334

by Thomas M. Disch

  Leaving the office, Ab drew in a deep breath and squared his shoulders. he tried to get himself into the I-can-do-it spirit of a Sousa march. He had a problem. There’s only one way to solve a problem: by coping with it. By whatever means were available.

  For Ab, at this point, there was only one means left. Chapel was waiting where Ab had left him on the ramp spanning 29th Street.

  “It has to be done,” Ab said.

  Chapel, reluctant as he was to risk Ab’s anger again (he’d nearly been strangled to death once), felt obliged to enter a last symbolic protest. “I’ll do it,” he whispered, “but it’s murder.”

  “Oh no,” Ab replied confidently, for he felt quite at ease on this score. “Burking isn’t murder.”

  On April 2, 1956, Bellevue Hospital did not record a single death, a statistic so rare it was thought worthy of remark in all the city’s newspapers, and there were then quite a few. In the sixty-six years since, there had not been such another deathless day, though twice it had seemed a near thing.

  At five o’clock on the afternoon of April 14, 2022, the city desk computer at the Times issued a stand-by slip noting that as of that moment their Bellevue tie-line had not dispatched a single obit to the central board. A print-off of the old story accompanied the slip.

  Joel Beck laid down her copy of Tender Buttons, which was no longer making sense, and considered the human-interest possibilities of this nonevent. She’d been on stand-by for hours and this was the first thing to come up. By midnight, very likely, someone would have died and spoiled any story she might have written. Still, in a choice between Gertrude Stein (illusion) and the Bellevue morgue (reality) Joel opted for the latter.

  She notified Darling where she’d be. He thought it was a sleeping idea and told her to enjoy it.

  By the first decade of the 21st Century systematic lupus erythematosis (SLE ) had displaced cancer as the principal cause of death among women aged twenty to fifty-five. This disease attacks every major system of the body, sequentially or in combination. Pathologically it is a virtual anthology of what can go wrong with the human body. Until the Morgan-Imamura test was perfected in 2007, cases of lupus had been diagnosed as meningitis, as epilepsy, as brucellosis, as nephritis, as syphilis, as colitis … The list goes on.

  The etiology of lupus is infinitely complex and has been endlessly debated, but all students agree with the contention of Muller and Imamura in the study for which they won their first Nobel prize, SLE— the Ecological Disease: lupus represents the auto-intoxication of the human race in an environment ever more hostile to the existence of life. A minority of specialists went on to say that the chief cause of the disease’s proliferation had been the collateral growth of modern pharmacology. Lupus, by this theory, was the price mankind was paying for the cure of its other ills.

  Among the leading proponents of the so-called “doomsday” theory was Dr. E. Kitaj, director of Bellevue Hospital’s Metabolic Research unit, who now (while Chapel bided his time in the television room) was pointing out to the resident and interns of heaven certain unique features of the case of the patient in Unit 7. While all clinical tests confirmed a diagnosis of SLE, the degeneration of liver functions had progressed in a fashion more typical of lupoid hepatitis.

  Because of the unique properties of her case, Dr. Kitaj had ordered a liver machine upstairs for Miss Schaap, though ordinarily this was a temporary expedient before transplantation. Her life was now as much a mechanical as a biologic process. In Alabama, New Mexico, and Utah, Frances Schaap would have been considered dead in any court of law.

  Chapel was falling asleep. The afternoon art movie, a drama of circus life, was no help in keeping awake, since he could never concentrate on a program unless he knew the characters. Only by thinking of Ab, the threats he’d made, the blood glowing in his angry face, was he able to keep from nodding off.

  In the ward the doctors had moved on to Unit 6 and were listening with tolerant smiles to Mrs. Harrison’s jokes about her colostomy.

  The new Ford commercial came on, like an old friend calling Chapel by name. A girl in an Empire coupe drove through endless fields of grain. Ab had said, who said so many things just for their shock value, that the commercials were often better than the programs.

  At last they trooped off together to the men’s ward, leaving the curtains drawn around Unit 7. Frances Schaap was asleep. The little red light on the machine winked on and off, on and off, like a jet flying over the city at night.

