse Cemetery and that he'd lost Max there.

She stares at him. "Don't you know where you've been all this time? Didn't they tell you? Tell you about Max and the others? Poor Seymour."

He hears her, this caricature of the girl called Helen he'd once attempted to fall in love with, trying to make him believe where he'd been all that time – a hundred seasons at least, she says – following the blind thunderbolt that had killed Margaret and Louis and Max, killed everybody except him, Seymour, and of course Hautecloque, cursed with immortality, downgraded from prefect to a mindless toilet cleaner.

She'd seen it all, she says, when she limped into that exploded room, the others charred but not him, Seymour, and then she'd fainted. After, she'd visited him once a month in their terrible hospital. But he was still in coma so she spaced her visits the second year to every other month and the year after every six months and then not at all.

Hearing her deny the reality of his years of selfless devotion in the Montparnasse Cemetery, Seymour recalls the way out of nightmare, the way back to his deep friends. He raises his arms heavenward, his eyes too, staggers forward, trips over a pile of books and sprawls. His sleeve is shoved up, disclosing, inches from his eyes, a scrawny old arm, heavily veined and covered with white hairs. He guesses his face must match hers in decrepitude. He starts crying.

The old woman tries to comfort the old man. Things are much better here since the Corsican took over long ago. Ruin has been halted and repaired, showers installed, toilets modernized, the food vastly improved although far from good. Above all, books, thousands and thousands of books available as he could see. Now that he's out of coma the two of them could discuss books until the final age-clobber, with any luck nothing after that.

An authoritarian fist thumps on the door. A second later it bangs open and Sadie stands on the threshold, unchanged with her iron-gray hair done up in a bun, her severe marble-white face and her frigid gray gaze fastened on Seymour spread-eagled among books and crying.

She orders Number Two and Number Four to prepare themselves for a visit, an all-important visit, in the Common Room.

The Common Room has been repainted and refurnished. Two new leather armchairs have replaced the five battered ones before the window. It frames blue summer outside. They turn their back to it and sit down at the new oak table. Seymour slumps forward and rests his head on his crossed arms. He closes his eyes and tries to summon up incised stones. He hears the old woman's dry cough and the pages of her book turning.

Footsteps. Sadie barks: "Attention!" Seymour sits up. Helen closes her book on a finger and looks up.

Accompanied by Advocate in deferent attendance, Prefect Marchini, resplendent in his white uniform, advances and surveys the room with his piercing black eyes. He strides to the table, touches the surface and examines his finger. "Dust," he pronounces and scribbles in a notebook. He turns to the seated pair, looking at them as though they were more intrusive grains of dust.

"I have come to announce your transfer and settle the appertaining administrative details." He signals to Advocate who places papers and a pen before each of them.

The old man and the old woman protest feebly. They don't want to be transferred. Helen says that she's content to be where she is, not really here but in better places as long as the books are in supply.

"You cannot remain here. Now that Number Four has returned, both of you must be transferred. You are unwanted relics of a bygone dark period in the history of the Prefecture. There will be no more errors committed. Corridors will no longer collapse. No files will be misplaced. Above all, there will be no more Suspended Arrivals."

Prefect Marchini turns his back on them and strides out of the room.

"My friends..." Advocate begins.

"No friend of mine. No transfer for me," says Seymour.

"No friend of mine. No transfer for me," says Helen.

"My friends, my dear friends, be reasonable, I implore you. Read and sign (in triplicate) the release document. It is impossible for you to prolong your sojourn here. The only alternative to transfer is exit."

"Exit, then," says Helen.

"Yes, exit," says Seymour.

"Exit?" exclaims Advocate. "After all this – as you say – 'time'? This – to quote you – 'long wait'? Now that you are on the very verge of permanent transfer? Transfer to the quays of Paris? Beaches? Mountains? Fine food and wine? Fields of golden wheat sprinkled with red poppies? Larks arising from them? Love?"

"Love? The scarecrow I am?" says Seymour. "More of your torture."

"I assure you that you will win back the youth you possessed when you materialized here," says Advocate.

