THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror

by Thomas M. Disch

  “Blue,” the boy repeated, pleased. Presto, he took a square of blue cloth out of the box and held it up to the screen. Such assurance: as though for any word she might have spoken he could have matched it with something from the box. “Blue it is,” he said, and let go of the square of cloth, which fell, with delicate logic, to the concrete step.

  She laughed, delighted.

  The boy frowned. “Is it an aluminum screen?” He ran a fingernail over the silvery mesh. “They won’t hold to aluminum, you know.”

  “No. I mean, no, I don’t know.”

  “Do you suppose I could come into your kitchen? Otherwise I can’t show you what I’ve got here.”

  Giselle unfastened the screen, and the boy, after scooping up his fallen square of cloth, came in. He seemed, in his brisk, bright way, immediately at home. His red hair matched the trim on the curtains. His shirt was the watery, washed-out gold of the Formica tabletop. The tan pants blended into the linoleum. A tiger prowling through the jungle couldn’t have been better camouflaged.

  “Look!” he said. He threw the square of blue cloth—its reverse side was a blue-and-white check—against the side of the stove, to which, with a muffled click, it adhered. He turned to Giselle, demanding an appropriate reaction.

  “Beautiful,” she said, “just beautiful.”

  When she said no more, he became uneasy. Blue flames licked up from his orange hair. But surely, she told herself, it was an illusion, part of this change that had come over things so suddenly and so wonderfully. They were beautiful flames.

  “I mean,” she said, touching a finger to the calico, “it’s such a beautiful blue.”

  “Uh,” said the boy, uncertainly. Then, plunging on: “What you’re holding in your hand is a Magnapad. But you could almost call it a Magic-pad, couldn’t you. The Magnapad is a magnetic potholder. Perhaps you’ve read about them. Now with Magnapads you don’t have to go hunting around for those lost or misplaced potholders when you have to take something off the stove in a hurry. The Magnapad is always right on hand, when it’s needed, where it’s needed. Magnapads come in four decorator colors—blue, green, red, and yellow, but I’m out of green today. And you don’t have to worry about washing them, did I say that? You’ll wear out the potholder itself long before the magnet inside has lost its magic touch. You might suppose that just a single one would cost three or even four dollars, but as a matter of fact I’m selling them at the manufacturer’s wholesale price of one dollar each, three for two-fifty. You could get three blue Magnapads to match the color scheme of your kitchen. Or—”

  He looked about him. In all her kitchen there was nothing blue but the Magnapad clinging to the stove and the flames springing from his head.

  “Or—” The flames leaped up, as though a gas jet had been opened to its widest aperture. “—perhaps you’d prefer the Rainbow Assortment.” He hung a red Magnapad on the Frigidaire, a yellow one on the oven door, then stared up at her with resolute pathos, like the leanest and least able of predators. “You never have to worry about washing them, did I say that?”

  He wanted her to buy one of his potholders. If she did, he would go.

  “A dollar, you say,” she said.

  “Or three for two-fifty.”

  “Let me look in my purse.”

  There it stood on the counter by the sink, a bulging black plastic purse. At a glance she knew she wanted nothing to do with it. She would as soon have put her hand into a steel trap as into that purse. Yet, to be rid of him, she defied her forebodings and opened the purse. As though of their own volition, its contents spilled out onto the Formica counter. Now, in the grave, she saw it all spread out again, as clearly as if a store had put it in a window on display: the loose Kleenexes, the keys, the Excedrin bottle, the Frigidaire’s warranty, the various matchbooks, the billfold thick with photographs, the half-peeled package of Spearmint Life Savers.

  None of this clutter registered as hers. When had she ever been in a restaurant called the Oak Grill? She opened the billfold and looked at a snapshot. Without a mirror she couldn’t have said if it was a picture of herself or of someone else. It was as though the brightness of these present moments had made the past invisible, as the brightness of the sun blots out the stars behind it. As though by comparison to Now the past simply didn’t exist. Even in this later, so much less brilliant Now of the grave, the only memories she felt to be truly hers were these pertaining to the time, nearly a year, between the day of her awakening and the night of her murder. Like a teenager endlessly replaying her stock of hit singles, she returned to these memories again and again. It was her one recourse from the somber contemplation of the eventless darkness around her.

