THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror

by Thomas M. Disch

  “That is to say, since what we’re drinking isn’t entirely real, its taste must be based on what we each can remember of Chivas Regal back when we were alive. Assuming you had some then?”

  “Oh, lots of times. When people were losing heavily at the tables they’d order this stuff probably more than anything else. Heavy losers like to look like big spenders.”

  “Can I ask a personal question?”

  He meant, she knew, a question about sex. On the walk to the liquor store, they’d exchanged quick but candid accounts of their lives and deaths. He knew about her murder; she knew about his suicide. They’d also talked about sex. It was then he’d made his pass at her, after which the conversation became a lot more abstract and impersonal.

  “Ask.”

  “Why did you go to Las Vegas?”

  “I told you. I had this vision, I guess you would call it. My husband’s photograph started talking to me. He said he was going to kill me. I suppose I should have wondered if I was going crazy, but I’m glad I didn’t. I didn’t even pack a suitcase. I just walked out of that house and kept walking.”

  “But why Las Vegas?”

  She shrugged. “I felt lucky. And I was right about that. I never had to do a lick of work the whole time I was there. When I needed money I would just go somewhere there were slots, and I would have this kind of tingling feeling for which one was going to give me a jackpot. I almost never had to put in more than four quarters before the bells started ringing.”

  He shook his head and attempted, so far as his disfigurement permitted, a knowing smile. “I find that just a little hard to believe.”

  “So? What can I say? Some people are lucky. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, There she was, a little suburban housewife who gets bored with Willowville and decides life is going to be more exciting as a hooker.”

  He lifted his hands in denial. “I never said that.”

  “No, scarcely anyone would ever come right out and say it, but a lot of them thought it. Or they left money, which is the same thing. But do you know who were the absolutely nicest people? The losers. Someone who had just lost everything he owned—or at least everything he could lay his hands on. They would make love to me like they were Adam and I was Eve and the garden of Eden had just been invented. It didn’t last long, usually, but while it did it was terrific.”

  Berryman nodded. “That seems reasonable.”

  “I wonder if that’s why my husband killed me. I never really considered it till now, talking to you. But it’s likely, isn’t it? He must have found out where I was somehow and come there and seen me with someone else and gone crazy; it’s a theory. I really have no idea how his mind works. I probably never did.”

  “Didn’t he say anything?”

  “No. There was a note at the desk at the motel where I was staying, saying that a Mr. Glandier was looking for me, and I thought, ‘That’s it, time to check out.’ I went up to my room, but he’d managed to get inside ahead of me. The door was unlocked. And he didn’t say a thing, just strangled me. But do you think that’s why? Do you think it was jealousy, as simple as that?”

  “I… couldn’t begin to guess. I’ve never met the man.” His wounds began to bleed more copiously. It seemed a way of blushing. He took a long desperate swallow of whiskey.

  Giselle smiled and touched his knee. There was something about him, his shifts back and forth between bubbling excitement and a silky sort of gloominess, that brought back to life a whole slice of her year in Las Vegas. The way she’d floated along the Strip or through the casinos, amazed by the lights and the swarms of people, disconnected from everyone else, colliding with other people’s eyes, nothing making the least bit of sense or needing to, and then one night, bingo, out of the blue, just like it happened in every song, she would meet the one stranger who understood everything that was happening just the way she understood it, and for a night or a weekend they would tell each other their stories and make love and eat dinner and say goodbye. Such a weird and wasteful way to have lived, it seemed now. Though better, far, than the way she’d lived before.

  Berryman had set his glass down and taken a handkerchief from his coat pocket to try and stanch his bleeding. The handkerchief was brown and crusty from earlier use and accomplished nothing. He put it back in his pocket and reached for his glass, which had disappeared. “Damn! Again!”

  “Here,” said Giselle, “have mine.”

  He accepted her glass, and said, “You still haven’t answered my question, you know. Not about Las Vegas. The question before, about hell. Don’t you ever feel condemned?”

  “Not really. Confused, often enough. But condemned would be like condemned to death, wouldn’t it? And we’re dead already.”