"Another one of your traps. The way you trapped and murdered Margaret and Louis and Max with your lie."

"No, no," says Advocate. He plunges his face in his hands a few seconds and emerges, muscles of grief tugging at his rigid mask.

"I plead responsible but not guilty for that tragedy. Contact between Madame Williams and the former Prefect was to have lasted no more than the blink of an eye. In no way was the punishment to have involved the innocent victim, not to mention the others. A monstrous negligence was committed, on an echelon far higher than mine."

Advocate recoils at his words, glances at the ceiling, waits for something to happen. Nothing happens. He resumes: "Blasphemy. Yes, blasphemy. Let me confess to more. At the height of disorder, before Prefect Marchini threw up a frail temporary barrier against it, I found myself wishing for the total triumph of chaos and once had a splendid dream of it happening. The strange wind that periodically sweeps through the corridors rose to unimaginable tempest force. The millions of dossiers took wing and vanished. The pillars shook and fissured and finally the entire edifice collapsed on us, freeing us to void, blessed void. I woke, alas, to things as they were, later corrected by Prefect Marchini. But Prefect Marchini is fighting a rear-guard action against chaos. For..."

Advocate breaks off, leans forward toward the old people and whispers: "Clearly, the Central Intelligence is disintegrating. Soon the forces of cohesion in the universe from atom to galaxy will collapse. All things will come apart and the dream will come to pass and we too will be free, returned forever to void. What other prospect awaits us? We can hope for nothing better, unlike you, able to return out there and smell roses and taste rare river fish and weigh beloved bosoms in your cupped hands. And you say no to all that. How can you possibly say no to all that?"

"Another trap," says Helen.

"To make us hope, another one of your tortures," says Seymour.

"No, no, never, I who share your pain would never knowingly torture you, never," says Advocate, eyes brimming.

"Another one of your tortures," says Helen. "Like naked and old in the honeymoon room."

"The little girl and the butcher with the cleaver," says Seymour.

Advocate winces as though pelted with rocks as the outrageous catalogue of a second lifetime of suffering tumbles out, each item scarcely formulated in the mind of one than expressed by the other, so that finally neither of them knows who says it, a fusion in bitterness, a polyphonic litany of grief and grievances: all that hope in those corridors, hope before all those doors that opened on nothing, hope at the beginning of the tunnel that ended in urinals, hope at the two trial-runs, the horror of them, no more of that, hope is what makes you suffer, we've abandoned hope, you can't hurt us anymore, what we want is exit, not transfer, exit, exit, exit.

The old man and woman chant the word in chorus and stop, exhausted.

Advocate stares at them out of his mask of powerless goodness. His rheumy eyes seem on the point of overflowing. His lips tremble.

"Transfer is a choice. It cannot be imposed. But it is impossible for you to remain here in Administrative Suspension. Exit is the unavoidable alternative to transfer. I would humbly suggest, humbly implore, that, before you formulate, through the necessary administrative channels, your decision to exit, rather than to transfer, you should sleep upon the matter and then decide. _La nuit porte conseil_."

They think it's another trap and say so but finally agree to sleep on the matter (what else can they do, anyhow?) sure that nothing during their last night here could make them change their minds and choose transfer to more suffering.

That night they are visited by their loved ones, never so close, never so urgent, imploring, an imploration impossible to refuse.

Seymour is walking down his sweetheart's street, not the copy drawn in painful black and white on a plaster wall in half-life, but the real one in true color: there, the decorative dish with the rose-encircled peasant-lass, there, the yellow lemons on the boxes of oysters and there, the golden horse head. The heavy porte-cochere clicks open and she steps out as he best remembers her, ponytailed with a gold crucifix on a high-buttoned white blouse and implores him to come, she's been waiting for him for so long.

Helen encounters Richard standing bewildered in the middle of the sidewalk with a guidebook in his hand. "I've been looking for you for so long," he says. "Where were you all this time? I want to go with you to... to..." She's afraid he'll say the Catacombs but he ends by saying he wants to go to the Luxembourg Gardens which is exactly where she wants to go and she imagines them both sitting there near the basin, embracing, with the joyous cries of the children sailing model sailboats, the billowing sails, the jet of the fountain blown into a faint rainbow, the leaves of the pruned lindens blown into twinkling points of silver.

