The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  “It’s a plague,” Flesh said. “It’s a smoting.”

  “What? Mr. Flesh? What do you want me to do? You wouldn’t believe what this stuff smells like.”

  “I’d believe it.”

  “You got any suggestions, Mr. Flesh? I didn’t want to trouble you. I know you got your own problems, but I don’t know what to do. You got any ideas?”

  “Be hard, Mister Softee.”

  “What? I can hardly hear you.”

  “Nothing. I have no suggestions.” He handed the phone back to the nurse. “It’s the plague,” Flesh said. “A fiery lake of Mister Softee, check.”

  “There you are, Mr. Flesh,” another of the nurses said, coming up to him. “Dr. Gibberd has your test results. He’s waiting for you.”

  Flesh nodded, allowed himself to be returned to the ward.

  Gibberd, standing at the Englishman’s bedside, waved to him. He indicated to the nurse that she set a screen up around Flesh’s bed. He was carrying a manila folder with the results of Ben Flesh’s tests. They were all positive. It was M.S. all right, Gibberd told him, but of a sensory rather than a motor strain. The chances of its becoming motor were remote. The fact that he’d been in remission all these years was in his favor. He really wasn’t in such bad shape. For the time being there would be no treatment. Later, should it shift to a motor M.S., they could give him Ritalin, give him steroids. How would he know? Well, he’d be falling down in the streets, wouldn’t he? There’d be speech impairment, wouldn’t there? There’d be weakness and he wouldn’t be able to tie his shoes, would he? There’d be nystagmus, don’t you know? Nystagmus? A sort of rotation of the eyeballs. Anyway, there was no real reason to keep him in the hospital. They needed the beds. Flesh looked around the empty ward.

  “As a matter of fact,” Gibberd said, “I wish I were going with you. Where you off to now? Someplace cool?”

  “I can drive?”

  “Of course you can drive. I’ve told you, there’s no strength loss, no motor impairment at all. It’s just sensory. A little discomfort in your hand. So what?”

  “But it’s America’s number-one crippler of young adults.”

  “M.S. is a basket term. You’ll be fine. These symptoms should go away in two to three months. Boy, this heat.”

  “The heat, check.”

  “Well. Get dressed, why don’t you? I’ll write up your discharge papers. Be sure to stop by the cashier on the way out. Really. Don’t worry about the M.S.”

  “Sensory discomfort, check.”

  “I guess you’ll be wanting to get back to your Mister Softee stand before you leave. This heat. I could use a Mister Softee myself right now.”

  “The Mister Softees are all melted. The Lord has beaten the Mister Softees back into yogurt cultures.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Plague.”

  “What’s all this about plague?”

  “The plague is general throughout Dakota. We’re being visited and smited.”

  “Well. Good luck, Mr. Flesh.”

  “Doctor?”

  “Yes?”

  “What about him?” Flesh jerked his thumb in the direction of Tanner’s screen. The doctor shook his head.

  “He’ll be shipped off to Guernsey eventually. The R.A.F. maintains a hospital there for incurables.”

  The doctor extended his hand. A shiver of electric plague ran up Flesh’s hand and arm when Gibberd touched him. He felt he could start the hospital’s engines just by touching them, that the energy was in his hands now, in the ruined, demyelinating nerves sputtering like live wires in his fingertips.

  Gibberd left and Flesh dressed. He was about his business, heading toward the cashier and the Cadillac. (Probably it wouldn’t start; the battery dead, check. Check the oil.) Then suddenly Ben turned back. He stood for a moment in the center aisle, staring in the direction of Tanner’s screen. “Tanner,” he said, “I don’t want you to say a thing. Don’t interrupt me. Just listen just.

  “Gibberd has given me my walking papers. He has given me my dirty bill of health. It’s interesting rather. Here we are, two guys from opposite sides of the world. Yank and Limey. Strangers. Do-be-do-be-doo. Flight Lieutenant Tanner of Eng and Brit Honduras with Nigerian virus in his gut, and me, Ben Flesh, American—don’t interrupt, please just—Ben Flesh, American, ranger in Cadillac of Highway this and Interstate that. Yet somehow the both of us ill met in this hotshot trop med ward in Rap Cit S-dak. You know what? Don’t, don’t answer. You know what? Never mind what, I’ll get to what later.