  Time past passed the time—but not at a steady tempo. A day of remembered life might slip by, subjectively, in moments, while moments of remembered life could bring her mind to a standstill, as though she were to stop and stare at a vase of flowers decorating one of the graves above.

  Just so had she stood then, bemused, not by the contents of her purse as such but by their seeming lack of content; by their aura, barely perceptible even to her keener sense, of latent evil, evil that wriggled up from the keys and matchbooks like little black noodles of smoke.

  “Something wrong, lady?”

  Yes, certainly, there was. She was insane. What she could see coming out of her purse and out of the boy’s head, these emanations, were not real, could not be real. And the proof that she was crazy was that even in the midst of these hallucinations she refused to believe she was crazy. She knew she was seeing things, suddenly, as they really were: she knew it.

  “Nothing is wrong,” she said at last.

  “Did you want the Magnapads. Or not?”

  “Yes.”

  What she had to do, and what she did, was to open the billfold again (ignoring the snapshots and the black emissions) and then to take out the five-dollar bill that she kept, folded in four, in reserve for an emergency.

  She unfolded the bill. Abraham Lincoln’s face was speckled with dots and scarred with lines, like an aborigine’s. Looking at it another way, you could see that the lines and dots were his face. He seemed well-intentioned but uncommunicative. She would have preferred the banknote to the Magnapads, as being on the whole more magical. Leaves, laces, letters, lines curled about its four corners in a jumble of arcane significances. There was the bold universality of THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, the modest uniqueness of L52894197A, the little stories latent in “Dorothy Andrews Elston, Treasurer of the United States” and “David M. Kennedy, Secretary of the Treasury.”

  The reverse side was more verdantly green. It showed a temple of some sort, proportioned like the bill. Over the long rectangle of the temple, on a long ribbon: IN GOD WE TRUST.

  Yes. Of all possible messages this was surely the most urgent. But so immense, so manifold, so terrible, especially from the new vantage point of the grave.

  Yet for all its weight and complexity there was a countervailing simplicity, a gospel as gentle as the water of baptism, in that TRUST. Trusting meant she didn’t need to think of it. He would come, in His own time. He was there now, smiling over the cradle of her awakening, addressing her in the baby talk of five-dollar bills and potholders, making her laugh.

  “You don’t have anything smaller?” the boy asked, when she handed him the lovely Federal Reserve note.

  “Is it too large?” she asked surprised. She had supposed it was the same as any other bill, to look at.

  The boy flushed red, and the corolla of flame about his head was tinged with a complementary green. “I haven’t sold any others so far today,” he explained. “I can’t change a five.”

  “Oh.”

  “Unless—”

  “Yes?”

  “Magnapads also make startling gifts to give to your friends.”

  “I’m sure that’s so.” She smiled.

  “Tell you what. If you took three blues ones and a Rainbow Assortment I’ll throw in a seventh one for free! W
ould red do? It’s what I’ve got most of.”

  “Red is fine.”

  He took a red Magnapad from the box and hung it on the door of the oven.

  “Thank you,” she said, reaching out to touch his shoulder. The flames leapt up to an alarming height, then shrank as suddenly to a little necklace of blue diamonds above the collar of his shirt. “Thank you, madam!” And he was out the door without a backward look or a word of goodbye.

  Alone, she made a pattern on the door of the Frigidaire with the seven Magnapads. The single yellow Magnapad went in the middle, with a brace of blue Magnapads above and below. Then she hung the two red Magnapads to form a double diamond pattern, so:

  R

  B

  B

  Y

  B

  B

  R

  For a moment, gazing into the uppermost red Magnapad, it seemed quite certain that if she were to open the door of the Frigidaire she could have stepped directly into eternity. But then, instead, she heard another door open, the front door of the house. It was her husband coming home from work.