  “Not necessarily. You can be condemned to pay a fine. That’s the root of the word—from the Latin damnum, a legal fine. I thought by killing myself I’d just slip away unnoticed, as I might have left a party without saying goodbye to my hosts—without paying the fine. I truly didn’t expect an afterlife. Oh, I wrote my share of religious poems, and very orthodox they were in their way. I couldn’t, after all, let Eliot and that lot have all the glory. The Metaphysical tradition was mine as much as his. But an actual, literal afterlife, like this, with rewards and punishments and gatekeepers? Believe me, if I’d foreseen such a possibility, I’d have taken Hamlet’s advice more seriously.”

  “Which is?”

  “Hamlet said he’d have wanted to kill himself if he could be sure it would be like going to sleep and never dreaming. He equated hell with a nightmare. That’s a rough paraphrase; Shakespeare says it much better.” Berryman struck a declamatory pose, switched on an English accent, and recited:

  “To die, to sleep;

  To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;

  For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

  When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

  Must give us pause.”

  He paused, and repeated the last phrase, as though to his prompter: “ ‘Must give us pause.’”

  A maudlin throb had entered his voice, and from maudlin, Giselle knew, a drunk could quickly progress either to raucous or to stupefied. How was he to be kept sober enough to be helpful (as he’d promised he would be; he had been present at many deliveries performed by an obstetrician friend of his in Rutherford, New Jersey) at the crucial moment? She did not want to sneak off into a dark corner like a cat dropping a litter of kittens.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “What’s wrong now?” she asked, setting the bottle to the side of the box she sat on.

  “The rest is silence. I can’t remember another word of that soliloquy. I used to know virtually the whole play by heart. My mind’s becoming a sponge—a dry sponge. And now the bottle’s missing!”

  She looked down beside the box: like the white elephants you can’t stop thinking about for fifteen seconds if someone tells you not to think of them, the bottle was still there. But really, he had to be slowed down. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough for the moment?”

  Berryman cracked the plastic cup between his fingers and threw it on the floor, where the ice cubes went skating about the linoleum. “I don’t think it’s fucking fair,” he shouted, “that I should end it all and then end up in the same situation I was in before, with you acting like a goddamned ward mother!” Then, suddenly as his anger had flared, it faded. “Though, of course, that’s exactly how Dante designed his Inferno and kept its torments keen. The sinner must repeat the sins of his earthly life, but in their platonic form, so to speak.”

  She wished he could talk about something besides all the old books he’d read, though so long as he talked about anything at all she supposed she ought to be grateful. Talk (his own talk, about his own problems) seemed to be, much more than booze, what he stood in greatest need of.

  And so for the longest time they talked. They talked about Hamlet and various poet friends of Berryman’s who’d killed themselve
s (and whom Adah Menken was punishing, like him, with a kind of house arrest), and whether any of them had intended, in their hearts of hearts, to succeed at suicide, and whether it was ever really the best or the only way out of a drastic problem. The afternoon went on and on, and customers went in and out of the store like zombies seen in instant replay, and the shadows of the houses crawled across lawns and sidewalks and began to cross the street, until, the sky growing overcast, these varied shadows were swallowed up into a single shadow and that shadow thickened to twilight, and all the while the poet went on, not always about suicide or his own books or the suicides or even the books of other famous poets, but sometimes about matters of more general interest, such as the essential differences between men and women and between rich people and poor people, and their similarities too, and about the way things worked in the afterlife, especially for spirits like Adah and Joy-Ann who had got loose from earth and could move around in what Berryman called the Aether.

  “The Aether?” asked Giselle.

  “The Aether, the Other Side, Heaven—whatever you call it, it sounds like you know what’s there. And I don’t, and who knows if I ever will? But sometimes…” He sighed poetically. “Sometimes I feel so close to breaking through to—well, wherever. Have you ever looked closely at the shadows of the ripples that the drops of water make, falling from a shower head into a full bathtub? The ripples bounce back from the sides of the tub and make interference patterns with new ripples expanding from the impact point of later droplets. Sometimes I’ll close my eyes and there’ll be patterns like that, only incredibly vast. And I know that if I could enter that pattern—”

  “For me,” said Giselle, “it’s a crisscross pattern. Like a pie-crust or a potholder. But I get the same feeling. I want to get inside it, as though it were a sleeping bag, and zip it up behind me and just be there.”