The next morning, they wash and dress blindly and go into the Common Room. The functionaries are waiting and accompany them to the cubicles. They sign the release papers in triplicate without reading them, hardly seeing them, their vision still inward and prophetic of things outside. They don't even say goodbye to one another despite all that time spent together.

***

Part Five

### Epilogue And Prelude

Chapter 50

June 23, 1951

She emerges nauseous to sunshine flooding her hotel room, glaring sunshine that makes her temples throb painfully but disperses the fragments of the long nightmare, mid-morning sunshine (her watch marks 9:45) and she's still in bed, something which never happens and today of all days, won't she be late for the appointment? She knows she's ill but forces herself up, goes over to the table, unsteady on her feet, and squints at the administrative-blue summons enjoining her to present herself at the Visa Department of the Préfecture de Paris at 11:30am in view of obtaining her Permanent Resident carte de séjour. She sits down, waiting for the dizziness to go away, and tries to focus on her mother's letter received the day before, confirming the earlier jubilant phone call: now that her father had rallied and was out of danger there was no point her returning to Denver, all that expense.

She washes from head to foot at the washbasin, carefully avoiding her poor image in the mirror, and dresses quickly. She decides to skip breakfast. Maybe fresh air outside will settle her stomach and clear her head. She takes her book and leaves the hotel. Halfway down the block her brain starts to function and she realizes the metro is in the other direction.

She takes a few steps down the metro stairs. The nausea worsens at the idea of underground corridors instead of sky. She pulls back and up and decides on surface transportation to the Prefecture.

Near the bus-stop bystanders have gathered. She hears a tense American voice and calming French voices.

A woman says: "Don't get excited, it's not our fault if you don't speak French."

Another bystander says in English: "Combs? You want perhaps to buy combs?"

The American voice, tense to the breaking point: "No! No!"

Helen joins the group. He's a tall very nice-looking young man, a little wild-eyed with frustration. Holding a heavy valise in one hand and clutching a guidebook in the other, he looks as if he'd gotten off the boat train from Le Havre that very morning.

"Can I help you?" At her question, in English, the bystanders drift away, leaving them by themselves.

"Nobody understands me here. No, they understand but they won't tell me where it is. I don't want to buy a comb."

He could use one, she thinks. His hair is as wild as his eyes. But he looks nice that way. She asks him just what it is he's looking for. His eyes are blue.

"They refuse to tell me where the Catacombs are."

"It's not worth visiting. I've been there. Nothing but bones and skulls. I was glad to get out of it into the sunshine. It's such a nice day. Have you ever been to the flower market by the Seine? Or to the Eiffel Tower? Or the Luxembourg Gardens?"

She breaks off, embarrassed. Won't he think she's trying to maneuver him into going to the flower market or to the Eiffel Tower or the Luxembourg Gardens with her? Isn't that exactly what she's trying to do? He's so lost. That appeals to her even more than his good looks. Maybe she'll be able to calm him down. All her friends back in Denver said she was good with lost bewildered people. It'll get you into trouble one of these days, they often said.

But she has to go to the Prefecture immediately. And he's set on going to the Catacombs, God alone knows why. He says it again, that where he wants to go is to the Catacombs.

Stupidly (as she'll soon realize) she walks with him back to the metro she hadn't wanted to go down to. She shows him the big map under glass, points at the line to take, the station to get off at, change for this other line and then get off here at Denfert-Rochereau. Denfert-Rochereau is where there's a big green lion.

"I don't want to go to the zoo. I want to go to the Catacombs."

"It's a statue, a big old bronze lion. That's why it's green. Anyhow a real lion at the zoo wouldn't be green would it? An Irish lion maybe."

"There are no lions in Ireland. Or snakes either. I'll get lost. Come with me to the Catacombs."

A small cloud veils the sun. A chilly wind starts up.