  “Well. Strangers. Sickmates on the edge of the Badlands. Both incurable and generally fatal. Oh, I know a lot about my disease, too. When Dr. Wolfe first diagnosed my case—you remember, I told you about Dr. Wolfe—I boned up on it in the literature, in What to Do till the Doctor Comes. It’s progressive, a neurological disorder of the central nervous system, characterized by muscular dysfunction and the formation of sclerotic, or hardening—be hard, Mister Softee—hardening patches in the brain. One’s myelin—that’s the soft, white fatty substance that encases the axis cylinders of certain nerve fibers: what a piece of work is a man—one’s myelin sheath is unraveling like wool. It snags, you see? Like a run in a stocking. I am panty hose, Lieutenant. Vulnerable as.

  “Incurable. Generally fatal. Usually slow and often, in its last stages, characterized by an odd euphoria. I was blind once, I tell you that? No family to speak of. I have heart disease and many businesses. Is this clear? No, don’t answer. The point is, the lines of the drama of my life are beginning to come together, make a pattern. I mean, for God’s sake, Tanner, just consider what I’ve been through, I’ve told you enough about myself. Look what stands behind me. Theatrical costumes! Songs! My history given pizzazz and order and the quality of second- and third-act curtains, coordinated color schemes for the dance numbers, the solos and show-stoppers, what shows up good in the orchestra and the back of the house, and shines like the full moon in the cheap seats. I got rhythm, dig? Pacing, timing, and convention have gone into making me. Oh, Tanner, the prime rate climbs like fever and we ain’t seen nothing yet. Gibberd dooms me. You should have heard him. He makes it official. He dooms me, but very soft sell so I can’t even be angry with him. It’s getting on, the taxis are gathering, the limos, the cops are up on their horses in the street, and I don’t even know my lines—though they’re coming together—or begin to understand the character.

  “What do you think? Shh, that was rhetorical. What do you think? You think I should kick my preoccupations? The stuff about my godfather and my godcousins? All the Wandering Jew shit in my late-model Caddy, going farther than the truckers go, hauling my ass like cargo? Aach.

  “Me and my trademarks. I’m the guy they build the access roads for, whose signs rise like stiffened peters—Keep America Beautiful—beyond the hundred-yard limit of the Interstates. A finger in every logotype. Ho-Jo’s orange roof and the red star of Texaco. D.Q.’s crimson pout and the Colonel’s bucket spinning, spinning. You name it, I’m in it.

  “So. Doomed. Why? Shh. Because I am built to recognize it: a lip reader of big print and the scare headline. Because I’m one of those birds who ain’t satisfied unless he has a destiny, even though he knows that destiny sucks. How did I get this way? I used to be a kid who ate fruit.

  “Anyway. As I was saying. You know what? You know what I think? Shh. Hush. I think you’re dead. Don’t bother to correct me if you’re not. That’s what I think. I think you’re dead there behind your screen, that you’ll never see Guernsey. The dramatic lines demand it. Theatricality’s gravitational pull. Who are you to go against something like that? You’re too weak. You have to be strapped to your chair, for God’s sake. So. It’s nice how you can let your hair down with strangers. We were strangers, right? Have we ever met, sir? Do you know me; has there been communication between us in any way, shape, or form; have we gotten together before the show; have promises been made to you? Thank you very much, sir. Thank you very much, ladies and
gentlemen.

