The Franchiser

1

Where has he seen these men? Their sport coats are the nubby textures and patterns of upholstery from credit furniture supplements in Sunday newspapers. They are crosshatched, double knits, drapery, checks like optical illusions, designs like aerial photographs of Kansas wheat fields, Pennsylvania pastureland, or the russets of erosion in western national parks. The pockets of their blazers are slashed, angled as bannister. Change would fall out of them, he thinks. The flaps are mock, shaped like the lower halves of badges. Their notched, pointed collars ride their shoulders like the conferral of wide, mysterious honors, the mantles of secret orders — and Flesh supposes they belong to these. He has never seen such shoes. Many are glossy white loafers, the color and sheen of wet teeth in ads. Gratuitous, useless buckles vault the white piping that rises from their shoes like welts. The jewelry and fixtures in the center of their false straps could be I.D. tags, or metal tablets, or slender sunken scutcheons. He sees no belts in the tight cuneiform-print trousers, in the plaids like colored grids, like cage, windowpanes, that climb their legs like ladders. The pants hold themselves up, self-supportive, a flap of fabric buttoned to a rim of itself like flesh sealed to flesh in operations. He marvels at their bump-toe shoes, their thick fillets of composition heels like shiny mignon or rosy cross sections of pressed geology. At their shirts like Christmas ties.

Where has he seen such men? Sitting beside him when he had ridden on airplanes, with their slim gun-metal attaché cases open on their laps like adult pencil boxes. (He has no attaché case, travels even lighter than they.) Huddling with maître d’s behind the velvet ropes in restaurants. In convention at Miami Beach and San Diego in low season. With widows in the public rooms, restaurants, and oyster bars of good commercial hotels. With unmarried women a dozen years younger than themselves who chew gum. Yes. Yes. And always together, always in pairs or pairs of pairs, their flings a cooperation and conspiracy, their style a fever. (Though it wasn’t “fling.” They would have entire wardrobes of such clothes, their closets actually hazardous, flammable, with Fortrels, Dacrons, low-banked acetates, back-burnered polyesters, double knits.) And made brave, it could be, by the very resiliency of their clothing, the flexible permanent press that snapped back into place like rubber bands, that would not hold a wrinkle or keep a clue, as though they wore, these loud and husky men, garments blessed by gods, an invulnerability they perhaps took seriously, a vouchsafement of safety that made them louder, easily tripping their anger as galosh-shod boys might stomp in puddles. Not so he, Flesh, in his wools and silks and cottons, his earthy, dry-clean-only fibers, his easily trampled crops of clothes. Nor Lace the Liquidator, that creased and rumpled, raveled man.

Oh why, why, why do I mourn them? Why do they touch me so, wrapped in their crazy laundry? These Necchi men and Falstaff distributors, this pride of Pontiac dealers and Armstrong linoleum licensees? Am I not one of them? And if my kindling point is higher, what doth it avail a man to keep his cool if his eyes boil, for the truth is, I cannot look at them without something profound in my throat forcing the maudlin hydraulics of the heart. Maudlin and sober still. These are my Elks, my Vets of Foreign Wars, my Shriners and Knights of Columbus and Pythias, my Moose mobs and Masons of all degrees. Oh. Oh. Variety Club is the spice of life. They do good work: tool the cripple, and patiently teach the retarded their names, bus the underprivileged to the park and usually it doesn’t rain. God’s blessing on them. Mine. All praise to the raising of their hospitals, to their raffle good will. Just, damn it, make them careful where they drop their ashes or swing their cigarettes! One live ash on a single pant leg and we could all go up. It would be the Chicago fire in Columbus, Indy, Wichita — all the landlocked campuses and home offices. (Home offices, yes, those legislative capitals of our trades where we, patriots to machines, to goods and services, pilgrims to the refresher course, all those wee congresses of American style, where last year’s figures and this one’s plans and promos hang out, where we honor the founders and applaud the record beaters, inspired and instructed, seminar’d, on-the-job-trained in Hamburgerology, the new models, sign placement, the architecture of the access road, lapping it up, taking it in, community relations, how the Civil Rights Act of ’68 has opened the way to the black dollar, which credit cards to honor, and all the rest. Business and Sociology, the first on our block to key the restroom, guard the fountain, cage the clerk. Inspired by their inspiration, enthused by their enthusiasm, standing when others stood and humming the bouncy anthems of our firms, tears in my eyes in the face of all this blessed, sacred, smarmy hope even if I know, as I do know, what I know. And loving it all anyway, my cellophane-window nameplate, the long capitals of my name and place of business.)

There was a Ford LTD mounted on a platform in the lobby, turning, stately and slow as a second hand, pristine, mint, and looking on its pedestal and under the cunning lights as no automobile ever looked in the streets. A museum piece, a first prize.

He went to the desk and registered. A Chase-Park Plaza bellman carried his bag and room key past the conventioneers still waiting to sign in.

He didn’t go much any more, sending his proxies more often than not, those he hired to run his franchises for him.

It was spring and the prime interest rate was 2.93 percent. Though they were already into April, the sky was the color of nickels, loose change, and the temperature never higher than that of a mild winter in a plains state. Flesh still wore his long dark cashmere coat, a fedora pulled low, tight on his head, a scarf. That was why he had spotted him — he was not so famous then — sore thumb, high profile, visible in his white suit as a man falling from a building. It was not white really, not the stark white of letterhead, but richer, the white of faintly yellow piano keys, of imperfect teeth, old texts. It was — this occurred to him — the “in person” white of presence, like limelight burning on a magician on a stage. He had never seen anyone so bright. And it was, once he recognized him, as if the man were on fire, his white hatless hair like whipped smoke.

He saw him from the back, knew him from the back. Ben rose from his bench in the park and followed him to a little play area where the statues of characters from Alice in Wonderland were grouped. He stood beside the statue of Alice and the Mad Hatter, and when a few who recognized the man approached him with their cameras, Ben politely deflected them. The man, unconscious of his bodyguard, gazed at the frigid figures, and Flesh, everywhere at once, held up a strategic hand, extended a black cashmered arm, waved his dark scarf, swung his fedora, ruining their shots.

“Isn’t that—?”

“Shhh. Yes. Please,” Flesh urged, “he’s not to be disturbed.”

“I’m not disturbing him. I just wanted—”

“I’m sorry,” Flesh said, “I know. All you want is to take his picture but the man’s superstitious. He believes you steal his substance when you photograph him.”

“That’s crazy,” he said, “his pictures on all those—”

“Portraits. Oil paintings. You want to get your oils and brushes, okay, but no photographs.”

“I never heard anything like—”

Then getting a little rough, shooing, pushing, shoving.

“Hey, this is a park. It’s a free country. Who you shoving?”

“The camera,” Flesh demanded.

“No.”

“Go on, beat it. I tried to be nice.” He put his hand in his overcoat. The man backed off.

“I’ll be damned,” he said, “if I ever buy another bucket—”

“Yeah, we’ve lost you to Steak ’n Shake. These things happen.”

“But he’s so pleasant on television.”

“Look, fella,” Ben said kindly, “he has a lot on his mind. Leave him be, why don’t you?”

“I just wanted—”

“Sure,” Flesh said. He patted the fellow on his back and sent him off, then walked around the circumference of the statue in order to study the man from the front. The face was benign as an angel’s, with his mouth closed the white goatee and mustache like a kempt fat mushroom, the dangling strings of his black tie like a wishbone or a character in an Oriental alphabet. Flesh was surprised to see that the white suit coat was double-breasted, like a chef’s. The eyes behind the horn-rimmed specs twinkled with vision. Flesh came up beside him. “Howdy,” Ben said. The man glowered at him. “Howdy.” Flesh moved closer. They were almost touching.

“Lord, the man hours that gun into that,” the fellow said, nervously acknowledging him. “Look that Mad Hatter.”

“Look that Alice,” Flesh said. The man moved to another grouping. Flesh followed silently. “Look that Queen,” he offered.

“Look that Mock Turtle,” the white-suited man said wearily.

“Look that Cheshire Cat.”

“Look that pigeon shit.”

“Ben Flesh,” Ben Flesh said, extending his hand.

“Colonel Sanders,” the man said grudgingly.

Ben pushed his hand out farther. The man took it finally and Flesh grasped the chicken king’s hand in both his own and pulled it toward his face. Before Colonel Sanders knew what was happening Flesh opened his jaws wide as he could and shoved as much of the man’s hand inside his mouth as possible. He sucked the startled man’s knuckles, ran his tongue along his lifeline, chewed his nails, the heel of his hand, tasted his pinky. The Colonel made a fist and fought for his hand, which Ben still held to his mouth.

“Lemme be. What’s wrong with you?”

And Ben could not have told him, couldn’t have said that he’d pulled his first stunt, an engram of character and aggression. He stood before the Colonel with the man’s hand still at his lips. He was blushing. “Finger-lickin’ good,” Flesh said. “It’s true. What they say. About Dixie,” he added lamely.

The Colonel shook his hand about, drying it. He looked down at his suit, changed his mind. Flesh whipped out a handkerchief and waved it across the top of Colonel Sanders’s hand like a shoeshine cloth. He whistled, snapping the handkerchief smartly one last time, and returned it to his pocket.

“I’ll be damned,” Colonel Sanders said. “You’re a fool.”

“Listen,” Ben said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what made me…”

The Colonel looked at me curiously. Then seemed suddenly to relent. He was taller than I would have expected — six foot one, better. Taller than myself.

“My height?” the Colonel said.

“Sir?”

“My height. People like their avunculars stubbly little Santas. Eb Scrooge’s old boss — what’s his name — he was a shorty. All of ’em, squatty, florid little fellers. Only your father figure is supposed to be tall. Well, you know what my real significance is, Jack? It ain’t the finger-lickin’-good routine. I mean to go down as the first avuncular in U.S. history to break the height barrier, bust six two. One day I’m comin’ out the closet altogether entire, speak the King’s English, iambic pentameter. That’s what I’m really after. Oh, I ain’t fixin’ to put out the twinkle in my eye or extinguish the roses in my cheeks — just very manly, very deliberate and distingué. Stand up straight, unhunch my shoulders, give my backbone its head, let America see what’s been hid from it too long — that a man can be lovable, turn out a good product, and tall all at the same time.”

“I never realized,” Ben told him, “what an idealist you are.”

“Shucks,” said the Colonel. “Schucks, pshaw, and…” He drew Ben toward him conspiratorially, looked both ways when they were nose to nose.

“—and?”

“—and pshit!”

They went to lunch at La Caravelle. “Unless you prefer Clos Normand,” the Colonel had said.

“I’ve never been to either.”

“I know. Le Perigord.” Then changed his mind. “No, that’s all the way east.” Decisively. “Caravelle.”

It was the largest of intimate rooms, and there was, for Flesh, the sense that, remove the tables and cloak room — he thought like this, the franchiser vision, his blueprint imagination — lift the rugs and install the proper equipment, and one would have a gentlemen’s barber shop of the sort found in the basements of immense commercial travelers’ hotels.

Ben Flesh examined the table linen while Colonel Sanders looked over the wine list and bantered with the sommelier in French. He lifted the bread basket — it was cunningly made bread, baked to look like slabs of wicker — and tore into the most delicious roll he had ever eaten. He offered the Colonel one but the man shook his head.

“Flours the palate,” he said. “Tarts up the old wine cellar. Well, Ben,” he said, “it’s Ben, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What you up to, Ben? Why you bothering me?”

“We’re in the same line of work.”

“We are, are we? Well, you sure don’t dress for it. You dress like a lawyer or a cardiologist. You a lawyer or a cardiologist, Ben?”

“No, sir, I’m a franchiser.”

“Franchiser, eh? What sort franchises you sell? What’s your product?”

“I buy franchises.”

Colonel Sanders looked at him suspiciously. “You’re a damn liar, son. If you bought franchises you’d see the contract calls you the ‘franchisee.’ ”

“That’s always sounded like a cross between a Frenchman and Chinaman. I call myself a franchiser.”

“An’ you want to talk to me ’bout a Colonel Sanders — Well, that’ll have to wait. I don’t believe in business lunches. Here’s the wine. They do a wonderful half liter of Château Pomme hereabouts. That all right with you? It’s a ’53 white. The red’s better, of course, but it stains my beard.”

The sommelier poured an inch of wine in the Colonel’s glass. The chicken king rinsed, nodded judiciously, and the sommelier filled Ben’s glass.

Sanders ordered for them both. Ben was to have cassoulet, the Colonel a cold bouillabaisse and some cold asparagus.

“How’s your cassoulet?” he asked.

“It’s wonderful. I never knew beans — these are beans? — could be so good.”

The Colonel took a fork and poked around in the stewy mound on Flesh’s plate. “Yes, sir, beans, pork sausage, and — son of a bitch!” he roared, “that’s duck! Son, don’t eat that. Where’s that son bitch garçon? You see where that peckerhead got off to?” He shouted for the waiter.

Ben winced.

“Who you shamed for, skippy?” the Colonel demanded. “That’s duck they give you. You squeamish for these people? Publishers, bud. Publishers, agents, editors, and starving writers. Expense accounts. Credit cards. Why, we the onliest folks in this restaurant showing them cash. Waiter!”

“Sir?”

The Colonel harpooned a piece of tanned flesh from Ben’s plate. “C’est le canard! Ce n’est pas l’oie! Cochon! Merde!”

“It’s delicious,” Ben said.

“It’s fuckin’ duck!” Sanders roared. “It’s s’posed to be goose!”

The waiter tried to take Ben’s plate, but Ben held on. “I like duck actually,” he said.

“Fah! Leave it be then. He likes duck. Let ’em eat duck. Boy,” he said, when the waiter had gone, “you are surely a disappointment to me. Okay. Now we’ve had our scene, let’s aid digestion with some good conversation. What’s your pet peeve?”

He was still a young man, still in his early thirties. I was still innocent, my character, which is not shaped, as psychologists would have it, in the formative first five or six years or we are back to Calvinism, infant damnation, the loss of the will, but, as I truly believe, in the thirties and forties, still unformed but just beginning to happen, thicken, as chocolate pudding thickens, begins its first resisting circle in the stirrer’s slowed spoon. So I was still a young man, not yet me, not yet myself.

“My pet peeve? I don’t know. Deliberate cruelty, I guess.”

“ ‘Deliberate cruelty,’ ” he said. “Forget the duck. My mistake. You bring your goose with you. You are goose equipped. Deliberate cruelty. Your pet peeve is deliberate cruelty? Ben, if you’re tellin’ the truth you’d better do yourself some more window shopping or you’ve bought yourself an ulcer for sure. Deliberate cruelty, hell. What other kind is there? No, lad. No, son. Get something refreshing you don’t have to rub shoulders with it in the street every day, it ain’t there like wallpaper, the last thing you see when you turn the light off at night, the first thing you see in the morning. Now I got a pet peeve a man can be proud of. You say, ‘What’s that?’ ”

“What’s that?”

“Well, it so happens I like baseball. Always have. Now we don’t have no franchise in the South, not yet, even though some our best ballplayers come from down there. Oh, Louisville, where I live, we got us a good minor-league club, but you can’t get very excited about a minor-league team you know there’s a major- league team about. You follow me?”

“Minor-league baseball is your pet peeve.”

“Shit. That ain’t no pet peeve, that’d be a petty peeve. Hell no.”

“That there are no major-league clubs in the Southland.”

“ ‘The Southland’ Kid, you ain’t even trying.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well hell, what kind of half-ass pet peeve would it be if any Tom, Dick, or Harry could get it first off? It’s okay. I’ll tell you. In my line I travel a lot, get to places where the TV and radio pull in the big games. I mean the Yankees and Red Sox, the Cubs, Cincinnati, Deetroit and Philly, the Senators, Cards. Well, I mean now I’ve made a study and ever’ one them broadcast busters they go crazy somebody fouls one off into the stands.” He began to mimic the announcer. “ ‘Oh. There’s a scramble among the fans. A kid’s chasing. Hey, he’s got it! Sign that youngster up. Well, there’s a young lad who’s going home with a souvenir he’ll never forget.’ If they’d just get through one game without they say something like that. That’s my pet peeve. Who you envy?”

“Envy?”

“With me it’s song writers. All their experiences. Whoosh. Good Lord, those fellers are always sittin’ on top of the world or they down in the dumps below sea level. Sailors with girls in every port got the same opportunities. And the same apparatus. More maybe, but they cain’t even hum, let along sing the poetry part. Dumb-ass tars.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

Yes, lyricists and composers figured in his life, in his godblood.

“You want dessert? They do a lovely flan.”

“I’m stuffed. I just want coffee.”

The Colonel took a Bull Durham pouch from a pocket inside his jacket and, opening it, pulled out two Russian cigarettes and offered one to Ben. “Light the holler.”

“They’re strong.”

“Shh,” Colonel Sanders said. “Quieten down. Let’s just set.”

Over their coffee, through the thin smoke of their Sobranies, Flesh studied the man.

“Can’t get over it, can you?”

“Get over—?”

“Me. My cheeks are thinner in person. The cartoon features? Air-brushed. My flush? Pancake powder. A character actor would spot it in a minute. ‘Number five,’ he’d say. Yes and you know my best feature, kid? My lap. We built everything up from that foundation. Oh, my footlight being, my proscenium presence. You shocked, sonny? No no, kid. Roosevelt never stood and Lenin and Trotsky turned a mustache and a beard into history. French barbers made the Commie revolution. Image. You got about as much image as a shoe salesman. You could buy up all the franchises in the world, but you ain’t got the face for a billboard. Jesus, son, you haven’t the face for nothing your own. You’re growing dim. You’re fading on me. Get into the disappearing-ink trade, that’s my advice. What you up to? Why’d you come for me?”

“I was drawn,” he said. “I am hypnotized by a trademark.”

They stopped at the Colonel’s suite in the Pierre. Flesh waited in the living room while Sanders changed.

“There, that’s better,” the chicken prince said coming out of his dressing room. “Had to get out of that damn suit. ’Nother ten minutes inside that thing I’d feel like a great big damn sideline, like I was rolled in lime.” He had changed to a light-brown pin-stripe and there was a Windsor knot in his tie. “How you like that? How I look?”

“Fine,” Ben said.

“Yeah. Want to walk up to the Frick, or we could do the Metropolitan? It’s two years since I’ve seen the Rembrandts.”

“I thought we might go up to Riverdale.”

“That a sanatorium?” The Colonel laughed. “That’s some sanatorium and you got kin there. Old folks with long bony fingers. You powerful attracted to the aged, a lad your years.”

“No no,” Ben said. “It’s this residential section in the Bronx. You’ll like it.”

The twins and triplets were there. It was variously their Easter break, spring vacation, or Spring Clean-Up Week. Whether by accident or design, things had so worked out for the Finsberg stock that though they attended prep schools, colleges, universities, and graduate schools in different parts of the country, their vacations not only overlapped but actually meshed. It was as if Fieldston School, where all of them had attended high school and where Kitty and Sigmund-Rudolf were now seniors, was the Greenwich Mean Time of the academic year, its openings and ends of term and all holidays in between somehow a determinant chronometric pulse that radiated out to the two small liberal-arts colleges, three large state universities, and one important graduate school where the other twins and triplets were enrolled.

They looked more alike than ever. Audrey Hepburn’s boyish cut in Roman Holiday, though now two or three years past its universal modishness, was still popular with and suitable to the girls, and something in the genes of the boys — men now, some of them — had permanently waved their fine black hair so that it lay on their heads like loose bathing caps or visible turbulence. And, relaxed in sneakers and jeans on their holidays, in their white shirts loose over their trousers, the tall, rather powerfully built though flat-chested girls and young women were strikingly like their slim, somewhat stunted brothers. Also, they were of an age, seventeen the youngest, twenty-three the oldest, where all had reached their full height — five foot, ten inches. The girls’ low rich voices were identical in pitch to the slightly highish timbre of the young men’s.

“I’d like you to meet my godcousins,” Ben said to the Colonel. “Lotte, Ethel, and Mary; Patty, LaVerne, and Maxene; Gertrude, Kitty, and Helen, say hello. This is Cole, Oscar, Sigmund-Rudolf, Jerome, Lorenz, Noël, Irving, Gus-Ira, and Moss.”

“Jesus,” Colonel Sanders said.

“Gosh, Ben,” said Gus-Ira, “except for the suit, he looks just like Colonel Sanders.”

“He is Colonel Sanders,” Ben said.

“Is this a show?” the Colonel asked. “What are they?”

“They’re my guarantors, Colonel. They help with my businesses.”

“Are we going to have chicken from the Colonel, Ben?” young Sigmund-Rudolf asked.

“Are we, Ben?” chimed in Ethel, Cole, Noël, and LaVerne.

Sanders was a little nervous. “Hey,” he said, “hold up. You ain’t spuk to my people. You just don’t go up to the Colonel his own self and get you a franchise. There’s channels. How I know Riverdale is zoned for chicken?”

“Jeepers,” said Jerome, “were you thinking of putting it up in Riverdale, Ben? That’s a swell idea. The closest carry-out place is Fordham Road.”

“And that’s just chinks,” Patty said.

“They’re cold before you get them home,” Irving said angrily.

“Cold chinks. Yech,” Kitty said.

“Yech,” they all said, for they had identical tastebuds.

“Hold on,” Colonel Sanders objected.

“You know what I’m wondering?” Helen said.

“What’s that, Helen?” Ben asked. He knew them all, had never since he’d first met them and learned their names at their father’s funeral years before confused them. Not even Estelle, now a troubled woman of close to fifty, could keep them straight, but Ben knew, had always known, because he went instinctively beyond externals, penetrating even the subtle externals of twin and triplet character to something marked in them, as certain of their differences as a geologist of landscape, of fault, strata, and where the ice age stopped, hunching the mineral deposits, informed-guessing at the ores and oil fields, water-witching what was — forget age, forget sex, forget names even — the single distinctions, one from another, that they bore — their infirmities, their mortalities, distinct to him and strident as the graffiti of factions.

Each had told him — and he’d never forgotten; something perhaps in the pitch of the confession — his, her peculiar symptom. The Finsbergs, for all their money and education and charm, for all the chic victory of their urban good looks, for all their style and chipper well-heeled spirits, their flush wardrobes and Parisian French, their skill on skis, and their slope bright wools sharp as flares, for all their American blessings, were freaks, and carried in their bloodstreams and pee, in their saliva and fundament and the tracings of their flesh, all the freak’s ruined genetics, his terrible telegony and dark diathetics. It was Julius, set in his ways, throwing himself like an ocean into Estelle’s coves and kyles, till all that was left of his genes and chromosomes was the sheath, the thread of self like disappearing Cheshire garments resolved at last to their stitching. Obsessive, worn-out, he had made hemophiliacs of the self-contained and self-centered. Julius’s progeny — that queer wall of solidarity and appearance, that franchise of flesh — were husks, the chalices in which poisoners chucked their drops and powders.

“Pick me up,” little Gertrude had said to him when she was only eleven, “try to lift me.”

“Why? What for?”

“I bet you can’t,” she said.

“Of course I can.”

“Then prove it. Try to pick me up.”

He moved behind her, put his arms around her slender waist, and strained backward. He couldn’t budge her. Gertrude laughed. “Come on, it’s a trick,” he said. “What is it?”

“It isn’t a trick. Go on, you get another turn.”

“It’s a trick. Well…Okay.” He stood in front of her, bent down suddenly, and wrapped his arms tightly just under her buttocks and clasped her to him. Using all his strength, he managed to raise her one inch above the floor. He held her up for no more than two seconds and then dropped her. She dragged him down with her as she fell.

“It’s a trick. What is it?” He was short of breath.

“I haven’t any bone marrow,” Gertrude said. “My bones are all filled with this like iron.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can’t be X-rayed,” she said. “My bones show up as dark tools, like carpenters’ things and plumbers’.”

And La Verne’s organs lined the side of her body, her liver and lungs and kidneys outside her rib cage. Ethel’s heart was in her right breast. Cole had a tendency to suffer from the same disorders as plants and had a premonition that he would be killed by Dutch elm blight. Mary could not menstruate and Gus-Ira was a nail biter allergic to his own parings. When he bit them he broke out in a terrible brocade of rash. Lorenz’s temperature was a constant 102.5, and Patty, who had perfect pitch, could not hear loud noises. Kitty would still be a bed wetter at thirty and Lotte, the one he’d kissed years before beside the bus, enjoyed perfect health until her twenties, when she began to come down with all the childhood diseases — measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, adenoids, and colic. Noël had cradle cap. Helen was a mean drunk.

“I’m racially prejudiced,” Irving, one of the sweetest of the family, told him.

“You, Irving? Racially prejudiced? You’re one of the most reasonable people I know.”

“I’m racially prejudiced. It’s like a disease.”

“All of us have a little prejudice. I guess we fear what we don’t understand. We roll our windows up when we drive through Harlem. We lock our doors.”

“I’m racially prejudiced,” Irving said calmly. “I hate the niggers. I hate the way they smell. I can’t stand the moons on their fingernails. I want to gag when I see their woolly hair. Their purple blubber-lips make my skin crawl. They’re lazy and drunk and want our women. The bucks have dicks as big as the Ritz and the women swell our welfare rolls. I’m racially prejudiced. I wish genocide were legal. I think we should drop A-bombs on their storefront churches and fire their barbecue stands. I’m racially prejudiced. It’s a disease.”

And Maxene’s hair had begun to thin when she reached puberty — she wore wigs cunningly woven from her brothers’ clippings and trims — and Moss’s beautiful eyes could not see certain kinds of metal. And one of the boys, Oscar, had things wrong with him in the gray social areas of illness. He was at once an alcoholic and a compulsive speeder.

Jerome was chronically constipated.

“I don’t move my bowels more than twice a month. Two dozen times a year.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“The doctors don’t understand. They give me enemas. I’m not compacted. The stools are normal. My breath is sweet. The tongue’s a good color. They think it’s something to do with metabolism, that my body doesn’t create as much fecal matter as other people’s do. It’s something to do with the metabolism.”

It was something to do with the metabolism with all of them, some queer short circuit in the glands and blood, the odd death duties of the freak. Human lemons, Detroit could recall them. Like, he thought, giants’ and giantesses’ niggardly life spans, fat men’s, as if there were a strange democracy of displacement in nature, that if you took up more room than others you could have it less long. And though he never mistook one twin for another, never confused a triplet, had perfect pitch for their shell-game life, knowing at all times which pea was under what shell, he never forgot that they were freaks. They were almost all the family he had, as he, in an odd way, was almost all the family they had, and though he loved them they frightened him, troubled him with their niggered woodpiled chemistry.

“What I’m wondering,” Helen said, “is…”

“I know,” Lorenz said.

“We do too,” said Cole and Kitty.

“Whether we get to find out the secret recipe,” Gus-Ira said quietly.

The Colonel stared at them. “I don’t know what this is,” he said, “but it’s fishy. Now if they’s one thing a fried-chicken guy like me can’t stand it’s something fishy. I ’us studying on the scupture in the Central Park and this feller”—he pointed to Ben—“come up and started fussin’ me. I thought I’d be nice, do like we do down home. Next I know we in some taxi car driving thoo all New York City, people everwhere, tall buildins, projects, folks in skull caps, over bridges and past the whole rickety racket of this Lord forlorn squashed-together mess. Then we turn a corner and — whoosh — we in the open, we in country. Green lawns, trees, gret big ol’ houses, and I think to myself, Why it’s like — what do you call it—Brigadoon, as if…”

Patty, LaVerne, and Maxene started to sniffle. Instantly the others took it up. The Colonel looked at Ben, but he was as confused as Colonel Sanders. The sound was alarming. It was as if they stood together in the flu ward of a hospital. Then the sniffles became sobs, wails, a declension of grief.

“Hey,” Colonel Sanders said, “what’s wrong with you fellers? What’s that caterwauling? You boys fairies?”

“Tell him, Ben,” Ethel blubbered.

“Ben doesn’t know,” Noël grieved.

“He doesn’t, he doesn’t,” the rest moaned. They wrung their hands.

“What is it?” Ben asked.

“It’s fishy,” Colonel Sanders said.

Gradually the crying subsided. Oscar pulled himself together. “He reminded us.”

“Reminded you?”

“Mother gave birth one last time,” Lotte said.

“In ’47,” said Helen.

“March it was,” Sigmund-Rudolf said.

“Opening night.”

“Brigadoon.”

“Mother was so excited.”

“We all were,” Kitty said. “Sigmund-Rudolf and I couldn’t have been more than six or seven at the time, but we all were.”

“We were,” said Moss, Gertrude, and Jerome.

“We were backstage.”

“Mom was in her seventh month.”

“She went into labor.”

“It was the excitement.”

“Father told her to be careful.”

“It was only her seventh month.”

“He didn’t want to take any chances.”

“But a musical!”

“You couldn’t keep Mother away from a musical.”

“She’d been a dancer.”

“There was hoofer in her blood.”

“She said it was certain there’d be a doctor in the house.”

“Something’s fishy.”

“We got swaddling cloths from Wardrobe.”

“Plaid.”

“ ‘Make sure there’s plenty,’ Father told the wardrobe mistress, ‘it’s sure to be triplets.’ ”

“We all thought so.”

“She’d never been bigger.”

“It was a boy.”

“Just one.”

“He passed during ‘Almost Like Being in Love.’ ”

Gus-Ira recited the lyrics. “ ‘…For I’m all aglow and alive,’ ” he finished melancholically.

“The irony,” said Cole softly.

“It stopped the show,” Mary said.

“And baby brother,” said Gertrude and Kitty.

“Fritz-Alan Jay,” Lotte said.

The twins and triplets sighed.

“That’s when Pop first started to take an interest in you.”

Ben Flesh shuddered. He recalled the moment he had taken the Colonel’s hand in his mouth. It was strange. He didn’t understand it, but he knew he had just changed in some obscure, important way. He hadn’t known about Fritz-Alan Jay, hadn’t realized till they’d just now casually mentioned it the nature of his surrogacy, its true measure. Why, I’m not their godcousin at all. Despite the difference in our ages, that I’ve turned thirty and almost half of them are still in their teens, I have been their baby godbrother, dead in infancy, alive for those few minutes only between the solo that stopped the show and the hawking of the orange drink in the outer lobby. The idea altered him. He felt emboldened. He turned from the kids and addressed the Colonel. “Is there?”

“What’s that?”

“Is there a secret recipe?”

“The secret recipe’s a secret,” the Colonel bristled. “I see what you-all up to now. You taken me out here to divulge my ingredients. Never, sir. Never.”

“I’ll have a bucket analyzed.”

“Haw.”

“I can do that. I don’t even need a bucket. A breast will do. I’ll have the white meat analyzed and the dark will come right along with it.”

“It’s patented. You’d have to own one my franchises to sell my chicken. I’d sue your wings off you you sold chicken to go to come to taste within a country mile like mine. I’d enjoin your gizzard and injunct your drumsticks.”

“Haw!”

“Don’t argue, Ben,” Mary said. “If you want the franchise we’ll get it for you. Won’t we, brothers, won’t we, sisters?”

“Aye,” they said.

“Haw!” Ben said. He roared it at them, at gravid Gertrude, rooted by weight; at Kitty the bed-wetter; at xenophobic Irving, whose hatred boiled his spittle; at LaVerne, who stepped absent-mindedly into her lungs, putting on her organs like a drunk getting into a girdle in a routine; at Gus-Ira, who broke out when he bit off a hangnail; and Ethel, who wore her heart in her brassiere, and at all the rest of that wormy diked, Maginot geneticized, clay-foot crew — their father’s theatrical costumes made flesh, a wardrobe of beings, appearance shining on them like spotlight.

“What’s wrong, Ben? Are you upset?”

“Haw!”

“We’ll co-sign.”

“Don’t fret, Ben.”

“Haw!”

“We’ll be responsible.”

“When I say,” Ben said.

“What, Ben?”

“When I say. When I say the prime rate is prime, when I say the interest is interesting, when I say.”

“Haw,” their guest said. “Haw.”

Ben looked at him. The man had removed his glasses. He touched a corner of his mustache like a villain in melodrama and, as they all watched, began to peel it back from his face like a Band-Aid of hair.

“What?” Ben said. “What’s this?”

“I ain’t him,” the man said. “Haw! Haw and hee hee!”

“But—”

“I ain’t him. I’m not he. I’m Roger Foster of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I own airport limousine services in three states.”

“You’re not the chicken prince?”