"I can't. I have an appointment," she says to his back. Already he's going down the steps. He's sure to take the wrong line. Strongly tempted to join him, she takes three steps down out of the sunshine, which has returned, and then pulls back and up again.

"Line Eight," she cries to his dwindling back. Somebody will tell him how to get to Denfert-Rochereau and somebody else, once he gets there, how to get to the Catacombs, opposite the metro station, on the other side of the Avenue du Général Leclerc.

She walks back and takes the bus. It's only when the big green recumbent lion looms in the windshield that she realizes she shouldn't have sent him down into the confusing metro corridors. She wonders what's wrong with her brain today, acting like a brand-new tourist herself. She sees the entrance to the Catacombs and scrutinizes the crowd even though she knows he's still wandering in the corridors below.

When she gets out at the Cité stop in sight of the Prefecture, she starts trembling badly. Weak and dizzy, she goes into a café and orders a cup of coffee in a voice she doesn't recognize as her own. The tremble aggravates to shudder. Something rises up in her that she can't keep down. Face screwed up, lips compressed, she walks fast to the women's toilets, locks herself in a cubicle, kneels to the toilet bowl and waits for relief.

But no vomit comes. What comes is a terrifying eruption of tears, painful as though shedding blood. Why is she crying? "Don't know, don't know," she gasps between sobs until she's able to attach her grief to old things: the loss of her rag doll, the dead kitten, the melting snowman, her beloved grandfather laid out in his best suit, hopeless loves, all those past tears renewed and multiplied, a deluge.

The deluge stops as suddenly as it began. After a while she's able to get up off her knees. She wipes her face with her handkerchief, leaves the toilets and pays for the untouched coffee. Gripping her book tightly, she slowly walks to the Prefecture.

The place wasn't far. He'd hoped walking would make things better. But not even halfway there he has to lower himself on a bench for the third time since he left the hotel and wait again for the giddiness and nausea to let up. Between the cars and passersby he catches interrupted glimpses of himself, reflected wavy and insubstantial in the store window across the street, slumped as with the weight of the single-lens Voigtländer reflex around his neck, the wooden tripod like a strange crutch, the shopping-net with the rug and the bottle of wine. The distorted ghost-like image seems to confirm his fear that he's coming down with something serious.

He finally gets up and wanders blindly in the general direction of the Seine. In an unfamiliar street, signaled by the golden effigy of a horse head, a butcher in a bloody apron is hacksawing a hooked haunch of meat. The sight unleashes a new wave of nausea as he thinks of raw horsemeat sticky with raw egg.

He walks past it and then halts at the sight of a good stretch of wall across the street: arrow-pierced hearts with entwined initials, a high-placed constellation of stars in yellow crayon, a penciled scribble, "Marie, je t'aime!!!" and a gigantic red phallus aimed like a Nazi V2 rocket at the constellation of stars. He decides to photograph it, moves and collides with a young woman stepping out of a building.

For a second they clasp each other for the sake of equilibrium. Then they pull back from that clumsy embrace (he with the tripod and shopping-net, she with a shopping basket), both apologizing. The young woman (pale, plain, ponytailed, with a gold crucifix on a high-buttoned white blouse) turns about and reaches for the heavy door half-open on a cobblestoned courtyard and a shop-window with the scrolled words Tailleur pour Dames et Messieurs. She pulls it shut, apologizes again, and walks down the street the way he has come.

He leaves the street behind him. A quarter of an hour later he halts, sure he's forgotten something important, vital even. He examines the contents of his pockets. The blue convocation to the Préfecture de Police is there. His passport and his carte de séjour too. So is his wallet. Finally, he realizes he's forgotten his handkerchief. But he doesn't have a cold and is unlikely to weep: the two uses of a handkerchief. He walks on, trying to feel relieved at having attached his malaise to something concrete, but finds it insufficient.

The malaise goes on, strengthens, even. Did he miss a class at the Fry-Fitz Academy of Foreign Languages yesterday? Lose the homework? Then he recalls that good stretch of graffitied wall. He hadn't noticed the name of the street. Unless he returned it would be lost forever. His watch tells him he hasn't time to return. He hails a cab, feeling even worse.