  “Yet from what you said about your mother’s experiences there, and from things that Adah Menken has let drop, their heaven doesn’t sound at all abstract. It’s about as different from this world as St. Paul is from Minneapolis. Just the Other Side of another kind of river.”

  “Yes, but Mom did say she hasn’t gone the whole way to heaven yet, and where she is now she doesn’t see other spirits about, except for Adah Menken. So maybe it’s different for each person, the way your ripples are basically round and my crisscrosses are square.”

  The telephone began to ring, as it had twice before since they’d come into the liquor store, but this time the owner of the store continued clearing the register and getting ready to close, seemingly oblivious.

  “That’s odd,” said Berryman. “When it rang the last time it was deep and drawn-out, like a bell tolling. Now the sound isn’t being slowed down. Do you suppose—”

  “—that it’s for us? I’ll see.”

  Giselle went to the phone and picked up the receiver. Beside her the store’s owner was making bundles of one-dollar bills.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hello, Giselle. This is Adah Menken. Could I speak with Mr. Berryman?”

  Giselle held out the phone to Berryman. “It’s for you.”

  He groaned. “I knew it. I knew this was too good to last.” He answered with a “Hi” of resignation and thereafter said nothing but “Right,” “Got it,” and “Mm-hm,” like an employee in a very subordinate position. Before Giselle could ask after her mother, he had hung up.

  “I warned you this would happen,” he said. “Someone right in this neighborhood is setting up a séance, and I’ve got to be there. Such a damned waste of time. They’ll want to know things I haven’t got a clue to, and even when they ask a question I can answer, my dyslexia makes it almost impossible for me to give a coherent reply on the damned Ouija boards.”

  “But what about—” She did not say “me” because, in truth, she did not mean “me.” Instead she placed her hands over her protruding abdomen.

  “You’re welcome to come along. It’s not that far off. The corner of Calumet and Carver.”

  “That’s where I grew up! Is someone having a séance in our house?”

  “Are you on the northeast corner, yellow stucco with brown trim, cyclone fencing around the back yard?”

  “That’s Alice Hoffman’s house. I saw her at the funeral parlor today. I’ll bet she’s trying to get in touch with my mother. Which is a little peculiar. I mean, she’s a Catholic.”

  “You’d be surprised the people I’ve seen using Ouija boards,” said Berryman. “Priests and nuns.” He winked with his good eye.

  “No. You’re just saying that to shock me. Aren’t you?”

  “Maybe. See for yourself. Are you coming?”

  “Yes, please. I promise I won’t interfere.”

  “Interfere all you like. If you can spell, we’ll give Alice Hoffman a séance that’ll knock her socks off. But before we set off, would you—um, be so kind? I promise I won’t become incapacitated. I’ll just have enough to stop the fear and trembling.”

  Giselle nodded her acquiescence and, as they left the store, took another bottle of Chivas Regal off the shelf. She gave it to Berryman, and he carried it clutched to his chest beneath crossed arms, like a child on his way to bed cradling his teddy bear.

  CHAPTER 36

  “Would you believe,” said Bing, mincing the carrot to atoms, “that I once weighed a hundred and eighty pounds? At my height; can you imagine?” He slid the pulverized carrot off the chopping block and into the pot.

  Alice Hoffman regarded the pile of raw produce on her kitchen table with dismay. She seldom had to confront vegetables that weren’t frozen. “Do you really need that much?”

  “Oh, this soup isn’t for just one meal. It should see you through an entire week. Every day just add a little something different, a pinch of this, a nuance of that. When I started the Prettykin program I didn’t eat anything but this soup for a month. Soup for lunch, soup for dinner, and for breakfast a grapefruit, a tablespoon of bran to keep the bowels moving, and sometimes in the evening, when I lost all self-control, some thin turnip slices.”

