The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories

by William Browning Spencer

  “No,” the man said. He was shaking his head. He stood up and thumbed through the photos in his hands. “You insult me. These are not the goods. These are not … these are not your photographs.”

  Benny chuckled. “You are sharp. I got to give you that, you are sharp.”

  The man threw the photos on the floor. “In all our dealings, we have been above board. I am disappointed in you.”

  “Those are Lou Himmel’s photographs. Perhaps you recognized them. That really is Aunt Kate. Lou’s Aunt Kate, not mine. Lou being dead, I figured he wouldn’t mind.”

  “I wish to see your photographs.”

  Benny shrugged. “I burned them.”

  “You know what this means.”

  Now Benny stood up. “Yeah, it means I don’t give a goddam. Now get out of here.”

  The man sighed and looked around the room as though seeking a reasonable audience. “I’ll complete the paperwork, then.”

  “Whatever lights your fire,” Benny said. “Whatever honks your horn.”

  The storm raged outside. Benny was watching the six o’clock news when Nurse Cable—everyone on the ward called her Julie—entered. She was a pretty young woman with black hair, cut rather severely, and a lush Georgia accent. She took Benny’s blood pressure. “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “Poorly,” Benny said. “I’m an old man, and anyone my age who says he is feeling great has simply forgotten what it means to feel great. I’m going to die, you know.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. These tests are perfectly routine. We all die someday, but I don’t think you’ll die today, Mr. Levin.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” Benny said. “I’m sick of the game, frankly. What sort of a game is it when your opponent can look at the cards when he deals the hands? I’m beginning to think that Lucy had the best of it.”

  “Lucy?”

  “My daughter.”

  “I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

  “I did. She drowned.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? We are all sorry for what’s inevitable. Piece by piece it is taken away from us. We appear to bargain, but it all comes to the same thing in the end. Death and condolences.”

  Julie fluffed the old man’s pillow. “You are in a morbid frame of mind tonight, Mr. Levin, I’ll say that. I’m not sure I can absorb so much philosophy this evening. There are three very sick people on the ward, and some less sick ones that need a bit of coddling.”

  Benny chuckled. “That’s the spirit. Youth has no business mucking with philosophy and despair.”

  “Not during work hours any way,” Julie said. She left.

  It was nearly ten when she returned. Benny was sitting up in bed looking at a photograph.

  “He missed this one,” Benny said. “He held it right in his hand, but he thought it was one of Lou’s.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Julie said. She had to go. There were meds to disperse, I.V.’s to regulate.

  He handed the photo to her. “It doesn’t look like much, I suppose.”

  It didn’t. The photo was black and white, and showed a motel looking like a grey shoe box on its side. There were some vague mountains in the background hoarding rain clouds, and you could almost hear the hiss of tires on a wet highway. A sign said: Parkway Motel. The camera, a cheap box-camera judging by the quality of the image, had been jarred during the exposure, tilting and blurring everything.

  “Eileen hugged me just as I snapped it,” Benny said. Benny laughed and took the photo back. “Oh, I don’t expect you to admire the beauty of the photo. Its charms are all internal. That was our honeymoon. We stayed there the first day on our way down to Key West.”

  Julie said she had been to Key West a year ago with her parents, and the conversation turned to the despicable nature of land developers and the apathy of the powerful. Than Julie had to get back to work.

  Benny watched the eleven o’clock news that evening and then turned the TV off and went into the bathroom. He turned the shower on, brushed his teeth.

  When Benny turned back to the shower, the man was standing under the fall of water, his dark suit soaked, his hair plastered against his forehead, his small eyes grim and veiled by the twin waterfalls pouring over the bony ridge of his brow.

  “Son of a bitch!” Benny said, stepping backward as though bitten. He slipped then, reached out for a handhold, and caught only a draped towel that came away from its rung, falling with him. The back of his head slammed against the tiled floor.

  “Are you all right?” Eileen asked. Her face was inches from his. The shower was still on, the pouring water making a mist behind her head.