  CHAPTER 10

  The damned are forever blaming other people for the situation they are in. Rapists blame their victims, tax defaulters blame accountants, and gluttons blame bakers, all on the adamic theory that temptation isn’t fair play. Glandier blamed his wife for having put him in the completely false position of becoming a murderer; false, because he had never intended to murder her, richly as she may have deserved murdering. It had happened. He had found her, and the impulse overmastered him, surprising him quite as much as it must have her. Admittedly there’d been moments in the months following her disappearance when he’d imagined murdering her, but that had been in compensation for his helplessness. Surely when one’s wife has run off without warning, without even leaving a note stating her reasons, one is entitled to a few imaginings.

  What a year it had been! The pressure, at first, to pretend that nothing was wrong, and then, when his neighbors could no longer be fobbed off with the first set of lies (Giselle was visiting friends, she was nursing her sick mother), the humiliation of having to invent a second line of defense (Giselle was sick and getting treatment out of state), which he knew very well that no one believed. Why does a beautiful twenty-six-year-old wife leave a fat thirty-nine-year-old husband? Having put the question in those terms, Glandier never doubted the answer. It was the punch line of every joke he’d ever told: sex, dirty sex. She’d been fooling around while he was off at work and finally had run off with the son-of-a-bitch who’d seduced her, as sure as gravity makes apples fall or gunpowder makes bullets fly.

  For almost a year he’d lain in his king-size bed with that knowledge beside him, and all the while his feelings seethed and squirmed and grew. Hate, of course, enormously, but weirdly a kind of love too. Glandier had had as little intention of loving anyone, including his wife, as of becoming a murderer. Not from any active misanthropy but out of a developed skepticism toward the sort of behavior that went by the name of love in the world about him. Love was hokum, moonshine, b.s., manipulation. It was the weapon wives used on husbands and parents on children to get them to toe the line. He could still remember the day his mother had traded in the commodity once too often—“If you love me, you’ll do it”—and he’d realized, gleefully, that he didn’t love her and therefore didn’t have to obey her. That dog-biscuit sort of love was a useful tool for training children, but less and less effective as one developed a reasoning adult awareness of one’s own self-interest. Glandier believed, with his favorite economist, Milton Friedman, that self-interest was the best regulator of social relationships in a free economy. He believed in striking the best bargain possible and devil take the hindmost. He believed in paying as low a wage to employees as they could be made to accept and in treating wives in a similarly self-considerative manner. Therefore it had seemed very strange, and even neurotic, for him to have started loving Giselle at precisely the moment she left him in the lurch. But there it was, a love that could set him crying when he heard a song on the radio, a love that gave him nightmares of loss and abandonment, a love that wouldn’t let him think of anything else for hours at a stretch but the textures of her body, the tones of her voice, the astonishing fact, unnoted heretofore, that his wife was an independently existing person with thoughts in her head that he could not begin to guess at. Indeed, until she’d disappeared, it had never occurred to him to imagine an inner life for her, nor, so far as he could recall, had she ever bothered to tell him much about herself. Some childhood memories, her preferences in food and furniture, an occasional announcement that she was “feeling depressed” (which he took to mean that she was on the rag), and a susceptibility to tears when she saw sad movies—that was about the extent of his data on her. As to sex, the presumptive cause of her disappearance, he had not known and seldom wondered whether, for all her well-nigh nightly willingness to let him get his rocks off, she had got any personal satisfaction out of it. Sex between them had had the character of a job designed by a time-and-motion-study specialist. Giselle had been called upon to show little in the way of initiatives. As to discussing these matters, Glandier had felt a reasonable, manly disinclination to inquire whether Giselle’s occasional stifled exclamations or heavy breathing did or did not signify orgasm. In truth, sex had always seemed one of life’s nastier necessities, something not to be thought of, a good reason for taking a bath.

  Now, however, even though he’d killed her, he could think of nothing else. He was becoming—there was no other word—a sex maniac. Not just in terms of the time he spent nowadays thinking about it, imagining it, craving it, but also in terms of the sort of sex that filled these musings, which was crazy, sick, sadistic, and irresistible as a dream. He remembered the moment of the murder with a confusing, beautiful sense of… there was no word at all, not satisfaction, not pleasure. More than anything he longed to experience that sensation again. He would look down at his hands as they rested on the polished wood of his desk and get horny as his mind would rehearse the motions of strangulation, the quick tightening of the right thumb on her windpipe, which yielded to the pressure not as a garden hose might, with even pliancy, but collapsing with a sudden snap like a tougher-than-usual Styrofoam cup. When he was fucking Libby or Sacajawea the same dear memories or even weirder fantasies fizzed through his head until, at that moment of orgasm, they suddenly reversed their valence and became nightmares.

