Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die, Page 2

Suddenly Maggie Williams is again.

  It happens in the promised twinkling of an eye, but without last trumpets or angelic choirs and she’s still corruptible.

  Maggie Williams, first of the poorly Chosen Five to emerge from no-being, hadn’t been for twenty-two years. Naturally she hadn’t known it. There’s no sense of time in no-being. No sense of anything. No sense to it at all. No present, no past and absolutely no future there, short of resurrection.

  She hadn’t stood for the last ten of her eighty-three years. Now she stands unassisted. Blind for as many bitter years, she now sees.

  Sees what?

  Hardly sees the gigantic colorless shabby bureaucratic room with all those pillars and empty benches and those high peculiar walls. Doesn’t at all see the lofty stepladder and on top of it the little middle-aged man in a gray smock and a filthy beret, filing files in one of the thousands of drawers that make up the wall from floor to ceiling.

  What Maggie Williams does see, almost dazzled by the sight, is a lovely milk-white girl, perfectly nude, with green eyes and a generous red mouth. A cascade of fiery hair spills over her freckled shoulders. Fiery crotch-fleece below attests to the authenticity of the color of the cascade above. The girl’s legs are long and lithe, her breasts as explosive as howitzer shells. There’s a tag attached to her beautifully turned right ankle.

  Maggie, catholic about the gender of love objects in her sexually active years, is instantly smitten, an odd reaction, she’s aware, for a woman of her quavering age. Maggie smiles at the girl and the girl instantly smiles back at Maggie. She looks smitten too. She’s faintly familiar. Maggie raises her hand in greeting. When the girl simultaneously does the same thing in reversal she becomes totally familiar.

  Maggie realizes that she herself is the girl and the girl is she, reflected in a tarnished full-length wall mirror.

  “Oh God!” she whispers, burning with even more intense love for the girl of twenty-odd she’d been so long ago and is again. She’s drunk with joy at the miracle (that will be her defense much later for her scandalous behavior). Her renovated body longs to express that joy in a dance. She recalls that she had once been a professional dancer.

  Why “had been” though? Why that mournful pluperfect? Is. The great present of the present tense. Is. Is a professional dancer again. Also an amateur sculptress and jewelry designer, she further recalls. Of course she can’t exercise those talents here, not having the raw material of statues and jewelry handy.

  But she does have the raw material of dance with her lovely naked body and the desire to dance the dance of blessed Is. That’s what she does now.

  While Maggie Williams leaps about ecstatically, the four other members of Batch MLX 59833 materialize in the gigantic bureaucratic room, naked and young and tagged (one of them strangely). Unaware of materialization, they’re still in the grip of supposedly final things.

  For the squat hairy man, it’s a tree looming in the windshield of his skidding truck.

  For the man in horn-rimmed glasses, despair and ten-story plummet with cartwheeling buildings and sky, the sidewalk coming up fast.

  For the two others, a woman and the strangely tagged man, the supposedly final thing is less dramatic: a run-of-the-mill sterile white room with scared and grieving faces looking down into theirs.

  Now – though they don’t know it yet – they’re here in the Great Good Place for good people of the right nationality.

  But will they be here for long?

  Flinging herself about with graceful abandon, Maggie Williams dedicates her dance to the Most High she’d never believed in before, except for three months at thirteen when, terrorized by periodic blood, she’d yearned for purity in a convent. She believes now, with all her newly discovered soul. She understands that this is divinely commanded resurrection.

  Panting, her body gleaming with perspiration, she falls to her knees next to a great pillar, like a church pillar, casts her eyes upward and then closes them on tears and fervently thanks God for an end to was and had been, thanks Him for miraculously renewed light and youth and beauty after so long.

  Concentrated on her prayer of thanks, as she had been on the dance of joy, Maggie Williams doesn’t notice any of the four others until she opens her wet eyes again. She breaks off thanksgiving and stares in disbelief at the pillar and what’s protruding from it. She breathes, “Ohh!”

  Protruding from the pillar, no mistake possible, is a great male organ, at repose, with a tag attached to it.

  Maggie moves on her knees and rounds the pillar. Casting her eyes upward again she beholds the most beautiful naked man she’d ever seen and she had seen and enjoyed countless many, but so long ago, so terribly long ago.

  O God, that heroic heart-cleaving wedge of a torso: broad shoulders slanting down to muscled loins and O God those lovely muscled thighs on each side of O God O God. She guesses at adorably tight small muscular buttocks behind those thighs. Maggie gazes even higher at sky-blue eyes, long blond hair and a blond drooping mustache above a full red mouth. She burns to be explored and adored by that mouth to the tickling accompaniment of that mustache.

  He could only be another gift, like light and youth, tagged for her like a Christmas present.

  She smiles at him shyly, eyelashes fluttering in incendiary demureness. Then she returns her gaze to the tagged part of him, expecting to see radical modification. There is none at all.

  She clasps her hands behind her neck and slowly bends back into a lovely tense sharp-nippled arc and waits for him to rise to the occasion and salute her supple beauty.

  She waits and waits, uncomfortably, but nothing outstanding happens.

  Maggie finally realizes that those open sky-blue eyes are staring, not at her, but at inner things. She straightens up and reaches out for the peculiarly positioned tag. On one side she sees tiny words in French, on the other, Louis Forster, 1877-1927 Fournée MLX 59833. With great care she removes the tag but lingers on the support. Like marvelous velvet Louis is. The precious weight of it.

  Louis begins responding now, responding and responding. “My God, my God,” she murmurs at the incredible extent of the response. Soon her hands are cupping his buttocks, adorably tight, small and muscular, as suspected, and she’s unable to articulate her deep thankfulness for the supreme gift, except for a muffled “Mmm, Mmm.”

  Atop the high stepladder the little middle-aged man in the gray smock and the filthy beret gapes down goggle-eyed at the couple, a cloudy drop of saliva forming on his lower lip.

  He mutters: “Ah, Bon Dieu, Bon Dieu de Bon Dieu!”

  As if in reaction to all these ill-inspired evocations, in two tongues, of the Most High, there comes a brief petulant mutter in the sky above the celebrated metropolis, surprising in that pure blue. It’s inaudible except to a surviving handful of the Faithful. Even to them it sounds more like a distant celestial breaking of wind than genuine wrathful thunder. But most of the Faithful are old and hard of hearing.