  “I slipped,” Benny said. “Wow.” Eileen helped him up, an arm around his waist. She was still fully dressed, a dark dress with white dots, and she was soaked. Benny was suddenly aware of his nakedness. He had never been naked with Eileen, and he felt awkward and ungainly. The throb at the back of his head was insignificant.

  Eileen dried him and hustled him under the covers. “Are you okay?” she asked, leaning over him.

  “I’m fine,” he said, reaching to touch her cheek. “But you are soaked.”

  “That’s easily remedied,” his new bride said, and she shucked her dress in one effortless motion, the wet garment rising over her head, her slip following. She walked toward him, glowing, her crooked smile enriched by the fullness of her hips.

  “I wish I had a photograph of you right now,” Benny said.

  “Not on your life, fellow,” she said, crawling under the covers. “You’ll have to settle for a snapshot of this motel.”

  And the shock of her body, its full length falling upon him, clicked the shutter of his heart.

  Pep Talk

  Nadine’s note was on the refrigerator, and I read it and said, out loud, “There goes my heart.”

  That was the beginning, I guess, the first time I talked to myself ever. My mother had always maintained that talking to oneself was a sign of mental decline, and it was certainly true that uncle Walt, who talked to himself constantly, seemed to confirm this belief. At any rate, Floppy, our dog, was in the kitchen, and maybe I was talking to him, although the truth is I had never confided much in him and didn’t think of him as a sympathetic ear.

  Nadine’s note was short and written in the flowery script she’d learned going to a night class. It said, “Roger, I have left you and I will come by and get Floppy and my things on Saturday. Do not—I repeat—do not call me at the office.

  “I am sorry it had to end this way, but there wasn’t any future for us. It is nobody’s fault, but we were not compatible people. I hope you have a good life and when you are very old can look back on it with no regrets. Always your friend, Nadine.”

  I opened the refrigerator door and, on a whim, opened the freezer compartment and stuck my head in. “Nadine,” I whispered, “You have broke my heart.”

  Nadine came by on Saturday, accompanied by her girl-friend Emily. Nadine is not a beautiful girl, mostly thanks to an expression of disgust that is her constant companion, but Nadine is a knock-out compared to Emily, who is stout with a vicious smile and a way of rocking back on her heels while she gives you the once-over that is unsettling.

  “Hey Roger, how you doing?” Emily said.

  I didn’t say anything. I went into the bedroom and shut the door and lay there on the bed, watching the ceiling fan go around. A ceiling fan can be a blur, or you can try to hang onto one of the blades with your eyes and let it swing you around. This last is a queasy business and I abandoned it after a half hour. When I came back out, Nadine went into the bedroom and got her clothes. “You are not being much help,” Nadine said when she walked back past me with an armload of dresses.

  “I’m doing my best,” I said.

  After Nadine and Emily left, taking Floppy with them, I said, “It’s just you and me, Roger.”

  And that’s when I started talking to myself in earnest. It
wasn’t a gradual process. “What will you have for breakfast?” I asked myself, and I said, “Some Cheerios, I guess.”

  “Bananas?”

  “No thanks.”

  “You sure?” I guess what hooked me on talking to myself was the concern in my voice. You can’t get that from strangers—or even most friends.

  I spent the weekend by myself and when I got to the office on Monday, I found I didn’t have much to say. Ordinarily I might have told Arlene, our bookkeeper, about Nadine’s leaving, and at lunch I might have asked Howard Peters his opinion of the situation. But I found I wasn’t interested in talking to anyone. I was waiting until I got home and could talk to myself.

  I noticed, in the next few weeks, that talking to myself was more interesting than I would have thought.

  Sometimes I would treat myself as though I were a dim-witted child. “You better take an umbrella,” I would tell myself. “It’s raining.”

  “Well, I know that,” I would say. I would sound exasperated, but I wasn’t really. I liked being worried over.

  Most of the time I didn’t have long, windy conversations with myself. I’m not, after all, deranged. It was more like I would pass myself in the hall and exchange a few words. “Another dreaded day, another dismal dollar,” I would say.