  Using the diagram Ab had scrawled on the back of a transfer form, Chapel found the pressure adjustment for the portal vein. He turned it left till it stopped. The arrow on the scale below, marked P P, moved slowly from 35, to 40, to 50. To 60.

  To 65.

  He turned the dial back to where it had been. The arrow shivered: the portal vein had hemorrhaged.

  Frances Schaap woke up. She lifted one thin, astonished hand toward her lips: they were smiling! “Doctor,” she said pleasantly. “Oh, I feel…” The hand fell back to the sheet.

  Chapel looked away from her eyes. He readjusted the dial, which was no different, essentially, from the controls of his own Yamaha. The arrow moved right, along the scale: 50. 55.

  “… so much better now.”

  60. 65.

  “Thanks.”

  70.

  “I hope, Mr. Holt, that you won’t let me keep you from your work,” Joel Beck said, with candid insincerity. “I fear I have already.”

  Ab thought twice before agreeing to this. At first he’d been convinced she was actually an investigator Macy’s had hired to nail him, but her story about the computer checking out the obits and sending her here was not the sort of thing anyone could have made up. It was bad enough, her being from the Times, and worse perhaps.

  “Am I?” she insisted.

  If he said yes, he had work to do, she’d ask to tag along and watch. If he said no, then she’d go on with her damned questions. If it hadn’t been that she’d have reported him (he could recognize the type), he’d have told her to fuck off.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he answered carefully. “Isn’t it me who’s keeping you from your work?”

  “How so?”

  “Like I explained, there’s a woman up on 18 who’s sure to terminate any minute now. I’m just waiting for them to call.”

  “Half an hour ago you said it wouldn’t take fifteen minutes, and you’re still waiting. Possibly the doctors have pulled her through. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

  “Someone is bound to die by twelve o’clock.”

  “By the same logic someone was bound to have died by now—and they haven’t.”

  Ab could not support the strain of diplomacy any longer. “Look, lady, you’re wasting your time—it’s as simple as that.”

  “It won’t be the first time,” Joel Beck replied complacently. “You might almost say that that’s what I’m paid to do.” She unslung her recorder. “If you’d just answer one or two more questions, give me a few more details of what you actually do, possibly we’ll come up with a handle for a more general story. Then even if that call does come I could go up with you and look over your shoulder.”

  “Who would be interested?” With growing astonishment Ab realized that she did not so much resist his arguments as simply ignore them.

  While Joel Beck was explaining the intrinsic fascination of death to the readers of the Times (not a morbid fascination but the universal human response to a universal human fact), the call came from Chapel.

  He had done what Ab asked him to.

  “Yeah, and?”

  It had gone off okay.

  “Is it official yet?”

  It wasn’t. There was no one in the ward.

  “Couldn’t you, uh, mention the matter to someone who can make it official?”

  The Times woman was poking about the morgue, fingering things, pretending not to eavesdrop. Ab felt she could decipher his generalities. His first confession had been the same kind of nightmare, w
ith Ab certain all his classmates lined up outside the confessional had overheard the sins the priest had pried out of him. If she hadn’t been listening he could have tried to bully Chapel into…

  He’d hung up. It was just as well.

  “Was that the call?” she asked.

  “No. Something else, a private matter.”

  So she kept at him with more questions about the ovens, and whether relatives ever came in to watch, and how long it took, until the desk called to say there was a driver from Macy’s trying to bring a body into the hospital and should they let him?

  “Hold him right there. I’m on my way.”

  “That was the call,” Joel Beck said, genuinely disappointed.

  “Mm. I’ll be right back.”

  The driver, flustered, started in with some story why he was late.

  “It’s skin off your ass, not mine. Never mind that anyhow. There’s a reporter in my office from the Times— ”

  “I knew,” the driver said. “It’s not enough I’m going to be fired, now you’ve found a way—”

  “Listen to me, asshole. This isn’t about the Newman fuckup. And if you don’t panic she never has to know.” He explained about the city desk computer. “So we just won’t let her get any strange ideas, right? Like she might if she saw you hauling one corpse into the morgue and going off with another.”