She sits on a rear bench, absorbed in her book, much closer to the cobblestones and the fog-wreathed gas lamps of London than to the fellow-aliens in the big bureaucratic room awaiting their turn to be processed. At intervals one of the stern-faced female functionaries pops out of one of the cubicles up front and calls out a name, irritated when the foreigner doesn't instantly respond to her stubbornly Gallicized version of it.

Someone sits down noisily alongside her, jarring her out of the London street a few seconds. The spectacled young man with a camera around his neck places a tripod and a strange shopping-net on the bench. The shopping-net contains a red rug and a bottle of wine. She returns to her book.

A few pages later, a clatter and a muffled crash pull her out of it again. The young man is sitting rigid, staring ahead stiff-faced, ignoring the shopping net and the tripod fallen to his feet. His face slowly collapses, an ugly mudslide into grief. She hesitates between him and the book. When he starts making disquieting sounds, she leans over and asks if she can be of help. Just as she repeats her question one of the female functionaries barks out her name. She remains seated, waiting for reaction. He doesn't know she exists. With even greater asperity, the female functionary cries: "Mademoiselle Ford, Hélène!"

She gives him a quick touch meant to comfort. Visibly it doesn't. She gets up and hurries into the cubicle.

Her processing is laborious. The severe-faced female functionary confuses her with another Helen Ford. By the time she gets out, the weeping young man is gone. She assumes he's been processed by the other functionary. But his tripod is still there on the floor. Next to it, there's a little reddish pool. She takes it for strangely anemic blood and then, as the sour smell of wine registers, remembers the sound of breakage.

She takes the tripod and leaves the gray processing room. Like tracing a wounded animal, she follows the red drops in the corridor to a massive door marked Entry Strictly Forbidden to All But Authorized Personnel. She guesses that he'd wanted to hide the shame of uncontrollable tears. She pushes the door open on a long dusty corridor and follows the drops, more widely spaced now, up a steep rickety staircase and sure enough, there he is, in a huddle, back against the wall, still at it.

"Can I help you?" she asks for the fourth time that day. At first she thinks he's bringing out "No" between sobs and then realizes it's "Don't know."

"You forgot your tripod. You've got wine all over your clothes."

He comes out of it. He looks at the shopping net and mumbles: "The rug's full of glass. I'll cut my knees, kneeling."

"Oh, you're a Moslem?" she says, for the sake of diversion.

"My name is Seymour Stein," he mumbles, "but I'm nothing."

He works the sodden rug out of the net and begins to pick out shards and crumbs of glass. He looks like he needs more diversion, badly.

"Silly question. How could you possibly be a Moslem with that wine? Why do you kneel on the rug, though?"

"I photograph wall graffiti. Some of them are low. I saw nice ones this morning. I don't remember the street, I've lost the street."

Weeping again, he stuffs the rug into the net, grabs the tripod, scrambles to his feet and heads the wrong way, not back but towards another staircase.

"Where are you going, Seymour?" she says, following him. He jabs his finger at a faded inscription Toilettes on the wall with an arrow pointing at the stairs. She wonders if it isn't an excuse to get rid of her but she says, "Yes, me too," and joins him on the staircase.

They hunt about for the toilets in a maze of corridors and end up getting lost. She looks for the wine drops to guide them back but they must have evaporated.

They explore still another shabby corridor. It ends at a closed iron door. He pushes it open. They take a few steps down an immensely long poorly lighted corridor which terminates in darkness. A cold dusty draft starts up, as if somebody in the distant zone of darkness ahead has opened another door. The draft rises to gale force; the iron door clangs shut behind them and goes on clanging in echo before them.

They turn around and find their door locked. They try to walk forward again and haven't the strength to prevail against the wind. She sinks down into a squat against the wall. "I'm not well," she says in a faint, apologetic voice.

He joins her in that posture and says he thinks he's dying. He mumbles the symptoms, starting with the terrible nightmare and then splitting headache, nausea, unmotivated tears and now this weakness. He can't get up, can't move.

