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 unbutto
ned, 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.