  “So it’s agreed. We’re strangers, locked each into his own symptoms, you into Lassa fever and me into my sensory problems. And somehow, as strangers will, somehow we got to talking, and gradually understood each other. I wiped your blood up. You saw my asshole with its spoor of shit. Well, strangers get close in such situations. Now I have my dirty bill of health and I’m told to move on and Dr. Gibberd tells me you’re for Guernsey when your orders come through. And here’s where I’m supposed to go behind them screens and shake hands. Well, I won’t! I won’t do it. That ain’t going to happen. Because you’re dead! Slumped in that queer way death has of disarraying things. So that’s it. The destiny man thinks you’ve been put here on earth to satisfy one more cliché, to be discovered stone cold dead in a Rapid City General wheelchair. For what? So one day I’ll be able to say in my impaired speech—‘There wash thish time in Shouf Dakota, and I wash on the shame woward wi-with thish young chap from the R.A.F. (He called it “Raf.”)—And we got pretty close. The two of us. There was a terrible heat wave and neither of us could sleep. We were kept up half the night by the screams of mental patients who couldn’t be quieted because the power was out, and even though the hospital had its own auxiliary generator, there wasn’t enough power for electric-shock treatments, so we told each other the story of our life, as fellows will in hospital, and got pretty close to each other, and finally I was discharged and I went over to young Tanner’s screen to say goodbye and found him dead.’

  “Well, fuck that, Lieutenant! I like you too much to use you around fireplaces. We’ll just skip it because I ain’t going behind no screen to make certain, because if you are dead, by Christ, I don’t think I could take it. I would grab a scissors and cut the lines of my drama. On the other hand, please don’t disabuse me of my sense of the fitness of things. Keep still just. So long, dead guy.”

  He turned and started to the exit, but just as he got there he heard a loud, ripping, and unruly fart. Well, how do you like that? he thought. What was it, the critique of pure reason? Or only the guy’s sphincter relaxing in death? Flesh shoved hard against the handle on the fire doors.

  He was like a refugee now. A survivor, the last alive perhaps, the heat a plague and waiting for him in his late-model Cadillac baking in the hospital’s open parking lot. He unlocked its doors and opened them wide but did not step in. Whatever was plastic in the car, on the dash, the steering wheel, the push-button knobs on the radio, along the sides of the doors, the wide ledge beneath the rear window, had begun to bubble, boil, the glue melting and the car’s great load of padding rising yeast-like, separating, creating seams he’d been unaware of before, like the perforations on Saltines.

  What has happened to my car?

  It was as if an earthquake had jostled its landscape. Things were not aligned.

  He feared for his right, hypersensitive hand, its stripped nerves like peeled electrical wire. If he touched anything metal in the automobile, if he so much as pressed the electric window control, it would ignite. He waited perhaps ten minutes, stuck his head inside to see if the car had cooled off. Imperceptible. Leaving the doors open, he walked back inside the hospital and went up to a fourteen-or fifteen-year-old boy who was sitting in one of the chairs in the waiting room.

  “Kid,” he said, “I’ll give you five dollars if you start my car for me and turn the air conditioning on.”

  The boy looked at him nervously.

  “It’s all right. Look. Here.” He held the money out to the boy. (It was difficult—his fingers had no discrimination left in them—to separate the bill from the others and remove it from his wallet.) “It’s right there on the lot. You can see it from the window. The Cadillac with the doors open. I’ve just been discharged from the hospital. I’m not supposed to get overheated. Please,” he said and started to leave, turning to see if the boy was following. He had not left his chair. “Well?” Flesh said. “Won’t you do it? I’m not supposed to get overheated. Doctor’s orders. Look, if you’re afraid, I’ll stay here. Here, here are my car keys. Go by yourself. Take the money with you.”

  “I don’t drive.”

  “What? You don’t drive? Don’t they have driver’s training in your high school? That’s very important.”

  “I go to parochial school.”

  “Oh. Oh, I see. Parochial school. The nuns. If I came with you I could tell you what to do. I could stand outside and tell you just what to do. It’s easy. They make it look like a cockpit but it’s easy. All I want is for you to start it and turn the air conditioning on High. It’s urgent that I get out of the heat. I’ve been in the hospital and the car has been standing. It’s like a blast furnace. If five dollars isn’t enough—”

  “All right,” the boy said uncertainly.

