Free GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE by Howard Waldman

room will be cleaned and the beds made up. They had
not been expected.
    The naked bulb starts blinking. She strides
over to a chest of drawers, yanks out a drawer and calls their
attention to rows of bulbs wrapped in tissue-paper. Beneath
drooping lids their eyeballs sluggishly roll in the direction
indicated by her rigid forefinger. Now she points to the blinking
bulb.
    “When a bulb burns out it is your
responsibility to replace it by a new one. There are twenty new
ones here. When you get to the nineteenth bulb you must be sure to
notify the relevant functionary and you will receive a new
lot.”
    That shocks the two men out of
somnolence.
    “The nineteenth!” Seymour exclaims.
    “The nineteenth!" Louis exclaims. “We could
be in this here place long enough to have to change nineteen
burned-out electric-light bulbs?”
    “How long does a bulb last?” Seymour
asks.
    The female functionary’s face withdraws into
frigid infinite distance, as though the requested statistics are a
state secret or as though she hasn’t understood the question
involving the passage of time.
    “Six months?” Louis ventures.
    She doesn’t confirm it but she doesn’t deny
it. The two men, secretly afraid the life-span of an electric light
bulb is much longer than six months, choose to take her continuing
silence for tacit confirmation. Six months, then. But multiplied
nineteen times.
    “Six months, nineteen bulbs …” says
Seymour.
    “Nineteen times six months amounts to …”
Louis breaks off, trying to cope with the multiplication.
    “Practically ten years,” says Seymour, the
New York intellectual.
    He turns to the impassive silent female
functionary. “You mean, you actually mean that we could be
imprisoned here for practically ten years?”
    “You are not prisoners,” the female
functionary rectifies in a scandalized tone, evading the question.
“You are in Administrative Suspension, therefore imposed guests.
Prisoners are locked up. Your door will remain unlocked. Unless, of
course, you willfully violate regulations.” She turns to the
door.
    “The women now. I shall soon be back.”
    True to her word, she leaves their door
unlocked. The bulb rallies and recovers steady light. Seymour and
Louis totter over to the beds and collapse in a cloud of dust and a
discordant twang of springs. Even more than warmth and food and
drink they crave sleep.
    They close their eyes. Sleep almost comes.
Time after time, though, on the brink of that darkness, they pull
back from it, afraid sleep may be a prelude to a permanent end to
cold and thirst and hunger, those painful precious things.
    From where they lie they can see the window
and blue sky. After a while, as though synchronized, they get up
and drag themselves over to the window. Max remains huddled in his
corner.
    Seymour and Louis stand side by side in silence.
They gaze out at the city. It’s like warmth and food and drink to
them.
    “By golly,” says Louis. “Hasn’t changed one
bit. Same swanky shops. Same elegant carriages.”
    Seymour stares. He sees the same swanky
shops all right but not a single carriage, elegant or not. What he
does see hasn’t changed one bit. There are the same inelegant cars
he’d dodged when suicidally jay-trotting their avenues in 1951:
stolid Peugeot 203s, bug-like Renault Quatre Chevaux , a Panhard Dyna , gangsterish low-slung black Citroën Tractions , plenty of gray dinky-toy Deux
Chevaux , like
garbage-cans on wheels, banged-up pre-war Renault Juvas and Rosalies .
    The sight fills him with tremendous nostalgia and he
wants the cars to be the real things out there, not the other’s
carriages dating back before the birth of his ponytailed
sweetheart, so meaningless. Of course, Louis rejects what Seymour
claims he sees, things that hopelessly age his slim honey-blonde
darling.
    They start arguing about it. They agree
about the buildings and the river but not about the vehicles. Not
about the women either. Neat ankles, says Louis with