“I’m Roger Foster of Cedar Rapids, Iowa,” Roger Foster said.

“Then what — But why — You look—”

“Certainly. I look. There’s a basic resemblance. I enhance it. I’m a Doppelgänger. Just like these guys.” He indicated the twins and triplets.

“Does this mean you can’t get the franchise, Ben?” Gus-Ira said.

“When I say,” Ben said weakly.

“The mustache was too much trouble to trim,” Mr. Foster said.

“Frankly, I don’t see how he does it. The goatee is real. The basic resemblance was there. All I had to do was get the eyeglasses, grow the beard, and work something out with the mustache. The rest — I told you in the restaurant. ‘A character actor would spot it in a minute.’ ”

“But why?”

“But why. Are you any different? Are you any different with your borrowed businesses? So I put the Kentucky Fried Chicken suit on once in a while. What the hell? It’s fun. Mistaken identity is a barrel of laughs, kid. You saw. The folks in the park. The tourists wanted to take my picture. I was a sight for sore eyes. As all celebrity is. I enhance the resemblance. I enhance my life. I enhance everybody’s life. Where’s the harm in a Doppelgänger just so long as he’s a nice man?” Roger Foster asked.

“A Doppelgänger,” Ben said.

“Sho. Sure. But you — You’re something else. You’re a Doppelgängster. You’re a Doppelgängster with your franchises and your big Doppelgängster Ring in Riverdale.”

“No,” Ben said. “What I do—”

“What you do. It’s a U.S.A. nightclub performance. You do John Wayne and Ed Sullivan. You do Cagney and Bogart. Liberace you do. Sinatra, Vaughn Monroe. Tell me something. Which is the real Howard Johnson’s? Which is the real Holiday Inn or Chicken from the Colonel?”

It was the late summer of 1960. The prime rate on four-to-six-month paper was 3.85 percent.

He stood looking down on the crowd below from the big revolving bucket reared back from true like a chariot overturning or spinning like a ride in an amusement park. From his vantage point — from theirs, only his shoulders, neck, and head visible, he must have seemed a gravedigger, a man immobilized in a torture barrel, someone locked in quicksand, a living bust of a man, something, to judge from their hoots and catcalls, that evoked reprisal, scorn, some Salem quality of the publicly shamed — he could see out over the shopping center to the welted lines of parked cars in the big lot like the hashmarks of giant fishbones. He saw the low flat roofs of shoestores, jewelers, men’s shops, dress shops, bakeries, a Western Auto, a cafeteria, a Woolworth’s, record shops and greeting card, a pharmacy, a Kroger’s, an optometrist’s, the immense decks of discount stores, each tar or asphalt roof pocked with vents and utility hatches, studded as domino. He called for his manager to turn off the sign, but the angle was difficult, leaving him, when it stopped, uphill of his audience.

“Hey, Sigmund-Rudolf,” he called, “swing me around. Another 180 degrees should do it.”

Sigmund-Rudolf was to manage the place during his summer vacation. He had practiced stopping the sign on a dime. His error was deliberate, just high spirits. (Ben didn’t mind, was glad Sigmund-Rudolf found it in his heart to be playful, for Sigmund-Rudolf’s disease, his bad seed, was perhaps the most humiliating. He had been saddled not with homosexuality — at nineteen he was one of the more virile boys and had as hearty a heterosexual appetite as any Finsberg — but with the symptoms of effeminacy; its starchless wrists and mincing tiptoe, its Cockney lisps, and something in the muscles of his face which widened his eyes and rolled them up to mock rue and exaggerated his frowns and put lemons in his lips — all the citrics of plangent faggotry, his lack of physical control programmed: the sissy coordinates of his every gesture, his muscles hamstrung with epicenity, girlishness, like a cripple of vaudevillized femininity or an unevenly strung marionette.)

The boy swung the sign around to where Ben wanted it. Now he was canted toward the crowd like a man about to be spilled from a cannon. He grasped the rim of the bucket for support — he would look like Kilroy, he thought — and began his address.

“My fellow New Yorkers,” he said. “There was once a countryman who had a place back in the hills with his wife and small babe. One day a neighbor who lived miles off where the trail from the county road left off at the beginning of the big woods came to him with a letter addressed to the countryman in care of the neighbor that the neighbor said had been left with him the day before. There was a notation on the envelope that read ‘Please Forward,’ but it was the neighbor’s impression that the postmaster had written both the ‘in care of’ and the notation to forward as well as the neighbor’s name, for if the countryman looked he would see that his name, the countryman’s, and his name, the neighbor’s, had been written in two different hands, and that it was a known fact that the postmaster was a shirker. Then he explained that his, the neighbor’s, wife had been poorly and could not be left alone and so he, the neighbor, had had to wait until a day when his young ’uns would be home from school before he could bring the letter that had been left in his charge. This was a Saturday and he had left as early as he could.

“ ‘I’m sorry your wife is poorly,’ the countryman said, ‘and I thank you for the trouble you took to bring me my message, for I know that the spot where the trail from the county road leaves off at the start of the big woods is a long way to my place back in the hills where I live with my wife and small babe.’ “ ‘You we’come,’ the neighbor said and the countryman invited the neighbor to set a spell while his woman made some lemonade for the neighbor to drink after his hot and dusty trip. ‘Thank you kindly,’ his neighbor said, ‘for the truth is, I am sorely parched.’

“ ‘You we’come,’ the countryman said and told his wife to bring the lemonade. Then they both, the countryman and the neighbor, sat down on the porch swing. The neighbor could see that the countryman was a mite uneasy, though he tried to hide it by carefully matching his push on the swing with his own, the neighbor’s, push.

“ ‘Excuse me,’ the neighbor said, ‘I misremembered myself and have plumb forgot to give you the letter.’

“ ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ the countryman said, but from the relief on his, the countryman’s, face, he, the neighbor, could see that it, the letter, had in fact been on his, the countryman’s, mind.

“The neighbor excused himself and asked if he could go on back to the outhouse as he had ‘business.’

“ ‘Surely you may,’ the countryman said.

“ ‘Thank you kindly.’

“ ‘You we’come.’

“Now the neighbor had no ‘business,’ having done it, his business, in the big woods after starting out with the letter for his, the neighbor’s, neighbor, the countryman. All he wanted was to give the countryman time to read it, the letter, and when he figured that he had had enough, time, to read the letter, it, he, the neighbor, came back outside and returned to where he had left him, the countryman, sitting, on the porch, the porch.

“Now when he returned, what was his surprise to see that there were tears in his eyes. He didn’t want to ask him about it and he knew it so he told him.

“ ‘From my brother.’

“ ‘Oh?’

“ ‘He says Paw is dying. I must be off. Enjoy your lemonade.’

He kissed his wife and small babe and solemnly shook his neighbor’s hand, but the neighbor, feeling he had badly served his neighbor the countryman by delaying the twenty-four hours before he brought the letter, and fearing, too, that it might already be too late and wishing to make amends, rose and offered to go back with him and take him to the city where he knew the countryman’s father lived and was now dying or already dead.

“ ‘Take me? How you fixin’ to do that?’

“ ‘In my pickup.’

“ ‘You got a pickup?’

“ ‘I live where the trail from the start of the big woods leaves off at the start of the county road. I do.’

“ ‘Thank you.’

“ ‘You we’come.’

“And he was good as his word, that he had a pickup and that he would drive them, himself, the neighbor, and the countryman, to the city, where his, the countryman’s, Paw was dying or already dead.

“They drove all day and all night and the morning of the next day and the miles flew by and they were already close to the city where his, etc., etc., was dying or already dead, when the pickup sputtered and steamed and gave out.

“The countryman was heartbroken. ‘I am sure sorely sorry,’ he said. ‘I would not have had that to happen for anything. Why to think,’ he, the countryman, said, ‘and all you wanted was to he’p a neighbor, me, a countryman, up to his eyes in it, shit, trouble, and your pickup is all busted and won’t never to run again and lick up the miles like they ’us on’y just steps. I am sorely sorry and when this is all over I will save and save till I get enough, money, to buy you another one, a pickup. And now I must be on my way to my Paw’s sick side. Thank you.’ And he was already out his side of the pickup before he, the neighbor, could properly say, ‘You we’come.’

“ ‘Ho’d up,’ he called, ‘ho’d up.’

“The countryman looked back and, seeing it was his neighbor calling, stopped in his tracks in the road.

“ ‘What?’

“ ‘It ain’t busted,’ he said.

“ ‘It ain’t?’

“ ‘I to’d you.’

“ ‘Why don’t it to go then?’

“ ‘ ’Cause we worked her too hard. The radiator boiled over. All we need is to get us some water and pour it in the radiator and she’ll go again good as new.’

“There was a stream close by the road and the neighbor, who kept a five-gallon gas can in the back of his pickup for just such emergencies, took the can and filled it at the stream and carried it back and poured its contents into the radiator and, after waiting a few more minutes for the engine to cool, started the pickup smooth as anything and they were on their, the neighbor’s and the countryman’s, way again as if nothing, the pickup sputtering and steaming and giving out, had ever happened. But the neighbor noticed that there was an odd expression on the countryman’s face. It was a troubled expression, but not the same sort of troubled expression he had seen when he had first returned from the outhouse where he had gone to pretend to do a business he had already done in the big woods on the way to his, the countryman’s, place back in the hills, in order to give him time to read the letter he, the neighbor of the countryman, had brought him, the neighbor of the neighbor. A naturally polite man, he did not want to trouble this already troubled man with his curiosity but he must have seen this because he too was a polite man and knew that that was on his mind and he decided finally to introduce the subject as much for his satisfaction as for his.

“ ‘If,’ he said, ‘a wheel was to bust, what would to happen then?’

“ ‘If a wheel was to bust? Why, I’d just get a new wheel and stick ’er on.’

“The countryman nodded.

“ ‘What about if that thing you poured that ’ere water in from that stream was to crack and couldn’t to hold no water — what then?’

“ ‘The radiator?’

“ ‘That what you call ’er?’

“ ‘The radiator, yes, sir.’

“ ‘What would to happen?’

“ ‘Well then, I guess I’d have to have them solder the crack or have them to put in a new radiator.’

“ ‘Them?’

“ ‘The mechanics.’

“ ‘I see. Thank you.’

“ ‘You we’come.’

“ ‘Suppose the engine itself?’

“ ‘Same thing.’

“ ‘The mechanics?’

“ ‘Yep.’

“The countryman nodded.

“ ‘And the same,’ the neighbor said, ‘if it was pistons or rods or a transmission or a carburetor or if the battery was to die.’

“ ‘The mechanics.’

“ ‘Sho.’

“The countryman paused for a moment, then turned in his seat to face the neighbor. ‘Where,’ he asked, ‘do them mechanics get all that ’ere machinery?’

“ ‘Spar parts,’ the neighbor said.

“ ‘Spar parts?’

“ ‘Sho. You got you a intricate, complicated thing like a pickup, you got to be sure you can get your spar parts if somethin’ should to go wrong and she should need replacin’. They’s whole entire catalogues of spar parts. Not just for this pickup but for ever entire one we done passed or done passed us on the way to the city here, and not just for pickups but for sedans and coupes, too, and for convertibles and delivery trucks and the big rigs highballin’ it down the turnpikes and byways. For motorcycles and bicycles and everthin’ that moves.’

“ ‘I’ll be,’ the countryman said, ‘I’ll be.’

“ ‘Sho,’ his neighbor said.

“Well, they continued on into the city, and when they came to where the countryman’s brother lived and were told by his wife, the countryman’s sister-in-law, which hospital her father-in-law, her husband’s and brother-in-law’s Paw, was at, they went there at once.

“ ‘You go on in,’ the neighbor said. ‘I’ll find me a spot in the lot.’

“ ‘The lot?’

“ ‘The parking lot. They’s plenty sick folks in yonder hospital and they all have kin want to visit with ’em and cheer ’em up or’—and here he looked down, averting his eyes from the countryman—‘if it’s too late for that — to say goodbye.’ The neighbor looked up to see how the countryman had taken this last part, but instead of the sorrow he had expected to see on the guy’s puss, what was his, the neighbor’s, surprise to see not sorrow but a curiosity so sharply defined it might have been language.

“ ‘Go on,’ the countryman said, ‘about the parking lot.’

“ ‘Well,’ the neighbor said, ‘they’s nothing to go on about. The hospital knows that sick folks’ kin want to come visit and have to have a place to park so they put up parking lots. That’s all they is to it.’

“ ‘They charge money?’

“ ‘They do.’

“ ‘The mechanics with the spar parts, they charge money, too?’

“ ‘Course they charge money. Sho they do. You born yesterday, or what?’ he asked with some impatience.

“ ‘Seems like,’ the countryman said. ‘Seems like an’ that’s a fac’.’ The neighbor looked at the countryman, who now seemed preoccupied. ‘Well,’ the countryman said abruptly, bringing himself back from wherever it was he had been woolgathering. ‘You go on and park in the parking lot while I straightway attend to my bidness.’ The neighbor let the countryman out of the pickup and drove off. When he returned, what was his surprise to see the countryman still standing where he had left him. If it were not for the fact that he now held a small white paper bag that he had not had before, he would have sworn that the countryman had not moved a muscle.

“ ‘It’s ’leven fifty-two,’ the countryman said.

“ ‘No,’ the neighbor said, ‘cain’t be. I heard the noon lunch whistle when we was still back in the pickup waitin’ on the engine to cool.’

“ ‘No,’ the countryman said, ‘not that ’leven fifty-two. Where Paw’s at.’

“ ‘Oh.’

“ ‘When you druv off to the parking lot I got to studyin’ on how we ’us gone to find my Paw in a gret big ol’ hospital like this ’un. I seen the winders. Take a full day to hunt in ever room, and s’pose he already dead an’ they fixin’ to bury ’im an’ there I ’us stumblin’ roun’ huntin’ ’im down in his room like some ol’ coon with a bad cold. What I do then, his ol’es’ boy an’ not even on time for his buryin’. And even if he still alive, ther I be bargin’ in ’mongst all them sick folks, goin’ roun’ to wher they sleepin’, all scrunched down in they beds, the sheets up over they heads an’ shiv’rin’ from they chills an’ fevers an’ me aksin’, “You my paw, mister? It’s me, you Paw?” ’

“ ‘Well, that’s not the—’

“ ‘That’s not the way they do it,’ the countryman said. ‘I remembered all you to’d me ’bout the spar parts and the parking lots and all them kin drops by to tell goodbye to all them sick folks an’ I thunk, Why they mus’ be some place right chere on the fust floor right wher you fust come in wher they keep the names and rooms wher them sick folks is. And I’ll be swacked if it weren’t jus’ the way I s’posed. I go in and right way ther’s this nice lady in a uniform settin’ at a table an’ she aks me whut do I want.

“ ‘How much you charge to tell me wher my paw is dying?’ I aks and I start to give her my name an’ stop, thinkin’, No, that’s not the way they do it, they’d use his name ’cause he’s the one dyin’ an’ I give her my paw’s name an’ she smiles an’ looks him up in what she to’d me later was a d’rectory an’ ther it is—’leven fifty-two.’

“ ‘How much she charge?’ the neighbor asked.

“ ‘Well, that’s the bes’ part. She don’t charge nothin’. That part’s free.’

“ ‘I be,’ he, the neighbor, said.

“ ‘Aks me ’bout this chere paper bag I’m ho’din’.’

“ ‘I ’us goin’ to.’

“ ‘It’s little chocolates. For Paw. Paw likes chocolates.’

“ ‘Chocolates.’

“ ‘I got to studyin’ whut you said ’bout all them kinfolks—’

“ ‘You to’d me that part.’

“ ‘I to’d you the part ’bout you sayin’ how they come to tell they sick folks goodbye. I ain’t to’d you nothin’ ’bout how I remembered the part where you said they come to cheer ’em up.’

“‘Oh.’

“ ‘And I studied on that part and I got the idea that they mus’ be some place right close by that they’d call it somethin’ all cheery like the Wishing Well wher kin could get some baubles fur their sick folks, an’ I aks the lady an’ she points it right out an’ it ain’t but thutty foot from wher I’m standin’ an’ she says, “Oh, that would be the Wishing Well,” an’ I went to it and they had everthin’ you could want — toys and little ol’ lacy nighties an’ comical books an’ chewin’ gum an’ the very same chocolates that my paw so dearly loves. Hershey Kisses they call ’em.’

“And with that the countryman tells the neighbor that it was time he went up to see his father and asks him, the neighbor, to come along, he’s come this far. The neighbor agrees and starts toward the stairway, but the countryman calls him back, telling him that if it’s a building where they put sick folks, then it would have to have an elevator or how would folks sick as his paw get up eleven stories and they would ride where the sick folks ride and it would have to be close by and if there was a charge why he, the countryman, would pay for them both since he, the neighbor, had been so nice already.

“They found the elevator and rode to the eleventh floor and the countryman asked the colored girl who ran the elevator what it would cost them and she said it was free and he, the countryman and his friend, the neighbor, got off without a word, their faces solemn as they could make them. When the elevator doors closed behind them, the countryman hooted in wild laughter and the neighbor, seeing the joke at once, joined in.

“ ‘Fool nigger,’ the countryman said, laughing so hard his nose began to run, ‘she thinks you’re sick.’

“ ‘She thinks you sick, you mean. You the one aks her how much she charge.’

“ ‘ ’Cause I ’us makin’ out you too sick to talk for your own self.’

“Well, they giggled on this for a while and at last a nurse came up to them and asked if she could help them.

“ ‘We’s Paw’s kinfolks,’ the countryman said, recovering himself, ’come to see sick folks in ’leven and fifty-two.’

“ ‘This way, please,’ the nurse said, and she led them to the room where his, the countryman’s, father lay, not dying as it, the letter, had said, but sitting up in bed watching afternoon game shows on TV and laughing every time folks in New York or out on the coast answered the question wrong and lost their money.

“ ‘Dumb Eastern and Coastern fucks,’ the old man roared and laughed fit to bust. ‘Look that Eastern fuck, give the Captain the wrong answer and he just lost his car.’

“ ‘I brung chocolates, Paw,’ the countryman said.

“ ‘Thanks, son, they’s my favorites. Don’t never be like them Eastern and Coastern fucks, don’t never gamble.’

“ ‘I won’t, Paw,’ the countryman said.

“ ‘Saw a man this mornin’, Coastern fuck he was, dumber ’n dog shit, an’ he lost his dream house ’cause he didn’t know which curtain it ’us standin’ behind. His own house, an’ thet dumb Coastern fuck couldn’t remembers its address! Got all confused an’ all he could remember was where he’d left his pig. Don’t never gamble, son. You neither, neighbor. Special when you don’t stand to gain nothin’ by it. Have a chocolate.’

“ ‘Thanks, Paw. The letter said you ’us dyin’. You don’t seem like you dyin’.’

“ ‘Ain’t dyin’,’ his father said.

“ ‘You ain’t?’

“ ‘Naw. They run some tests. Figured what I got.’

“ ‘Yes?’

“ ‘Well, once they could name its name, there was a medicine for it that could fix it.’

“ ‘Can I aks you sumfin’?’ his boy, the countryman, said after a while.

“ ‘Sho,’ his father said. ‘Shoot.’

“ ‘This here medicine — they charge money for it?’

“ ‘Fool! Course they do.’

“ ‘That’s jus’ what I thought,’ his visitor’s neighbor’s neighbor, his son, the countryman, said.”

Ben Flesh paused. They were staring up at him.

“Because,” he said, “distance demands its road, the bowel its vessel, the disease its medicament. It is the lesson learned by the countryman the day he thought his paw would die. I have not mentioned it, but even after he saw his father on the mend, this too went through his mind: ’He’s got a body. If it dies it will have to be boxed, have to be buried. They ain’t through with us even after we quit of them. And it was as if he, a countryman, a farmer, a dealer in earth all his working life, thought about it — earth — for the first time. It was as if, my friends, he had discovered the uses of real estate. He had learned the secret of being—that existence has its spare parts, that the successful life is only a proper knowledge of accessory!

“I am Benny in the Bucket, the spirit of Bernie Baruch upon me. Baruch. Atoh. Adonai. Bless this enterprise, oh, Lord. Bahless it. Give us a bahreak! Whet appetites left and right, visit cravings on the pregnant for carry-out chicken, impress upon Mums giving birthday parties the advantages of convenience foods and inscribe everywhere upon the universal palate a taste for the Colonel’s white meat and dark, hanging it there like wallpaper or a fixed idea; tangle its aromatics with the hairs of the nose and make consumers to go in the streets with fried skin chewy as gum in their mouths and licking on bones as on all-day suckers. Doggy my Americans, Pop, foxify them for me and the Colonel.” And looked up.

“Well, folks, I felt I couldn’t ask my manager, Sigmund-Rudolf Finsberg there, to open our doors for business without first making a few remarks appropriate to the occasion. Now I know you’re getting hungry, I know you’re anxious to get in there and find out for yourselves what all the fuss is about, why I and my colleagues have gone to such pains to bring Kentucky Fried Chicken to Yonkers—‘Meals the Whole Family Will Enjoy at Prices Every Family Can Afford.’ And in a few moments I’ll be giving Mr. Finsberg a high sign worked out between us just the other day. You’ll find special grand-opening specials that will have you picking chicken out of your teeth for a week, but first — uh — first — first…”

He wondered what he was up to. Even as he’d told them his story, he’d wondered. What was he doing? What was being done to him? It was nothing like stage fright, no amateur’s last-minute wish to be elsewhere, anywhere. He wondered something else. Not only why he was doing this, but what prevented him from stopping. He could not let them go. He couldn’t stop talking. He hadn’t prepared, he’d meant only to get their attention, Benny in the Bucket a simple stunt of welcome. But why this logorrhea? He suspected his character, a vessel thrust forward by resentment, his stalled personality waiting on anger like a player of a board game waiting on a pair of thrown fours, say, to advance his counter. And why resentment? He remembered when he had shouted over the long-distance telephone at his commanding officer. He grew in fits and starts, lived in phases and stages like a classic kid in Spock or Gesell. Why couldn’t he stop? What did he resent? And if he was angry, then why was he so happy?

“Anyone want a ride in the bucket?”

“Then I think it’s time we—”

“Know what? This is hallowed ground. It is. I was here last weekend checking our equipment. There was this fantastic crowd. In the parking lot, the mall. I couldn’t figure it out. Then there were these — these sirens. I thought, Jesus, what is it, is it burning down? The shopping center? Is Macy’s burning? I got a ladder and climbed up the bucket to see. There was a motorcade, limos. What the hell? That’s what I thought — what the hell? Nixon stepped out and was helped up on the roof of a big black Lincoln. I wondered if he could see me in the bucket. What about the Secret Service guys? What did they make of me? ASSASSIN POPS CANDIDATE FROM FRIED CHICKEN AERIE! Hallowed ground. Jack Kennedy a few days after. The media. Dave Brinkley up close, Cronkite standing. The truth squads of both parties, shadow cabinets. Paul Newman’s been by, Bob Montgomery. This is hallowed American ground of the twentieth century. A shopping center in a white suburb with good schools. One day it will be remembered like an old-time battlefield — some, some Gettysburg of the rhetorical. You heard ’em here first, all the campaigners to whose thumbs we entrust our red buttons and our black boxes. It’s the Lyceum here, the new stump! What merely civil acts could follow such performance and presence? What quotidian acts of the market basket and shopping cart? What out-on-a-limb toe balances and triples? How can I top them? My God, friends, it’s Colonel Sanders who should be here today! The Colonel himself in his blinding whites. Standing where I stand and tossing chicken parts like lollies from the float. Not Ben Flesh in the flesh but him. No surrogate — not after Nixon, not after Kennedy. Him! His State of the Union! But you know?” He beat his breast with his fists. “You know? When you come right down to it, this — this is the State of the Union! BEN IN THE BUCKET! BENNY IN THE BARREL!

“Open up! I’m the truth squad! The secret ingredients of Colonel Sanders’ Fried Chicken from far-off Kentucky are, well, chicken of course, sage, onion, salt and pepper, flour, cornmeal, eggs, and shortening — And plenty of ACCENT!

“Open the doors, it’s opening day. Go on, go in. We ask only that you take a number!”

He pulled himself up to the lip of the bucket and threw his arms over its sides. He hung there suspended. He would appear to them, he thought, exactly like a man lying facedown on a diving board would appear to swimmers directly beneath him.

“They asked me,” Flesh said, “they asked me, ‘Ben, why chicken?’ ‘Everybody has to eat,’ I told them. ‘Each must eat, all must bite the calorie and chew the carbohydrate. We must be nourished. This is a need. The play goes to the man who makes necessity delicious.’

“Mrs.,” he called down to a woman in white shoes, “people have feet. There’ll always be a demand for shoes.” He saw a young man. “They have bodies which have to be clothed. The Washington clothing lobbies are among the most powerful in the country.” And another man: “They’ve got to live somewhere — houses, apartments. A landlord prospers.” He spotted an old lady: “Human feeling, the sense of family—there’s a bond. Greeting cards. The long distance. Cemetery plots. Real estate is real.” And a girl: “They have to be distracted. Books, records, trips to Nassau on the Youth Fare.” And a teenage boy: “Pornography is a growth industry!” He had his eye on a husband and wife, the man’s arm around the woman’s shoulder: “The course of true love never runs smooth. There are lovers’ quarrels. People fight. They kiss and make up. Say it with flowers. Sweets to the sweet.” There was a boy with glasses: “They have eyes that wear out with all there is to look at. You couldn’t go wrong in optometry!”

And just then he went blind in his left eye.

He was not with the Wine and Spirits Association of America people, not with the Toyota Dealers, not with the Midwest Modern Language Association. He paid top dollar for his room and walked the corridor of restaurants and expensive boutiques, tiny, some of them, as roomettes on trains, that linked the lobbies of the Chase and Park Plaza Hotels. He smiled at everyone. Without a name tag, in his sober suit of natural fibers he must have looked like one of the managers of the hotel, or like Koplar himself perhaps, or even a well-turned-out house detective. Except that there were no more house detectives. They were security personnel now, and some he knew in the better hotels spoke with cultured European accents. Whatever happened to the house detective, whatever happened to the house physician? The hotel dicks were all from Interpol and the docs were revolving pool personnel, family doctors on retainer. Less romantic than the old days of Dr. Wolfe. Oh yes.

He went into one of the shops and bought a purse of softest calf’s leather, paid for it with an American Express card which the girl checked against the February 1974 list of closely printed American Express numbers, American Express Deadbeats of February 1974. It was like a musical comedy. (“Do you take Diners? Master Charge? Carte Blanche? American Express? BankAmericard?” “Yes, sir, oh yes.” He could have paid for it — an $85 purse — with his driver’s license or Blue Cross card. He carried his credit cards in his inside jacket in a Bicycle Playing Cards packet.) He gave the woman Kitty’s address — she was Mrs. Roger Sayad now — and asked that it be sent.

“Will there be a card?”

“Yes. A card.” She handed him a small white envelope and a card. He wrote Kitty’s name on the envelope, tore up the blank she had given him, and enclosed his Sunoco credit card.

“It’s sentimental. This used to be honored at Best Western motels.”

The saleswoman looked at him.

“Among so many conventioneers — I represent only myself this trip — I am seized by the spirit. I am taken with a frenzy for the old days, you follow? My heart leaps up. You follow my heart leaping up?”

She smiled weakly and he wanted to tell her that he wasn’t drunk. And he wasn’t.

But he could tell no one anything anymore. His tears embarrassed them. The kid hitchhiker a few days ago was something else. That story had been one from old times. He went up to his room.

What reminded him, what started the whole damn thing, was the sight of all those businessmen. In Miami Beach — that would have been just four years ago, the prime rate had been 7½ percent — he’d attended two conventions at once, K-O-A and One Hour Martinizing.

Dr. Wolfe.

A pallid wafery man with thinning hair that seemed to grow out from a tuft of widow’s peak and stretch back over his head, growing uphill but somehow the dark individual strands like the ribs of a fan that covered almost all his scalp. A head of hair like a magic trick. Flesh with more was balder. A quiet man who spoke in a low monotonous voice. Dr. Wolfe. In order to hear him Ben found himself leaning into Wolfe’s speech, as if shouldering a stiff wind, heavy weather. With his head bent toward his host’s conversation, there was an odd nautical quality to his step. Flesh felt like a sailor rolling along beside him. They might have been walking upwind on a deck. The faint praise was faint. Dr. Wolfe. “Have lunch with me.” It was more command than invitation. The man was a bore. Ben could not rebuff bores, regarded their conversation as down payment on his own.

“Those K-O-A’ers needed to hear that.”

“Well—”

“It was interesting. But I’m not sure you were correct.”

“I’m new in the business. It was simply an outsider’s first impression.”

“No no, it was stimulating. But what would the presence of motorcycle packs do to our family trade?”

“I didn’t really say anything about motorcycle packs. I wasn’t thinking of opening up the campsites to Hell’s Angels.”

“Once the word got around they’d come, though. They could come singly, or in pairs. They might not seem motorcycle packs, but then, when they were all together, you’d see what you had.”

He didn’t care to argue the point. It was just something that had occurred to him during the open meeting and that he’d offered in the packed Fontainebleau Hospitality Suite during “Give and Take Hour.” “I thought you said you liked the idea.”

“I said it was interesting. It needs to be discussed.”

Ben didn’t care to discuss it.

“We’ll go outside the hotel. I’ve been eating in that pharmacy up Collins Avenue. The prices they charge here are ridiculous.”

“Listen, I’m a little rushed. I’m supposed to be with One Hour Martinizing in an hour.”

“Yes?”

“I’m giving a talk on the subject ‘Come Back Thursday.’ ” Wolfe didn’t smile.

“It’s just up Collins Avenue. By the time we got seats in the coffee shop we’d have to gobble our sandwiches.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“K-O-A’s a family trade,” Wolfe said when they were seated at the counter in the drugstore eating their egg-salad sandwiches. (Wolfe had ordered for them both.)

“What about hostelers?”

“Hostelers are people’s children. They’re decent.”

“Oh.” Flesh had begun to hate the man.

“It’s all very well,” Wolfe said, “for you absentee landlords, but I have to live at the campsite. We’re in Boca Raton. If your proposal went through, if it got in our bylaws, I’d be the one to suffer, I’d be the one subjected to the terror.”

“I didn’t put it as a proposal.”

“There’d be dope, fights. We’d be kept up half the night. My wife can’t take that.”

“It would be up to the individual, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes? It would be the Public Accommodations Act all over again. Civil rights. If I wasn’t in compliance, I’d lose my license.”

“Well, I didn’t put it as a proposal.”

“It was warmly received. And that other. What was it — serve beer on the premises?”

“All I said was that if K-O-A had a small retail food and beverage outlet—”

“That’d be beer. You’d have a problem with the hostelers. A lot of those kids are under age. There’d be false I.D.’s. I see nothing but trouble. For a few shekels. Is that all that matters to you, shekels?”

“Look, Mr. Wolfe—”

“I don’t say I couldn’t use the money. Lord knows I could. But I got enough grief as it is.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about me. They asked for ideas. It was all off the top of my head.”

“My wife’s bedfast.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Sixteen years. She’s bedfast. She’s incontinent. She wears a diaper.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Ben said.

“And all those steroids. Her bones are so soft I can’t use nothing but down. Down pillows, a down mattress I gave seven hundred shekels for. Doctor wants her to sit up some each day. Had to get her a down chair. Swan’s down. Special made. My wife sits down on down,” he muttered. “She isn’t old enough yet for Medicare. I have to pay for those steroids out of my own pocket. They keep changing her medications but it’s all steroids. This is the first convention I’ve been to since she come down bedfast. Only reason I could get away is it’s in Florida and my sister-in-law said she’d take care of my wife. She lives in Miami. I use her apartment. Don’t even get to stay in the hotel.”

Flesh nodded. “I was on steroids once,” he said. He offered the information as a way of reaching some accord with the man, but he was astonished at Wolfe’s reaction.

“You? You were? Yes? Tell me.”

“Well, it wasn’t a big deal really. I don’t think I could have been on them more than two weeks, but at the time it scared hell out of me.”

“Yes? Yes? What?”

“I went blind in my left eye.”

“Oh yes,” Wolfe said. He was grinning.

“I say ‘blind,’ but it was, I don’t know, white. As if I had my eye open in a glass of milk.”

“Hah,” Wolfe said.

