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Background

Stark naked and young again, three men and two women materialize in a dilapidated bureaucratic room overlooking the quays of Paris and make the posthumous discovery that "Good Americans go to Paris when they die" is more than a humorous adage. Their joy is dampened when they learn that a possible processing mistake has been made by the other-side Prefecture de Police bureaucracy For if, indisputably, the Newly Arrived are Americans and have died it's not sure they had all been good in their former existence. Margaret Thompson, a bubble and fan dancer in the Paris of 1937, had led a dissolute life and had perhaps driven one of her Paris lovers to suicide. Moreover, upon materializing she'd promptly engaged in oral sex with half-conscious Louis Forster, a Marine guard at the American Embassy in 1900 who had abandoned his pregnant French sweetheart. Seymour Stein, a neurotic New York intellectual, had acted identically with his sweetheart in 1951. Another processing error has been committed with Max Pilsudski, a Las Vegas truck driver who had never been in Paris. Only tragic Helen Ricchi whose husband had disappeared in Paris in 1951, seems to qualify for transfer.

While waiting for an administrative ruling on their fate -- transfer to the Paris of their twenty-fifth year or back to no-being -- the Five are placed in Administrative Suspension and consigned to sordid cramped living quarters.

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--no need for bars--in front of the window with a view of Paris on the other side of death.
      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, understanding that this bleak place is where they will have to wait for the Administration to rule on their fate: return to nothing or return to the Paris of their twenty-fifth year. Wait for how long? 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. The female functionary 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, the ex-Marine, breaks off, trying to cope with the multiplication.
      "Practically ten years," says Seymour, the ex-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 square of blue sky above the city. 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 Paris. 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, gangsterish low-slung black Citroën Tractions and plenty of gray dinky-toy Deux Chevaux, like garbage-cans on wheels.
      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 pony-tailed 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 indulged in self-abuse on the stepladder enters the room. His filthy beret is moronically pulled down to the eyebrows and he wears a fearful chastised expression. He bears 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 Philip. That's what they call me when they don't call me other things. Philip isn't my real name. I don't know what my real name was. But call me Philip 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 Division 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 Commons 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.

Shyly, back to back, Seymour and Louis unpin their loin-towel 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 sweetheart.
      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. (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 in the Prefecture? 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, the Las Vegas truck driver. 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 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 Commons Room where the all-powerful Prefect awaits them, perhaps with the ruling on their fate: return to nothing or return to the Paris of their twenty-fifth year.

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