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 yo
ur 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.