“It didn’t last long. At first I thought I had a tumor. That’s what scared me. I went to an ophthalmologist and he referred me to a neurologist and the neurologist put me in the hospital for observation.”

“Yes?”

“Well, it wasn’t a tumor.”

“No.”

“And the doctor put me on steroids and the blindness cleared up in, I don’t know, it was almost ten years ago, three, maybe four days.”

“A retrobulbar optic neuritis.”

“That’s right,” Flesh said. “How would you know that?”

Wolfe laughed. “It’s how it starts. Ten years ago, eh? What were you — thirty, thirty-two?”

“I don’t know. About thirty-two. It’s how what starts? What are you talking about?”

“It’s the nation’s leading crippler of young adults, sonny. You’ve got multiple sclerosis, same as my sixteen-year-bedfast wife.”

“What are you talking about? I don’t have multiple sclerosis. It was retrobulbar optic neuritis.”

“That’s right. That’s it. That’s how it starts.”

“It was ten years ago.”

“Sure. You’re in remission.”

“I don’t have multiple sclerosis.”

“No? Wait one or two years. You’re in remission, that’s all. I know more about the nation’s leading crippler of young adults than any neurologist in the country. I read all the literature. It was the British proved that anybody gets optic neuritis winds up with M.S. Didn’t your doctor tell you that?”

“No,” Flesh said.

“Course not. It’s a stress disease. You could be in remission another five years, but you’ve got it, neighbor. It’s progressive and it’s degenerative and it eats your nerves like moths in the closet. Lay in down and don’t be so sure you want the hippies and them kids with their choppers and drugs. You need rest.”

“Fuck you,” Flesh said.

“That’s all right, I’ll get the check. My treat.”

Ben moved off. “Lay in down,” Wolfe called. “Get insurance. Lay in down, foam rubber, creams and unguents for the bedroom, for your abrasive big-shot ways.” He could hear Wolfe’s laughter behind him as the man trailed him back to the hotel.

Dr. Wolfe.

He had been blind. He had been a blind man. And once he’d had a heart attack. Later, he tried to explain it to Gertrude.

“You were only half blind, you could see white. Me, I’ve got bones like monkey wrenches and the Guess-Your-Age-and-Weight man at the fair doesn’t know what to make of me.”

Just as he didn’t know what to make — before he knew what the blindness meant, before Dr. Wolfe told him — of himself.

“In the old days, yes,” he’d told Mary, “in the days when I was between twenty-one and thirty-eight and coming down with my character like a disease. Before I got to be whatever it is I’ve turned out to be. When I was turning out to be it. I didn’t know what to make of me. Except it seemed significant that I’d been in World War II. I didn’t ever see action, but that was part of the pattern, can you understand this? I was in the world war but I didn’t see action, I was blind but only in one eye and just for a few days, and even your sister reminded me that I could see light, that the visible somehow translated itself in my brain to pure energy — to white, to light. And, oh yes, that I was an orphan, but late-blooming, orphaned only after I’d turned twenty. Already a man. Which didn’t make me Oliver Twist. And I had a godfather. More cushion. And an inheritance. And even that mitigated. We’re not talking about lump sums — not even as much as my piddling severance pay when I left the army of MacArthur and Eisenhower, just this mitigated, administered inheritance, not money but the interest on money, the privilege of borrowing dough. And a college graduate, but even that, my education, off center somehow, me not knowing what I was getting into at Wharton, odd man out in that scioned, silver-spooned set, maybe the only person there not preparing to step into someone else’s shoes, not in training for a life laid out like clean clothes on the bedgevant. And a heart-attack victim, too, don’t forget, when I was thirty-eight. But not a victim. I didn’t die, didn’t see that action either. Just let off the hook with what the doctor called a ‘warning.’ He meant I should change my life. But how can I change what I don’t understand? The blindness that was not real blindness and the orphan lad who was no lad. A soldier in the biggest war in history who never got close to combat. And the heart attack that went away. All this pulled-punch catastrophe that has been my life. The phony inheritance and mixed blessing. I don’t understand this stuff.”

“What about me?” La Verne asked when he attempted to speak to her about it. “What about me with my askew architecture, my organs with their faulty wiring, my insides like left-hand drive? As if I were a bridge built by racketeers.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. You’re unique.”

“Unique. Terrific. Unique. Death’s Special Introductory Offer.”

“What, am I discounting your risk? Is that what you think? No no. Who am I to cut anyone’s losses? That isn’t the point. All these things — they’ve got me programmed for an Everyman. A little of this, a little of that. My smorgasbord life.”

“You’ll dance on our graves.”

“That ain’t it.”

She turned away from him in bed. Her nightgown had ridden up her backside. “It ain’t? That’s it.”

He called Irving.

“Yes,” he said, “in St. Louis…Oh, I don’t know, about an hour ago…No, at the Chase-Park…Because I don’t like to impose…All right, come on, Irving, what ‘offended,’ what ‘hurt’? You know my habits. The truth is, I hate making beds. Sometimes I shoot right in the sheets. Why should Frances lean over my laundry?…No, certainly not. Your sister isn’t with me…No. No…Call the desk. See if I’m registered with anyone. Come over, search the room. As a matter of fact, that’s a good idea. Bring Fran. I’ll take you both to dinner at the Tenderloin Room. You’ll cut up my meat for me…Yeah. Hah hah, yourself…No, Chicago. I’m going on to Kansas City…Yeah, right, Irving, it’s a surprise audit on the One Hour Martinizing. I got word you been skimming the first six minutes on me…So tell me, Irving, how’s business?…What? The niggers again?…All the way out to Overland? Irving, I already closed up the Delmar location. You wanted west county, I gave you west county. What is it, you Daniel Boone, you got a manifest destiny? Irving, darling, the niggers are going to push you into the sea…Into the Pacific, yes. What good is a dry-cleaning service in the ocean? Saltwater’s bad for the material…No, I’m not making jokes at your expense…I appreciate it’s a sickness with you…Really, have dinner with me. Yeah, I understand. Right. Sure…Certainly I understand. You don’t like to come into the inner city…Irving, give Frances a kiss, I’ll see you both at the plant in the morning. Bring the books.”

2

He loved the shop, the smells of the naphthas and benzenes, the ammonias, all the alkalis and fats, all the solvents and gritty lavas, the silken detergents and ultimate soaps, like the smells, he decided, of flesh itself, of release, the disparate chemistries of pore and sweat — a sweat shop — the strange woolly-smelling acids that collected in armpits and atmosphered pubic hair, the nameless combustion of urine and gabardine mixing together to create all the body’s petty suggestive alimentary toxins. The sexuality of it. The men’s garments one kind, the women’s another, confused, deflected, masked by residual powders, by the oily invisible resins of deodorant and perfume, by the concocted flower and the imagined fruit — by all fabricated flavor. And hanging in the air, too — where would they go? — dirt, the thin, exiguous human clays, divots, ash and soils, dust devils of being.

“Irving, add water, We’ll make a man.”

His godcousin looked up from the presser. “What color?”

“Hello, Ben,” Frances said. She was her husband’s countergirl.

“Frances, how are you?” Ben leaned across the counter and kissed her. “Did you bring the books?” he asked Irving.

“Please, Ben,” Irving said, “not in front of the shvartzeh.”

“Irving, she’s your wife.”

“I know, I know,” he said, “it’s a sickness.”

Frances was black. Marrying her had been a sort of experiment in social vaccination. He had reasoned that if polio, measles, and smallpox could be defrayed by actually contracting them, then perhaps he might be able to cure his racial prejudice by marrying a black woman. The blacks he knew in New York — Irving, still living in Riverdale, had attended Columbia University, where he majored in anthropology, and commuted to and from the campus in rolled-window, locked-door cabs — were, except for their color, indistinguishable from most of the whites he knew. They spoke with New York accents, something the anthropologist could never really get over. It was his idea to leave the city to seek a bride. Afraid to go South, where, at the time of his contemplated courtship, the prohibitions against miscegenation were either still on the books or, if technically legal, enforced by the vaudevilles of Klansmen, he chose St. Louis, neutral territory, a place where blacks still sounded like blacks, where, though their civil liberties were underwritten by law and municipal ordinance, they still lived in ghettos and did the dirty work when they could find it.

In the days when his tortured godcousin, then an M.A. candidate in anthropology — a subject he studied for the same reason he would choose a bride — had first hit upon the idea for his cure, Ben had again and again been subjected to Irving’s rhetoric, speeches that might, with certain alterations, have been memorized from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

“I know what I’m doing, Ben, I’m not going into this thing with my eyes closed. I know what people will think. Oh, my friends will be very ‘polite’ of course. They’ll come to the wedding and bring gifts. They’ll drink our health and say, ‘It’s marvelous what Irving’s done. What courage! What courage on both their parts!’ But they’ll never get used to it. They’ll never adapt. There’ll be unintended snubs, invitations not sent, embarrassing silences when me and the jigaboo run into them on the street, pregnant pauses, or, even worse, circumlocutions. They won’t really know how to handle it. We’ll make them uncomfortable. And some of my ‘good’ friends — oh, they’ll mean well, I suppose — will try to warn me of the dangers and consequences. ‘All right,’ they’ll say, ‘so you want to run off and be an idealist. Terrific. Wonderful. Hurrah for Martin Luther Finsberg, but aren’t you forgetting something? What about the children? What will they have to pay for your idealism?’ They’ll reason that if I want to marry dark meat that’s my business, that I’m free, white, and twenty-one, but it’s unfair to our little nignogs.”

Flesh had given him his job, had made him manager of the franchise in St. Louis. He was the only one of the Finsbergs still connected with any of the franchises.

Ben moved behind the counter and plunged in and out of the ranks of garments suspended from the conveyor in their polyethylene bags like FBI silhouettes, police-force torso targets. “Out of my way, Hart, Schaffner and Marx. Watch it, you Brooks brothers. I’m coming through, Kuppenheimer. Straighten up, chest out, tummy in, Hickey. How many times do I have to tell you? Lookin’ good there, Freeman. Ah, madam. Itchy-kitchy Gucci, Pucci.”

The girls at the creaser and topper machines laughed. Flesh walked up to the Suzy, an adjustable dress form on which men’s and ladies’ garments could be hung for special attention — spot cleaning, alterations. Nothing was hanging on it at the moment. “Shameless,” Flesh said and gave it a feel. The shirt folder rocked with laughter. She was a huge black woman in a short skirt and, because of the heat, a man’s ribbed undershirt. Ben looked at the woman and pointed to her chest. “Hey, that’s cute, sweetheart. You got some tits on you, momma.”

“Christ, Ben,” Irving whispered, “don’t talk like that. These girls carry switchblades and razors.”

“She don’t mind,” Flesh said, not bothering to lower his voice. “You mind — what’s your name?”

“Gloria.”

“You mind, Gloria?”

“Naw,” she said.

“See? Gloria doesn’t mind.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Irving whispered, “they have no morals.”

“Irving,” Ben said.

“I know, I know,” Irving said softly.

“The books,” Ben said.

“I want you to see them, Ben, but there’s something I’d like to discuss with you first.”

“Something wrong with the books? I’ll catch you out in a minute. I went to Wharton. I speed-read double-entry wise.”

“No, of course not. The books are perfect. This is something else. I was going to write you.”

“Because if there was something funny about the books I wouldn’t laugh, Irving.”

“The books are fine. Look, can we go over by the sign?” Irving moved toward the front of the store. Ben followed. “Listen,” Irving said, “there’s something I have to…What are you doing?”

“This poster.” He held up a large cardboard poster. Men and women were smiling in their dry cleaning. He rubbed his hand across the front of the advertisement. “Jesus, Irving, it’s a dry-cleaning plant. Look at the dust. The damn ads are schmutzick!”

“They’re filthy in their habits,” Irving said, “they’re not a clean people.”

“Look here,” Ben said, taking a display from the front window and holding it for Irving to see, “look at the lapels on this suit. Look at the guy’s tie. These fashions are from 1955. Look at the dress the broad’s wearing. Look at their fucking hairstyles. What is it, the nostalgia craze? Can’t you get new displays?”

“Ben, I would, but they steal them. You know how they are. They rob them to hang up on their walls for paintings.”

“Come on, Irving.”

“It’s a sickness, Ben.”

“Get well soon, you’re running a business here. Look at the One Hour Martinizing sign.” He pointed to the neon tubing — an enormous green ‘I’ framing successively smaller green and red I’s, I’s within I’s within I’s like hashmarks. He touched the sign. “My finger isn’t even warm. The tubing’s insulated by dust. It hums and crackles like shortwave. Look at the dark spots where the neon ain’t flowing. The fucker’s got hardening of the arteries, blood clots, neon myocardial infarction. Does it even shine in the dark, Irving?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. The equipment. It’s old, Ben. They have Valclene now. It’s odorless and it does a terrific job. With Valclene we wouldn’t need a steam tunnel, we wouldn’t need a stretcher.”

“We’ve got a steam tunnel, we’ve got a stretcher.”

“You’re missing the point, Ben. We could get rid of at least one girl. It would practically pay for itself. We’d save money.”

“What’s Valclene? How much is it?”

“It’s an entirely new process, Ben, odorless. I don’t know the exact cost. Maybe $17,000, $20,000 tops.”

“Yeah? How many years would that girl you’d get rid of have to work to earn that much money? Three? Four?”

“That’s not the point. That’s not the only advantage. All right. These people work cheap, but—”

“Irving, listen to me. You know what the dry-cleaning business is worth today? How many pair of slacks did you do this week?”

“I don’t know, I’d have to—”

“A dozen? A half dozen? You haven’t noticed the wash-and-wear fabrics are knocking us on the head? They put suits in the washing machines now. Suits. Sport coats!”

“Not winter suits, Ben.”

“No, not winter suits. So suddenly it’s a seasonal business.”

“Ben, with the new equipment—”

“With the new equipment, what? What with the new equipment? Forget the new equipment. And I don’t have to look at the books. I don’t even want to see them. I can guess what they say. I know all about the books. Best sellers they ain’t. So what’s this shit about new equipment? Irving, you forgot your anthropology so quick? You don’t know that the do-it-yourself coin-op places are changing the dry-cleaning culture in this country? That they’re kicking our brains off? That this new outfit — what’s its name? — American Cleaners, yeah, American Cleaners, will take any garment and do you a job on it for 69 cents? A suit 69 cents, a sport coat. A dress. What do we get for a dress, a buck ninety-five?”

“They don’t do the kind of job we do, Ben. They don’t turn out a product like ours. Not for 69 cents. How can you compare?”

“Irving, I’m delighted by your pride. I really am. I am. That’s good. That’s beautiful. Really.” He lowered his voice. “Irving, you’ve got white pride. But let’s not talk about machines, all right? Unless maybe you want to take the stuff in and run it over to American Cleaners. We could use their machines. The coin-ops. We’d clean up, yes?”

“Why are you making fun of me?”

“I’m not making fun of you.”

“I work like a nigger in this place. Damnit, Ben, my brothers and sisters and I guaranteed your loan. $14,000. My father made you our responsibility in his will. Why do you treat me like this? Why do you mock our relationship?”

“I don’t mock our relationship. I cast it in bronze. Ping ping. I chip it in marble. Tap. Tap tap. I baste, tack, braid, plait, stitch, sew, and crochet it in fabric. In fabric, Irving, fabric. Fabric is the fabric of our relationship! Skin of my skin, cloth of my cloth. Don’t you know anything? Anthropologist! What’s the matter, don’t you recognize these digs? It’s the Finsberg Memorial Library here, my allegiance to costume, my tribute to Godpop. Fitting. Hah! Fitting’s fitting. Needles and pins, Irving, pins and needles. Needles, pins, and thread warped us and woofed us. Yay for yarn. Rah for ribbon. Whoopee for wool. Lest we forget, Irving, manager, godcousin, kid, this is for Julius, this is for him, the yellow tape around his shoulders like a tallith, around his neck like an Old Boy’s tie, pins in his red lips like a cushion tomato. Lest we forget! We owe everything — you, me, Estelle, the sibs, all of us — to dress, garb, caparison, wardrobe. We are what they wore. Millinery made us. Raiment did, weeds. Vestments, trousseau, togs, layettes. Traps, Irv, habits, duds, and mufti. Regimentals, jungle green and field gray. Redcoats. Canonicals and academicals. Sari, himation, pallium, peplum. Tunic, blazer, leotard, gym suit. Cassock, soutane, toga, chiton. Trews, breeks, chaps, and jeans. Jodhpurs, galligaskins, yashmaks, burnoose. Breechclouts and sou’westers. Spatterdashes. Greaves and ruffs. Unmentionables and Sunday-go-to-meeting. Irving, Irving, call the pelisse!”

“We don’t do much greaves, we send the yashmaks out.”

“Well I’m very pleased with what I see,” Ben Flesh said. “The place is in good hands.”

“We’re dying on the vine, Ben. Smell it in here. Feel how hot it is. All right, they’re niggers — I couldn’t ask white people to work in a place like this — but even the jungle bunnies have to have their Coca-Cola. Christ, Ben, you know what I pay for salt tablets? No dry-cleaning plant’s like this today. They’re modern, cool as drugstores, with no more odor to them than lobbies in airports. Ben, we’re in violation of the health codes. It’s a good thing the spades ain’t union or we’d really be in trouble. As it is, I think the inspector wants to be paid off.”

“Pay him.”

“But why not convert? Why not meet the new specs? It doesn’t make sense, Ben.”

“Pay him. Raise the girls’ wages.”

“I used to smoke. Two packs a day. I can’t touch cigarettes anymore. They taste like this, like chemicals.”

“The Surgeon General has determined that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health.”

“What’s this? Good for my health? It’s poison. Look, I have my inheritance. I’ll put the stuff in myself.”

“You’re my manager. I own the place. The manager doesn’t put in a gum-ball machine without my approval. He doesn’t put in a can for charity. I like everything just as it is. I like the smells. I like the way they make my eyes sting and contract my nostrils like toxic snuff. This is for Julius and for my father, who was once his partner. This is what they would have known. I like it the way it is.”

“You like? You run it.”

“You’re quitting?”

“Yeah. Why not? What am I doing managing a dry-cleaning joint? I’m worth almost half a million dollars, you know that? I’m educated. I have advanced degrees. Yeah, why not?”

“And Frances, your house nigger, you’re worth a half million, you’re educated, you’re quitting Frances, too?”

“What’s Frances got to do with it?”

“Nothing. Except she’s part of your cure, that was your idea. And this place, this is part of your cure, too. You were exactly the right man for the job. That’s right. You. Because your genes crackle like static electricity in the presence of schmutz, cleaning syrups, and your indoor heat waves. Your fate is to scrub, scour, mop, wring out, to run the world through the mangle. You dip, rinse, sluice, and douche. You don’t hate niggers, you’re in love with the cleaning lady! For Christ’s sake, look around you, you’ve put together a harem in here. When you die laundresses will stick you in a tub and lower you in fuller’s earth.”

“It’s a sickness.”

“Yeah yeah.”

“Yes.”

“You kinky dummy! Earth turns you on. Look at your fingernails. You look like you’ve been on your hands and knees in the garden.”

“Why do you talk to me like this? Aren’t we friends?”

“Friends?”

“Aren’t we?”

Ben took Irving’s face in his hands.

“The same nose, eyes, lips, teeth, ears. The same hair. The same give to the flesh, the same resistance. I close my eyes and I feel your tan. The same tan.”

“The same?”

“As your sisters’.”

“Are you on about that again?”

“Ah no, lad, of course not. Slip on something from a polyethylene bag. We’ll kiss. You’ll drive in drag to Kansas City with me. We’ll stop at rest areas on the Interstates and neck. We’ll put two straws in our Coke. We’ll sip and giggle.”

“Jesus, Ben. I’m kinky? What are you?”

“A family man.” He raised his voice. “A family man. The whole damn Finsberg family. A family man!”

“Listen,” Irving said, “I’ll stay on until you can get someone else.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Or I’ll look. I’ll find somebody trustworthy.”

“Okay. All right. Whatever.” He was waving his right hand as if it had cramped, shaking it back and forth at chest level, clenching and unclenching his fist.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Paresthesia.” Ben started to laugh.

“What? What is it?”

“Poetic justice, symbolism. Irony and fate. Life’s rhyming couplets, its punch lines. The goblins that get you when you don’t watch out.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Needles and pins. What form does, what made us what we are today. Cloth of our cloth, etc. Me. I’m the Finsberg Memorial Library! They stitched it in my body and used my nerves for thread. I’m a fucking pin cushion!”

From Wolfe’s mouth to God’s ears.

He’d been driving for hours, on his way from his St. Cloud, Minnesota, Dairy Queen to his Mister Softee in Rapid City, South Dakota — his milk run, as he liked to call it. His right hand had fallen asleep and there was a sharp pain high up in the groin and thigh of his right side.

Mornings he’d been getting up with it. A numbness in his hand and hip, bad circulation, he thought, which left these damned cold zones, warm enough to the touch when he felt them with the freely circulating blood in the fingers of his left hand or lifted his right hand to his face, but, untouched, like icy patches deep in his skin. Perhaps his sleeping habits had changed. Almost unconsciously now he found the right side of the bed. In the night, sleeping alone, even without a twin or triplet beside him, the double bed to himself, some love-altered principle of accommodation or tropism in his body taking him from an absent configuration of flesh to a perimeter of the bed, a yielding without its necessity or reason, a submission and giving way to — to what? (And even in his sleep, without naming them, he could tell them apart.) To ride out the night sidesaddle on his own body. (No godfather Julius he, not set in his ways, unless this were some new mold into which he was pouring himself.) Pressing his head — heavy as Gertrude’s marrowless bones — like a nighttime tourniquet against the flesh of his arm, drawing a knee as high up as a diver’s against his belly and chest, to wake in the morning cut off, the lines down and trailing live wires from the heavy storm of his own body. Usually, as the day wore on, the sensation wore off, but never completely, some sandy sensitivity laterally vestigial across the tips of his fingers, the sharp pain in the region of his thigh blunted, like a suction cup on the tip of a toy arrow. Bad circulation. Bad.

Unless. Unless — Unless from Wolfe’s mouth to God’s ears.

He checked into the Hotel Rushmore in Rapid City and asked the clerk for a twin-bedded room. And then, seeing the width of the single bed, requested a rollaway be brought, narrower still. This an experiment. In the narrow bed no place to go, his body occupying both perimeters at once, returned as it had been in the days before he’d shared beds, the pillow beneath his head almost the width of the bed itself, tethered by a perfect displacement, lying, it could be, on his own shadow. But in the morning the sensation still there, if anything worse, not to be shaken off. (Never to be shaken off.)

And a new discovery. At Mister Softee handling the tan cardboard carton of popsicles, as cold to the touch of his right hand as dry ice. He thought his blood had thickened and frozen. Something was wrong.

He got the name of a doctor from his Mister Softee manager, saw Dr. Gibberd that afternoon, and was oddly moved when the doctor told him that he would like him to go into Rapid City General for observation.

A black woman took him in a wheelchair to his bed.

It was very strange. Having voluntarily admitted himself to the hospital, having driven there under his own steam — his 1971 Caddy was parked in the Visitors’ lot — and answered all the questions put to him by the woman at the Admissions Desk, showing them his Blue Cross and Blue Shield cards, his yellow Major Medical, he had become an instant invalid, something seductively agreeable to him as he sat back in the old wheelchair and allowed himself to be shoved up ramps and maneuvered backward — his head and shoulders almost on a level with his knees — across the slight gap between the lobby carpet and the hard floor of an elevator and pushed through what he supposed was the basement, past the kitchens and laundry rooms, past the nurses’ cafeteria and the vending machines and the heating plant, lassitude and the valetudinarian on him like climate, though he had almost forgotten his symptoms.

“Where are we going? Is it much farther?”

“No. We almost there.” She shoved the brass rod on a set of blue fire doors and they moved across a connector through a second set of fire doors and past a nurses’ station, and entered a long, cinder-block, barracks-like ward in which there were perhaps fifteen widely spaced beds down each side of a broad center aisle. Except for what might be behind a folding screen at the far end of the ward, the beds were all empty, the mattresses doubled over on themselves.

“This is the boondocks,” Ben said. “Is it a new wing?”

“You got to ask your doctor is it a new wing,” she said and left him.

A young nurse came and placed a hospital gown across the back of the wheelchair. She asked Ben if he needed help. He said no but had difficulty with his shirt buttons. Unless he actually saw his fingers on them, he could not be sure he was holding them.

“Here,” she said, “let me.” She stooped before him and undid the buttons. She unfastened his belt. “Can you get your zipper?”

“Oh sure.” But touching the metal was like sticking his hand into an electric socket. The nurse made up the bed. He sat back down in the chair and, watching the fingers on his right hand, carefully attempted to interlace them with the fingers on his left.

“Modest?”

Ben nodded. It was not true. In sickness he understood what he never had in health, that his body, anyone’s, everyone’s, was something for the public record, something accountable like books for audit, like deeds on file in county courthouses. If he was ashamed it was because he couldn’t work his fingers. He stood to take off his pants and shorts. Then he smiled.

“Yes?”

“I was just thinking,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I’m Mister Softee.” She turned away and completed the last hospital corner. “No,” Ben said, “I am. I have the local Mister Softee franchise. It’s ice cream.” She folded the sheets back. “It’s true. Anytime you want a Mister Softee, just go down and ask Zifkovic.

Zifkovic’s my manager.”

“Please put your gown on.”

“Tell him Ben Flesh sent you,” he said and burst into tears.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Ben said, “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

“That’s why you’re here,” she said, “so we can find out.” She helped him out of the chair gently, unfolded and held open the gown for him. “Just step into it,” she said, “just put your arms through the sleeves.” He had to make a fist with his right hand so his fingers wouldn’t touch the rough fabric. She came toward him with the gown. His penis moved against her uniform. “Can you turn around?” she said. “I’ll tie you up the back.”

“I can turn around.” He was crying again.

“Please,” she said, “please don’t do that. You mustn’t be afraid. You’re going to be fine.”

“I can turn around. See?” he sobbed. “Is it smeared? My ass? What there is of it. All belly, no ass. Is it smeared? Is it smeared with shit? Sometimes, I don’t know, I try, I try to wipe myself. Sometimes I’m careless.”

“You’re fine,” she said. “You’re just fine. Please,” she said, “if you shake like that, I won’t be able to tie your gown for you.”

“No? You won’t?” He couldn’t stop sobbing. He was grateful they were alone. “So I’d have to be naked. How would that be? This — this body na-naked. Wouldn’t that be something — thing? No ass, just two fl-flabby gray pouches and this wi-wide tor-tors-torso. They say if you can squeeze a half inch of flab between your forefinger and thumb you’re — you’re too fat. What’s this? Three in-in-inch-ches? What does that make me? I never looked like you’re supposed to look on the — on the beach. I’ve got this terrible body. Well, I’m not the franchise man for nothing. It’s — it’s like any middle-age man’s. I’m so white.”

“Stop,” she demanded. “You just control yourself.”

“Yeah? What’s that? Shock therapy? Thanks, I needed that? Well, why not? Sure. Thanks, I needed that.” He turned to face her. He raised his gown. “Flesh the flasher!” He was laughing. “See? I’ve got this tiny weewee, this undescended cock.”

“If you can’t control yourself,” she said.

“What? You’ll call for help? Lady, you just saw for yourself. You don’t need help. You could take me.” He sat on the side of the bed, his legs spread wide, his elbows on his thighs, and his head in his palms. But he was calm. “I just never took care of the goddamned thing, my body. I just never took care of it. And the only thing that counts in life is life. You jog?” he asked suddenly.

“What’s that?”

“Do you jog?”

“Yes.”

“I knew. I knew you did. You smoke?”

“No.”

“Right. That’s right. Ship-fucking shape.”

“I think one of the interns…”

“No,” he said calmly, “I’m okay now. No more opera. But you know? I hate joggers. People who breathe properly swimming, who flutter kick. Greedy. Maybe flab is a sign of character and shapelessness is grace. Sure. The good die young, right?”

“Why do you loathe your body so?”

“What’d it ever do for me?”

“Will you be all right now?”

“I told you. Yes. Yeah.” He got into bed. When he pulled the covers up his hand tingled. The nurse turned to go. “Listen,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Tell Gibberd he can skip the preliminaries, all the observation shit. Tell him to get out his Nation’s Leading Crippler of Young Adults kit. The kid’s got M.S.”

“You don’t know what you have.”

“Yes. Wolfe the specialist told me. He gave me egg salad and set me straight.”

The nurse left him. He tried to feel his pulse with the fingers of his right hand and couldn’t. He did five-finger exercises, reaching for the pulse in his throat, his hand doing rescue work, sent down the carefully chiseled tunnels of disaster in a mine shaft, say, to discover signs of life. He brought the fingers away from his neck and waved to the widows. He placed three fingers of his good hand along a finger of his right and, closing his eyes, tried to determine the points where they touched. He couldn’t, felt only a suffused, generalized warmth in the deadened finger. He took some change the nurse had put with his watch and wallet in the nightstand by his bed and distributed it on his blanket around his chest and stomach. Still with his eyes closed, he tried to feel for the change and pick it up. He couldn’t. He opened his eyes, scooped up a nickel, a dime, and a quarter with his left hand and put them in the palm of his right hand. Closing his eyes again, he very carefully spilled two of the coins onto the blanket — he could determine this by the sound — and made a fist about the coin still in his hand. Concentrating as hard as he had ever concentrated on anything in his life, and trapping the coin under his thumb, he rubbed it up his forefinger, trying to determine the denomination of the remaining coin. It’s the dime, he decided. He was positive. Yes. It’s the dime. The inside of his thumb still had some sensitivity. (Though he couldn’t be sure, he thought he had felt a trace of pulse under his thumb when he had held the dead necklace of his right hand against his throat.) Definitely the dime. He opened his eyes. His hand was empty. He shoved the change back in the nightstand and closed the drawer.

“I say, are you really Mister Softee?” The voice was British and came from behind the screen at the far end of the ward.

“Who’s that? Who’s there?”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Jolly good. They’re rather splendid.”

“Thanks.”

“Mister Softee.” The name was drawn out, contemplated, pronounced as if it were being read from a marquee. “Apropos too, yes?”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, after your performance just now for Sister, I should have thought that would be obvious, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m sick.”

“Not to worry,” the invisible Englishman said cheerfully. “We’re all sick here.” Ben looked around the empty ward. “Sister was right, you know. You are going to be fine. You’re in the best tropical medicine ward in either Dakota.”

“This is a tropical medicine ward?”

“Oh yes. Indeed. One of the finest in the Dakotas.”

“Jesus,” Ben said, “a tropical medicine ward.”

“Top drawer. Up there with the chief in Rapid City.”

“What do you have?” Ben asked.

“One saw you through the crack where the panels of my screen are joined. One saw everything. One saw your bum. It is smeared, rather. What do I have? Lassa fever, old thing. Came down with a touch of it last year. Year it was discovered actually. In Nigeria. Odd that. Well, I wasn’t in Nigeria. I was in Belize, Brit Honduras, with RAF. What I meant was, Lassa fever was discovered in Nigeria. Trouble with a clipped rather precise way of talking, articles left out, references left dangling, pronouns understood, is that it’s often imprecise actually, rather.”

“What was odd?”

“Beg pardon?”

“You said, ‘Odd that.’ What was odd?”

“Oh. Sorry. Well. That a disease could be said to be discovered. Of course all that’s usually meant is that they’ve isolated a particular virus. But I mean, if you think about it the virus must have been there all along, mustn’t it? And I should have thought that people, well, you know, natives, had been coming down with the bloody thing since ages. I mean, when Leif Erikson, or whoever, was discovering your States, some poor devil must have had all the symptoms of Lassa fever, even dying from it, too, very probably, without ever knowing that that’s what was killing him because the disease had never been named, you see. Now it has. Officially, I’m only the ninth case — oh yes, I’m in the literature — but I’ll bet populations have died of it.”