She tells him that her symptoms are the same. They're coming down with something, that's sure. But it can't be dying, she says, to comfort him. It does feel like dying, though.

"We'll have to find our way out," she says but doesn't move. He doesn't move either. They can't.

Another metal door slams faintly far down the corridor, arousing more phantom closures. The wind dies abruptly.

Distant irregular footsteps approach. They open their eyes and see a policeman limping out of the zone of darkness. Attached to his belt is a great metal ring with dozens of big keys that jangle with every swaying step. Time goes by. Finally he stands above them, immensely tall and gaunt.

"What are you doing in this place? Papers!" His voice is imperious and rusty.

They hand him their brand new carte de séjour. He moves clumsily to a bare bulb and examines the documents. Then he goes over to the iron door, unlocks and opens it.

"Your papers are in order. You have no business here. Leave immediately."

She picks herself up and helps the young man to his feet.

"We're lost. What is the way out?" she says feebly as they both cross the threshold.

"Your problems on that side of the door are not my concern," says the policeman. The door clangs shut.

Strength seeps back. They find the wine-drops and soon the way out.

In the sunshine they feel a little better. They slowly walk toward the Latin Quarter. Neither of them has anything particular to do there. Each thinks it's the other's way.

Between the Prefecture and the Saint Michel fountain, as they breast insolently healthy crowds, he makes her go carefully into her symptoms, which are his. She'd have preferred other subjects, such as where he comes from and what he does in Paris when he's not kneeling on a rug. But she has to recite those symptoms a second time.

It's her fit of unmotivated weeping (it happened half an hour before his, he learns) that particularly alarms him. Doesn't it mean their central nervous systems are affected by the disease, whatever it is? They both must have it, he tells her.

She almost feels happy at having a connection with him, even that one. A few minutes later she begins to wonder if there isn't maybe another, less pathological, connection developing between them. She's noticed that every few seconds he keeps glancing at her. Also, over and over he asks how she's feeling. Isn't that a sure sign of interest? She tries to forget that she's not the type of girl good-looking men look twice at and that he doesn't even know her name, hasn't asked.

He stops before a newspaper kiosk. The tripod falls out of his grasp onto the pavement. It's Shanghai Flu, he brings out. She has to support him. People have already died of it, he says. Flu in summer time? she says dubiously. She picks up the tripod and looks at the newspaper closely. Not here, she assures him. In Australia. It's winter down there.

They reach the Saint Michel fountain. She's still holding the tripod. To get him onto a different subject she asks about his graffiti shots. In an hour, if he's still alive, he'll be going to the Place de la République, he says. Last week he'd discovered marvelous graffiti on a disaffected garage wall there.

She asks questions, which she hopes sound intelligent, about non-representational photography and wonders if perhaps she might watch him work. If you like, he says, not really enthusiastically, she judges. But then, nicely, he asks again how she's feeling. A little tired, she says.

By now they've reached the Luxembourg Gardens. She suggests resting a little. "A few minutes," he says. He has to make it to the Place de la République. What's the hurry? she asks. Won't the graffiti stay put? He explains that the sun has to strike the wall at a glancing angle to bring out the irregularities, the pits and poster wrinkles and in late June that happens between noon and one.

They sit down on green iron chairs near the splashing fountain. He looks at the children sailing boats with billowing sails, the jet of the fountain blown into a rainbow, the pruned trees twinkling with points of light and for the first time that day he feels at peace.

He turns to her to say that he's feeling better. She's slumped forward, deathly pale, mouth half-open, staring down at the ground. Deeply alarmed at what's awaiting him (that half-hour lag between their symptoms), he touches her shoulder. She looks up slowly into his anxious face. His sympathy makes her feel a little better and color returns to her face. He's deeply relieved at her quick recovery. He'd probably experience her relapse in half an hour, but a short non-fatal relapse.

There's no direct bus line to the Place de la République. They get off at the Boulevard Saint Martin stop. At the end of the boulevard looms the giant statue of the Republic with its proffered sprig of laurel. Not a car is in sight but the sidewalks are crowded with onlookers facing the square where police whistles shrill above a murmur like distant surf.

