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