“I don’t think I understand what—”

“Well, only that I know where I stand, don’t I? Just as you, if you were right about yourself, know where you stand. Is that an advantage? I wonder. Quite honestly I don’t know. Yes, and that’s strange, too, isn’t it, that I know things but don’t know what to make of them? Incubation period one week. Very well. Weakness? Check. Myositis? Check. And the fever of course. And ulcerative pharyngitis with oral lesions. Yellow centers and erythemystositic halos. Rather like one of your lovely Mister Softee concoctions rather. Myocarditis, check. Pneumonitis, pleuritis, encephalophitathy, hemorrhagic diathesis? Check. Well, check some, most. What the hell? Check them all. Sooner or later they’ll come. I mean I expect they will. Gibberd’s been very straight with me. I think it pleases him how classic my case has been. Yet one can’t tell, can one? I mean, what about the sleeplessness? I sleep like a top. I was sleeping when you were brought in, wasn’t I? It was only your racket woke me. Well, what about the sleeplessness? Or the slurred speech? One has some things but not others. There was the headache and leg rash and even the swollen face, but where was the leg pain? And this is the point, I think: What I have is incurable and generally fatal. Generally fatal? Generally? Fatal? Will this classic condition kill me or not? Incurable. Always incurable. But only generally fatal. Oh, what a hopeful world it is! Even in hospital. So no more racket, you understand? No more whimpering and whining. Be hard, Mister Softee!”

“All right,” Ben said.

“Yes, well,” his roommate said. “Are you ambulatory? I couldn’t really tell. I saw you stand. But I saw Sister help. Are you? Ambulatory?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, good. I wonder if I could trouble you to come back of the screen. One is rather in need of help.”

“You want me to come back there?”

“If you would. If it isn’t too much bother. Oh, I see. The contagion. Well. There’s nothing to fear. Lassa can’t be contracted from anyone who’s had the disease for more than thirty-two days. One’s had it a year and a half.”

One could call the nurse, Ben thought. I have been orphaned and I have been blinded. I am Mister Softee here and Chicken from the Colonel there. Godfathers have called me to their deathbeds to change my life and all this has been grist for my character. I am in one of the go-ahead tropical medicine wards in Rapid City, South Dakota, and a Lassa fever pioneer needs my help. Oh well, he thought, and left his bed and proceeded down the long empty ward toward the screen at its rear. He stood by the screened-in sick man.

“Yes?” Ben said.

“What, here so soon? Well, you are ambulatory. Good show, Mister Softee! I’m Flight Lieutenant Tanner incidentally. Well then, could you come back of the screen, please just?”

“Come back of it.”

“Yes. Would you just?”

Flesh went behind the screen. The Englishman was seated beside his bed in a steel wheelchair. Heavy leather straps circled his weakened chest and wrapped his flaccid legs to hold him upright in it. Flesh looked down meekly at the mandala of spokes, then at the Englishman’s bare arms along the chair’s wide rests. They were smeared with a perspiration of blood. Tiny droplets of blood freckled the man’s forehead, discrete reddish bubbles mitigated by sweat and barely deeper in color than blown bubble gum. A sort of bloodfall trickled like tears from the hollow beneath his left eye and out over the cheekbone and down his face.

“Leukopenia, check,” the Englishman said.

“My God, you’re bleeding all over.”

“No. Not actually bleeding, old fellow. It’s a sort of capillary action. It’s complicated rather, but the blood is forced out the pores. It’s all explained in the literature. Gibberd told me I might expect it. It was jolly good luck your happening to be by. There’s a box of Kleenex in that nightstand there. Would you mind? If you’ll just tamp at the bloody stuff. Oh, I say, forgive that last, would you just? I should have thought to think that would do me rather nicely.”

“Maybe I’d better call the nurse.”

“She’s rather busy, I should expect. There are people who really need help, for whom help is of some help, as it were. As I don’t seem to be one of them — incurable, generally fatal, I’m taking the darker view just now, old boy — I should think you would have thought we might work this out between ourselves.”

“Yeah, between ourselves,” Ben said. “Pip.” He took the Kleenex and began to dab at the man’s skin.

“There’s a good fellow. That’s got the arm, I think,” the Englishman said.

“This never happened before?”

“No no. Absolutely without precedent. I say, do you realize?”

“What?”

“That if this disease really was discovered in 1970—well, it was, of course, but I mean if it didn’t exist before 1970—why, then I’m only the ninth person to have experienced this particular symptom. We’re breaking freshish ground here, you and I.”

Ben, working on the bloodfall at its headwaters just under the Englishman’s left eye, started to gag. He brought the bloodied Kleenex up to his lips.

“Be firm, Mister Softee.” Ben swallowed and looked at him.

“I think that’s it, rather,” Ben said quietly.

“Yes, well, it would be, wouldn’t it, except that the insides of my thighs seem a bit sticky.”

“No no. I mean that’s it. Generally fatal. I’m taking the lighter view. I’m calling the nurse.”

“Mister Softee.”

“What?”

“We’ve the same doctor.”

The same spring that Ben Flesh lay in the tropical medicine ward of Rapid City General — the prime interest rate was 6³/₄ percent — a record heat wave hit the northern tier of the central plains states. Extraordinary demands on the energy supplies caused breakdowns and brownouts all over. The hospital had its own auxiliary generator, but the power situation was so precarious that the use of electricity, even there, was severely cut back, if not curtailed entirely. There was no electricity to run the patients’ television sets, none for air conditioning in any but the most crowded wards, or in those rooms where the heat posed a threat to the lives of the patients. It was forbidden to burn reading lights, or to play radios that did not run on batteries. All available electricity was directed toward keeping the lights and equipment in good order in the operating theaters, maintaining the kitchens with their washers and driers, their toasters and refrigeration units (even at that Flesh suspected that much of what he ate was tainted or turning), to chilling those medications that required it, to operating the laundry services (though the sheets were changed now every third or fourth day instead of daily), and to keeping the power-hungry instruments going that analyzed blood and urine samples and evaluated the more complicated chemistries and tests. The X-ray machines, which required massive doses of electricity, were now used only for emergencies and only the dialysis machine and iron lung, top priorities, were unaffected by the brownout. Even electroshock therapy was suspended for all but the most violent cases, and Flesh was kept awake nights by the shrieks and howls of the nearby mad, people so far gone in their terror and delusion that even powerful tranquilizers like Thorazine were helpless to calm them.

“It isn’t the heat,” the Englishman said, as they both lay awake one night while the screams of crazed patients in an adjacent ward came through their open windows. (The windows had to be opened, of course, to catch whatever breeze might suddenly stir.) “It’s the humidity drives them bonkers.”

“They were already bonkers,” Flesh said irritably.

“That exacerbated it then,” the Englishman said just as irritably.

“Shit.”

“You know,” the Englishman said, “I don’t remember heat like this even in Brit Honduras.”

“Brit Honduras, Brit Honduras. Why can’t you say British Honduras like everybody else?”

“Everyone in RAF called it Brit Honduras.”

“And that’s another thing — Raf. Can’t you say R.A.F. like any normal human being?”

“I’ll say what I bloody well please.”

“Then be consistent. Say ‘Craf.’ ” (The Englishman had been on detached duty with the Canadians at their air base in Brandon, Manitoba, when the first symptoms of his Lassa fever had begun to manifest themselves.)

“Why should one say ‘Craf’ when it’s the Royal Canadian Air Force? I should have thought you would have heard of the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises. I’d have to say ‘RCAF,’ wouldn’t I? The whole point of an acronym is to save time. One could, I suppose, say ‘R-caf.’ That might be all right, I should think. Yes. ‘R-caf.’ That’s not bad. It has a ring, just. One could say that.”

“Don’t say anything.”

“I say. Are you saying, don’t say anything?”

“Don’t say bloody anything. Shut bloody up. Go to sleep just. Close your eyes and count your symptoms, check.”

“Well, we are in a temper. You’re bloody cheeky, Yank.”

“ ‘Yank.’ Jesus. Where’d you train, on the playing fields of the back lot? Why don’t they run my tests? I know what I have anyway. Why don’t they read the lumbar puncture thing?”

“Well, they’ve their priorities, haven’t they? The lumbar puncture. That was manly. You screaming like a banshee. Louder than our lunatic friends.”

“That needle was big as a pencil.”

“ ‘Please stop. Please! Oh goddamn it. Oh Jesus. Oh shit. Oh fuck.’ Oh me. Oh my. Oh dear. Be adamant, Mister Softee. Be infrangible. Be stiff, Mister Softee. Be obdurate, be corn, be kibe!”

Flesh shut his eyes against Tanner’s taunts and took the darker view. “I’m taking the darker view,” he said quietly. “I’m taking the darker view because I’m going to kill him.”

In the morning the nurse came for Ben with a wheelchair. It was more than a hundred degrees in the ward.

“Is it my tests? Are my tests back?”

“You have a phone call. You can take it at the nurses’ station.”

“A phone call? Gibberd?”

“No.”

“I can’t think who it could be. No one knows I’m here. Is it a woman?”

“A man.”

She wheeled Ben to the phone and put the receiver in his left hand.

“Mr. Flesh?”

“Yes?”

“Zifkovic.”

He’d forgotten about his manager. “Yes, Zifkovic, what is it?”

“How you feeling, sir?”

“The same. I’m waiting for my test results. Is anything wrong?”

“The stuff’s all turned, sir. It’s rancid glop. There must be a ton of it. The Mister Softee’s all melted and running. We were working with ice for a time but I can’t get no more. It’s a high tide of ruined vanilla. The fruit flavors are staining everything in sight. I got the girls working on it with pails and mops but they can’t keep up. A truck come down from Fargo with a new shipment today. I told him that with this heat wave we couldn’t accept, but he just dumped it anyway. It’s outside now. A whole lake of the shit. What should I do, Mr. Flesh? Mr. Flesh?”

“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.

But his body — he’d been sick, he’d been in hospital, M.S. was a stress disease — couldn’t adjust to the new hours and he had to return to the old pattern of traveling the highways during the day, thinking to change directions when the radio told him of the brownouts in western Nebraska — he’d been heading for Wyoming, for the high country, mountains, as if electricity followed the laws of gravity, pushing his Cadillac uphill (but that wasted gas, too, didn’t it?) toward the headwaters of force — and drop toward Kansas. He couldn’t decide. Then, on Interstate 80, he saw detour signs spring up sudden as targets in skeet, the metal diamonds of early warning. He slammed his brakes, slowed to fifty, forty, twenty-five, ten, as the road turned to gravel and dirt at the barricades and the traffic merged two ways. A tall girl in an orange hard hat stood lazily in the road holding up a heavy sign that said SLOW. Her bare arms, more heavily muscled than his own, rubbed death in his face. He yearned for her, her job, her indifference, her strength, her health. He stopped the car and got out. “Tell me,” he said, “are you from west of here or east?”

“What? Get back in your car, you’re tying up traffic.”

“Where do you live? West, east?”

“Get back in that car or I’ll drive it off into a field for you.”

“Look,” he said, “all I want…” She raised her arms, lifting her sign high and plunging its metal shaft into the earth, where it quivered for a moment and then stayed, stuck there like an act of state.

“You want to try me?” she threatened.

“I want to know if they’ve still got power west of here.”

“Power’s all out west of here. Get back in your car.” He lowered his eyes and returned to his car and, going forward slowly and slowly back, made a U-turn in the dirt and gravel narrows.

“Hey,” the tall girl shouted. “What the hell—”

On the sixth day, on Interstate 70, between Russell and Hays — the radio was silent — he looked out the window and was cheered to see oil rigs — he remembered what they were called: “donkey pumps”—pumping up oil from the farmers’ fields, the ranchers’. The pumps drove powerful and slow as giant pistons, turning like the fat metal gear on locomotives just starting up. Ridiculous things in the open field, spaced in apparent random, some almost at the very edge of the highway, that dipped down toward the ground and up again like novelty birds into glasses of water. Abandoned, churning everywhere unsupervised and unattended for as far as he could see, they gave him an impression of tremendous reservoirs of power, indifferent opulence, like cars left standing unlocked and keys in the ignition. There was no brownout here. (Of course, he thought, priorities: oil for the lamps of Asia, for the tanks and planes of political commitment and intervention. Flesh was apolitical but nothing so drove home to him the sense of his nation’s real interests as the sight of these untended donkey pumps in these obscure Kansas fields. Wichita had been without electricity for two days while the thirsty monsters of vacant west central Kansas used up enough to sustain a city of millions.) He pulled off the Interstate at Hays and went up the exit ramp, heading for the Texaco station, the sign for which, high as a three-story building, he had seen a mile off, a great red star standing in the daylight.

It wasn’t open.

He crossed the road and drove to the entrance of a Best Western Motel. He went inside. The lobby was dark. At the desk, the cashier was preparing a guest’s bill by hand. “Is that what you get?” They checked the addition together.

“I guess,” the man said.

“Did you want to register, sir?” the clerk asked Ben.

“What’s happening? Why are the lights out? Is your air conditioning working? The TV? What about the restaurant? Will I be able to get a hot meal? Is there iced coffee?”

“There’s a power failure,” the clerk said. “We can put you up but I’m afraid all the electric is out. You’ll have to pay by credit card because we can’t get into the register to make change.”

“But the pumps,” Ben said. “All those pumps are going. I saw them myself. There can’t be a brownout. What about those pumps?”

“Those are driven by gasoline engines,” the clerk said.

“Oh,” Flesh said, “gas. Jesus, that never occurred to me.”

“Did you want a room, sir? There’s no air conditioning but you can cool off in the pool. Usually there’s no swimming after 9 p.m., but because of the power failure we’re going to keep it open all night.”

“There’s no filtration,” Flesh said. “It’s stagnant water. There’s no filtration. It’s kids’ pee and melted Mister Softees and gallons of sweat.”

“It’s heavily chlorinated, mister. It’s been supershocked plenty. We’re spending a fortune on chlorine and pH minus.”

He stayed. He stayed because in an odd way the clerk spoke his language and Flesh had caught hints in the man’s speech of his own concerns and obsessions. The motel people had made, he suspected, on their level, the preparations he had made on his. There would be a ton of ice to preserve their meats and keep their Cokes cold. There would be flashlights and extra batteries — candles would be too dangerous, Coleman lamps would — on the nightstand and on the sink in the bathroom. He signed the registration card in the gathering dusk.

That was not the first time he was fooled. Two days before he had left Interstate 80 at North Platte, Nebraska, and doubled back east along U.S. 30 to Grand Island. It had already turned dark in Grand Island. The phones were working and he called Nebraska Power and Light. This wasn’t a power failure but a localized brownout; he was told that the electricity would be back on by morning. He decided to continue driving. If the brownouts were localized he could probably find a town farther on where there was still juice. He consulted his Shell and Phillips and Mobil maps of Nebraska by the beam of his flashlight. His best bet would be to leave U.S. 30 and get onto 34. That way, heading toward Lincoln, he would hit Aurora and York — York showing in fairly large type on Shell and Mobil — and then Seward, then Lincoln itself. If nothing happened by Seward, State Route 15 looked promising. He could head north to David City and Schuyler or south to the junction with U.S. 6, leave 15, and continue on 6 the three miles to Milford or the twelve to Friend. He would keep his options open. At Schuyler, if nothing was happening, he could get back on U.S. 30 and head west again to Columbus, represented on all the maps in type just a little less bold than Grand Island itself.

That’s what he did finally. It was very dark now. There was absolutely no moon. It seemed odd to Flesh that after days of such horrendous sunlight there would be no moonlight at all. Did that mean there were clouds? Was the weather about to break? (Yet the air felt no heavier; he could not perceive heat lightning.) He drove with his brights on. State Route 15 was unimproved road, paved, but gravel kept spitting itself at the Cadillac, putting great pits in its body and undercarriage. The gas gauge was dangerously close to empty, and Flesh pulled off to an improved county road that he would have not seen at all if he had not had his brights on. He stopped the car and went with his flashlight to the trunk. This was the first time he had had to use any of the gas from the five-gallon cans. As he emptied each can he got back into the driver’s seat and read the gas gauge. Five gallons was a spit in the bucket to the huge Cadillac tank and he found that he had to empty four cans and part of a fifth before the gauge read Full. This left him with only three and a fraction cans in reserve — he had not yet purchased all twelve five-gallon cans — perhaps seventeen or eighteen gallons at the most.

He closed the lids on the empty cans as tight as he could — this pained him, aggravating his M.S. as any contact with metal did — and returned to his car. Somehow he forgot what he was about and continued by mistake for perhaps three miles on the dirt road. The sheer comfort of the ride on the dry, packed dirt — it was like riding on velvet, the smoothest journey he had ever taken — lulled him, so that finally it was his comfort itself that warned him of his danger, that taught him he was lost. Oh, oh, he mourned when he discovered what had happened. A pretty pass, a pretty pass when well-being has been so long absent from me that when I feel it it comes as an alarm, it a symptom. He looked for some place he could turn the car around and came at last to a turnoff for a farm. Dogs howled when he pulled into the driveway. He saw their grim and angry faces in his headlamps and feared for both them and himself when they disappeared from sight — moving as slowly as I am, they will be at my tires now — dreading the thump that would signal he had killed one. But he managed to turn back up the dirt road he had come down — it no longer seemed so comfortable a ride — and regained State Route 15, turning north toward Schuyler.

As he had feared, Schuyler — allowed only the faintest print on the map, and not on the Shell map at all — was nothing but a crossroads, a gas station, a tavern, a couple of grocery stores, an International Harvester Agency, and three or four other buildings, a grange, a picture show, a drugstore, some other things he could not identify in the dark, homes perhaps, or a lawyer’s or a doctor’s office. He stopped the car to consult his map again.

It would have to be Columbus, eighteen miles west. The 1970 census put the population at 15,471. A good-sized town, a small city, in fact. Sure. Very respectable. He had high hopes for Columbus and turned on the radio. He could not pull in Columbus but he was not discouraged. It was past 2 a.m. after all. Good-sized town or not, these were solid working people. They would have no need or use for an all-night radio station. He started the engine again and swung left onto U.S. 30. (U.S. 30, yes! A good road, a respectable road, a first-class road. It went east all the way to Aurora, Illinois, where it spilled into the Interstates and big-time toll roads that slip into Chicago. It paralleled Interstate 80 and even merged with it at last and leaped along with it across 90 percent of Wyoming, touching down at all the big towns, Cheyenne and Laramie and Rawlins and Rock Springs, before striking off north on its own toward Boise and Pocatello and west to Portland in Oregon. He was satisfied with U.S. 30. U.S. 30 was just the thing. It would absolutely lead him out of the wilderness. He was feeling good.) And when he swung west onto 30 and got a better view of the Schuyler gas station, he saw the pump in the sway of his headlights. The pump!

Good God, what a jerk he’d been! Of course. Oh, this night had taught him a lesson all right! That he need never fear the lack of gas again. All he had to do when the gauge got low was to head for the hick towns with their odd old-fashioned gas pumps that didn’t give a shit for brownouts or power failures, that worked by — what? — hydraulics, principles of physics that never let you down, capillary action, osmosis, all that sort of thing. He was absolutely cheerful as he tooled along toward Columbus. He was tired and grotty, but he knew that as soon as he hit Columbus things would work themselves out. He would get the best damn motel room in town. If they had a suite — sure, a town like that, better than fifteen thousand, certainly they would have suites — he’d take that. He would sleep, if he wished, with the lights on all night. There was electricity to burn — ha ha — in Columbus. He felt it in his bones.

And sure enough. In fifteen minutes his brights picked up the light-reflecting city-limits sign of Columbus, Nebraska — population 15,471, just like the map said — touched the glass inset sign and seemed to turn it on as you would turn on an electric light. And just past it, somewhere off to his left — and this must still be the outskirts — two great shining lights. Probably a party. Two-thirty and probably a party. Oh, what a live-wire town Columbus! He would have to build a franchise here. Tomorrow he’d scout it and decide what kind. Meanwhile, on a whim, tired as he was, he turned left on the street where the two great lights were burning and drove toward them.

He seemed to be driving down an incline in a sort of park. Probably it wasn’t a party as he’d first suspected. Probably it was the Columbus, Nebraska, Tourist Information Center. But open at night? Jesus, what a town! What a live wire, go-to-hell-god-damn-it town!

Then he was perhaps a hundred or so feet from the lights and in a kind of circular parking lot. He parked and took his flashlight and walked toward the lights.

It was not until he was almost upon them that he saw that they were not electric lights at all, that he saw that they were flickering, that he saw that they were flames, that he saw that they bloomed like two bright flowers from twin pots sunk into the ground, that he saw that they were set beside a brass plaque, that he saw the inscription on the plaque and read that these twin combustions were eternal flames in memory of the dead and missing Columbus Nebraskans of World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam.

“Oh,” he groaned aloud, “oh God, oh my God, oh my, my God, oh, oh.” And he wept, and his weeping was almost as much for those Columbus Nebraskans as it was for himself. His cheerfulness before, his elevated mood, was it the euphoria? Was it? No, it couldn’t have been. It was too soon. Maybe it was only his hope. He hoped it was his hope. Maybe that’s all it was and not the euphoria. Feel, feel his tears. He was not euphoric now. His disappointment? No, no, disappointment could not disappoint euphoria. No. He was sad and depressed, so he was still well. Hear him moan, feel his tears, how wet. Taste them, how salty. He remembered, as he was admonished by the inscription on the plaque, the dead soldiers and sailors and marines and coast guardsmen of Columbus who had died in the wars to preserve his freedom. He remembered good old Tanner, dead himself perhaps in Rapid City General, and the father of the kid — though he’d only heard about him — who started his car for him, the man with the heart attack. He prayed that the lie he’d told was true, that the boy’s father’s cardiograms had stabilized. (He was sorry he’d lied to the boy. See? He was sorry. He felt bad. How’s that euphoric?) He recalled the boy himself, the broken-field runner.

“Oh, Christ,” he said, “I, I am the broken-field runner. I, Flesh, am the broken broken-field runner and tomorrow I will look at the map and see where I must go to stop this nonsense and wait out this spell of crazy weather.”

Except for the eternal flames, Columbus was black till the sun rose.

So it was not the first time he was fooled. Nor the last.

The last — he stayed on three days in Hays, Kansas, because in the morning the power came back on; he was very tired, exhausted; he needed the rest — was the evening of the day he decided to leave Hays. At five o’clock the power failed again. Rested — he felt he could drive at night once more — he climbed back into the Cadillac and returned to Interstate 70. His gas cans — screw the hick pumps, he’d decided, and had accumulated the twelve cans by then and had had them filled — were in the trunk, his grips and garment bags again on the backseat. He’d eaten at the motel and was ready for the long drive west. (He’d decided to go to Colorado Springs.)

After the layover in Hays it was pleasant to be back on the highway again, pleasant to be driving in the dark, pleasant to be showered, to wear fresh linen, to be insulated from the heat wave in the crisp, sealed environment of the air-conditioned car, to read the soft illuminated figures on the dash, the glowing rounds and ovals like electric fruit.

He leaned forward and turned on the radio, fiddled with the dial that brought up the rear speakers, and blended the sound with those in front. His push buttons, locked in on New York and Chicago stations, yielded nothing but a mellow — he’d adjusted the treble, subordinating it to the bass — static, not finally unpleasant, reassuring him of the distant presence of energies, of storms, far off perhaps but hinting relief. He listened for a while to the sky and then turned the manual dial, surgical — and painful, too; this was his right hand — as a ham, fine tuning, hoping to hone a melody or a human voice from the smear of sound. It was not yet nine o’clock but there was nothing — only more sky.

But of course. I’m on FM, he realized when he had twice swung the dial across its keyboard of wavelength. He switched to AM and moved the dial even more slowly. Suddenly, somewhere in the soprano, a voice broke in commandingly, overriding the static and silence. Flesh turned up the treble. It was a talk show, the signal so firm that Ben assumed — he had left Kansas and crossed the Colorado line — it was Denver.

“The Dick Gibson Show. Go ahead, please, you’re on the air.”

“Hello?”

“Hello. Go ahead, please.”

“Am I on the air? I hear this guy.”

“Sir, turn your radio down.”

“I can hear this guy talking. Hello? Hello?”

“Turn your radio down or I’ll have to go to another caller.”

“Hello?”

“We’ll go to a commercial.”

There was a pause. Then this announcement:

“Tired of your present job? Do you find the routine boring and unchallenging? Are you underpaid or given only the most menial tasks? Then a job with the Monsanto Company may be just what you’re looking for. Monsanto Chemical has exciting openings with open-ended opportunities for men and women who have had two years’ experience in the field of Sensory Physiology or at least one year of advanced laboratory work in research neurophysiology. Preferential treatment will be given to qualified candidates with a background in ethnobotany and experimental cell biology, and we are particularly interested in specialists holding advanced degrees in such areas as the determination of crystal structures by X-ray analysis, kinetics and mechanism, or who have published widely in the fields of magnetic resonance, molecular orbital theory, quantum chemistry, and the nuclear synthesis of organic compounds. Applicants will be expected to have a high degree of competence in structure and spectra and advanced statistical mechanics. Monsanto is an equal-opportunity employer.”

“The Dick Gibson Show. You’re on the air, go ahead, please.”

“Dick?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dick, I’ve had this fabulous experience and I want to share it with your audience. I mean it’s a believe-it-or-not situation, a one-in-a-million thing. It’s practically a miracle. Can I share this with your audience, Dick?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Yes. Thank you. Well, to begin at the beginning, I’m a brother.”

“A brother.”

“Yeah. But you see my parents split up when I was still a little kid and then my mom died and my father was too sick to take care of us, so my brother and me were farmed out to different relatives. What I mean is, I went with my mother’s sister, my aunt, but she couldn’t take care of the both of us so my brother went with an older cousin. I was six and my brother he must have been around eight at the time. Well, my aunt married a soldier and they adopted me legally and he was transferred and we pulled up our roots and we moved with him, and I was, you know, what do they call it, an army brat, going from post to post with my aunt and my new father, the corporal. He was a thirty-year man and we like traveled all over, pulling up our roots every three years or so, and when I was old enough to leave the nest I got a job with this company, and as time went on I met a girl and we dated for a while and finally we decided to get married. Now we have children of our own, a boy seven and a cute little girl four.

“Well, sir, I’m with the J. C. Penney store, and I made a good record and Penney’s opened up a new store in the suburbs and about a year ago my department head asked me if I’d consider moving to the new store with the idea in mind that I could train the new kitchen-appliance salesmen and be the head of the department and run my own ship. Well, of course when an opportunity like that opens up, you jump at it. Opportunity knocks but once, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Dick Gibson said. “What are you getting at, please?”

“You mean the miracle?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s what I was getting at. Yesterday a guy comes in for a present for his wife’s birthday. He was thinking in terms of a toaster, but he didn’t know exactly what model he had in mind, so I asked him if he had kids and he said yeah, he had two kids, twin boys, ten years old. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘in that case you probably want the four-slice toaster.’ That’s our Ezy-Clean pop-up job with an adjustable thermostat control and a crumb tray that opens for easy cleaning in a handsome chrome-plated steel exterior. I have the same toaster in my kitchen.”

“Yes?”

“Oh yeah. So he asked to see it and I showed it to him and I told him that he could compare it to any model on the market at the price and it couldn’t be beat and that’s the truth. Well, to make a long story short, he went for it. I mean, it was just what he had in mind without knowing it and I asked, as I always do, if it would be cash or charge. He said charge. I asked if he wanted to take it with or have it sent. He said take it with. So he gave me his charge plate, and when I went to my machine to write up the sales slip, I couldn’t help but notice when I read his charge plate that he was my brother.”

“Really?”

“My long-lost brother.”

“That is a coincidence.”

“Wait. When I went back, I was like shaking all over and he noticed it and he asked what was wrong and I said, ‘Are you Ronald L. Pipe?’ And he says, ‘Yes. What about it?’ And I tell him, I tell him I’m Lou B. Kramer!”

“Oh?”

“Well, I expected him to fall down in a dead faint, but he doesn’t bat an eye. Then I realize, I realize Kramer’s my adopted name, my stepfather’s name, the corporal’s.”

“The thirty-year man’s.”

“Right. And it’s been, what, twenty-eight years since we laid eyes on each other. He’s bald, and I’m prematurely gray and I’ve put on a little weight from all that toast. Of course we don’t recognize each other. So I tell him his history — our history — that when he was eight years old his folks split up and his mom passed away and he was raised by an older cousin. ‘Can this be?’ he asked. ‘How do you know this?’ And I explain everything, who I am and everything, and that if he’d paid cash or if it hadn’t been for my habit of reading my customers’ names off their Charge-a-Plates we’d never have found each other to this day.”

“Well,” Dick Gibson said.

“Wait. That’s just the beginning of the coincidence. I punched out early and we had a couple of beers together.”

“I see.”

“We both drink beer!”

“Gee.”

“We’re both married and have kids!”

“How do you like that?”

“His wife’s birthday is the day after tomorrow!”

“Oh?”

“My wife was born in the springtime, too!”

“Hmn.”

“We both bowl!”

“You both do?”

“I average 130, 135.”

“And he averages?”

“About 190.”

“Do you have anything else in common?”

“We’re both Democrats. Neither of us is a millionaire.”

“I see. Well, that’s really — I’m going to have to take another—”

“We both watch Monday-night football!”

“—another…”

“When we go out with our wives — when we go out with our wives—”

“Yes?”

“We both use babysitters!”

“…call.”

“Neither of us has been in prison; we both like thick juicy steaks. Dick, Dick, both of us, both of us drive!”

“Thank you, sir, for sharing your miracle. The Dick Gibson Show. You’re on the air, go ahead, please.”

Flesh couldn’t stop laughing. Things would work out. He left Interstate 70 and turned off onto U.S. 24 to drive the remaining eighty or so miles to Colorado Springs. At Peyton, Colorado, where his headlights ignited a sign that read COLORADO SPRINGS, 24 MILES, the signal was so powerful that he might have been in Chicago listening, say, to the local station of a major network.

When he was almost there, there was a station break. “This is Dick Gibson,” Dick Gibson said, “WMIA, Miami Beach.”

Then he panicked. It’s not, he thought, because it’s so close that it’s so clear, it’s because all the other stations have failed! It’s because America has everywhere failed, the power broken down!

And that, that, was the last time he was fooled.

Yet the lights were on in Colorado Springs.

Colorado Avenue was a garden of neon. The lights of the massage parlors burned like fires. The sequenced circuitry of the drive-ins and motels and theaters and bars was a contagion of light. A giant Big Boy’s statue illuminated by spots like a national monument. The golden Shell signs, an old Mobil Pegasus climbing invisible stairs in the sky. The traffic lights, red as bulbs in darkrooms, amber as lawn furniture, green as turf. The city itself, awash in light, suggested boardwalks, carnivals, steel piers, million-dollar miles, and, far off, private homes like upturned dominos or inverted starry nights. Down Cheyenne Mountain and Pikes Peak niagaras of lights were laid out like track. Don’t they know? he wondered. Is it Mardi Gras? Don’t they know? And he had a sense of connection, the roads that led to Rome, of nexus, the low kindling point of filament, of globe and tubing, as current poured in from every direction, rushing like electric water seeking its own level to ignite every conductor, conflagrating base metals, glass, the white lines down the centers of the avenues bright as tennis shoes, stone itself, the city a kind of full moon into which he’d come at last from behind its hidden darker side. The city like the exposed chassis of an ancient radio, its embered tubes and color-coded wire.

He drove to the Broadmoor Hotel and checked in. Only a suite was available. That was fine, he would take it. How long would he be staying? Open-ended. A bill would be presented every three days. That was acceptable. They did not honor credit cards. No problem. He would pay by check. He could give them two hundred dollars in cash right then if they liked. And was willing to show them his money. That wasn’t necessary. All right then. Could he get a bellboy to help with his bags? He was tired. Then he could go to his rooms at once. The boy would take his car keys and bring his bags up when he had parked Mr. Flesh’s car for him. Fine. His suite was in the new building. The new building, was that far? Oh no. Not at all. Another boy would show him the way. That was fine. That was just what he wanted.

He tipped his guide two dollars and sat on a Georgian chair by a white Georgian desk and put a call through to Riverdale.

He shoved the cartridge into the stereo and dedicated it aloud to Irving’s wife, Frances. My Fair Lady took him past St. Charles to Wentzville, Candide, played twice, to the Kingdom City exit, West Side Story to Columbia, where he ate lunch. He put his ’74 Cadillac through the Kwik Kar Wash. It cost him seventy-five cents and, as far as he could see, did no better job than his Robo-Wash in Washington, D.C., which took no longer and was a quarter cheaper. The difference — though there was no one ahead of him now — would have to be in customer convenience. His lot was shallower, the washbarn closer to the street. His customers, when there was a line, had to wait in the street. That meant a few bucks off the top to the cop every week. This guy’s machinery, set off to the side at the rear of his lot, permitted his customers to form a sort of U-shaped line, maybe eleven cars long, no, twelve or thirteen — he hadn’t allowed for the cars at the pit of the U — before they backed up into the street. Still, the sharp turn they had to make at the back of the lot to get into the barn must have chipped plenty of fenders. The management had put up a “Not Responsible” notice, but Flesh could guess how much that was worth. The insurance company would hassle him plenty, and why not? The customer couldn’t read the disclaimer until he had already committed himself, made or begun his turn into the narrow passageway, and it was too late, particularly if there was a strand of cars behind him, to back out. Sure. Six of one, half dozen of the other. The guy could keep his extra twenty-five cents. Flesh would rather deal with cops than insurance companies any day of the week.