  I would laugh, nod, and say, “Life is hell.”

  If you start talking to yourself day in and day out, you will find that you don’t want brilliance; you just want something comfortable like the talk of old married couples, just something to bounce off the walls, something to navigate by.

  Nadine had taken the TV. The radio she had left only pulled in one station, a station dominated by what sounded like a bedridden evangelist who thumbed through the Bible and read whatever struck his fancy. I had a very clear picture of this evangelist as a fat, pale man in a bathrobe, his chins quivering as he spoke. I imagined that his children refused to talk to him. I sympathized with his situation, but I couldn’t listen to his show. So my apartment would have been pretty quiet if I hadn’t taken to talking to myself.

  Often I would address myself in a polite but distant manner. There’s a lot to be said for politeness and common decency.

  “Want another cup of coffee?” I would ask.

  “No thank you, really,” I’d say.

  Every week or so that summer Nadine would call to see how I was doing. We had been living together for three years before she left, and she thought of herself as an authority on me. She said she was concerned, because I wasn’t one to get out and do things. She was afraid I would slide into a depression.

  Somewhere in September, she stopped calling me. Our last conversation had ended badly. That was when she said she thought she might be bisexual.

  “What?” I said.

  “Emily thinks I might be bisexual,” Nadine said.

  “Ha!” I said. “Emily!”

  “What do you mean by that?” Nadine wanted to know. I knew that tone in her voice, and I knew better than to speak my mind candidly when that tone appeared, but I did it anyway.

  “Well,” I said. “A mouse shouldn’t, just generally speaking, put too much stock in the opinions of a cat.”

  Nadine chunked the phone down on that sentence, and I was rewarded with a loud dial tone.

  “Bit of a huff? Small snit, your Highness?” I delivered the lines in a thin, British-by-way-of-Monty Python, accent. I liked the effect.

  In the weeks that followed, I found I could enliven my conversations with myself by adopting a variety of voices and accents. These developed into characters, some of whom were particularly helpful in certain circumstances. For instance, a down-home drawl was a great comfort when I was embarked on a home repair project. Having ripped the threads from a piece of rusted pipe while attempting to unclog the sink, it helped immeasurably to have a slow, cozy voice say, “Well, Roger old boy, I reckon you have made a gawd-awful mess of it.”

  I’d shrug my shoulder. “I guess so.”

  “Hell, even the best coon dog loses the scent sometimes. Let’s call us a time out here. Have a beer.”

  “I suppose so,” I would say, not anywhere near as reluctant as I sounded, and feeling much calmer already.

  In November, my birthday rolled around and Nadine—who, I’ve got to admit, wasn’t a woman to hold a grudge—called. “Happy birthday!” she said. “How does it feel to be thirty?”

  “Not bad.”

  “Do you have company? Oh, they’re singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ aren’t they? Friends from the office?”

  “Not exactly. Look, I better go.”

  “Sure. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Happy birthday, Roger. Happy birthday.”

  I hung up and cut myself another piece of cake. I had spent the whole morning blowing up balloons, and my chest hurt some, but I was happy. I rewound the tape and played it again.

  “Happy Birthday dear Rogeeeer, Happy—”

  I had bought a tape recorder for positive affirmations. A positive affirmation—in case you have missed the last couple of decades—is like when you go up to a mirror and say, “I love you, Roger.” This sort of thing improves your self-image and just naturally dispels negativity. I had tried it but I hadn’t had much luck with it.

  “I love you, Roger.”

  “Well thank you,” I’d say, but I would feel awkward, and at a disadvantage, like I wasn’t responding enthusiastically enough. Actually, if I were someone else, I wouldn’t want to hug me. I’m not that kind of guy. I might shake my hand, but I wouldn’t hug me. And I would appreciate not being hugged.

  Anyway, I bought this little tape recorder at K-Mart and read the instructions and spoke into it, “You are a warm and loving person, Roger.”