  For Glandier wasn’t completely a monster. He could feel guilt and shame as well as the next man. He didn’t want to be a sex maniac any more than he’d wanted to be a murderer. Sometimes he did try to avoid such thoughts, but it was impossible, living alone, always to keep looking in the opposite direction from sex. The TV would remind him, in an ad for a shampoo, of the way Giselle’s hair had swayed, the most delicate of pendulums, above her bare shoulders, and his fingers would quiver with excitement and nothing would answer but jerking off. Or a story in Analog—when he read for pleasure, he read science fiction—would swerve unexpectedly in the direction of sex.

  Admittedly there were times when he sought assistance and stimulus. His favorite masturbatory aid was the fiction of John Norman, author of Raiders of Gor, Hunters of Gor, Marauders of Gor, Slave Girl of Gor, and, as well, of a nonfiction guide to the same shadowed realms, entitled Imaginative Sex. In that book Norman not only provided the yummy “recipes for pleasure” beloved by fans of the Gor series but he argued, as well, for the essential normalcy of man’s need to beat, rape, and abuse and, by these means, to dominate the woman he loves. Despite these reassurances, Glandier was not always able to free his spirit of a certain weight of guilt, especially at such times as his imagination exceeded Norman’s, passing beyond the permitted bounds of the captured-by-pirates or raped-by-a-monster fantasies to reveries of murder and dismemberment. Could such desires be reconciled with Norman’s attractive thesis that sadism and masochism were the natural and inevitable outcome of the evolutionary process? Glandi
er could well imagine an era when every man was a huntsman and every woman a potential prey, but the prey, once captured, had to be domesticated, surely, not killed. There could be no survival value, in an evolutionary sense, in the murder of one’s sexual partner—and so it even seemed logical to feel some guilt on that score. Sometimes, guiltily, Glandier considered returning to the couch of Dr. Helbron and discussing the matter in a cool, grown-up, analytical way, but the danger of admitting too much always prevented him from acting on such self-improving impulses. So long as he was unwilling to confess to his wife’s murder, he seemed doomed to relive it. Hell is a tape loop that keeps playing the same stupid tune over and over and over forever and ever and ever.

  CHAPTER 11

  Tuesday morning brought a major dislocation at Techno-Controls. The long, bitter, undeclared war between Glandier’s friend and ally, Jerry Petersen, and the resident boy wonder of marketing, Michael Sheehy, had ended in a decisive victory for Sheehy. Petersen was out on his ass, and Sheehy was now a V.P. with five hundred square feet of office space on the fourth floor right down the hall from Roy Becker. Glandier felt sure that worse was still to come. Sheehy’s opinion of the R & D program was well-known: fat to be trimmed.

  Such was his stated opinion of Glandier as well. Sheehy with his long hair and lean figure, his open collars and gold necklaces, represented the greening of Techno-Controls Corporation. He was a jogger, a liberal Democrat, a Knight of Columbus, the father of six children, and only four years after joining the company the most successful salesman it had ever had. He and Glandier had taken an immediate instinctive dislike to each other, which had escalated to abhorrence (on Glandier’s side) when the Sheehys had moved into 1240, five houses up the street from Glandier, a broad red farm of a place with an acre of lawn and flower beds and, towering over the wood-shingle roof, seven magnificent willows that had been planted when the original pre-suburban marsh had been drained back in 1947. Glandier’s own pair of willows were bonsais by comparison. Now Sheehy had stuck up a goddamned windmill in his back yard. Sometimes on summer nights, watching the tips of the whirling vanes from his bedroom window and straining to hear its little squeak-ticky-ticky-squeak, Glandier would have slow-burning fantasies of sneaking over to 1240 and dynamiting the fucker.