What the hell was he thinking about? He’d dumped his Robo-Wash two years before. A mistake from the first. Strictly a novelty. A place to give kids the illusion — sitting in their cars while foamy water shot at them from all directions — that they were snugly drowning in the sea, and the illusion, as giant brushes like rolls of carpet rose up from the floor and left the wall, that they were being softly crushed. A novelty. A ride. Family entertainment. And never mind the self-creating traffic jams, not that there could have been that many. He’d picked a lousy location. Washington was black. Those people cared for their cars, polished them like flatware, either doing it themselves or, going the other way, springing for two-fifty and three-dollar jobs. He couldn’t have had the Robo a year.

He’d gone to Kitty with the proposition, told her the money — what had it cost him? under $12,000 probably — wasn’t significant enough to trouble the sibs with, and asked her to co-sign for him personally.

Kitty, the bed wetter, had never married. She did not think it fair to ask her husband to sleep on rubber sheets. Strangely, she never pissed her sheets during an afternoon nap or when she dozed off reading in a chair or watching TV. Only at night did she lose control, at night when the dreams came. The dreams, Flesh thought, the dreams she must have!

“This is really something, Kitty,” he’d said on their way to the place in Queens where he had first seen the Robo-Wash. “Wait, you’ll see.”

“Ben, it isn’t necessary. You know I trust your judgment. We all do. I don’t have to see the car wash. If you say it’s good, I believe you.”

“No. You have to see it. I want you to know just what you’re getting into. After all, I’m asking you to guarantee the loan personally. I want you to get an idea of the potential.”

“That’s the part I don’t understand. Why come to me? If it’s all that great, my brothers and sisters would go along with it as a matter of course, and you say the money isn’t significant.”

“Well, that’s the point. See, this is what I have in mind, Kitty. Up to now I’ve hit you kids collectively because the sums more often than not have been considerable, but suppose we do this, suppose I start up a series of small businesses and approach you one by one. We might all make more money.” Years before he had begun to cut them in, as co-signers of his loans, for a small share of the profits, though they had never actually had to put up a penny. He’d argued that they were entitled to it. Under the terms of their father’s will he was not obliged to do this, but he insisted. The sibs, though well off, were none of them making the fortune their father had made. Some, profligate, had already gone through a good deal of their capital. And that, of course, was the argument he had used to convince them, for they truly had not wanted to change an arrangement which had never actually cost them anything. “Look, Gus-Ira, I know you don’t need it. You’re a doctor, you do very well, but Oscar, the rock band, the bus he paid for and outfitted to travel in, what about him? Until he cuts a hit record he could really use the money. What the hell, even if it only pays the gas and oil for one of those trips he makes to the rock festivals, it would come in handy.” In this way, addressing the generosity of each, he had finally gotten them to accept the six or seven hundred dollars a year apiece that he gave them.

“Well yes,” Kitty said, “but I don’t know anything about business. I trust your judgment.”

“I just want you to see. I don’t want you to trust my judgment. You shouldn’t go into things with your eyes closed. Wait, Kitty, it’s just a bit farther. We’re almost there.”

He turned off Queens Boulevard and went out Jamaica Avenue. They had to go more slowly now. There was much traffic. It was a densely commercial street. He honked at the double-parked trucks. They drove along under the elevated tracks, saw the shower of sparks from passing trains burn themselves out like meteors, shooting stars. They proceeded past Laundromats, $5 a pair shoe outlets, gas stations, Chinese restaurants, taverns.

“Where is this place?”

“It’s only a few more minutes.”

And turned into the Robo-Wash. He maneuvered the Cadillac carefully into place, guiding it gently as he could to the struts and chocks. They were in an odd cinder-block building like a tiny covered bridge, the walls tapestried with machinery, the ceiling veined with pipes that ran overhead like rods for shower curtains. Flesh read the instructions:

1. Make certain front wheels are properly aligned with T-bar. Both tires must be in contact with metal chocks.

2. Turn off ignition.

3. Car must be in neutral.

4. Lower window on driver’s side and insert 50¢ in slot. Quarters or half dollars only.

5. Raise all windows! Do not touch brakes or steering wheel.

“You’ve got to watch this, Kitty. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

He slipped seven quarters into the machine.

“But that’s $1.75. It says fifty cents.”

“This will give us a better opportunity to see what it can do. Raise your window. Is your window up?”

“Yes.”

“Here we go then.”

They heard a subterranean growl as some sort of metal hook rose below them, engaged and grappled the axle. “She’s locking it,” Ben said. “It’s amazing. It adjusts universally. Like the tone arm on a phonograph that mixes ten- and twelve-inch records.”

Then there was a long hiss like the sound of air escaping from a tire.

“Oh, Ben,” Kitty said.

And then, as the car began to be pulled forward, sheets of water, panes of it — the extra dollar and a quarter, Ben thought happily — slapped at them from every direction at once, like waves, like a riptide, and so thick that the illusion was they were indeed in the sea under water, Kopechne’d. Detergent added now, dropping like snow, foaming the windows, frothing their vision, Kitty grabbed his hand and squeezed.

“Something’s wrong,” she said, “the extra money you put in, you must have jammed it or something. Oh, Ben.”

While the car rocked back and forth — he had not turned off the ignition, had left it in drive; it was being tugged back as it strained against the hooks; Kitty, of course, hadn’t noticed — the heavy brushes came out of the walls, closing in on them like the trick rooms of matinee serials. The timing was off, the brushes embracing the car even as the water continued to shoot out of every pore in the pipes, crushing the detergent against the windshield, twirling, lapping at the car like the bristled tongue of some prehistoric beast. Kitty had both arms around his neck. “Please, Ben. Oh God. Please, Ben. When does it stop?”

“I don’t know. Something’s wrong,” Flesh said, pressing the brake and causing them to lurch forward. “Jesus, do you think it’ll crush us? I can’t see out.” It was true. The interior was almost totally dark.

The brushes were all about them now, scraping the long sides of the car, settled on the roof, rolling and bumping as the Cadillac, in drive, threw their timing off still further and Ben pulled at the bottom of the steering wheel with one hand. From his side he lowered his electric window a bit. “I want to see if—” Then lowered Kitty’s.

“Ben, let’s get out,” Kitty said nervously. “It’s beginning to come in. We’ve got to get out.”

“We can’t,” he shouted over the sound of the water and the grunt and grinding of the brushes, “we’d never be able to open the doors. The brushes are up against us. Even if we could get out, the bristles would tear us to pieces.”

“Oh, God. Oh, Ben,” Kitty screamed. “When does it stop?”

“We’ve still got to go through Rinse,” Ben yelled.

“What?”

“Rinse. It’s part of the cycle!’

And that’s — Kitty practically in his lap now, her arms thrown about his neck like a drowner, her legs capturing his as though she meant to shinny up him to safety — when he felt the warm trickle of her pee as it rolled down his thigh and knee and splashed against his shoes and puddled the thick carpet of his Cadillac.

So he knew why he’d approached her. For his priviness to those wild dreams that no man but himself shared, not of the dead, not even of sex, but simply of excitement, Kitty’s kiddy spook-house conjurings, her fervid invocation of plight, trap, and wicked pitfall that froze her reason and loosened her urine, to induce in her that high-strung roller coaster, snap-the-whip, loop-the-loop, vertiginous vision he’d somehow recognized in her from the beginning — known would be there — but till now had never seen. He shoved the lever into neutral, shut off the engine.

“It’s like this at night, isn’t it?”

“Oh, Ben.”

“At night. In the dark. This is how it is then, isn’t it?”

“Please.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said. She was whimpering.

“It’s all right,” he told her, “the brushes, they’re just cloth, the bristles are smooth as chamois.”

“Oh, Ben.”

“It’s all right,” he said, “everything is fine. Look, Kitty dear, they’ve already gone back into the walls.”

“Oh, Ben,” she said. “Oh, Ben, oh, you son of a bitch.”

She raised no objection when he told her brothers and sisters about his Robo-Wash proposition. But it was a long time before she would speak to him again.

He drove the remaining 120 miles to Kansas City without the tape deck or radio. Oh my oh my but he had the memories.

3

Ghiardelli Square in San Francisco. Atlanta’s Underground. Yes, and Hartford’s Constitution Plaza. Louisville’s Belvedere. Minneapolis’s Mall and L.A.’s Century City. Denver’s Larimer Square and Chicago with its Old Towns and New Towns. The Paramus Mall in New Jersey. Lincoln Road in Miami Beach — a bad example. Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle — a good one. St. Louis with its Laclede’s Landing. The new Cincinnati. The new Detroit, Milwaukee. Albany’s billion-dollar civic center.

What was not highway was Downtown, the New Jerusalem. America’s Malls and Squares and Triangles like figures in geometry. Just the white man fighting back. Regrouping. Floating promises with bond issues. What had been white and then black was now white again. Phoenixy. The old one-two. Real estate’s chemotherapy, its surgical demolitions and plastic surgery. Like a cycle in nature or a rotation of crops. Allowing the blighted inner cities to lie fallow, the cores to oxidize — all those Catfish Rows of the doomed. Then Reclamation, Rehabilitation, Conversion, Salvation. Resurrection. The Tokyoization of the United States, the Boweries beaten into Berlin showcases. As if America had lost a war, a lulu, a Churchillian son of a bitch. We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the streets, we shall fight them on the slums and on the ghettos. We will never surrender. We will smear them. But as if we hadn’t, didn’t, and the worst had happened, the bottom dropping out of victory. And were now being reparated, mollified, kissed where it hurt and made better. Given this — what? — Democracy and these — what? — monuments of the mercantile, these new Sphinxes and new Pyramids, these new wonders of the world. And everything’s up to date in Kansas City.

The prime interest rate is 11 percent and he stands in the five-story lobby of the Crown Center Hotel, the first jewel in Hallmark’s Triple Crown.

He has seen, from the highway, the twin saddles of the Harry S. Truman Sports Complex, two sloping stadia like counters in shoes, home of the Chiefs, home of the Royals — what, he thinks, what a franchise! — glimpsed the three-million-dollar scoreboard, tall as a high-rise, the glassed-in private boxes and suites along the rim of the stadia like handsome molding. (He has read that some of these rent for $18,000 a year. Eighteen Thousand Dollars.) And has proceeded through Kansas City’s squeezed downtown with its decaying warehouses and skyscrapers, some abandoned, nostalgia in the making like a bacteria culture, and out Truman Road and onto Grand Avenue to the Crown Center, passing the hotel with its high cantilevered tower like a machine-gun-emplacement on a prison wall, the windows like stereo speakers or light meters on cameras. Passing the Crown Center Shops on his right, the squares and plazas and fountains and open ice rink on his left, Hall’s huge office complex, vaguely — he has seen line drawings, even knows where the apartments will stand — like a locomotive, and turns right into the parking garage, and parks — no room on the Jack of Hearts, no room on the Jack of Diamonds, no room on the Queen of Spades — on the Queen of Clubs level. Of course! Hallmark cards. And has pulled his grip out of the trunk, his garment bag. An attendant comes up to him. “Better lock your car, sir.” And it is as friendly as — he’s Queen of Clubs — an admonishment not to show his hand. He wonders as he walks toward the double set of doors what is above him, a king? Of what suit? Does the parking lot hold a pair of kings? What is above the pair? And is now close enough to read the sign above the double doors: TO WEST VILLAGE AND CROWN CENTER SHOPS. Ah. Aces high for hotel parking. He has been dealt a losing hand, trumped, out cut. He stands pat however and continues on through the doors.

And is in West Village, Chelsea Court, the shops like five-sided open-ended cubes hanging suspended in multileveled space and attached to each other by catwalk, the black-painted iron stairs of fire escape and spiral staircase. And is unsteady on his feet, overcome by a sense of standing among the fallen blocks of giant children. It is a theater of merchandise, he is overwhelmed by an impression of having stepped backstage. He looks about him, is momentarily confused, cannot tell audience from actors. Each store is a perfect set. And trade is dialogue. It’s like market day in some European town, it’s like a fair. He could be in a shop window, he could be in the street, in a crazy, zigzag perpendicular of streets; he could be standing ankle deep in some archaeology of the retail, the palimpsest digs of commerce. Nutty, displaced bourses, bazaars, booths and kiosks, the chic salesmen and saleswomen become mongers, costers, colporteurs, discreet tradesmen, hawkers, cheapjacks, chapmen. Some actually wear aprons over their mod clothing; others, their sleeves rolled above their forearms, posture like artisans, as if they have just this minute put the finishing touches on wares they have made themselves. He listens for and momentarily expects to hear work songs, street cries, folk solos, rags, arias: “Straaawberreez! Nay-ills and hatchets! Tenniss rackettsz, skeee wear here!” He sees a credit card change hands and is mildly surprised. Even cash would have surprised him here. He expects barter, solid elemental stuff — silver, gold, pinches of gold dust laid out on scales. There is something claustrophobic in this three-dimensional marketplace. The clever names of the shops oppress him. He reads them but has as much trouble taking them in as he has had when he has tried to read the news moving by in a huge electric typeface along the side of a building. Athlete’s Foot (sport shoes); The Candle Power & Light Co. (sculpted wax candles); Sunbrella (sporty sun goggles); The Signal House (model railroading). Some shops are of a sort he has never seen before in his life. There is a place called Wine-Art where one buys the equipment and essences for making wine. There is a place called Bits and Pieces which sells nothing but miniature handcrafted furniture for dollhouses. He looks closely at a grandfather clock no more than two inches high. Its pendulum swings, its minute and hour hands register almost the same time as his wristwatch. (There is a two-minute discrepancy; he is certain it’s his watch which is slow.) Another shop, The Stamp Pad, sells customized rubber hand stamps. He casts about somewhat wildly for an exit, finally spots one, makes his way by means of necessary detours — once he had driven this way, doubled back and forth, taken sudden instinctive, erratic swings south and north, looking for a hole in a heatwave — doglegs, travels a maze, climbs up one level in order to get to another beneath it.

He is out of West Village but still in Crown Center Shops. The stores are more conventional here but still — for him — troubling. Here and there along the corridor there are benches, like benches in museums. Lord Snowden is a men’s haberdasher, Habitat a furniture store, Ethnics a gallery of folk art. There are too many specialty shops, a place that sells yarn, another that does soap. There is The Board & Barrel, with its gourmet cookware; The Factory (a hardware store). There are The Bake Shop, The Candy Store, The Cheese Shop, The Flower Shop, The Sausage Shop, The Fish Market, The Meat Market, The Poultry Market, The Produce Market. And these, with their bare, spare generics, are somehow even more coy than the shops that are puns and double entendres. Though he feels that they have missed a bet, that they might have put in a broker and called it The Stock Market.

Yes. It is precisely what he had thought. As if America has lost a war with France, say, or England, or with, perhaps, its own past, knuckled under to its history. What’s a nice guy like me doing in a place like this? he wonders. A man of franchise, a true democrat who would make Bar Harbor, Maine, look like Chicago, who would quell distinction, obliterate difference, who would common-denominate until Americans recognize that it was America everywhere. The Stamp Pad, indeed. He would show them rubber stamp!

He sees a sign for the Crown Center Hotel and makes for it. No detours. No doglegs. No catwalks. No ups, no downs.

And is standing in the lobby of the hotel. There is, incredibly, along the width of its western wall, a waterfall, a tall slender stream of water no wider at its source than the stream that might come from heavy firehose, but opening out as it drops, spreading, diverted to two channels like the twin barrels on a shotgun, hugging, lower down, rocks, slipping over what appear to be mossy boulders, splashing plants, lichen, citrus trees, and spilling finally into a collecting pool, a sort of hemisphere of walled-off bay. The waterfall is reached by escalators, by exposed balconies two stories above him. Guests, tourists, stroll along iron-railed gangways that crisscross the waterfall like bridges in Japanese gardens. They stand at different levels, as if on scaffolding, spread out and up and down like notes on sheet music. And Flesh watches a woman toss change in the pool. Several sit for their photographs. He has guessed the appeal. It is the appeal of surrealism and odd juxtaposition. Something pit-of-the-stomach in the notion of bringing the outdoors in, just as the elevators at the tower end of the lobby, though entered from the lobby itself, climb the outside of the building, riding up gravity like effervescence in club soda. An appeal in inversion. He suffers a sort of vertigo for the people displaced above him in the air on their balconies and catwalks and scaffolds like so many window washers or house painters or construction workers. He has himself just come from the Center’s suspended cubes, sick in his stomach and feeling the heavy, off-center nausea of the weight, for example, in loaded dice.

He looks away from these human flies and sees that he stands above an excavation, an upholstered pit, roughly at the center of the immense lobby. It is a sunken barroom, the depth of the shallow end of a swimming pool. Low, handsome furniture — chrome, leather the color of the cork tips on cigarettes — is grouped in a deliberate randomness which gives the illusion of a house made up entirely of living rooms. There is something odd about the bar, though he cannot at first put his finger on it. He still holds his light suitcase, his garment bag rests on his arm like a towel on the sleeve of a waiter. He walks around the perimeter of the bar. The tops of the drinkers’ heads are at a level with his knees. The waitresses, carrying their trays, come up to his chest.

Then he realizes what is so strange about the bar. There is no bar. People are served from low consoles about the size of shields. (An impression reinforced by the crown and heraldry emblazoned on their fronts.) But that still isn’t it. Not entirely. Now. Now he knows. The consoles are not unlike the rolling carts pushed up and down the aisles of airplanes. The girls might be stewardesses, the young men stewards.

The franchiser understands the place now. With its nature brought indoors and its machinery out, with the lowest point in the lobby giving the sense of flight. The elements have been split, transposed, not just inversion but an environmentalist’s hedge against the continuity of the present. He might be, he might be in some zoo of the future. This is what a waterfall was like. Those were called trees. Those smaller things plants. When there was still fuel, people used to fly in heavier-than-air machines to go from one place to another. They were served food and drink on them. If you’ll come this way and step into the machine, you can get a good view of the outdoors, the “streets,” as they were called in those days. People used to move about in them.

They were way ahead of him, way ahead of the franchiser with his Robo-Washes and convenience-food joints, with his roadside services and dance studios and One Hour Martinizing, with his shopping center movie houses and Firestone appliance stores and Fotomats. Why, he was decadent, a piece of history, the Yesterday Kid himself, Father Time, OP Man River — his America, the America of the Interstates, of the sixties and middle seventies, as obsolete and charming and picturesque as an old neighborhood.

(Later that night he would go with other men to a restaurant called The Old Washington Street Station. He would read the legend on the back of the menu: “Surrounded in an atmosphere of early Kansas City history, The Old Washington Street Station invites you on a journey through our historic past. Ninth and Washington was the location of one of Kansas City’s first cable railway powerhouses. For your dining pleasure, an authentic reproduction of an early Kansas City streetcar has been provided in our main dining room. We invite you to make yourself at home, enjoy our good food, your friends, and fond memories of Kansas City’s rich heritage.”

“Is this true?” he would ask the waitress. He had a few drinks in him.

“Is what true?”

“What it says here. Is it true?” He would point to the legend on the back of the menu.

“Oh yes.”

“Terrific,” he would say, and bring his finger down smartly in the middle of the paragraph. “That’s what I want. That’s just what I want for my dining pleasure. Wheel it over.”

“What?”

“The Kansas City streetcar. And don’t tell me you’re all out. I can see it from here. Boys,” he would say, “I’m very hungry.”

And would study the menu like a map, asking, genuinely unsure, “Should we stay here? Look, look what’s upstairs. It shows you. We could eat in the jailhouse, we could eat in the courtroom or the barber shop. We could eat in the haberdashery or the penny arcade. We could eat in the orchard. We could eat, we could eat in the library or the parlor or the governor’s mansion or on the porch or gazebo and wet our whistles in the Brass Bed Cocktail Lounge.”

“Benny’s a little loaded.”

“Benny’s whistle is lubricated.”

“Come on, Benny, calm down, son. Let’s just stay right here in Grandma’s Garden.”

“Macintyre,” he would say, “you silly bastard. Grandma’s Garden. You hear that, Lloyd? You hear that, Frommer? Grandma’s Garden. The stupid son of a bitch calls it Grandma’s Garden.”

“Hey, come on, now,” Macintyre would say, “watch your language. I know you’ve got a few drinks under your belt, but there’s a lady present. Now, come on, Ben, just try to behave yourself.”

“Watch my language? Watch my language? I am watching my language. Take a look at your own, you fuckhead. You wanted to eat in Kenny’s Newsroom, you wanted to go to Harlow. What were some of those other places? Lloyd? Frommer? Wait, wait, don’t tell me: Yeah. The Snooty Fox. He wanted to eat in a railroad car, he was willing to try a warehouse. Jesus!”

“The Warehouse is supposed to have the best K.C. strip steaks in K.C.”

“Yeah,” he would say, “and you know why? ’Cause they’re so aged, you asshole.”

“I told you before. I warned you.”

“Forget it, P.M., he’s had too much to drink.”

“Sure, Paul, take it easy, he’s three sheets to the wind.”

“Oh, my God, ‘P.M.,’ you lousy afternoon, you dumbass evening, ‘three sheets to the wind.’ “ He would be laughing. There would be tears in his eyes. “And, yeah, wait, wait, somebody said something about The Monastery. And which one of you fatheads wanted to try Ebenezer’s? Which one Yesterday’s Girl? You want yesterday, you schmucky hickshit? Yesterday? They’ll give you — they’ll give you…Listen, you really want picturesque? Let’s get out of here. I know this charming Holiday Inn.” And would stand up, shouting, his voice carrying through the entire restaurant: “Who here remembers Thursday? Huh? Anybody recall Saturday? How about it? Thursday? Friday? Saturday? Those were the days, those were the good gold goddamn candyass days. Huh? Huh?”

And would be pulled down, Frommer and Lloyd peacekeepers still, but pulling him by his bad arm, holding on to his paresthetic right hand, Lloyd’s metal graduation ring against Flesh’s skin like an electric prod, the hands restraining him — how could they feel what he felt? — as alien nervewise and texturewise as moonrock.

“Oh,” would scream, “Aiee,” would call, “God!” would cry.)

He presents his confirmation at the desk, registers, asks if his room is near where the other Radio Shack franchise people will be.

He strolls through the exhibits in the Century Ballroom.

“Hey,” says Ned Tubman from Erlanger, Kentucky. “How you doin’?”

“Fine.”

“I seen your name tag. Bowling Green, hey?”

“Right.”

“Western Kentucky State University?”

“Yes.”

“What’s shakin’?”

“Oh, you know.”

“Foxy. Close to the chest. Well, I’ll tell you. — When’d you say you opened up?”

“About three years ago.”

“Three years. Well. How long Fort Worth sit on your application?”

“I don’t know, I don’t remember.”

“What was it? You slip ’em somethin’?”

“Who?”

“You know — Fort Worth.”

“I bought it outright.”

“Oh. Outright. Say listen, I didn’t mean — But if you bought it outright — Me, I had my application in fourteen months. By the time they okay’d me, Lexington was gone, Richmond was took, Berea, Bowling Green—” He pointed to Flesh’s badge. “Every last college town in the state. They come up with Fulton.”

“Fulton’s a pretty good size.”

“Yeah, I was gonna take it but then they told me about Erlanger. Said it had an institution of higher learning. I switched.”

“And it doesn’t?”

“Oh yeah. Oh yeah, it does. It does surely. It got the Seminary of Pius X.”

“Oh.”

“You ever try selling stereo to them fellows? Police band? Headsets? Tape decks? Shit. Well — Good luck to you.”

“Same to you.”

“I’ll lay in Gregorian chants, ‘Perry Como Sings the Lord’s Prayer.’”

“Sounds good.”

“Yeah, sure. Meanwhile, you get the real college kids. Marijuana, the Pill — Those are the turn-ons, man. Biggest thing ever to hit the music industry. Know what I heard?”

“What?”

“That R.C.A., Zenith, Sony, and Panasonic gave E. Y. Lilly and Pfizer and the rest them drug companies money to develop the Pill.”

“No kidding?”

“The truth. Heard they sponsor the Mafia and the drug traffic.”

“I don’t see—”

“Why you think a lid of grass so cheap? It goes against every law of supply and demand. That’s the record companies, mister. The record companies do that. They give the pot farmers price supports.”

“Oh.”

“Subsidize poppy fields.”

“Really?”

“Pot and poppy parities, yes sir.”

“I see.”

“Sure.”

“I never thought about it.”

“I will. Open your eyes.”

“God bless.”

The displays are compelling. Each screened booth with its shelves of sound equipment glows, buzzes like cockpit, like miniature war room, like listening posts in science fiction. Meters of fine tuning like green pies closing. Needles that travel against arbitrary scales, past the reds and oranges of distortion toward baby blues of pitch-perfect harmony and balance. Round clocklike dials across dashboards of sound. Stereo cartridges like decks of cards, that look, sunk in their slots, like open tills, like queer, spit product. Cleverly notched steel spindles, turntables like reels of computer tape. And the gorgeous cargo of speakers like splendid crates, blank black domino shapes tight in their mahogany frames. The grooved and handsome ferruled knobs — AM, FM, AFC, vol. and bass, treble and balance, filter and phono, auxiliary tape. Contour control, “joy sticks.” Jacks and fuse lights. Sliding levers, smoked-plastic dust covers. Headsets like the ears’ furniture, their thick foam stuffing, their leathery vinyl skins. The broad wide-eyed faces of cassettes, the immense and careless weave of the 8-tracks. Digital AM-FM clock radios, their neon numerals the color of struck matches, the broken verticals and horizontals of the numbers like fractured bones, unkindled ghost digits just visible behind them like the floating, germ-like transparencies that drift across the surface of an eyeball. Other styles — card numbers that flip over like scores on TV game shows, or that rise into the radios like figures on odometers. There are pocket-size tape recorders, microphones built into them like snipers’ scopes. And portable televisions like pieces of luggage. There are antennas like fishing rods, like whips, like window screens, like swatches of fence, like pen-and-pencil sets, like huge metal combs, like immense paper clips. There is specialized stuff — marine radiotelephones; citizen’s band transceivers; base stations, mobile; 8-channel FM scanning receivers with their movie marquee light sequences. Tuned to crime, tuned to fire, tuned to weather, tuned to all the ships at sea — earth, fire, air, and water tuned. The notches of wavelength-like lines on rulers or the scale on maps, all the calibrated atmosphere of frequency.

I have been in the Bowling Green shop just once. I am a personnel man finally, only an absentee landlord, a silent owner in the sound trade. They rip me off, my managers, my hired help. They aren’t to be trusted. They skim. I know that. I’ve taken bartenders and put them in charge of my franchises. I’ve turned vice-squad detectives into bosses. Clerks in liquor stores, ticket sellers, head-waiters, gas-station attendants — all those technicians in larceny. My gray-collar guys of good judgment who know just where to draw the line and just when to stop. What can it cost me in the long run? Less than fringe benefits, less than Blue Cross, pension plans. I tell them up front what I’ll stand for. They appreciate that. If they take advantage I send the auditors in or go myself. But that’s rare. The rule of thumb is, they work their asses off in order to increase the profits from which they are allowed to steal. In the long run I’m probably even, maybe a dollar or two ahead.

I came to the Radio Shack bash to buy. Chelton should have come. He knows the stock better, the clientele. I’m his operative really, just following orders.

It’s just that I’ve got to do something.

We were all in our seats. They dimmed the lights in the Century Ballroom. The great collar of equipment from the display booths that lined three sides of the ballroom glowed like electric Crayolas. It was really rather pretty. The franchisers applauded. Even I started to applaud but it hurt my hand. Then someone yelled, “Bravo, bravo,” and this was taken up and soon everyone was clapping and cheering, giving a standing ovation to a lot of colored dials. It was like applauding dessert, the waiters’ parade of cherries jubilee at a catered dinner, luminous baked Alaska at a golden wedding anniversary. Businessmen are so dumb.

Then — I don’t know how they did this, some linked rheostat arrangement or something — they brought down the lights on the equipment until the ballroom was pitch black. A white pin spot flared on some Fort Worth guy on the dais and we sat back down.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “there’s to be a demonstration.”

The pin spot, round as a pancake, large as his face, reduced itself, burned briefly on the tip of his nose, and went out. The Century Ballroom was bereft of light, blackness so final it was void, a vacuum of light. We could have been locked in the subterranean on the backside of moons. I thought of the brownouts I’d fled, but this was darker, melanistic, the doused universe and the pitch of death.

And they applauded this, applauded darkness. So dumb. And I thought — the Wharton Old Boy — it’s a miracle Dow Jones has an average, a miracle that there’s trade at all. The dollar’s a miracle, the dime a wonder, America astonishing, all organization a wondrous serendipity. Higher the handicapped and Excelsior to all. Applauded darkness!

Self-consciously — oh, the demands of level good will — I thought perhaps I should join them. Even in the darkness — who could have seen me? — I felt this pressure to join in, to add my two-cent increment of invisible loyalty, pressured like men at ball parks to stand with their fellows for the anthem, to move their lips over the words flashed on the scoreboard, and make a noise here and another there when the song descends to their key. But it hurt my hand to applaud and I kept still. And then, the oddest thing.

A man called, “Bravo, bravo.” Then the chant was taken up, and through the sound of applause and cheers I could hear chairs scraping all about me as they were pushed back and the Radio Shack people stood. It was ludicrous. Cheer darkness! As well applaud lawns, crabgrass, hurrah the sky and clap for rain. The givens are given. I wouldn’t move. I hadn’t the excuse of my game hand but I wouldn’t move, would not rise with my clamorous colleagues.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Fort Worth man said, “there’s to be a demonstration.”

The lights came on in the Century Ballroom. The Fort Worth man was not on the dais. No one was standing. The chairs were just where I had remembered their being when we had sat down after applauding the new line of equipment. We looked at each other.

“What happened?” my neighbor asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What was all that clapping? Why did you get up when the lights went out?”

“I didn’t. Why did you?”

“I never moved.”

All around me people were asking the same questions of each other. It seemed that no one had applauded, no one had stood.

“Where’d what’s-his-name, Fort Worth, go?”

“I don’t know.”

“There he is.”

“Where?”

“By that console. There. Beside the dais.”

The man from Fort Worth, his arms folded across his chest, stood smiling at us. He moved toward the microphone stand again.

“How did you like the demonstration? We played a little joke on you. We played a little joke on you and you’ve just heard the future.”

“What’s this all about, Sam?” This was called out by a man in my row.

Sam, the Fort Worth guy, nodded and smiled. He shaded his eyes, pretending to look where the question had come from. “We recorded your initial response and played it back for you.”

“Was that some kind of quadraphonics?”

“Quadraphonics? Honey, it was decaphonics. It was quinquagintaphonics. It was centophonics. Myriaphonics. It was the whole-kit-and-caboodlaphonics! The system’s perfected. It’s on line now. Well, there’s nothing to it from an engineering standpoint, or even from a recording standpoint. All they have to do is plant a mike wherever they want. The technology’s been licked since stereo. We could do that all along, make as many tracks as we wanted. It’s just multiplex. It was at the other end, the delivery system, where the trouble came in. Now we’ve got these miniaturized speakers that we can plant anywhere. Well, you just heard.”

“Is it expensive?” I had the impression there were shills in the audience.

“Initially. Initially the customer buys the receiver. That’s that console over there. That one’s professional of course and costs about four grand, but we can give him something almost as good, at least for his home entertainment purposes, starting at about eleven hundred and fifty dollars and going up to about eighteen or nineteen hundred. About the same price as professional-quality stereo equipment.”

“It’s high, Sam. These are kids, newlyweds.”

“They’ll go crazy for it,” Sam said. “You still haven’t caught on, have you? Anybody here with the vision to see what we’ve done?”

“I have.” Ben spoke. He rose and stood beside his chair.

“Pardner?” Sam said.