  Flesh accompanied him to the car, keeping up a nutty chatter. “Parochial school,” he said, “sure. Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish. Tradition. What are you so afraid? Parochial school. Broken-field running. You could be off like a shot if you wanted. What could I do? I’m sick. You could dodge. Fake me out. You’d go between the parked cars. What could a sick guy like me do? I couldn’t catch you in the Cadillac. Relax please. Who’s sick? Maybe I know him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I found you in the waiting room. You’re visiting somebody. Who?”

  “My dad.”

  “Oh, your dad. What’s his name? We’re fellow patients. Maybe I know him.”

  “Richard Mullen? He had a heart attack.”

  “Dick Mullen’s your pop? Dick Mullen?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh, he’ll be fine. I heard the docs talking. He’s out of the woods.”

  “You really heard that?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Out of the woods. On the mend. His last two cardiograms have been very exciting. They’ve definitely stabilized. He mustn’t let you see you’re worried. I mean, you mustn’t let him see you’re worried. Who’s your patron saint? Pray to your patron saint for a cheerful countenance. Pop’s going to be terrific.”

  The kid began to cry.

  “What’s this? What’s this? What kind of a patron saint are we talking about here? Some deafo?” Flesh looked into the sky. “That’s cheerful countenance, not tearful!” He smiled and the boy laughed. They were at the car, Ben standing behind the boy at the driver’s side, feeling the terrific heat.

  “Get in,” he said. The boy hesitated. “What, you think I’m the witch in Hansel and Gretel? You think I could fake you out? A broken-field runner from parochial school? Get in, get in.” He handed the boy the keys and told him what to do and, once the engine had started, how to work the air conditioning. He had the boy close all the doors. “Let me know when it’s cool,” he said. “Rap on the window with your knuckles.” In a few minutes the boy came out of the car. They changed places. Ben lowered the window and tried to give him the five dollars, but the boy shook his head. “Take it, go on, don’t be crazy. Take it, you saved my life.”

  “Really,” the boy said, “it’s all right.”

  “The laborer is worth his hire. Take the money. Buy yourself some Mister Softees.”

  “No. Please. Really. I don’t want the money.”

  “What, listen, is this a religious thing? Is this something to do with parochial school?”

  “What you told me about my father,” the boy said. “What you heard from the doctors about his improvement. That’s all the payment I, you know, need. Thank you.”

  Flesh was thinking about his health, the prognosis, the things he’d read since Wolfe had first explained the meaning of his blindness. He was thinking of what one day he could expect to feel in his face, flies walking lightly in place of his cheeks, the heavy sensation of sand between his toes and in his socks even when he was barefoot, of weakness in his limbs, of hunks of deadened flesh along his thighs and torso like queer grafted absences against which the inside of his arms would brush as they might brush against rubber or wood, sensations he could not imagine now, feelings
under his thumbnails, the ridges of his cock, things in his pores, stuff in his lip, thinking of the infinite symptoms of the multiple sclerotic.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I understand. You’re a good boy. Tell Mother. She probably needs cheering up, too.” And he put the car in gear and drove against the fantastic record heat wave, looking for a hole in it as pioneers traveling west might once have looked for passes through the mountains, as explorers had paddled and portaged to seek a northwest passage. He used side roads and Interstates, paved and unpaved secondary state roads and county, bypasses and alternates, limited-access divided highways and principal thruways, feeling chased by brownouts and power-failed space, civilization’s demyelination, slipping safely into temporary zones of remission and waiting in these in motels until the symptoms of the heat wave caught up with him again and the electricity sputtered and was snuffed out like a candle and the air conditioning died.