  “Yeah, but…” The driver clutched for his purpose as for a hat that a great wind were lifting from his head. “But they’ll crucify me at Macy’s if I don’t come back with the Newman body! I’m so late already because of the damned—”

  “You’ll get the body. You’ll take back both. You can return with the other one later, but the important thing now—”

  He felt her hand on his shoulder, bland as a smile.

  “I thought you couldn’t have gone too far away. There’s a call for you and I’m afraid you were right: Miss Schaap has died. That is whom you were speaking of?”

  Whom! Ab thought with a sudden passion of hatred for the Times and its band of pseudo-intellectuals. Whom!

  The Macy’s driver was disappearing toward his cart.

  It came to Ab then, the plan of his salvation, whole and entire, the way a masterpiece must come to a great artist, its edges glowing.

  “Bob!” Ab called out. “Wait a minute.”

  The driver turned halfway round, head bent sideways, an eyebrow raised: who, me?

  “Bob, I want you to meet, uh … ”

  “Joel Beck.”

  “Right. Joel, this is Bob, uh, Bob Newman.” It was, in fact, Samuel Blake. Ab was bad at remembering names.

  Samuel Blake and Joel Beck shook hands.

  “Bob drives for Macy’s Clinic, the Steven Jay Mandell Memorial Clinic.” he laid one hand on Blake’s shoulder, the other hand on Beck’s. She seemed to become aware of his stump for the first time and flinched. “Do you know anything about cryonics, Miss uh?”

  “Beck. No, very little.”

  “Mandell was the very first New Yorker to go to the freezers. Bob could tell you all about him, a fantastic story.” He steered them back down the corridor toward the morgue.

  “Bob is here right now because of the body they just… Uh.” He remembered too late that you didn’t call them bodies in front of outsiders. “Because of Miss Schaap, that is. Whom,” he added with malicious emphasis, “was insured with Bob’s clinic.” Ab squeezed the driver’s shoulder in lieu of winking.

  “Whenever possible, you see, we notify the clinic people, so that they can be here the minute one of their clients terminates. That way there’s not a minute lost. Right, Bob?”

  The driver nodded, thinking his way slowly toward the idea Ab had prepared for him. He opened the door to his office, waited for them to go in. “So while I’m upstairs why don’t you and Bob have a talk, Miss Peck. Bob has dozens of incredible stories he can tell you, but you’ll have to be quick. Cause once I’ve got his body down here …” Ab gave the driver a significant look. “… Bob will have to leave.”

  It was done as neatly as that. The two people whose curiosity or impatience might still have spoiled the substitution were now clamped to each other like a pair of steel traps, jaw to jaw to jaw to jaw.

  He hadn’t considered the elevator situation. During his own shift there were seldom logjams. When there were, carts routed for the morgue were last in line. At 6:15, when the Schaap was finally signed over to him, every elevator arriving on 18 was full of people who’d ridden to the top in order to get a ride to the bottom. It might be an hour before Ab and his cart could find space and the Macy’s driver would certainly not sit still that much longer.

  He waited till the hallway was empty, then scooped up the body from the cart. It weighed no more than his own Beno, but even so by the time he’d reached the landing of 12, he was breathing heavy. Halfway down from 5 his knees gave out. (They’d given fair warning but he’d refused to believe he could have gone so soft.) He collapsed with the body still cradled in his arms.

  He was helped to his feet by a blond young man in a striped bathrobe many sizes too small. Once Ab was sitting up. the young man tried to assist Frances Schaap to her feet. Ab, gathering his wits, explained that it was just a body. “Hoo-wee, for a minute there, I thought…” He laughed uncertainly at what he’d thought.

  Ab felt the body here and there and moved its limbs this way and that, trying to estimate what damage had been done. Without undressing it, this was difficult.

  “How about you?” the young man asked, retrieving the cigarette he’d left smoking on a lower step.

  “I’m fine.” He rearranged the sheet, lifted the body and started off again. On the third-floor landing he remembered to shout up a thank-you at the young man who’d helped him.