"Sounds like a demonstration," she says. "You'd better call it off." He doesn't answer and strides forward. She has trouble keeping up with him. He must have changed his mind and wants to photograph the action, she thinks.

As they progress, the sound of distant surf slowly strengthens to the chant of a multitude, like a crowd at a football game. He stops and then steps on a bench for a better view of what's going on ahead. She joins him.

The Place de la République is strangely empty of passersby and traffic. From the windows and the wrought-iron balconies of the surrounding buildings spectators are looking down as at a great oblong bullfight arena. Hundreds of policemen block the avenues and streets converging on the square. Beyond the blue ranks guarding the Boulevard Voltaire thousands of shabby demonstrators advance under a sea of windy French flags punctuated by a scattering of red flags bearing the inscription Parti Communiste Français. An avenue-wide white banner commands in gigantic letters: U.S. GO HOME!

He goes on standing on the bench pale and motionless like a statue. To make him snap out of it she says: "We don't want to go home yet. We've just got our Permanent Resident _carte de séjour_."

He doesn't reply. She steps down.

Suddenly he jumps off the bench and disappears in the crowd.

"Seymour, wait!" To justify the cry for him to wait for her (after all, he doesn't even know her name, hasn't bothered asking) she cries: "I've got your tripod."

She weaves through the crowd, running after him, hampered by the heavy wood tripod. She reaches the Place de la République just as the head column of the demonstrators debouches from the Boulevard Voltaire on the other side of the square. They surge forward. Shouts and cries and whistles become deafening. Flocks of pigeons cowering on balconies and windowsills arise in flapping panic and circle overhead. The police fall back and then counterattack. Long supple blackjacks and tightly rolled-up lead-weighted cloaks rise and fall.

She skirts the buildings, running past onlookers in doorways, shops with lowered iron curtains, a butcher, puffy and white among quartered steers and decapitated calves, grasping the bars of his lowered grill possessively as though fearing their imminent expropriation by the communists. She looks around for the strange boy called Seymour, imagining him kneeling before low graffiti, the remaining bottle-shards in the rug lacerating his knees, police clubs bashing his head. A wave of sympathy for the poor bewildered boy effaces her lingering memory of the earlier bewildered boy with the guidebook whose name she hadn't learned and who, like this one, hadn't learned hers.

A group of demonstrators, one of them bleeding, runs towards her, pursued by cops with upraised clubs like exclamation-marks. A cop with a face like a fist veers toward her. Doesn't he take the tripod for a weapon? For a second she wants to throw it away. But it's not hers. He keeps on coming. Still gripping Seymour's tripod, her only connection now, she runs into the Rue du Temple, fleeing the tumult. She keeps running till her lungs ache and then stops.

He's there on a tree-shaded bench, head bowed, asleep. She sits down quietly, props his tripod against the bench between them and waits for him to wake up and take it.

A hard poke in the ribs awakens her. She pulls away from the bunched wooden legs as they jab toward her again. On his side of the bench he's bent over the tripod, cradled in the crook of his arm like a three-legged lover. He's screwing or unscrewing something with a penknife. "Damn you," he mutters and shakes the tripod. "Ow!" she says, not that the second poke in the ribs really hurt but to let him know she's there on her side of the bench. The screw bounces off the bench and rolls under it. "Damn you," he mutters and glances at her but of course he's addressing the tripod. She leans over, recovers the screw and hands it to him. He thanks her. Eyes focussed on the screwing job now, he says:

"It was a relief to see you on the bench when I woke up a while ago. I looked for you back there."

"Yes, the tripod must be expensive."

"A fortune new. Genuine cherry wood. Picked it up cheap second hand."

He finishes the job and looks at her.

"The tripod had nothing to do with it. I was scared for you. Those flics."

"I was scared for you too. Glad you didn't try to photograph the garage wall after all. You can always go back another day when things are calmer. How are you feeling now?"

"Jesus, I forgot all about that." He stares unseeing at a building and she guesses he's attentive to inner things. "Can't be sure but I think that maybe I'm feeling a little better. How about you?"