“I have. The vision. I have. It’s the Barbie Doll principle gone sound. It’s Mattel. Mattelio ad absurdum in spadessum. We kill them with accessory. They start with three speakers, four, and build toward infinity. Like model railroading — all the crap you could get. The station and stationmaster and a little signalman waving his tiny lantern with the teensy light inside. The gates and the bridges, the tunnels and tracks. The switches and couplers, the toy towns and trees. The Rockies and billboards and whistles that blew. The smoke. The freight cars and passenger. Cabooses. The observation car where the weensy President stood. The refrigerator cars cold to the touch. The flatcars with their lumber and perfume of evergreen. All the specialized carriers for oil, gas (non-flammable, nontoxic), natural resources. I have. I do.”

“Yes,” Sam said, “that’s it. That’s right.”

“I have,” Ben said. “I do.”

“Sign that pardner up,” Sam said, the man from Fort Worth. “Get an order blank back there, someone.”

“Because,” Ben said, “we live in a century of mood and until this afternoon only headphones gave the illusion of ‘separation.’ There is no separation. There are no concert halls in life. Nor do we see in 3-D. The chairs do not stand out. Only in stereopticons are the apples closer than the pears. We will Ptolemaicize men and have them move in their rooms as in a headset. I have. I do.”

“Hey now,” Sam said.

“And pour percussion in the porches of their ears. Their left ear and right. Tumble treble and crack the sax into the helix. A trumpet in every tragus, and violins in the semicircular canals. The flute in the fossa, the bass in the stapes. Quinquagintaphonics in the adolescent’s bedroom, the whore’s house, and doctor’s office. I have. I do. Mattel their minutes, Lionel their lives. Accessory them.”

“Hey,” Sam said, “you doin’ too much.”

“Cole Porter,” Ben said. “Hammerstein.”

“Buddy?” Sam said. “Buddy, you hear me?”

“In both ears.”

“Settle down, friend. We’re talking the new line.”

“That’s what I’m talking,” Ben said. His hand hurt him, his legs.

Everything tingled. Only his ears. I am up to my ears, he thought.

“Come on, now,” Sam said, “give us a break.”

“Put another record on. I’m having a Rodgers and Hart attack. Hah!”

Macintyre and Frommer were beside him. Lloyd has come up. He spies Ned Tubman through his nystagmic eyes. Ned and all whirl like pinwheels.

He put a call through to Riverdale.

“Yes?” It was Cole, the one who suffered from plant diseases.

“Hello, Cole. How are you? It’s Ben.”

(Not “Hi, who’s this?” but “Hello, Cole. How are you?” Even though they’d reached an age — Cole would be almost thirty-seven — when distinctions, were they to appear, would have begun to reveal themselves. But time itself thwarted, something in their Contac, time-released lived lives that stalled the oldest and ever so slightly aged the youngest prematurely, the seven-year point spread of their existence narrowed to an arithmetic mean so that they all seemed to be about thirty-three years old — in their prime his guarantors of the prime rate. But withal, the solidarity broken for him like a code, known like a secret, his best gift — poor Ben, poor sick, sad Ben — his connoisseurship for their voices and faces, his wine buff’s palate for their Finsberg body and Finsberg being. A gift. God-given. Poor Ben. Poor sad, sick Ben. Then why, for God’s sake, did he prefer Lorenz to Irving, Irving to Oscar, Cole to Lorenz? Did he see nuances in twin and triplet character as well? Character? He? Him? Poor Ben? Poor Ben.)

“Ben. How are you? Gee, we’ve been trying to get in touch with you for about two weeks. We called Phoenix Ford, we tried your H. Salt Fish, your Arthur Treacher in Stockton, the Jacuzzi Whirlpool in Columbus. Everywhere. We thought you might be at the Mister Softee in Rapid City, but the lines are down and we couldn’t get through.”

“I’m in Colorado Springs.”

“Colorado Springs? Are you looking over a new franchise, Ben?”

“Why were you trying to reach me?”

“It’s Mom, Ben.”

“What happened? Cole, is something wrong with Estelle?”

“She’s dead, Ben. She died ten days ago.”

“Estelle?”

“I guess that makes you head of the family.”

“What are you talking about? What do you mean ‘head of the family’?”

“Well, you’re the oldest, Ben. We figure that makes you our godfather.”

“I’m your godcousin, your godbabybrother. How can I be your godfather?”

“Relationships change, Godfather.”

“Stop that. What happened to Estelle?”

“It was tragic, Ben. It was the comeback.”

“What comeback? What are you talking about?”

“The comeback. After the sensational reception of No, No, Nanette, Mother — well everyone, really — saw the terrific potential in revivals. You know, nostalgia. Ruby Keeler’s reviews ate her heart out, Ben. She was Patsy Kelly’s pal but Kelly’s raves really got to her, I think. Well, we still have our contacts on Broadway and Mother learned that they’re planning to do a revival of Irene. She thought it could be her big chance. She hasn’t been the same since Father died. You know that, Ben. The musical theater is in our blood.”

Yes, Ben thought.

“Well, she found out where the auditions were to be held and she went down. She used her maiden name. She wasn’t looking for favors and figured that after all these years the Finsberg name packed more clout than the name she used to dance under, so she deliberately used her old stage name. These producers are young. They aren’t the old-timers.”

“Yes?” Ben said.

“So what can I tell you, Ben? They asked her to tap dance to ‘They Go Wild, Simply Wild over Me.’ She dropped dead. What can I tell you?”

“She dropped dead?”

“She was out of condition, Ben. She’d prepared ‘Alice Blue Gown.’ She never expected the other.”

“I’m sorry, Cole. I don’t know what to say.”

“So that’s the story. What can I tell you?”

“Gosh,” Ben said, “a heart attack.”

“Yeah,” Cole said dreamily, “that and stage fright. Comeback fever. It’s getting them all, the old-timers. It’s a terrible thing, Ben. These revivals are killing them all off. The ex-hoofers are dropping like flies. So how have you been?”

“Is the family together?”

“Until a few days ago. Most everyone’s gone off by now. Gertrude and Gus-Ira went back today. There’s just a few of us in Riverdale.”

“Who’s there now, Cole?”

“Oscar,” Cole said, “Noël, and myself.”

“What about the girls?”

“Patty, La Verne, and Maxene,” Cole said coolly.

“I’d like to speak to Patty, please, Cole.”

“Sure,” Cole said. “Sure you would.” He could hear Cole call out. They must all have been in the drawing room. “It’s himself. He wants to speak to you, Patty.” There was a pause. “She’ll take it upstairs—Godfather.”

He understood Cole’s feelings. He had slept with almost all the boys’ sisters by this time. “How are you, Cole?” he asked gently.

“Oh,” Cole said, “you know. The Japanese beetles have been pesky this summer, but aside from that I’m managing.”

“That’s good, Cole, I’m glad.”

“Hi, Ben, it’s Patty.”

“Hello, Maxene. I’m sorry to hear about your mother.”

“Darn it, Ben, we never could fool you.”

“No.”

“Hello, Ben.”

“Hello, Patty.”

“I’ll get off now, Ben.”

“Goodbye, Cole.”

“Goodbye, Ben.”

“Goodbye, Maxene.”

“Have you got to see me, Ben? Are you at a hotel now?”

“Patty, I’ve got to see you. I’m at a hotel in Colorado Springs. The Broadmoor. Get a plane to Denver, then fly down from there.”

“I’ll come out tomorrow,” Patty said. “I’ve been waiting for your call. I knew it would be you. I knew you would need me. That’s why I stayed on.”

“I know.” He did. Patty, who could not hear loud noises, was the one he needed.

She wired her arrival time and he met her plane. “I’m sorry about Estelle. I sent a contribution in Mom’s memory to the Riverdale Temple Sisterhood.” Patty nodded and opened her arms. They kissed. She flicked her tongue around inside his mouth, darting it like a mouse across the vault of his palate. “Woof,” he said, releasing her. “Woof.”

“The Black Studies Programs in the nation’s high schools and universities,” she said, “are racist in intent. They’re designed to induce in young colored people a pride of such fantasy dimensions that an entire generation of blacks will voluntarily return to Africa.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“I’m not the Insight Lady for nothing,” she said.

He had loved all the girl twins, all the girl triplets. From the time he was twenty-four until now they had been his collective type. All that could happen to married men had happened to him. He had courted them, loved them well, had affairs, been unfaithful, kissed, made up, moved in, moved out. He had loved and won, loved and lost, pined, mooned, yearned. He had had understandings, stood up at their weddings, given the brides away, proposed the toasts. He had flown in for their operations, collared the surgeons in the corridor, spitting his tears in their faces, thrown down his distraught warnings, pleading always his passionate sui generis priorities. Over the years his love letters to them would have made thick volumes. And though they were identical physically, he had loved each in her turn — achronologically — and despite the monolith of their triplet and twin characters, for different but not quite definable reasons.

“I don’t know,” Ethel had once said to him when he was falling in love with Mary, “what you see in her.”

“What,” Mary had asked when he was beginning to see Helen, “has she got that I haven’t got?”

And he could not have told her. Could not have told any of them. It was as if love were the most solipsistic of energies, spitting and writhing, convulsing on the ground like a live wire, uncoiling, striking at random.

“It’s — what? — a feeling, an emotion,” he told Kitty when he was starting to itch for balding Maxene, “like anger, something furious in feeling that will not listen to reason.”

“All us cats are gray at night, surely,” Lotte said when she learned he was seeing LaVerne. “Don’t you know that?”

And it was so. If he knew anything it was their replicate bodies, their assembly-line lives, their gynecological heads and hearts, informed about their insides as a mechanic. Which, for one, made him a great lover, the official cartographer of Finsberg feeling, expert as a pro at the free-throw line, precise as a placekicker. And lent something cumulative to love, some strontium ninetiness in his ardor, the deposits compounding, compounding, till the word got round, the sisters deferring after the third or fourth, hoping probably to be last, as heart patients, say, might want their surgeons to have performed an operation a thousand times before it was to be performed on them.

“Oh, God,” Gertrude screamed in orgasm, “the last shall be first!”

And for him cumulative, too. But if the sex was better each time for his practice, that did not mean it had ever been fumbling. No. Never. The kiss he had given Lotte beside the bus all those years before had had in it all the implications of his most recent fuck. And some increment of the social in his relations with the girls, of the historical. Because he had seen them through not only their own puberty but the century’s, had heavy-petted them in the fifties, taken them, stoned on liquor, in lovers’ lanes in the back of immense finned Cadillacs, like screwing in a giant fish, worrying with them through their periods, sometimes using rubbers, sometimes caught without — who knew when one would fall in love? — driving them in the late fifties to gynecologists in different boroughs and waiting for them in the car while they were fitted for diaphragms. And in the sixties going with them to the gynecologists’ offices while their coils were inserted. Discoursing about the naughty liberation of the Pill and, when, in the late sixties, the warnings and scares began to appear, going with them right up to the shelves in pharmacies where they picked out their foams. Something of the mores of the times associated with each act. Could he, then, have fallen in love with history, with modern times, the age’s solutions to its anxieties? Have had with each girl what other men had never had — the possibility of a second chance, a third, of doing it all over again, only differently, only better? Sexually evolving with them during the sexual revolution.

But sentiment, too. That refractive as well as cumulative. Associating with each sister the song, the device, the clothing and underclothing peculiar to her incumbency. A living nostalgia, differentiated as height marks inked on a kitchen wall. An archaeology of sex, love, and memory.

And Patty was the last. (She was not the Insight Lady for nothing.)

They drove up to the Broadmoor, a pink Monaco castle at the foot of the Rockies, and he showed her the hotel in a proprietary way, taking her through the nifty Regency public rooms with their beautiful sofas, the striped, silken upholstery like tasteful flags. He showed her huge tiaras of chandelier, soft plush carpets.

“Yes,” she said, “carpets were our first floors, our first highways.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“We call the rug in the hall a ‘runner.’ It’s where the runners or messengers waited in the days of kings and emperors.”

“I never made the connection.”

“It’s an insight. Chandeliers must have come in with the development of lens astronomy at the beginning of the seventeenth century. I should think it was an attempt to mimic rather than parody the order of the heavens, to bring the solar system indoors.”

“Really?”

“Well, where, to simple people, would the universe seem to go during the daylight hours, Ben?”

“But chandeliers give light.”

“Not during the daytime. The chandelier is a complex invention — a sculpture of the invisible stars by day, a pragmatic mechanism by night. But a much less daring device finally than carpeting.”

“Why, Patty?”

“Because carpeting — think of Oriental rugs — was always primarily ornamental and decorative. It was a deliberate expression of what ground — our first flooring, remember, and incidentally we have to regard tile, too, as a type of carpeting—ought to be in a perfect world. Order, symmetry, design. And since rugs came in before lens telescopy, how could they know? Oh, carpeting’s much more daring. A leap of will.”

“Of will?”

“Men will the laws of nature.”

“I’m glad you came, Patty.”

“Oh, look,” she said, “just look.” They had stepped through the great French doors onto the broad cement patio behind the hotel where small wrought-iron tables and chairs had been set up. People chatted, sipped drinks, and watched the promenade of guests as they moved across the patio and onto the smooth, flower-bordered paths that circled the man-made lake. Cheyenne Mountain and Pikes Peak rose unobstructed behind the lake.

“It’s very beautiful, isn’t it?” Ben asked.

“It’s so sad,” Patty said.

“Sad?”

“Look,” she said, “look at the arrangement of the chairs. Look at the round tables.”

“So?”

“Ringside seats, Ben. It’s a play. They’ve pettied the mountains, turned them into a kind of nightclub act. They’ve made them a spectacle. Our rooms,” she said, “they’re rooms with a view, I suppose.”

“Yes,” Ben said, “we have a suite in the new building.”

“How European!”

Ben agreed, though he had never been to Europe. There was a Marienbad quality to the place, a sense of spa. It wasn’t what she meant. She meant that the idea of rooms with views was European, that the practice of pegging rates to one’s proximity to a mountain, or, as in the case of hotels and apartments lining Central Park, was, not so much a matter of commerce — surely hotels could fix the price of their rooms and suites so that they could make just as much money without charging extra for a view — as a throwback to an aristocratic principle that had, she supposed, its source in some notion of succession, a crown prince higher than a duke, a duke higher than a count.

“Certainly,” she declared. “Now I see! It comes from the Court and the seating arrangements at table. The greater the revenues one could provide the royal treasuries, the closer one got to the king.”

“Gee,” Ben said.

“But it’s all so unnecessary. With the advances of architecture all rooms could have views. Rectangles are the enemy of democracy, concavity is its best friend.”

“I’m sick,” Ben said.

“What a lovely tie, Ben.”

“They told me I have multiple sclerosis. I got into my car and just started driving.”

“Men’s ties are a sort of male brassiere, of course. In the phallic sense of straightening the chest. I don’t go much for the plumage theory. What’s more interesting is that ties complete the circle of the throat, much as a priest’s collar does. Shirts, open at the throat, are arrows to the genitals. Do you suppose there can be a correspondence between the tie and the hangman’s noose? Idiom says ‘necktie party,’ but the operative word is ‘party,’ I should think, with its comic insistence on the collaboration between the celebrational formality and seriousness of death. Then there’s the notion of the knot, a clear adumbration of the Adam’s apple. But overriding all is the tie’s tattoo symbolism.”

“Overriding all, yes,” Ben said.

“To suggest the throat’s tattoo. Marvelous. And to do it in silk, wools, the softer cottons. Pleasure/pain. Velvet bondage. God!”

“Maybe we’d better go up.”

“When they told you,” she said, turning to him, “did you ask, ‘Why me?’ ”

“No.”

“Listen,” she said, “this is important. Later, during your mad dash about the country, did you say it? Did you ever think it?”

“No,” he said, “not once.”

“Good for you, Ben,” she said. “Let’s go up. I want to make love.”

“Why me?”

As she unpacked, hanging her pantsuits so they would not wrinkle, carefully arranging her blouses and dresses on the hangers as one might tug and fluff clothing on a dressmaker’s form, making a chorus line of her shoes in the closet, setting out her lotions and creams on the counter, her combs and her brushes, like one setting out plants in a garden, putting her jewelry in the drawer like a shopkeeper seeding his cash register in the morning, Ben lay in the center of the king-size bed and watched her, another’s chores tranquillizing to him, soothing, seductive. The FM played softly and the insights poured from her as she moved about the room.

“ ‘La la la’ in songs is code for ‘love.’ Music is missionary. The church has its hymns, nations their anthems, every song is a serenade. Don’t kid yourself. Every song. And I’m not talking sombreros now, or greasers beneath the baked brick or near the stucco. What, you never heard the expression ‘They’re playing our song’? Music is primal salesmanship, Ben. Its most basic terms—‘note’ and ‘scales’—can be traced back to banking and commerce. What’s the commonest word in a lyric? ‘Gold.’ Consider musical comedy, Ben. The kind of song that made the Finsberg fortune. ‘I Found a Million Dollar Baby in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store’; ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business.’ ‘There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow, there’s a bright golden haze on the meadow.’ (And a gold record, incidentally.) Or”—here she broke into song—“ ‘Longing to tell you but afraid and shy, I’d let my golden chances pass me by.’ And ‘by,’ incidentally, is a play on words. ‘I’ll get by as long as I have you.’ By — buy.”

Bye-bye, Ben thought.

“And ‘have,’ Ben, ‘have.’ Good Lord, Ben, wake up. Think things through. ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ ”

“ ‘He’s just my Bill,’ ” Ben said.

“That’s it, that’s it. You’re making fun, of course, but subliminally that’s precisely what’s going on in that song. Remember, Showboat wasn’t written until America went off the gold standard and paper money came in. ‘I bought you violets for your furs.’ ‘A kiss on the lips can be quite sentimental, but diamonds are a girl’s best friend.’ ”

“You know a lot of songs,” he said.

“Oh, Ben,” she said, “I know everything.”

They made love. Her cries during orgasm were insights.

“I wonder,” she moaned, “why the group photograph has always been a convention? It must be because the group is aware that the next minute one of them could be dead. We are good. We are.”

“Oh. Oh,” Ben cried.

“Have you ever noticed,” she squealed, “how bottles of salad dressing are all the same shape, tall necks and wide, bell-shaped t-t-torsos?”

“Oh, God,” Ben shivered. “Oh, God.”

“And how,” she panted, “the la-labels are the-these little co-collars at the neck, and the-these sh-shield shapes on the front and back, and how there’s al-always a r-recipe?”

“Oh oh,” Ben raptured.

“That’s,” she groaned, “so they can all be sh-shelved to-together, so they may com-com-compete oh oh openly on the oh oh open market.”

“Uhnn. Oooh. Ahnn,” Ben whined.

“State capitols are legislative surrogates for the church architecture of Europe,” she keened.

Afterward they smoked some marijuana Patty had brought with her from New York. They passed it back and forth wordlessly. Ben was grateful for the silence.

“You know,” she said after a while, “you have this amazing insight into our bodies.” She meant hers and her sisters’.

“Yes,” he said, “by now I know exactly what you’ll do if I do this or that.”

“Why are you so stuck on us, Ben? Why are we so stuck on you?”

“You’re the Insight Lady.”

“The greatest neologism in the history of the English language is Tarzan’s cry when he’s swinging on vines—‘Awawawawawaw!’ What else could Burroughs have put in his mouth? ‘Gee!’? Believe me, it was a stroke of genius, Ben. You can demonstrate the reactionariness of reactionaries by showing how liberal they are about the distant. Policies that have them up in arms in their own country are a matter of indifference to them in underdeveloped nations. This is also true, incidentally, of people’s attitudes toward death. The best sentence is made out of the best combination of tenses, not out of the best words. Likewise the great work is the great action. Plots are more important than language. Plot is the language of time. How pompous pomp in a new country! The aristocracy, the army, and the pecking order in General Motors are all alike. All organizations equal all other organizations. Parliament and Barnum and Bailey. A Harvard professor I once saw on the Today show showed me that genius seems to have thought about what it has only just now been asked and, speaking beautifully about a subject, is actually inventing what it seems merely to be remembering. Other people’s lives are art. That’s why there’s a Broadway and a West End, why there’s literature. Spartacus was an antipacifist preaching exactly what Martin Luther King preached, but in reverse. Thus, ends are justified by means, since all means, if they work, are ultimately equal, that is, efficient. It is only ends which are unequal. We would both agree that some ends are nobler than others. Since means are interchangeable then, it is only ends which ever need to be justified. Oh, Ben,” she cried passionately, “I’m only this archaeologist of the daily. I read the quotidian is all. To me today’s newspaper is already nostalgia. Don’t look to me for the secret of your life!”

And no small talk even at dinner in one of the hotel’s restaurants. The menu her muse:

“Oh, look,” she said, “look at the menu!” They were in the Penrose Room at the top of the old building with its view of the Rockies beyond a solid wall of glass. “Feel it. The paper like a certificate of stock. Blue chip. If you look close you can see the tiny colored threads that run through it like a precious aspic of lint on money.”

“I can look close but I can’t feel it,” Ben said.

“Look at the cursive font distinctive as signature, the prices like distinguished addresses.”

“My hand.”

“Oh, Ben,” she said, “it’s as if printing costs determine the range of one’s appetite and fix it forever. Movable type and the destiny of hunger. When this menu was designed, it was designed once and for all. The chef and the man from graphics in consultation. Preordained, don’t you see, by what would look good on the document, for that’s what such a menu becomes — a document — legal and binding. Yes. A contract, if you please. ‘What do you do best?’ the graphics man must have asked. ‘Decide now, because you can’t change your mind later. The cost of this thing is like putting out a magazine.’ And he would have to have told him. Don’t you see what it means? Image and printing costs are responsible for the tradition of mediocrity in American restaurants.”

“But if the chef is doing what he does best—” Ben said.

“And how long must he do it? Chained to a years’ old assembly-line expertise, he must finally get bored, the quality has to suffer. How can he experiment? Where can he try out new recipes?”

“The food’s supposed to be very good here,” Ben said.

“Oh, Ben, don’t be naïve. Idiom only is informed. ‘Stop,’ it tells us, ‘where the truck drivers do.’ Do you suppose a truck driver’s palate is more knowledgeable than a rich man’s?”

“But you said—”

“It’s because they don’t usually have printed menus in such places. A mimeographed sheet shoved behind a hard clear plastic, and tucked like a snapshot into corner mounts in a photo album. Yes. And the blue-plate special in blue. You’ve seen him, surely you of all people, Ben, with your seventy thousand miles a year, you’ve seen him, the owner of the diner or the cook at the truck stop up on the last stool at the counter an hour before closing with his stencil in the typewriter and his hunt and his peck, doing tomorrow’s menu.”

“Usually such places the food is lousy.”

“The food, perhaps, the principle no. I don’t know this for a fact but it’s my guess that the Michelin people rarely list restaurants where the menus look like the Magna Carta.”

“Try the Rocky Mountain Rainbow Trout,” Ben said.

She was looking off in the distance. Ben followed her glance. Apparently she was studying a table of seven people near the western wall of glass.

“Never so much the family,” she said, “as when sitting together in a restaurant, the group leavened by an outsider, the daughter’s boyfriend or the son’s pal from university, say. A grandfather there, a father to pick up the check, a younger son ten. It’s the simultaneity of ease and showing off which makes the effect work.”

“You’re an expert on atmosphere,” Ben said. “But if you want to know, it’s the simultaneity of generations which does that.”

“What is it?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

“I wanted to tell someone,” he said. “I wanted to tell someone what’s in store for me, and all you do is give me Significance drill.”

“You told me your symptoms. You gave me Gibberd’s prognosis. It’s very hopeful.”

“I want my remission back,” he said and burst into tears.

If she understood she chose to ignore it, unless the fact that she walked on his left — his right hand was the paresthetic one, his right arm the numbed one — both her arms wrapping his in the doggy stance of a woman without insights, like a gum chewer or a teenager window-shopping with her date. If he had looked into her face at such moments he would have seen it scrunched, beautifully cutened, her cheek high up on the sleeve of his sport coat and her eyes closed. If such cheerleader conditions were meant to make him feel the letters bloom on his jacket, her efforts were wasted. He felt mocked, a jackass old man fifteen years her senior. (Her Senior, yes.)

They walked around the lake while she continued to chin herself on his left arm.

“That’s the ice rink,” he said. “They train for the Olympics in there.”

“I was just thinking,” she said.

“What?”

“Do you remember the menu in the Penrose Room?”

“Qh, Christ, Patty.”

“No, really. Do you?”

“Yes, sure, but—”

“The Gothic typeface.”

“What about it?”

“I was thinking about the masthead on The New York Times.”

“TheNew York Times.”

“Well, that’s Gothic. Many newspapers use it. That’s because it looks like Hebrew. All newspapers are a sort of Scripture. Gothic type must have evolved from monks trying to duplicate the look of the sacred texts.”

“I thought we might watch them,” Ben said.

“What? Oh. All right.”

Next to the auditorium was a sort of annex where the skaters limbered up or worked on figures which they could study themselves performing in mirrors along the entire length of one wall and the width of another. The room, rather like the practice room in a ballet studio, was the length of a bowling alley and perhaps seven lanes deep. Ben and Patty went up to the long glass spectator windows and looked in.

There were only three skaters working out in the practice room, which, with its thick ice flooring and the mirrors everywhere reflecting it, would have to be very cold, it seemed to Ben, unbearably cold. All three were girls. They wore leotards and their strong slim legs in the rich thermal nylon were the color of graham crackers or the crust on white bread. One girl began suddenly to spin, her momentum accelerated by her arms, which she drew slowly in toward the sides of her body until they were pressed so tight against her that she seemed literally to be supporting her twirling weight by the points of her elbows. The elbows should stop her, he thought. It seemed in defiance of some physical law that her body should continue its furious coil while her elbows held her so tightly. Ben could not tell whether her eyes were open or shut in the blur of her propulsion, but he guessed that they must be open or the mirrors would be pointless.

“My God,” he murmured.

“Yes,” Patty said.

The girl reduced her speed by extending her arms in a sort of Indian petition, then spun even more fiercely as she pulled them back in. Oddly, she looked like someone stylishly, melodramatically cramping. She looked an expertly demonstrated toy, a Yo-Yo perhaps, whipped about its cat’s-cradle track of string. They followed her gyroscopic feints, her speedy yaws and peppy bucks and pitches. Then the girl stopped herself suddenly with the blade of one skate, sending up a showery splash of silver ice like vapor burning off at the base of a rocket.

“Oh oh,” Patty said, and pointed to a newcomer on the ice, a girl who skated out pushing a strange device in front of her at present arms. It was exactly like a kid’s compass, only it was as tall as, taller than the girl.

“She’s going to make — Look,” Patty said.

The girl stopped in the center of the practice room, fixed one spiked leg of the compass on the ice, widened the arc of the second leg, and proceeded to trace an immense and perfect figure 8.

“Could you have imagined?” Patty asked.

“That instrument?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Good Lord, Ben, I’d never have dreamed. Oh,” she said, “oh, the world’s closed systems, it’s thousand thousand dialects and shoptalk. Thank you for showing me this.”

“I didn’t know about it myself.”

“Let’s go into the arena. Do you suppose they’ll be practicing?”

There were at least twenty-five people on the ice. Ben and Patty stood near where the timekeeper would have sat at a hockey game.

“Look,” she whispered, “some are wearing shoes. They’re the coaches. They must be the coaches.”

“I guess,” Ben said.

“It’s amazing.”

The skaters moved, propelled by an invisible torque, their incredible strength disguised by the rich caramels of their hose, their fetching costumes like a kinky lingerie, each hard-muscled ass yellow-ruffled, white, the gorgeous paydirt of their tough crotches—“They must shave themselves!” Patty said — a state secret, cunningly guarded. On their high skates they were tall as goddesses, and Ben ferociously watched them, angrily studying their silent fury, his own heart pounding at their long quiet glides and sudden swoops, the transcendent self-possession of their punishing narcissism. He wanted to kill them, to climb high, high up into the arena, take Texas Tower potshots at them from beneath the broadcasting booth. He wanted them to collide, to explode against each other, and though they came close, must in their floating, driving imminence have sniffed the ice-shrouded odor of each other’s personal gall, they always swerved at the last moment, almost driven off, bounced off the secret laws of right-of-way like people come up against force fields in science fiction. It was as if he were watching natural traffic patterns, a misleading random decreed by instinct.

He could not understand his anger, which went deeper than jealousy, closer to the bone than envy. There was despair in it, the accusation of a wasted life, of the wrong moral choices. He wanted to lacerate himself with it and edged away from his friend.

“Listen,” she said. “Listen.”

The coaches, only a couple of them men, had been shouting instructions to their skaters in a jargon that sounded to Ben like military code, secret password.

“Your threes, your threes and brackets.”

“Go to a mohawk.”

“That’s it. Choctaw. Choctaw.”

“Double lutz.”

“Rockers. Rockers.”

Now the coaches were silent and all one could hear, what Patty had asked him to listen to, was the steam-engine hiss of the skates, the shhh shhh of ice being torn at its surface by the speeding blades. It was the flat unconsummated sound of surf. Tea kettle and shore, train engine and the whistle of standing, sibilant jet.

“So?”

“It’s the sound of water, Ben, in all its states at once.”

“Why are they so dedicated? They’re like Brides of Christ.”

“They’re wonderful.”

“Yeah, yeah, they’ll live forever. Not one of them smokes and they practice eleven hours a day and they’ll dance on my grave. They’re not out of fucking high school. What are they doing here? Who pays their way?”

“I wish I could skate,” Patty said.

“You can’t? That’s good news. Let’s go back. We’ll drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and stay up all hours. It gives me the creeps this place. It makes me old and multiplies my sclerosis.”

In the room Patty rolled two joints. She handed one to Ben and kept the other for herself. “Too much is wasted,” she said, “when you pass it back and forth.”

“Is that an insight?”

“It’s an observation.”

Ben had had grass before, of course. He had turned on with several of the people who ran his franchises. He had always found it pleasant. Now he discovered its analgesic properties. His hand — he knew it was an illusion — felt almost normal to him. He was not so conscious of the grainy quality of all surfaces. They lay in bed and Ben stroked Patty’s naked back with his bad hand. “This is very nice,” he said.

“Twice as many women as men are homosexuals,” Patty murmured comfortably. “This is because from toilet training on they are required to touch themselves at both ends.”

“Is that an observation?”

“It’s an insight. Let’s speak insights, Ben. I’ll do one, then you do one. It’s your turn.”

“No. You could have had that one saved up. Give me a different one.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“Me? I trust everybody.”

“All right,” she said, “The Last Picture Show turned our culture around and started the nostalgia business. That and that song—‘American Pie.’ ”

“That’s a lousy insight.”

“You do better.”

“Okay. All your insights relate to music.”

“They don’t. What about the salad dressing? What about the menus and the thing about twice as many, what did I say, twice as many girl queers? They have nothing to do — to do with music.”

“Those are exceptions. Many of your insights relate to music.”

“That’s because—”

“That’s because Julius Finsberg had this theatrical costume business. Because he dressed all those musical comedies.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s right. There’s a lyric in my godblood la la.”

“All right. But it doesn’t count unless you do one about the culture.”

“The culture.”

“The culture — salad dressings, menus, top of the pops.”

“It wouldn’t be fair,” Ben said. “It wouldn’t be a fair contest.”

“Try. You can do it, Ben.”

“I know I can do it. What, are you kidding? It wouldn’t be fair to you. I’m Mr. Softee, I’m the chicken from the Colonel. Cock-a-doodle-do and the sky is falling. I’m the Fred Astaire man. I’m the Exxon dealer, we thought you’d like to know. It wouldn’t be fair to you. To you it wouldn’t be fair. I’m a — What was I saying? I was going to say something. Oh yeah. I’m a cultured man. I’m One Hour Martinizing and the Cinema I, Cinema II in the shopping center. I’m America’s Innkeeper, I’m Robo-Wash. I’m Benny Flesh, K-O-A, and Econo-Car International. I’m H & R Block, but it’s seasonal. The culture? I’m the culture! Ben Flesh, the Avon lady, Ben, the Burger King. Or maybe you meant something more academic? Sure. Okay. Howdoyoudo? I’mEvelynWoodofEvelyn-WoodReadingDynamics. Pleasedtomeetcha. WannareadWarandPeaceonyourlunchbreak? The culture. Sweetie, I’ve got ice-vending machines in every Big Ten campus town in the Midwest. Want, want to know something? My hand don’t work but I’m — hah hah, this’ll kill you — Mister Magic Fingers. Yes!”

