Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die



  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