  When I played it back, I was a little disappointed. I didn’t sound like a person I could trust. And I sure didn’t sound warm. I sounded smug, like some sort of con artist that has just pulled a fast one.

  I worked at it, consciously deepening my voice. If I rolled up a magazine and used it like a megaphone, that seemed to help. The trick was to be positive without being hearty. I wanted to be comforted, not slapped on the back.

  “You are getting better every day in every way,” I crooned, sitting cross-legged on the floor and megaphoning my voice toward the microphone on the carpet. “The world is your oyster, Roger Gilroy.”

  Of course, I eventually came to the conclusion that I would get better results if I had better equipment. “Love yourself enough to buy the best,” I advised myself.

  So I bought this elaborate tape recorder that had four tracks. You could “mix-down” on it—I think that’s how the salesman put it—so that I could record my voice on top of my voice. I could do it over and over again and sound like a whole chorus of me’s.

  Well, I didn’t master it overnight, but I was pretty good at it by the time my birthday rolled around, and that, of course, is what Nadine had heard.

  Anyone will tell you that the more you get into a hobby, the more it takes on a life of its own. Pretty soon I had acquired eight cheap tape recorders to supplement the fancy one. And then I discovered electronic timing devices. I’m no electronics whiz, but the trick of mastering anything is perseverance. You’d be amazed at what you can do if you hang in there.

  When I came home at night and turned the light switch on, a chorus of voices would greet me. “Hey, Rog. How you doing?”

  “Long day?”

  “Grab a beer boy.”

  “You look beat. You’re working too hard.”

  I almost forgot about Christmas. But Nadine reminded me by showing up on my doorstep. There she was when I opened the door.

  It was a cold winter, and she was dressed for it. She had on one of those red and white knit caps and a yellow woolen scarf and her famous over-fed grizzly coat.

  “Nadine,” I said.

  “Yep,” she said, “I got you a present. Merry Christmas.”

  She walked on in and I closed the door behind her. I was wearing a raincoat, which I’d tossed on ov
er my underwear in order to answer the door.

  Nadine sat on the sofa. “You are wearing a raincoat,” she said. She was never one to miss anything.

  “Well yeah. I didn’t know who might be at the door.”

  Nadine nodded. “Open your present,” she said, looking around the room as she shrugged out of her coat. She was wearing a sweatshirt promoting a rock band called “Carload of Feminists.”

  I started peeling off the gift wrap (cats in Santa suits).

  “Who’s our most favorite person? Roger Gilroy! Who! Roger Gilroy. I can’t hear you! Rooooooooger Gilroy!”

  “What’s that?” Nadine asked, already standing.

  Cheers and whistles were coming from the bathroom. I looked at my watch.

  “That’s the eleven o’clock pick-me-up cheer.”

  I put my hands on Nadine’s shoulders and eased her back onto the sofa. The cheer was subsiding.

  “It’s nothing,” I assured her as I went back to unwrapping her gift. “Hey this is great.”

  It was a book entitled, Your Best Self: How to Grow into Your Potential. The author’s photo on the back showed a slightly overweight man wearing sunglasses and grinning broadly as he stepped off a yacht.

  Nadine leaned forward. “I thought this book might really turn your life around. I mean, it has done wonders for me.”

  I went over and hugged her, an affectionate, ex-lover hug. “Well, I can use all the help I can get. I’m sorry I didn’t get you anything. I forgot all about Christmas.”

  “I’m not so crazy about Christmas myself,” Nadine said, sagging a little. “It’s been difficult. Lydia is moving out.”

  I didn’t know anybody named Lydia, so of course I asked who Lydia was and I got the whole story. Lydia was a performance artist and a lesbian, and she and Nadine had become lovers. Emily had warned right from the start that it wouldn’t work, but Nadine hadn’t listened.

  I sympathized. I said how human relationships were difficult, how it was hard to keep the lines of communication open, et cetera.

  “And you?” Nadine asked. “How are you doing, really?” She wiped her eyes. She is a woman who should cry in private, since weeping actually seems to elongate her nose somehow, and red blotches appear on her cheeks.