“How’s business, Ben?”

“Insights, insights, let’s see. Insights. Ho. Hah! Ho ho. Yes. It’s coming to me. I think he’s got it. Oh yes. Sure. Wonder Woman fights crime with her bracelets, right? Well, what is this if not a variation on the old theme that diamonds are a girl’s best friend? The envelope that film comes back in — I’m Flesh of Fotomat — is really only a sort of origami of paper boxes made in the image of the suitcase. Think, Patty, think. The yellow outside envelope has a little punched-out paper handle. Then there’s a wide white envelope inside — this is the suitcase proper — with little photographs printed on it. These are emblematic of the travel stickers one finds on steamer trunks. If you open it up you’ll find a little slip, a pocket where the negatives go. Just like the puckered pockets on the raised lid of a suitcase. Just like it. Why? Why this shape? Because, because, my dear Patty, because a photograph is a holiday thing. More pictures are taken on summer vacations than at any other time of the year. There’s a relationship between travel and photography. So, there’s this subliminal suggestion on the photo lab’s part that pictures and trips and the paraphernalia of trips — luggage, the suitcase — are all interrelated. We say ‘take a picture,’ we say ‘take a trip.’ The film ‘comes back’ from the drugstore. Eureka! Eureka City! What we’re dealing with here — film, vacations, life’s golden goddamn highlights — is memory, the illusion of eternity, the hint of resurrection. Memory ‘comes back,’ too. Pictures ‘come back’ and people ‘come back’ from their trips. That’s why they pack those damn photographs in those damn envelopes like that. So that’s, that’s one insight.”

“All right. Cereal boxes!”

“Cereal boxes, cereal boxes, let’s see. Yes. A family food. Breakfast. The cereal box is designed to be breakfast’s centerpiece, to stand there in the middle of the kitchen table. While Father reads the nutrition panel on one side of the box, Mom can look at the spoon premium on the other side. Meanwhile, the kid studies the cartoon on the back and learns about the toy. I haven’t figured out the front yet. Yeah, I have. The front is the title, the name. Kellogg getting in its licks.”

“Well—” Patty said.

“I know. I’m not too crazy about that one myself.” They were both silent for a moment.

“Do my ass,” she said. He did her ass.

“You know,” he said, “what we’re talking about here is shapes. You know what I think? I think the cereal box, the film envelope, the salad dressing, packs of cigarettes, the cartons they come in, all packages really, the mustard jar, the jelly, the bottle of ketchup and the carton of milk, everything, the pack of gum, the stick, the bag of potato chips, yeah, the bag of potato chips, the, what was I going to say? Yeah. The bag of potato chips, the box of strawberries, the ice-cream cone, the whatchamacallit, Fudgicle and Popsicle, the candy bar, yes, yes, the candy bar like a kid’s ingot, the candy bar, I could go on forever. Tomatoes in their cardboard and cellophane boxes, the bottle of nail polish with the little brush attached to the cap, tins of shoe polish, right? Loaves of white bread?”

“What’s the point? You’ve been talking for hours.”

“Wait. Don’t mix me up. What was that last one? Loaves of white bread. Decks of cards. Huh? Decks of cards. Wristwatches in their boxes. Three or four bananas with a strip of green tape around their middle and, uh, men’s shirts with those little pins always in the same places and lollipops and the ridges on licorice and, my God, automobiles, airplanes, cuts of meat—Kansas City strip, New York, porterhouse, chuck roasts, chops, cutlets — I mean Jesus, Patty (patties, Patty!), the animals aren’t built that way. Those are just arbitrary shapes. Why isn’t gum like a wafer? Why is it always a stick of gum? Why a bag of potato chips? Why wristwatches? I mean, this is it, there’s going to be a breakthrough here tonight.”

“You’re not doing my ass.”

“I can’t do your ass and concentrate on the breakthrough. All right. Did I say lipsticks? Lipsticks. Spaghetti boxes, boxes of soda straws, you know how there’s always a little window in the box? You remember seeing that? I don’t know if they still do that but they used to. Postage stamps! With their serrated edges. Well sure, I know, that’s functional so you can tear them off the sheet without ripping them. But that’s not the real reason, because you have the example of money, too. Why are there milled edges on dimes, quarters and half dollars but not on really small change like pennies and nickels? Why?”

“Why?”

“Traffic lights. Red. Amber. Green. The world over. Ethiopia and Iran. Ohio and Tasmania. Canned goods. The label goes all the way around. Top to bottom. Wall to wall. Why?”

“Why?”

“Uniforms — cops’, soldiers’, firemen’s. The metal badge on the front of a bicycle. Bicycle pedals. Who said that bicycle pedals have to look the way they do? Shoes! Sixteen holes for the laces. The laces. A pair of shoelaces. Think how they’re wrapped. The little armband of paper. Spools of thread and balls of yarn.”

“Toilet paper.”

“Toilet paper, right. Kleenex, Puffs. Paper napkins. Baby powder with those round holes punched in the top like a solar system. Tubes of toothpaste. Why not a jar of the stuff? Tubes of toothpaste but jars of cold cream. It could have been the other way around, you know. Yes, and money could be serrated just like postage stamps. As a matter of fact, it would be easier for banks to handle if it came that way. They could give you a sheet of money and you’d tear the bills off yourself. Jesus, Patty, do you see? Are you with me on this, Insight Lady?”

“What?”

“We read shapes. The culture is preliterate!”

“You think?”

“Sure. I think so. It’s tactile, a blind man’s culture. White canes and dark glasses. Or umbrellas wouldn’t furl left to right in both hemispheres. There’d be more variety in dog leashes. In our belts and boots. It’s never been taken for granted that anyone can read!”

“You think?”

“Why books have dust jackets.”

“Gee,” the Insight Lady said.

“Why bulbs look like pears and how the world got its curly tail. Nobody. Nobody ever. Nobody with money invested ever took it for granted that a single mother’s son of us could read. They think we’re so dumb. We are so dumb. And they are, too. So we get these symbols. The mustard jar a symbol and the candy bar a symbol, too. We live with molds, castings, with paradigms and modalities. With recognizable shapes. With—oh, God—trademarks like the polestar. I could go it alone in an Estonian supermarket. We live in Plato’s sky!”

“That’s a hell of an insight,” Patty said.

“It’s a farsight.”

“It’s a faroutsight.”

“Tactile.”

“Good, Ben.”

“Oh, God,” he said. “Tactile, tactile,” he said. “Men. Paradigms. Modalities.”

“Yes.”

“Women. The Finsbergs. The world like a chunk of Braille. Tactile.”

“Yes.”

“I want my remission back!”

And rented horses the following day and rode without a guide into the mountains. The animals, both a rich brown the color of their saddles, knew the trails. Ben had not been this excited since that day in the Bucket. He whistled John Denver songs until he caught himself doing it. In San Francisco once he had suddenly become aware that he’d been humming “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and one time at the shore he heard himself sing snatches of “Ebbtide.”

Patty was in the lead — neither was expert; Patty led because her horse had taken the initiative — and Ben, still stimulated from the night before, called after her. “Horses! Their names. Horses’ names. Cherry, Thunder.” These were the horses they rode. “Lightning. Flicka. They’re sexual traits. Male and female.”

“I’m sorry?” Patty said. “What was that? I don’t follow. ‘Lightning flicka,’ you said. ‘Their sexual traits. Male and female.’ Whatever are you talking about? What does ‘lightning flicka’ mean?”

“Huh? Oh.” She hadn’t heard him when he’d shouted. She’d gotten only the last part. He explained his new insight in a low voice so she could hear, but it was difficult to keep his voice down when he was so excited.

“But pets, dogs and cats, often have joke names, usually the name of their owners’ interests and obsessions. An English professor might call his dog Hemingway, and once I knew a stockbroker with a dog named Florida Power and Light. It’s a sort of inexpensive self-mockery. But boats, sailboats, small craft that sleep four to eight, rarely have funny names. That’s because boats are a big investment. There’s money involved. The men name the boats and give them the code names of sweethearts, their dead sons, and ancient dreams.”

“LaVerne and Maxene,” Patty said. “Ethel, Mary, Lotte, and Kitty. Helen. Gertrude.”

“Yes,” Ben said. “Gee.” There was a sort of clearing off to the side of the trail. They were perhaps nine thousand feet up now. “Would it be all right if we got off for a while? My balls are killing me.”

“You don’t have a jockstrap?”

“I never use them.” It was true. He never wore jockstraps and didn’t really understand their purpose. Into this he had no insight. They dismounted. Ben stumbled. It was as if he had been straddling an elephant. “You suppose they’ll wander off? I guess we could sit on that log and hold on to their reins.”

“How’s the hand?”

“Not bad. I’m glad I thought about the glove though.” He had asked to borrow the wrangler’s glove to wear on his right hand. It was odd. His hand was protected but not his balls.

The view was spectacular, immense. The trail had led through a pass in Cheyenne Mountain, and though the view was open and they could see for miles on almost every side, only the mountain itself walling their vision, they felt themselves separated from the culture they had talked about, on which each thrived and endlessly explained. It was nowhere visible. Colorado Springs had disappeared. Not even firebreaks were to be seen, nor the cog railroad that climbed Pikes Peak, nor the mysterious strand of electric lights visible from the Broadmoor — never identified — that followed the contours of the mountain into the sky. Not even the trail itself, now they had left it and led their horses down the gentle six- or seven-foot slope to the clearing.

“Hansel,” Patty said.

“Gretel.”

They were in nature. Ben let go of Thunder’s reins and stretched out on the ground, the soft scrub just downhill of the log he used for a pillow.

“Ought you do that? He might take it into his head to go back to the stables. Then Cherry would follow and we’d have to go back down the trail on foot.”

“They won’t,” Ben said. “They’ll go off to eat the mountain, but I don’t think they’ll leave us. You can let go.”

“I don’t know, Ben,” Patty said.

“Trust me,” Ben said. “Don’t foreshadow. I’m going to die of multiple sclerosis and you of loud noises. We’re safe. Lie down. Use the log.” She lay down beside him. “Can you feel it?” he said.

“What?”

“Gravity. Nine thousand feet of gravity sucking at our bodies, drawing our blood. The lines of force like tide.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Mother Nature’s blow job, Her Magic Fingers.”

“Yes,” Patty said.

“I feel wonderful,” Ben said.

“I do, too.”

“I feel wonderful. I feel magnificently stupid.”

“Stupid? No, Ben, not you.”

“Sure me. Oh boy. Stupid. It’s good. It’s fine. The incredible stupidity of a man in the sea, or on a mountain — well, I am on a mountain — or some place cold, freezing. Dumb as guys in mines or tumbling in the avalanche or breathing recycled air in submarines. Dumb as astronauts, as men in space, or clumsying the moon. You know what it is?”

“What?”

“It’s throwing yourself on the planet’s mercy, I think. Up here. Up here — a storm could come up. The lightning could whack us, we dassn’t screw or our hearts would explode. Even like this, at rest, they pump away at the thin air as if it were a punching bag. The forests could catch fire. We could die, Patty. The horses could take off. We could stumble. Misjudge the time, let it get dark, let it get too cold. It’s so dangerous,” he said. “All of it. It’s so dangerous. It’s terrific. Shhh. Shhh. I’m out…I’m out of breath.”

He was in nature. As far as he could see. Wherever he looked. In the path of the Ice Age, the scars and pockets gouged by the glaciers. He was in nature, his head as high as the timberline. He was in nature. At the scene of the planet’s crimes and explosions, its rocks thrown up from the center of the earth like an anarchist’s tossed bombs. In nature. His scent in the thin air like a signal to the bears, to the cougars. Out of his element, the franchiser disenfranchised. Miles from the culture, from the trademark and trade routes of his own long Marco Polo life.

And talked, when his breath was recovered, of wonders. Because that was all there was to do in nature, the only way he could protect himself, no place to hide in nature save in the wonderful. He meant the bizarre, he meant the awful, strangenesses so odd, so alien, they were religious. Vouchsafed to die of his disease, it was as if here, in nature, where everything was a disease, all growth a sickness, the mountains a sickness and the trees a sickness, too, with their symptomatic leaves and their pathological barks, the progress of his disease could leap exponentially, travel his bloodstream like the venom of poisonous snakes or the deathbites of killer spiders.

“I heard,” he said quietly — was this praying? was this some crazy kind of prayer? — “I heard of a man who had a bedspread made out of wolves’ muzzles. He kept them in a freezer in St. Louis until he had enough for his tailor to stitch together. I once,” he said, “knew someone who would tell his troubles to strangers on elevators, just the way travelers on buses and trains unload when they know they’ll never see the other party again. He talked very fast, of course, and as he got older and accumulated more troubles, he would have to seek out taller and taller buildings in which to ride. On the way down he never said a word.”

Patty was laughing.

“I guess,” he said, “the most selfish person I ever met was the wife of one of my managers. I happened to be in their town one time when she gave a birthday for her six-year-old kid. My manager told me about it.”

“What’s so selfish about that?”

“Well, she was giving the party, I don’t remember the exact date but this was when I had my Dr. Pepper bottling plant in Jackson, Mississippi, and I usually tried to make it down about the first week in August. I recall I had some car trouble and didn’t get there until late on Friday. The point is, there wasn’t enough time to do any work that Friday and I asked my manager if he’d come in on Saturday. That’s it — I remember — he said his wife was giving this birthday party for their kid on Saturday and he was supposed to help out.”

“I still don’t see—”

“Well, hell, I’m no Simon Legree, but I didn’t have much desire to hang around Jackson, Mississippi, all weekend until business hours on Monday, so I asked my manager — his name was Paul — I asked Paul if he couldn’t meet me at the plant after the party on Saturday. That way we could do our business and I could be out of there and back on the road, drive all day Sunday and make my next call Monday morning in Atlanta.”

“But he expected you Friday. I mean, Saturday was his day off. He didn’t know you were going to have trouble with your car. He’d told his wife—”

“Wait. I didn’t care about that. Neither did he. He was willing to meet me after the party.”

“Then—”

“The kid’s birthday wasn’t for two weeks yet. Thursday or Friday or something of the week following the next one.”

“Mothers often…They don’t always make the party on the exact day that—”

“They were starting their vacation on Sunday.”

“Sunday?”

“The Sunday following the party.”

“Well, I don’t—”

“They were driving to relatives who had a cabin on a lake in Door County, Wisconsin. Paul told me that. I remember his saying that.”

“I still—”

“His wife could have given the birthday party after they came back. It would have been closer to the actual birthday. Paul told me that, too.”

“Really, Ben—”

“She wanted the kid to have the presents.”

“So?”

“So he’d have things to play with in the car!”

Patty was silent. “That’s selfish,” she said finally.

“It’s wondrous selfish.”

He closed his eyes. “Ben,” Patty said, “you mustn’t fall asleep. We really would be in trouble if we fell asleep. We really could get killed up here.”

“I know a man who,” Ben said, “I knew a woman that…There was this fellow that…”

“Ben—”

“…had franchises. — Yeah? — Yes. He bought and sold franchises. He had maybe twenty, twenty-five franchises in his career. He was this small businessman with lots of small businesses. He had a hand in making America look like America. — I don’t get it, what about him? — Him? Not much. He knew these Finsbergs. — The freaks? — Yes. — But what about him? — He once heard about a farm woman who got up every morning at six-thirty to watch Sunrise Semester. She watched programs about American history, Italian literature, about Freud, art history, archaeology, the history of journalism. She watched it all. The French Symbolist poets. Whatever. She thought the professors were preachers. — Preachers? — Because they always held a book! She was wondrous ignorant. He didn’t know her, he’d only heard about her, but he had it on good authority, so you can be sure there really was such a woman so marvelous ignorant, so spectacular naïve. — Does it count if he never met her? — It has to. — Why? — Because he has to use everything he’s got. Because otherwise… — What otherwise? — Never mind, don’t get personal. — I was only asking. — I know, and I’d help you out if I could. It’s what they all say, of course, but I really would. I’d tell you about his lousy life expectancy. I’d tell you about his sister. — What about his sister? — Well, this guy, this franchiser, had a sister, has a sister. — Yes? — She lives in Maine. Outside Waterville. Her husband works for Colby College as a professional fund raiser. — That’s nice. That must be interesting work. — He has no franchises in Maine. They don’t see each other much. The sister’s barren and, he gathers, the guy, the franchiser, that it’s sort of, well, made her, well, very unhappy. I know what you’re going to say, that they could adopt, but for a long time they didn’t really want kids and now that they do, when they did, it was too late. She’s in her fifties. His sister is in her fifties. The agencies don’t like to give women that age…The husband wasn’t doing too good. It was during the Vietnam war. The kids were acting up, trashing buildings, rioting. People didn’t want to give money to a school where kids behaved like that. — But they all behaved like that back then. — People don’t like to give their money away. The husband wasn’t doing too good, too well. Colby’s kind of a small place. No government contracts. No state support. It depends upon alumni gifts. — Yes? — The husband wasn’t doing too well. I don’t remember now how he got into fund raising. Yes I do. He used to be a social worker. That’s the ironic part. He used to be a social worker in Chicago, where the franchiser’s sister lived. — This is an awfully long story. — Not so long. Hang in there. He’d been a social worker. With the agencies. ADC. HEW. HUD. All those letters. He had an in with the adoption agencies. He could have had all the kids he wanted. He could have picked them up in the Delivery Room. But they didn’t want kids back then. At least the sister didn’t. She was jealous, well, envious, of her brother. She thought he lived kind of an exciting life. He had all these franchises and he was always on the go. He didn’t. I mean, it wasn’t an exciting life, but that’s what she thought. She wanted to live an exciting life, too. On a social worker’s salary. They don’t make much, you know. — I’ve heard that. — So she worked, too. She saved. They went to Europe on their vacations. To Hawaii. After they’d been to Europe about a half dozen times, after they’d been to Hawaii, she got it in her mind that she really ought to go to school. That if she were educated, maybe then her life would be more exciting. She put herself through college. She was already in her thirties. She majored in — get this — Oriental Studies. Learned Japanese. Took an M.A. in Japanese. So she had this M.A. and would have gone on for the Ph.D. but their savings were all used up and anyway her adviser didn’t think she was good enough for the doctorate. They gave her what they called a ‘terminal M.A.’ Funny name. — I still think it’s a long story. — She was very disappointed and figured she was all washed up in the life-can-be-interesting department. This is when her husband heard about this fund-raising position in Maine. He’d been giving away money and food stamps and stuff all his professional life and he figured that if he was good enough to give it away, then he was good enough to collect it, too. So he asked his wife about it and she was anxious to get out of Chicago anyway because by now all the people she knew that she’d gone to graduate school with had either earned their Ph.D.’s or were writing their dissertations and she felt sort of funny about being around them. You know? — Sure. — But by this time it really was too late for them to adopt, even if she had had the energy. Which she didn’t, hadn’t. For she was worn down to the nub with all that trying to make her life interesting. — I see. — Yes. So he was very serious about the job and when the people at Colby thought there just might be a position for the franchiser’s sister in the Comp. Lit. department, that really reinforced their decision to go. — Did she get the job? — The sister? Yes. She taught Japanese literature in translation. — Well then. — She was a lousy Japanese-literature-in-translation teacher. After three years they decided to drop her. She was pretty good in Japanese itself, but they didn’t offer a course in that. Well, they had some friends in the college but mostly they were what her husband brought in, his colleagues, people in the Bursar’s Office, in Admissions, not the faculty itself. That crowd. — Oh.—And just about when the guy was running out of ways to write up proposals and get grants from the government, Vietnam came along and the kids acted up and the alums had a good excuse to stop giving. To make a long story short… — You said it wasn’t long. — I had to say that. It was a white lie. To make a long story short, it looked like the guy was going to lose his job. — Really? — Yeah. — Well, what about the franchiser? — Oh, him. Well, he waited until the last minute. — And? — He gave his brother-in-law $100,000 for Colby College so they would keep him on.”

“Ben.”

“—He wanted his sister’s life to be interesting, too. He felt bad that she envied him.”

“Oh, Ben.”

“—That’s another ironic part. She still envies him. She doesn’t know shit about interesting lives.”

“Oh, Ben.”

“—He never told her about this woman he knew who made up contests for magazines.”

“Ben,” Patty said.

“There was this woman — the Contest Lady.”

“Please, Ben.”

“Maybe you know her.”

“Please, Ben.”

“After college she knocked around some, traveling, working a bit, taking lovers — like that.”

“Why are you—”

“But Lotte wasn’t satisfied. Things bored her. I never knew anyone so easily bored. Your sister must have been very religious, I think, to be so bored.”

“Religious?”

“Well, she wanted everything to have a point. She had the highest expectations of anyone I’ve ever known. Wondrous high. Expectations higher than these mountains, higher than my sister’s. Expectations to give you the nosebleed. ‘Come,’ I’d say, ‘I’m your godlover, I like you, come home, I’ll take you to the ball park and buy you a hot dog.’ But the hot dog has not been packaged that would satisfy your sister. When she bought her cooperative in the East Seventies — Tower East — she bought on the top floor, the thirty-eighth.”

“The thirty-sixth,” Patty said.

“See? She thought it was to be the thirty-eighth. See how high her expectations? See? But there she was, forced to live two stories beneath her expectations. What was that guy’s name she liked so much?”

“Bob Brown.”

“Yes. Bob Brown. You know why she wouldn’t marry him?”

“Because he lived in Oklahoma City. ‘How can I marry a man who chooses to live in Oklahoma City?’ That was her reason. That was what she told me stood between them.”

“Do you know the only time she ever saw the apartment in daylight was when the agent showed it to her?”

“She slept till dark.”

“She slept till dark. She could see how boring things were in the daytime. They stood out more plainly in daylight. Sharper definition. Greater resolution. She never once—think of this — she never once saw the view — the bridges, midtown Manhattan. Only by night. And then only until the drapes came. I don’t think she opened them once they were up. She ate her meals at Elaine’s. All she kept in her refrigerator was club soda, tonic water, and shriveled lemons. Elaine billed her. It cost her $8,000 a year for her dinners.”

“She saw her friends there.”

“Yes. Her friends. They’d sit around and play her contests. Those crazy contests she made up.”

“They were funny. Did you ever do one?”

“I’m no good at that stuff. What were some of the good ones?”

“The inventions.”

“Oh yeah. Right. The inventions.”

“The Planet of the Apes.”

“Right. The apes were very advanced but couldn’t see the obvious. Wasn’t that it? Something was always left out and an earthman had to set them straight.”

“Blowing,” Patty said.

Ben laughed. “Blowing. Blowing was terrific. These ape kids would go to the zoo or the park with their mothers and fathers and there’d be this ape selling colored balloons and the kids would make their parents buy them one and then they’d shlep the goddamn balloons along the ground on a string. Until the earthman said, ‘They’re beautiful balloons, why don’t you blow them up?’ And that was how blowing was invented.”

Patty laughed. In the thin air she had difficulty catching her breath.

Ben held his stomach, his sides. “Oh, God,” he said, “it is, it is dangerous. We could die laughing up here.”

Patty couldn’t stop. Slime spilled from her nose like blood from a wound. “And when he…he…hee hee hah hah…oh, Ben, sl-slap me or hah hah hah some-something.”

“Their fountain pens,” Ben said, roaring. “They had these fantastic fountain nch nch pens. Much more advanced than ours. Parker 22’s! But whenever — whenever they wrote anynchnchthing they al-always rip r-r-ripped the pa-paper.”

“Till the earthman told them about ink. Oh, God, Ben,” she said, exhausted.

Ben was completely lightheaded now. He was no longer convulsed because he had run out of air, out of breath. “They had radios,” he said quietly. “Transistorized AM-FM stereos that never made a sound. Only some static if there was a bad storm. TV’s with blank screens.”

“I don’t remember that one,” Patty said.

“The earthman asked why they hadn’t invented programs.”

“Oh yes,” Patty said. “I forgot that one.”

“The Wild Idea contest.”

“The Physics jokes.”

“They were too complicated,” Ben said. “But she was a hell of a Contest Lady, Insight Lady.”

“Yes,” Patty said.

“She was this fucking princess setting tasks, her ass to the guy who won her goddamn contests.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“How do you think she met Brown? He was out there in Oklahoma City, for Christ’s sake, entering those stupid contests and picking off first prize or honorable mention every week. She finally called him, summoned him. And it wasn’t because he lived in Oklahoma that she didn’t marry him.”

“It was.”

“But because she got bored with making up contests. Because your sister got bored with laughter.”

“What?”

“Because finally, if you want to know, just plain being happy didn’t come up to her expectations.”

Patty was crying. “Why did she have to kill herself? Oh, God, I miss her,” she sobbed.

“Those grotesque childhood diseases. The bad fairy’s chicken’s pox. The delayed measle and the mopey mump like a pea under her hundred mattresses. (Because she was, too, a princess and did, too, live in a fairy tale.) The colic of a kid’s sky-high fevers and all deferred disease. Her tardy terrible times. Lotte’s laggard, dallying, dilatory death. Let’s get off the mountain.”

“Oh, Ben.”

His bad hand felt as if it were housed in a sandpaper glove. “Because boredom is the ultimate childhood disease, and your sister had too damn many more rainy days than she could handle. Tell me, tell me, how high are your expectations? Are they bigger than a bread basket?”

“No.”

“Mine neither. How about boredom? Are you bored?”

“I’m excited.”

“Yes? Good. Long life to you.”

“Ben—”

He pushed himself up to his knees. He was breathless and his balance was bad and Patty had to help him and it was a good thing the horses had not left but were standing just the other side of the trail when, Patty helping him up the slight incline, they got back to it, and lucky that Patty was there to help him work his fingers into the proper sheaths of the glove, for he could feel nothing in his right hand and was unaware, who was aware of the significance of his encounters with princesses from fairy tales, that he had jammed his index and forefinger together with all his strength into a single sheath of the wrangler’s borrowed glove, unaware of this till Patty, Insight Lady that she was, saw the wide salami casing of his jammed hand and helped him with it, splaying his paresthetic fingers that burned if they touched something that was merely warm and turned icy if they touched that which was only cool and could not distinguish textures or else confused them, mistaking the blunt for the sharp, the rough for the smooth, but could feel well enough, when it came right down to it, pain but never pleasure, unaware that he had made this mistake who understood not merely the significance of his old lover’s, Lotte’s, death but the continued presence of the horses as well, that, riderless, freed, one might have expected to return to the stables of the Broadmoor — why certainly! clearly! because we are dudes and they know it and are dude-trained, broken to dude habits, knowing by heart of course the dude-resting and dude-dismounting places on this dude mountain, horses like good dancing partners who by this time could follow anyone, even franchise dudes like me and Insight Lady dudes like her, but not doing us any favors either and not even just doing their job but lessoned in this, made to go right fucking back up the mountain unhayed and unwatered with the wrangler if they return empty-saddled to a class dude place like the Broadmoor! — and lucky, too, that she was there to help him back on his horse, well, a horse, for God knew — not an Interstate, civilized trademark dude like him — whether it was Thunder or Cherry whose back he rode or she rode, and they pulled the reins just as the wrangler had told them to if they wanted to turn the horses and the horses, who were also in nature, too, recall, turned easy as pie and they went back down the trail together, half dude and half horse, just like something else from the fairy tales.

They spent part of their last day together at the Broadmoor with Patty analyzing the handwriting in the logos of some of Ben’s franchises. They found their samples in the advertisements of the Colorado Springs Yellow Pages. She told him that the Fin the “Fred Astaire Dance Studios” was very interesting.

“See,” she said, “how at the lowest point of the downstroke there begin to be right and left tending upward spirals. The F is practically a caduceus. God, Ben, it is a caduceus. In classical mythology this was the staff carried by Mercury. Mercury the messenger, fleet and nimble-footed in the sky. What is dance if not the defiance of gravity? Oh, I say, Ben, see the A, the hiatus at the top of the oval, the long l loop that doesn’t touch the base line. These are ‘irresistible eyes.’ This writer exerts a compelling influence on people. He wins their affection and confidence.”

“That’s Fred.”

Dairy Queen wasn’t in cursive, or Radio Shack, or Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken or Econo-Car, or most of the other of his franchises that had branches in Colorado Springs. But he’d had a Ford dealership once and Patty had a lot to say about the r in Ford, though it was poorly printed and didn’t show up clearly on the page.

He asked her to analyze Holiday Inn, said it might be useful to know about the competition when he opened his Travel Inn.

“When one leg of the H has a firm downstroke and the other is generally the same length but has a generously deflated concave loop, these are ‘horns,’ and the writer can become very obstinate and will almost always insist on his own way of doing things regardless of opposition or consequences. See how the H is crossed? Graphologists call this ‘airplane wings’ and think it indicates a tendency to press people for information which will be of advantage to the writer. When the wings cross both downstrokes, these are ‘riding crops one upon the other’ and the writer—”

“Do you believe this crap?”

“I get many prospectuses from corporations offering their stocks,” she said. “The numbers mean nothing to me. I’ve a head for figures but figures change. I look only at the signatures of the corporation’s officers. I am a rich woman.”

Ben nodded and they went to bed together one last time. It was, from Ben’s point of view and almost certainly from hers, the most satisfactory screwing they had yet done. As usual, at climax, the insights came pouring out of her, a mile a minute and on every subject under the sun. Ben tried to follow, for she was very interesting and made a lot of sense, but his own groans and whimpers interfered, blocking out much of what she had to say, until all that he could hear at last were his own cries of pleasure, the baritones of his fulfillment and tenors of his dude ecstasy and, listening to these, to his own forceful shouts of completion and triumph, it was as if he tried to distinguish between speakers on two contending frequencies on the radio — they were now truly in nature — and as he concentrated, squeezing all meaning from Patty’s lucid, fastidious orgasm, the better to hear his own barks and cackles and yaps of relish, he heard his noises coalesce, thicken into speech, the vowels and consonants of violence contained, intelligently rearranging themselves into an order and form that may have been there from the beginning.

“I,” he roared — from “ahh”—“want,” he demanded — from “oh,” “nh”—“my remission”—from “mnmnh,” from “shhh”—“back!” From shudders caught in his throat like chicken bones. “I want my remission back,” he said quietly.

He rolled off her and onto his back, his penis wetting her thigh, marking it with its contact and scent as animals mark other animals.

They turned on their sides away from each other, joined curiously at the ass, making an X. These were “railroad crossings” and the writer wants his remission back.

“Yes?” the Insight Lady said. “You want your remission back? Yes? Ben, you know ever since you first told me that, I’ve wanted to say certain things to you. I think I have an insight that might help you. It seems to me, Ben, with all this talk of remission, that you want to live like a man with his bladder empty, to travel light and even weaponless, but be protected anyway. It’s interesting, for example, that you have always had all that power equipment in your automobiles. Power steering, and power brakes, Ben, power windows. A power aerial that rises from a hole in the front fender. Oh yes,” she said, “you want to live even emptier-handed than the rest of us.”

“My hand?” he shouted angrily. “My hand? Graphologist! What about my hand? Did you ever once analyze that?” he yelled. “What the fuck do you think it would show?” he screamed. “The sand, the fucking sand! It’s a Sahara. Riffs ride their horses in it and shoot at the Foreign Legion. It’s a sandbox. Kids piss in it and make mud pies. My hand? This? The writer is in agony and only wishes, only prays he were fucking contagious!” he cried. “Silly bitchbody with your jerk-off insights and your pukey mind!” he thundered at her.

Patty turned to him. She touched his shoulder, pulling on it, turning him toward her. She leaned forward and kissed him sweetly on the lips and smiled.

“Oh, Ben,” she said, “it’s been a wonderful week. You’re a good listener,” she told him. “I wish my husband were. Well. I guess I’d better get dressed now. It’s only two hours till my plane. I love you, sweetheart. I love you, Ben.”

For of course she hadn’t heard him, hadn’t heard even the least of his loud noises.

“…a disgrace,” the guy from Fort Worth said. “Fun is fun and boys will be boys and it’s all very well to live it up at a convention, but to come in drunk and disrupt a meeting like that, the full plenary session with a new line on the line, that is quite another story altogether and really it would be best for everyone concerned, best for Mr. Flesh, best for the people in the Bowling Green area, best, frankly, for Radio Shack, if Flesh would just quietly relinquish his franchise, sell it back to the mother corporation, which would of course buy back his stock as well, all at a reasonable price. We assure you, sir, that you will not lose by the transaction. If anything, it’s Radio Shack which will suffer the most immediate financial setback. So, while we cannot force you, while we cannot—”

“How much?”