  Later, during visiting hours in the ward, Ray said to his friend Charlie, who’d brought in new cassettes from the shop where he worked: “It’s incredible some of the things you see in this hospital.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, if I told you you wouldn’t believe.” Then he spoiled his whole build-up by twisting round sideways in bed. He’d forgotten he couldn’t do that.

  “How are you feeling?” Charlie asked, after Ray had stopped groaning and making a display. “I mean, in general.”

  “Better, the doctors say, but I still can’t piss by myself.” He described the operation of the catheter, and his self-pity made him forget Ab Holt, but later, alone and unable to sleep (for the man in the next bed made bubbling sounds) he couldn’t stop thinking of the dead girl, of how he’d picked her up off the steps, her ruined face and frail, limp hands, and how the fat attendant from the morgue had tested, one by one, her arms and legs, to see what he’d broken.

  There was nothing for her in the morgue, Joel had decided, now that the day had yielded its one obit to nullify the nonevent. She phoned back to the desk but neither Darling nor the computer had any suggestions.

  She wondered how long it would be before they fired her. Perhaps they thought she would become so demoralized if they kept her on stand-by that she’d leave without a confrontation scene.

  Human interest: surely somewhere among the tiers of this labyrinth there was a story for her to bear witness to. Yet wherever she looked she came up against flat, intractable surfaces: Six identical wheelchairs all in a row. A doctor’s name penciled on a door. The shoddiness, the smells. At the better sort of hospitals, where her family would have gone, the raw fact of human frangibility was prettied over with a veneer of cash. Whenever she was confronted, like this, with the undisguised bleeding thing, her first impulse was to avert her eyes, never—like a true journalist—to bend a little closer and even stick a finger in it. Really, they had every reason to give her the sack.

  Along one stretch of the labyrinth iron curlicues projected from the walls at intervals. Gas brackets? Yes, for their tips, obscured by layer upon layer of white paint, were nozzle-shaped. They must have dated back to the nineteenth century. She felt the slightest mental tingle
.

  But no, this was too slim a thread to hang a story from. It was the sort of precious detail one notices when one’s eyes are averted.

  She came to a door with the stenciled letters: “Volunteers.” As this had a rather hopeful ring to it, human-interest-wise, she knocked. There was no answer and the door was unlocked. She entered a small unhappy room whose only furniture was a metal filing cabinet. In it was a rag-tag of yellowing mimeographed forms and equipment for making Koffee.

  She pulled the cord of the blinds. The dusty louvres opened unwillingly. A dozen yards away cars sped past on the upper level of the East Side Highway. Immediately the whooshing noise of their passage detached itself from the indiscriminate, perpetual humming in her ears. Below the highway a slice of oily river darkened with the darkening of the spring sky, and below this a second stream of traffic moved south.

  She got the blinds up and tried the window. It opened smoothly. A breeze touched the ends of the scarf knotted into her braids as she leaned forward.

  There, not twenty feet below, was her story, the absolutely right thing: in a triangle formed by a feeder ramp to the highway and the building she was in and a newer building in the bony style of the ’70’s was the loveliest vacant lot she’d ever seen, a perfect little garden of knee-high weeds. It was a symbol: of Life struggling up out of the wasteland of the modern world, of Hope…

  No, that was too easy. But some meaning, a whisper, did gleam up to her from this patch of weeds (she wondered what their names were; at the library there would probably be a book …), as sometimes in Tender Buttons the odd pairing of two ordinary words would generate similar flickerings poised at the very threshold of the intelligible. Like:

  An elegant use of foliage and grace and a little piece of white cloth and oil.

  Or, more forcibly: A blind agitation is manly and uttermost.

  4

  The usual cirrus at the horizon of pain had thickened to a thunder-head. Sleepless inside a broken unit in the annex to Emergency, he stared at the red bulb above the door, trying to think the pain away. It persisted and grew, not only in his shoulder but in his fingers sometimes, or his knees, less a pain than an awareness that pain were possible, a far-off insistent jingling like phone calls traveling up to his head from some incredible lost continent, a South America full of dreadful news.