Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

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.