He asks the question anxiously, which is nice, she thinks.

"Better too."

They get up and stroll down the street, going nowhere in particular. She carries the tripod again. The sun is very hot. For relief they go inside a grimy scaffolded church.

It's as dank and gloomy as a cellar. They think it's empty till they hear a violent snore. A bearded old man is slumped in a side pew. His high-buttoned black shoes stand in the aisle. They hold it in. It's improper to laugh in a church. Both of them move about, looking at niched saints and grimy oil-paintings of martyrdoms and resurrections. A withered flower from a marriage or a funeral lies on the flagstones. The altar is draped in protective canvas. Scaffolding rises about a fissure in the wall.

They both start shivering and sneezing. They hope it's the dankness of this place and not more symptoms of the illness they share. When they turn to leave they see the old man padding silently to the exit. His shoes still stand in the aisle. "Oh God," she says. She picks them up and they both hurry out. The old man has disappeared. She goes back inside, places the shoes in the aisle and returns to the church steps where Seymour is waiting.

They stand there blinking in the nice warm sunshine, their faces strained with what resembles grief. Then they can't hold it in any more and burst out laughing, uncontrollable laughter, weeping from it. When they recover, he says:

"I'm starving. I don't know your name."

"Helen. I'm starving too. The restaurants must be closed."

They buy two golden-crusted baguettes, cold cuts, black olives, green olives, tomatoes, a bag of black cherries and a bottle of good wine to celebrate their recovery. They walk all the way back to the Seine, a good place to picnic, exchanging information about themselves, talking about books and music, each trying to impress the other and succeeding.

They cross the Île de la Cité, going by the Conciergerie, the Palais de Justice and their point of departure, the Préfecture de Police. They cross the Pont Saint Michel, stroll along the quay and finally sit on the low parapet with the Seine directly below and devour the food.

Barges push upstream past them. In the burnished blue sky flights of pigeons swoop down and settle in the riverside trees and then rise again. Enlaced couples stroll by. They finish the wine. He turns to her, still a little anxious.

"How are you feeling, Helen?"

"I'm feeling fine, Seymour. How about you?"

"Well... maybe not too bad. No, better. Much better. Maybe it was all a false alarm. Where do you want to go now?"

"It's nice just sitting here. We've had a long day."

"Yes, a long day," he says.

They sit there for a long time, looking at the barges and the flights of pigeons and the enlaced couples going by. When the shadow of the Prefecture and the Conciergerie, that disaffected prison, begins to encroach on them they get up and join those other couples strolling along the river in the sunshine.

The End

OTHER BOOKS BY HOWARD WALDMAN

LIKE THE SUN AT EIGHT IN THE MORNING

At twenty-four, Philip Richmond is vaguely dissatisfied at his bookish and girl-shy identity. He goes to Paris on a research project and finds the city on the brink of revolution. He encounters two girls, one a lovely defiant participant in the revolt, the other, plain, scholarly, and serious, practically his female double. His choice will either be a rupture with or a confirmation of his unsatisfactory identity. Kindle

THE SEVENTH CANDIDATE

Edmund Lorz's firm, Ideal Poster, effaces obscene graffiti from subway advertising posters. A newly-hired operator, endowed with frightening almost superhuman skills, slowly dominates his employer's life and that of his secretary.

Kindle

TIME TRAVAIL

Harvey Morgenstern's wierd machine searches the past to resurrect a lost love--at the peril of his life. Kindle

BACK THERE

The Lauriers' tumble-down country place is just thirty miles but, in terms of comfort, a century from Paris. Harry, the New York photographer, calls it paradise and photographs it all, among other things, the Model T parts holding down the flimsy roof and the marvellously archaic well and scythe. And, of course, his mysterious sweetheart and her family. The Lauriers assume that Harry will soon become a member of that family. But divorced Harry, allergic to any commitment other than artistic, is convinced that marriage spells the death of love. Aren't things already perfect in this paradise? He goes on photographing it. Someone said, though, that all paradises are lost paradises. Will Harry finally understand that love, not art, is the major commitment?

CONTACT

howard.waldman@orange.fr