  He gassed up wherever he could. The pumps would not work where the electricity failed, and whenever he came to one of those zones of remission—the heat, constant everywhere, did not in itself insure a brownout; rather the land and towns, invisibly networked with mad zigzag jigsaw power grids, grids like a crossword, secret-coded with electrical messages he couldn’t break (in a single block the power might be off in five adjacent buildings but on in the sixth and seventh and off again in an eighth and ninth), had been mysteriously parceled; agreements had been made, contingency plans had gone into effect, Peter robbed here to pay Paul, there permitted to hold his own, a queer but absolute and even visible (the lights, the lights) negotiation and exchange like the complicated maneuvers of foreign currency, the towns seeming to have grown wills, a capacity to conspire, to give and to take; he had an impression of thrown switches, jammed buttons, broken locks—he first sought out service stations, accepting Regular if there was no Premium, refreshing his oil even if it was down by less than a cup, filling everything: his radiator, his battery, even the container that held the water that sprayed his windshield, to the brim, the brim. Only then did he seek a motel. And, registered, walked to a hardware store, not wanting to use any of his precious gasoline in the wasteful stop-and-start of town driving. In the hardware store he would purchase five-gallon cans and carry them back empty to the gas station closest to his motel to have them filled. These he would store in his trunk, moving his grips and garment bags onto the backseat of his car. (At one time he had as much as sixty gallons in gas cans.) And flashlights, too. And batteries. Bandoliers of batteries, quivers of them, an ordnance of Eveready. And in bookstores atlases, guidebooks of the region to supplement the service-station maps, the Texaco and Shell and Mobil and Phillips 66 South Dakotas and Nebraskas and Kansases and Colorados he already had. Finally to return to the motel, not yet undressing even, pulling a chair up to the television and switching from channel to channel—these were hick towns, the sticks, on cable TV, near the eastern edges of mountain time, the western edges of central—to catch the weather reports. (He bought a portable radio which he took with him into the motels to listen to the forecasts on the local radio station.) Becoming in that frantic week and a fraction since he had left Rapid City behind him, the stench of his spoiled, dissolved flavors in his nostrils—he’d stopped to see Zifkovic first, with him investigated the extent of the damage, the high-water mark of the melted Mister Softees, the smashed artificial strawberry and broken chocolate, the ruined crushed banana and pineapple and decomposed orange, the filmy vanilla and the serums of lime and lemon, all the scum of melted fruit, oils now, wet paint—a savant of conditions, an anchorman of drought and heat, a seer almost, second-guessing the brownouts, seeing them coming, a quick study of the peak hours, and not wanting to be caught in the motel room when the town stalled, dreading that, forgetting even his symptoms in his incredible concentration and prophecy. Hitting at last on tricks, calling the local power stations and electric companies, on ruses getting through to the executives themselves, calling long distance to Omaha even, misrepresenting himself. (The Mister Softee experience in South Dakota had taught him what to say: “Mr. Rains, Herb Castiglia here. I’m Innkeeper at the Scotts Bluff Ramada and I’ve got this problem, sir. I’ve got an opportunity to buy a ton of ice. Now the son of a bitch who’s pushing it wants forty cents a pound for the stuff. That’s a cockeyed price and for my dough the guy’s no better than a looter. He won’t sell less than a ton, and at forty cents a pound that comes to eight hundred bucks. I’m over a barrel, Mr. Rains, but I’ve got two or three thousand dollars tied up in my meats for my restaurant. What I need to know is if there’s going to be a brownout, and, if so, how long you expect it to last. If she blows I’m okay for six to eight hours, but in this heat any longer than that and the stuff will turn into silage. What do I do, Mr. Rains? I got to cover myself. Can you give me a definitive no or a definite yes?”) And striking responsive chords in Mr. Rains, in Mr. DeVilbiss, in Mr. Schopf, small businessman to big, getting at last the inside information he could not get on the half dozen or so channels available to him on the cable TV, or the local country-music and farm-report radio stations. And acting on these advices, skipping town, hitting the road. Driving after dark on the hotter days, the hundred-plus scorchers—to cut down on the air conditioning, to keep it on Low instead of High as he’d have to do in the daytime, conserving his gas, four days and he hadn’t had to tap the reserves in his trunk—and looking over the broad plains for the lights of a town, any town, a prospector of the electric.