  Alice, who hated turnips, looked at the vegetables with even more alarm. “This is all very nice of you, Bing, but it really isn’t necessary.”

  “Nothing is necessary,” said Bing primly, as he turned his attention to a large rutabaga. “Fitness isn’t necessary, a youthful figure isn’t necessary. But you will feel so much better, Alice, if you take off just twenty pounds. Thirty would be still better, but at least twenty. And I can help you do that. I have seen three other women through the Prettykin program, and every one of them was in worse shape than you. You see, this isn’t a diet—it’s a new life-style. You will change your eating habits, and you won’t want to eat a lot of refined sugar and high-cholesterol fats. Beans! There are wonderful things you can do with beans.”

  “But—”

  He lifted the paring knife and wagged it in silent reprimand. “It’s little buts like that,” he recited, “that lead to big butts.”

  She sighed resignedly and returned to the dining room, where the table had been prepared for Scrabble Ouija. Bing claimed to have read about Scrabble Ouija in the National Enquirer. A medium in Texas had by this means received some astonishingly detailed spirit messages and predictions from a number of dead-celebrities, including Alfred Hitchcock. The lettered titles were spread, blank side up, across the dark polished wood. A pen lay crosswise over a tablet of Basildon Bond stationery. Expensive beeswax candles from the same shop in Highland Park that had supplied the stationery had been fitted into the two crystal candleholders, a gift, forty years ago, from her cousin Bea in Seattle. Bea, who had died barely a year ago…

  Alice felt terrible. She knew that what she and Bing were intending to do was a mortal sin, on a par with going to an astrologer or joining a Satanic cult. The only reason she was willing to go ahead with the séance in defiance of the teaching of Holy Mother Church was the certainty that nothing would come of it.

  In fact, that was not the
only reason, or even the major one; in fact, Alice simply didn’t know how to say no to Bing Anker. She’d tried to stop him from making his giant pot of soup, but he’d refused to listen to her. He’d gone out and bought all those vegetables, and when she insisted that he shouldn’t go to any bother in the kitchen, he’d somehow turned everything around so that it seemed he was under some kind of obligation, as her houseguest, not only to make the miserable soup but also to put her on his own private diet program. It hadn’t even occurred to Alice, who’d held to exactly the same weight for the last thirty years, that she needed to diet. It was all very flustering. What Alice didn’t understand was that she liked being flustered.

  As he left the kitchen, Bing switched off the overhead light and then, after lighting the two beeswax candles, went about the rest of the downstairs turning off the other lights. He positioned his reluctant hostess in a chair on one side of the table, then went around the table and sat in the facing chair.

  “Now, before we do anything else, we must clear our minds of all low, materialistic thoughts. Think of somewhere completely peaceful, maybe it’s a lake, maybe it’s a garden, and try to feel its influence over your spirit. Relax completely. No tension, no anxiety. You see, the spirits can’t use us as their mediums unless we’re clear of all the ugly static that attaches us to the material plane. Have you done that?”

  Alice nodded.

  “Good. Now we’ll summon them.” Bing closed his eyes and rolled his head back and called out, in the voice he usually reserved for announcing the final, most suspenseful numbers of a bingo game, “O Spirits who have passed beyond this mortal sphere, whom the ignorant call ‘dead’—”

  Alice winced and sat a little stiffer in her chair.

  “—but who in truth are more alive than we, come to us! Share your immortal wisdom with two humble seekers. Speak to this grief-stricken woman and show her that life does continue beyond the grave. All right now, Alice, hold your right hand out over the letters, and when I take hold of the wrist let it go completely limp so the spirits can guide both our hands. Don’t use your own willpower. If you feel your hand being guided to the right, don’t resist, go with the flow. And whenever the spirits definitely stop your hand from moving any farther in any direction, then lower just the tip of one finger until you feel it touch one of the tiles, and I’ll pick that tile up. Understood?”