“What?”

“How much? What’s your best offer?”

“Well, we’d have to send someone down there to take an inventory. We’d have to have an audit. We’d want to—”

“Sold.”

“Well, I don’t know what to say. I hadn’t thought you’d be so—”

“On one condition.”

“Condition? Now look here, mister, you don’t have to sell to us, but we don’t have to sell to you either. We can cut off your purchasing privileges, you’d have to find some other supplier. So don’t you start waving any ‘on one condition’s’ around.”

“That if he wants it you’ve got to resell the franchise to Ned Tubman of Erlanger, Kentucky.”

“There’s a franchise in Erlanger. Isn’t Tubman…”

“Tubman, yes. He owns the Radio Shack in Erlanger.”

“Why would you care…Listen, if you’re thinking of making some sort of dummy corporation, selling to us and using Tubman as a front…”

“Tubman, yes. Tubman must have first refusal. I’m not in it. Tubman has always wanted to see Bowling Green, Kentucky.”

“He wants to see Bowling Green, Kentucky?”

“Like other people want to see Paris or the Great Wall of China.”

“He’s never seen it?”

“No, but he’s heard so much about it. He’s studied up. He’s got picture postcards, but it’s not the same. He goes back to his Radio Shack after hours. You know those special aerials you rig up to make the stuff sound good?”

“Yes?”

“He pulls in the Bowling Green stations. He listens to the home games on the best equipment. He catches the local news.”

“I see.”

“You see shit, but if you want my franchise, you’ve got to offer it to Tubman. I’m not in it. I’ll get out, I’ll step aside. Gracefully. But Tubman gets first crack.”

“Why is this so important to you? Are you kin?”

“We met at the convention and exchanged a few words.”

“Then what the hell difference does it make to you who we sell to?”

“Tubman.”

“Why Tubman?”

“His name.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Mr. Flesh? I don’t smell booze, but—”

“TUBMAN! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“It’s a sheriff’s name!”

“A sheriff’s name,” the man from Fort Worth said.

“Can’t you see it? I mean, I can close my eyes and see it on a hoarding, NED TUBMAN FOR SHERIFF. Big red letters on a white background. Standing out in the weather on the General Outdoor Advertising. He isn’t cut out for it. He’s cut out for the cut-rate radio business. If he doesn’t get to Bowling Green, I promise you he’ll follow the destiny of his name. He’ll run in the Democratic primary. With that name he can’t lose. He’ll wipe out the Republican: WILLIAM R. RANDOLPH FOR SHERIFF. Ned’s no pol. They’ll eat him alive at City Hall. They’ll give him a heart attack. Or he’ll be blown up in his car by the Erlanger syndicate people.”

“You are one crazy son of a bitch.”

“Me? Nah.”

“You sure got a hell of an imagination.”

“No no. Really. What I have — what I have is total recall for my country. What I have is my American overview, the stars-and-stripes vision. I’m this mnemonic patriot of place. Look at a map of the U.S. See its jigsaw pieces? I know where everything goes. I could take it apart and put it together in the dark. Like a soldier breaking down his rifle and reassembling it. That’s what I have. And if I tell you you can save Ned Tubman from the destiny of his name, you must believe me. You want the franchise back? Fine, it’s yours. But my conditions are my conditions.” He reached out and patted the Fort Worth man on the sleeve of his silverish suit. “We’ll work something out. My lawyers will be in touch with your lawyers.”

4

Because he was in remission, he thought, hanging a right at the Kansas Turnpike just south of Wichita (Swank Motion Picture rentals) and swinging on down I-35 toward Oklahoma City.

“Because I have my remission back,” he told his hitchhiker, “and manic rage, anger, petulance, exuberance, exul- and exaltation are its warning signals, the half dozen warning signals of remission. As well, incidentally, as of its opposite, exacerbation. Because I have my remission back and I got up with the lark this morning. But, big deal, I am in remission. Big deal, it’s a long time between drinks. Big deal, I can shuffle a deck of cards again and pick the boogers from my nose. Big deal. Because the truth is, we live mostly in remission. Death and pain being the conditions of our pardon. What, that surprises you? But of course. Childhood a remission, sleep, weekends and holidays, and all deep breaths and exhalations. Peacetime, armistice, truce — the world’s every seven fat years and muthikindunishtiks, its bull markets and honeymoons. Its Presidents’ first hundred days. Why sure thing, certainly, remission is as much a part of the pattern — well, there’s no pattern, of course — as the disease. Hell, it’s a part of the disease. It’s a symptom of the disease, for goodness’ sake.”

His rider was a man his own age he had picked up at the service plaza in Wichita. Dressed in a gray double-breasted suit with heavily padded shoulders and trousers that had been tucked into big brown workman’s boots, he had been standing near Ben’s Cadillac when he came back from breakfast. He had set his suitcase down between himself and the Cadillac, a dated, buff-colored valise with vertical maroon stripes at the corners vaguely like the markings on streamlined passenger trains, everything the cheap sturdy closely pebbled texture of buckram, like the bindings of reference books in libraries. Flesh noticed the old-fashioned, brassy clasps, amber as studs in upholstery. Oddly, the man’s suit, his early-fifties fedora with its wide brim and pinched, brain-damaged crown, and the suitcase — everything but the boots — seemed not new or even well kept up so much as unused, like an old unsold car from a showroom. He understood at once that he was looking at old clothes, at an old suitcase, that he was in the presence of mint condition, and that the man was a convict. An ex-convict who, to judge from his styles, had spent at least twenty years in prison, which meant, he supposed, that either the fellow was a recidivist whose last sentence had been so stiff because of his previous record, or a murderer. He did not look like a criminal, had not, that is, anything of the concealed furtive about him, motives up his sleeve like magicians’ props. He was, if Flesh had ever seen one, a man quits with the world and, what’s more — where did he get these ideas? how had vision come to perch on his eyes like pince-nez? — his hitchhiker would not have looked like this yesterday or even this morning, or whenever it was he had last still had time to serve. Five minutes before his release, five seconds, he would have given the state what it still had the power to exact — his respect and submission. He was with, Flesh knew, a totally scrupulous man. A man of measure, taken pains, meticulous as the blindman’s-buff Justice lady herself with her scales and pans, honest as the day is long, and a bit of a jerk. The ideal franchise manager.

“Which means, finally, that there’s something in it for you.”

“For me? God’s spoons, sir, what could you possibly—”

“It’s all right,” Flesh said, “I can dig it, old-timer. I’ve got your number. You’re free now. You’re a free man. Right now, this minute, maybe the freest man in America. For whatever it was you did, there was no parole for it. The judge said, ‘Twenty years,’ and you gave them sixty minutes on the hour, a hundred cents on the dollar. That’s why you can cross state lines today, why you have no parole officer to report to, why, in fact, you probably have no job waiting. You’re quits with them.”

“God’s overbite, mister—” The man’s strange oaths were delivered in a level, inflectionless voice, but for all their curious Elizabethan ring, Flesh was aware that his epithets were like blank checks, that at any moment — this was the danger of picking up hitchhikers, of leveling with men who had done twenty years — they could be hiked, kited with wind and murder and rage, but Ben’s remission was on him and he was no more capable of holding his tongue than of choosing his next symptom.

“No no, it’s all right. Let me take a wild stab — no offense, fella — and suggest to you that the reason you stood by my car — you never asked which way I was headed, that service plaza serviced both east and west — was that you wanted a ride in a Cadillac, wanted to see what it felt like, test its shocks and leathers against the springs and metal bench in the pickup that took you out to the work farm in the morning and picked you up in the evening to shlep you to the slammer.”

“God’s service for twelve!” the man said delightedly. “You’re a fortuneteller!”

“Who, me? No no, not even a keen observer most of the time. It’s only the juices of remission give me my power today. But that’s not in it. I want to make you an offer, I want to give you a job.”

“God’s nostrils, what would I do for references?”

“Did I ask for references? Did I say anything about references? What do you think, life is a term paper? I want you, not your references. I’m opening this Travel Inn in a bit, and I could use a good reliable man to run it. I’ll pay you fifteen thousand a year and you can take your meals in the restaurant and have a double that opens out onto the swimming pool.”

But in the end it was the convict who wanted Flesh’s references, the convict who was frightened off by Flesh’s own blank-check talk. By that and some quality he must have detected in him that was out of whack with his own notion of what was fitting. He made a speech, still uninflated and controlled. “Reality wants us,” the convict said. “What you offer me is very kind, what with your suspicions of me and all, and as to those I’ll say you aye or nay, neither one, for what I did if I did something and who I am if I am someone is none of your business. God’s gym shoes, sir, it isn’t that sort of world that you should get carried away, and even this, what’s happening right now, I mean me riding in this grand automobile, why that, too, is a sin against reality. I asked for the ride and you give it, gave it — I’m correcting myself because I know better and bad grammar is another sin against reality — and so that part’s my fault and I’ll have to watch myself and make my amends some way or other, but the point is that we come into this world and sooner or later an obligation is created and we have to be real. Real with each other and real with ourselves.”

“I’m real,” Flesh said.

“Maybe, maybe not. That’s not my business or for me to say. From what I understand, you got this sickness and now it’s given you some kind of breathing spell. — Well, sickness is real enough in its way, I guess, but it isn’t as real as health, and if I was you and I got the breathing spell you got—”

“You’ve your own breathing spell, Mister Convict.”

“—the breathing spell you’ve got, I wouldn’t go around crowing about how wonderful it all is.”

“No?”

“No, sir. I’d find my reality.”

“Who are you to talk, with your vintage luggage and your twenty-year-old suit?”

“That suitcase is what a suitcase is supposed to look like, and the suit is what men of my time wore. I’m not talking about clothes anyway. Why you traveling highways? Where you off to? Where you been? You got a wife? You got a son or sweet daughter at the University of Michigan?”

“Is that reality?”

“God’s glands, it is. You know what I’m hoping?” Flesh didn’t answer. “You know what I’m hoping? I’m hoping you got sample cases in the trunk of your car, yes, and casters on their bottoms to grease your gravity and road maps and Triptiks in the glove compartment and receipts from the oil companies because once you thought you might want to check your mileage, how much oil you burn. I hope you know to fire a sheet of newspaper and hold it up to warm the chimney so the fire draws. That your dampers are open in their season to be open and closed in their season to be closed.”

“I have plenty of road maps.”

“That you live in the middle of the middle class the bull’s-eye life. And that restaurants are for special occasions, birthdays, anniversaries, and once or twice a year just for the hell of it because you’re feeling good, because your ship came in or your uncle from California. I hope you have an insurance broker named Harry who sends you to a doctor who jiggles the results, systolic and diastolic, a dozen points up or down like a difficult window, and that your stocks aggravate you, that hindsight or foresight could have made you a rich man.”

“I am a rich man.”

“It ain’t the same. I wish you honorable lusts and one or two close calls with one of your wife’s bridge pals or a buyer, perhaps, when you’re both a little tight. And guilt like a whopping down payment you can’t manage so you draw back at the last minute and jerk off on the toilet seat that night like everybody else. I wish you the hypochondriacal concerns. May you find a lump you can’t figure at three o’clock in the morning and may a cough make you suspicious. Examine your stools like a stamp collector for two weeks running and give to a charity when it all blows over. Take an interest in the Super Bowl. Think about lamps, a davenport, finishing the basement, and settle for reupholstering what you’ve already got.”

“Reupholstering.”

“But spring for new carpeting every ten years. Talk arithmetic to yourself when you do your bills. Go on a diet and stick to it. Jog for a while and give it up. Cut down on smoking, really cut down. And may you have a nightmare you don’t understand or a dream that makes you cry and hear two jokes that crack you up but aren’t so funny when you tell them.”

“It sounds very exciting.”

“God’s rec room, who said anything about exciting? Exciting you already got. I’m talking about real, I’m talking about normal and the law of averages.”

“The law of averages,” Flesh said.

“All right, the Ten Commandments then. You can let me off up ahead.” They were still about seventy miles from Oklahoma City.

“There’s nothing up ahead.”

“That’s all right. That’s where I’m going. Thanks for the ride. Anywhere’s fine.”

Was he going to try something?

“God’s germs, man, stop the car, will you?”

Flesh took his foot off the accelerator to slow the car while he thought.

“God’s buttons, get a reality. I’m not going to hit you over the head.” He showed his hands. “Empty, see? You ain’t going to be cut. Just let me out, all right?”

Ben pulled over to the side and waited nervously while the fellow removed his suitcase from the back. He closed Ben’s doors and Flesh watched him carefully, expecting, once he realized he was safe, the man to cross to the other side of the highway. Instead, the convict simply moved a few feet down the road and put his thumb up. Flesh, annoyed, shifted to neutral and nudged the car in his direction, alternately depressing the power brake and releasing it, so that Ben, inside the big automobile, had the impression the Cadillac was actually limping up to the man.

“Hey,” Ben said, pressing open the electric window next to which his rider had been sitting. “You’re ruining my remission, do you know that?”

Their conversation was conducted with the fellow’s thumb still raised. It was, Ben Flesh suddenly realized — who had seen tens of thousands of hitchhikers in his day, his Flying Dutchman life bringing him up to, abreast, and beyond them (when, as most times, he chose not to stop) — the oddest gesture of petition there could be — a rakish prayer, more shrug than request, indifference in it, democracy. “Three years of suffering and you’re ruining my remission.”

“Get a reality,” the man said, only the corner of his mouth on Ben, his eyes on the road for cars. Ben watched him.

“Another shot in the dark — no offense — you’ll never get a ride with my car sitting here. You spoke of references. Surely to anybody passing by it must look as if I’ve just dumped you, given you bad references hitchhikerwise.”

“God’s rash, fellow, give over. Leave me be. All right, I made a mistake going with you. Well, I’ve served my time. Spring me, we’re square.”

“Let me just steal — no offense — a minute of your time — no offense.”

“Well then?”

“What’s wrong? Why do I put you off so? We’re perfect strangers.”

“We ain’t strangers,” the man said.

“I never saw you till this morning.”

“We’re not strangers. I been shut up with fellows like you decades. Crook, all crimes are crimes of passion. Adventure lays in the bloodstream like platelets. We’re not strangers. Get a normality. Live on the plains. Take a warm milk at bedtime. Be bored and find happiness. Grays and muds are the decorator colors of the good life. Don’t you know anything? Speed kills and there’s cholesterol in excitement. Cool it, cool it. The ordinary is all we can handle. Now beat it. Goodbye.”

“Listen—”

“God’s unlisted number, God’s toenails and appetizers! I told you, mister, get out of my way.” Flesh raised the electric window and drove off.

A few miles down the road he spotted another hitchhiker. His heart was still pounding from what the convict had said and he felt under some compulsion to stop for this new stranger, a fellow — he’d slowed to study him while he was still a couple of hundred feet away from the man — in his late twenties, Ben judged, without parcels or luggage and dressed not for the road — a mile or so back Ben had spotted an abandoned late-model Pinto on the shoulder of the highway, its doors closed and hood raised — but like a man with car trouble.

“Get in,” he said. “Run out of gas?”

“Yes,” the young man said, “or something with the engine. The last sign I saw said there are service stations at the next exit. I figure that would still be about ten miles or so up ahead.”

“I’ll take you.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

“No trouble,” Ben said.

And then the nice young man in the good clothes — it was closer to twenty miles than to ten — began to address Ben in public-service announcements.

“Only you can prevent forest fires,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I was just thinking,” the young man said, “only you can prevent forest fires.”

“Me?”

“Well. You and me. You know — us.”

“Uh huh.”

“Another thing. We should keep the drunk driver off the highway.”

“Yes,” Ben said.

“And hire the handicapped.”

Ben nodded and pressed down on the accelerator.

“More accidents occur in the home than anywhere else.”

“Yes, I heard that.”

He took a tube of Rolaids out of his pocket and extended it toward Ben.

“No thanks.”

“No?” The young man took one from the roll and put it into his mouth. “I keep this and all medicines out of the reach of children,” he said, chewing.

“That’s good,” Ben said. He drove even faster.

“Unh unh,” the young man said. “Slow down and live.”

It was odd. It was what the other one had been trying to tell him, too.

“Yep, discrimination in housing is not only wrong, it’s illegal. Save the children,” the man said. “Get your pap test, and remember,” he said, “if you’re an alien you have to register your address by January 16. Forms are available in any post office.”

When Ben reached the exit he took him to the first service station.

Sure, he thought, back on the highway, the manageable ordinary, yes. And where was it to be found?

Under the unicorn fast asleep.

He had said big deal his remission was back, big deal he could shuffle a deck of cards, but in his motel room in Oklahoma City he used and savored his suddenly recovered powers.

He trawled his right hand over the brocade spread, digging his fingers pleasantly into its rough plains, bristled as underbrush or stubble. He knew that his nerves were lying to him, that his brain had scrambled his sense of touch, that his fingertips moved over only temporarily coded textures, but there was a lump in his throat, and he was happy. This was the only reality he needed, had ever needed, to receive sensation in its more pleasant disguises, quenching after three years his nerves’ long thirst for the smooth, the soft. Happy is he, he thought, for whom gunny is as silk, burlap as cashmere, wool as percale, instead of — his experience of the past years — the other way around. He would have browsed textbooks of textiles like large tomes of wallpaper samples, would willingly have caressed all dry goods, all bolts, rolls, lengths, and swatches. He wanted jute between his fingers, sackcloth, linen, cambric, mohair. He longed to touch toweling, vicuna, worsted and jersey, tweed, homespun, duffel and mull. Serge, he thought, flannel. Muslin and calico. Chintz. He would have set his fingertips against the grain of sharkskin and dimity, gingham and voile, handled poplin and madras, satin and taffeta, the chiffons and the velvets. Corduroy, tulle, organdy, lace. Grosgrain, chenille. He was a sucker for seersucker, would have felt felt.

Oh oh, he thought, son of his tailor pop and godson of many-costumed Finsberg, how queer a fit my punishment has been. How unsuitable. How wickedly fate has taken my measure. For three years and more, health’s yokel, its clock-sock boob, fetching stares from the natives, those fashion plates, all the customized robust. Men and women with muscle tone, good color, sound tactile good sense, their protein levels in the Swiss banks of being. What I have missed! How deprived! And of all the fabrics the one most missed was woman’s, and next to that, perhaps even before it, the natural feel of his own now middle-aged skin.

He took himself in hand. Entered the shower. (He would not use soap, had no need for the protective glaze of lather.) Adjusted the temperature of the water with the thermostat of his body, his skin like a good thermometer, registering for the first time in years hot as hot, cold as cold, lukewarm as ecstasy. And focused the showerhead like a portrait photographer, shooting with needlepoint, fine spray, the splat of raindrop and heavy weathers of cloudburst. His body calling a spade a spade, even with his eyes closed discriminating, calling out the f-stops of velocity and feeling, feeling — God, had that gone too? had that abandoned him? — a strange sensation now, something new under the sun, no, something rerecognized — feeling wetness, distinguishing dampness, all the marvelous degrees from dry to soaked, the splendid spectrum of humidity.

And when he left the shower stall — he had no need for the traction of bathmats, his balance, which had been slipping away now for months, had returned — he dived into the thick motel bath towels no longer rough to his skin as sandpaper or ground glass or cat-o’-nine-tails. He rubbed himself down, however, with a pulled-punch vigor, making the stinging noises of hygiene — bahrruh, prrrt, shashashashasha — but holding back at last, fearful lest he accidentally press some raw nerve which would, like a linchpin tumbler falling into place in a lock, cause his brain to renege on his remission and return his body to its zipper condition. So he dried his scalp gently, even as he made his curious warpath movements, and ventriloquized the whoops and yaps of a remembered zealousness. And combed his hair wet.

And froze, alarmed and despairing because there was suddenly a queer, faintly burning, salt-in-wound sensation in the outside corners of his eyes. Oh, Christ, he thought. “Oh, God,” he said, “time’s up. I have counted my chickens. Death is not mocked.” And touched the tender spots where the gates of his disease were still open, where his M.S. had stood stupidly in the draft. And the tips of his forefingers came away wet. “Why, they’re tears,” he said in the profoundest wonder he had ever known. They’re tears and I felt them, my skin as honed as that! Feel them, feel them, delicate and baroque as the tracings of snails or the feathery strands of spiders. “Thank you,” he said. “Thanks. Thank you.” And lay naked on the bed, his skin taking the full force of the impression of the spread, imagining he could feel the warm reds and cool blues and neutral browns of its pattern beneath him, while the tears — he would not touch them, would not stanch them — flowed and flowed and finally stopped. And he could feel, enjoy, their evaporative lift. And even the molecular heft of the salt they left behind.

Then he touched with the fingers of both hands every square inch of his body. And the insides of his ears. And explored his nostrils. And poked about in his mouth to feel his teeth on his fingers, his cavities, to touch his tongue and dip it into the well behind his jaw. And reached into his asshole, going deep as a doctor.

His body was still there.

He called the front desk and asked that a bellman be sent to his room.

“Listen,” he told the man, “I’m going to give you ten dollars. I want you to send a woman. Cheap, expensive, I don’t care. I don’t care what color she is or what she looks like or anything about her age. I just want—”

“You want to be chucked out of here, that’s what you want.”

“No, no, you don’t understand—”

“Mister, it’s eleven-thirty in the morning. Oklahoma City isn’t New York.”

“Oh, I see,” Ben said, “the call girls haven’t started yet. I misunderstood. Oh, I see. Oh, that’s different.” He was addressing the bellman like a pimp but in his heart he felt as rehabilitated as Scrooge on Christmas morning. In another minute he would give him money to fetch a goose.

“Put your clothes on,” the bellman said.

“What? Oh.” He was still naked. Christ, had he traded his sanity for his remission? He couldn’t hope to explain. “Will you take the money anyway? I’m not — I didn’t know — look, I know what you’re thinking, what you’d have to be thinking, but it isn’t — It’s — Where’s my Bible?” he asked desperately.

The bellman sneered and Ben, when the man had gone, laughed his ass off, the same one he could touch again with his fingers and feel when he wiped himself.

Which didn’t butter any parsnips. He should have been at his Cinema I and Cinema II in the Draper Lake Shopping Mall, but he wasn’t leaving the motel till he got laid. He called his manager and said he was still in Wichita but was about to leave and would make it down by that evening.

He dressed and went into the dining room and had his lunch. The waitress was a young and pretty girl, and under the napkin on his lap he had an immense hard-on. He chewed his food nervously and stammered when he asked the girl for water. He made her stand by while he added up his check and his brain raced with schemes to engage her personally. He ordered desserts he did not want, commented on the weather, what people did before there was air conditioning, how interesting it must be to work in a motel, meet all those people, American people, who lived — he recalled his rider’s phrase — in the middle of the middle class. “You learn,” he said wildly, “about their different tastes. I mean, coming from all over as they do, they bring, they, uh, bring their customs with them, their peculiar, well, er, folk dishes. That would be, uh, be a, a fair statement, wouldn’t it?”

“Very fair,” she said. “In the morning the kids want Sugar Frosted Flakes and the grownups eat bacon and eggs.”

“Yes. Well…”

“Was there anything else? One of the girls is out today and I have her station, too.”

“Anything else? No no. It was, er, delicious. My compliments to the chef.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Yes. Well…Good luck, good luck to you. Only you can prevent forest fires,” he added lamely. He felt like an idiot and tipped her two dollars for a three-dollar lunch. His salvation now, his only hope not to seem like a fool in her eyes, was to seem insane. Madness had a certain integrity which stupidity lacked.

He started back to his room. It was absolutely necessary that he have a woman, yet, in a strange way, his desire had little to do with lust. Even his hard-on had been more a fact of his remission than of lasciviousness. He had told his brain what to do and it, in its new health, flexing all its recovered muscles, had done it. “See,” his brain said, “watch this. It’s like riding a bicycle.”

A maid was making up the room across from his. He let himself in with his key and cleared the motel soap off the bathroom shelves and hid it in his suitcase. He scooped up the towels he had used and shoved them into the shower stall.

“Miss,” he said, standing in the doorway of his room, “oh, miss?”

“Yes yeah?” She looked to be a woman in her late forties or early fifties, but it was difficult to tell. She may have been an Indian. She was extremely short, very fat.

“I don’t seem to have been left any soap.”

“No yeah? Take from cart what you need.”

“Oh.” He had had the idea she would bring it to him. He made a great to-do about selecting the soaps, strolling about the big canvas wagon as if it were a sweet table or a notions counter, looking into the cartons of matchbooks and the sheaves of treated shoe-shine cloths like bundles of fresh dollars in a teller’s drawer. He examined the cutlery of ballpoint pens and poked about among the waxy motel postcards and stationery. “Well,” he said, when the Indian woman came out with a roll of dirty bed linen, “there’s certainly a lot of things you have to remember to give out. All these pens and cloths and”—he looked directly into the woman’s face—“sanitary napkin disposal bags.”

“Mnh.”

“Oh hey,” he said, “look at that, will you? The sheets.” From where he was standing he could not see the sheets. “All crumpled and soiled…A lot goes on in a motel room, I bet.”

“What yeah?”

“I say, a lot goes on in a motel room that you and I wouldn’t know about. Or that I wouldn’t. You must see it all though. I mean, if you could only talk I bet you could tell some stories.” She had walked back into the room and started to make up the bed. Ben followed. “Could you use some help? I don’t claim to be much of a hand at making beds, but — uh, a little lady like you, I mean, well, if both of us…” She moved very quickly, so short she barely had to stoop to tuck in the sheets. Ben watched as, inverting the pillowcase and aligning one end of the pillow with it while holding the four edges, two of pillow and two of pillowcase, she flipped the pillow into its case. “That’s good,” Ben said. “I’m going to watch you closely on the next one. That’s a real time-saver.” She seemed unaware that he was in the room. “That’s really something,” he said when she had done it again with a second pillow. “That’s one of the tricks of the trade, I guess, what you pick up over the years. Yep yeah?” She had covered the bed with its spread. Ben took a deep breath. “I can’t get over how fast…I’ll bet you could muss up a bed and make it again with the same sheets without the housekeeper ever…Let me ask you something up front. Do you know what the hell I’m talking about?”

“No yeah.”

“All right. We’ll put it this way: You must get all kinds in a place like this. You must even get kinds like me.”

“Yes yeah? You yeah?”

“Lonely.”

That was not it, of course. He was not lonely. He was coated with the need to use himself. Ben Flesh, the restored Bourbon, the found Louis, the exile returned and looking for ways, literally, to feel and make himself felt. He did not so much want to screw — he had screwed in the last three years; he had not run out of god-cousins; there was the “Looks-Like Lady,” the “Way to Make a Million Dollars Lady,” there were others, some even who were not his godcousins — as to touch another human being, to hold someone, to feel their two lives, his, the other’s, like sparks arcing between two rods, to catch a pulse — this morning, lying on the bed after his shower, he had taken his own pulse, able to feel for the first time in years in the tips of his fingers the rhythm of his blood — his hands like heat-seeking devices, holding the life signs and interior parameters of another human, to feel her tremble, to hold her and feel her sweat, to know her body temperature and search out beneath her skin the muscles and bones, to feel hair and know it from flesh and flesh from cosmetics and with his eyes closed trace the calluses on her fingers and distinguish the fine down on her arms. His disease had deadened others as well as himself, had turned whole populations to wood and stone and given them the dead, neutral texture of plastic. It needn’t even be a woman. A child would do. He would have pinched cheeks and held their small heads, or dandled babies on his lap, and the squirmier the better. Oh yes. And been arrested. The curious fact of his civilization was that all intimacies save the ultimate were out of the question. You could fuck but not touch. He wanted nothing more now than to stand beside this small woman and close with her, feel her breath on his hand, or even, just to shake hands with her. But it was impossible, finally, to ask. She would have to know his life. From the beginning to this moment. Then, the most curious thing of all, she would yield, lending him her humanity as eagerly as if he had been her child. They would lie beside each other and he could touch her wherever he wished. She would run her finger across his palm. He would let down her hair. Everything would be permitted, nothing withheld. But it was impossible. There were no words save those of proposition and he could humiliate neither himself nor her any longer. “Thank you,” he said, “for the soap. You’re very kind.”

And a few minutes later — he was on the way to Cinema I and II, the hell with what his manager might think — he saw something which made him stop his car. He looked about desperately for a place to park, a vacant meter. Someone was pulling out a dozen yards down the street. He moved quickly to protect the parking space. He had no change for the meter and only about five minutes of parking time remained on it. To hell with it, let them give him a ticket, let them tow.

He walked inside.

“You’re next, mister.”

“The works,” Flesh said, and climbed into the barber chair.

“Shine?” a black man asked.

“Yes, yes, please,” Flesh said. He whispered to the barber.

“Dorothy,” the barber said, “the gentleman wants a manicure.”

“Get the cuticles,” Ben said, “don’t forget the cuticles.”

The girl brought her tray and stool up to Ben’s chair. “The cuticles are part of the treatment,” she said.

“Yes,” Ben said, “of course.” She held his right hand powerfully and began to file his nails. “Yes,” he said, “that’s good. That’s very good. And a soak?”

“It’s all part of the treatment,” she said.

“Part of the treatment, yes,” he said, and surrendered his hand to the warm soapy water and his face to the hot towel and his feet to the vigorous movements of the black man’s hands, the wonderful tickling sensation when he ran the polish-dipped toothbrush around the base of Ben’s shoes. And to the tears under the towel that came from his connection to these three people, and even to the sobs, the huge heavy heavings of his cured chest that they would see under even the great loose barber’s sheet that covered him.

The Franchiser goes to his movie.

My movie is wonderfully splendid. The white stone building looks something like a naval officer’s hat. I know only approximately what a parabola is, but my movie is paraboloid, I think. It isn’t rectangular, it isn’t flat; the rear wall — where the screens are, the cyclorama, I believe — is higher than the front or side walls. A naval officer’s hat, a pilot’s, something pinched and rakish, like, given distance, low furniture. The entrance is boulder and Thermopane, the boulders tan as Hush Puppies, broken ovals and oblongs of stone, snugged in their mortar mounting like facets. In daylight the tall, thick Thermopane is faintly green, pale as martini or bath water. Outside, along an angled, projecting corridor of bouldered wall are the movie’s locked framed glass cases — I have a key to these displays, I carry it on my Prince Gardner, top-grain cowhide key holder — where my movie’s beautiful posters are sealed beneath the permanent rubric: Now Playing. (And the posters are beautiful, so much better than the stagy, glossy stills of the old days with their look, even if the picture was actually in Technicolor, of having been tinted, cosmetized, rouge on the actors’ cheeks, eye shadow visible as birthmark above their eyes, stills like tableaux in a wax museum, like the mortician’s finagling. The posters are much better. Art work. Line drawings. Spare and promising. Logotypes even the shut-in — the big weekend ads in the Friday and Sunday papers — has by heart. As much a part of the film’s image as its theme music. No, but I saw the poster.)

Inside the lobby — more later — to the side, the movie’s twin ticket booths like tellers’ cages, the stainless chrome panels like a double sink, which spit out my movie’s lovely oversize tickets, wide as 35-millimeter film, yellow with a narrow blue edge like a soundtrack, and capable — depending who springs, how large the party — of producing a string of tickets long as a yardstick, longer.

The movie’s glass candy cases as big around as a boy’s bedroom. With their gorgeous tiers of cellophane-wrapped, cardboard candy boxes with their miniatures — their individually sheathed Heaths and Peter Paul’s Mounds and Almond Joys and Milky Ways and Mars. Milk Duds and jujubes like boxes of marbles. No bars any more. Oh, the immense dark Hershey’s of course, yellow Butterfingers long as a ruler (seventy-five cents some of them, practically nothing under forty-five cents). And popcorn in cylinders large as Quaker Oats boxes, with dollops of my movie’s drawn butter and high drifts of buff popcorn in the greased glass case like a spell of cockeyed weather. (We have done away with the hot dogs, slow rolling in grilled place like logs in a river.) And my movie’s juices, its carefully sized grape drinks and orange, its Pepsi and Fresca and Seven-Up. My movie’s immense carats of crushed ice, its napkin dispensers and straws.

Beautiful Naugahyde benches clear of the Thermopane and near twin easels of Coming Soon with their startling — it’s a first-run house — new posters, novel, like a king’s proclamation, banns, latest policy, fresh law, new rules. My patrons sidling up to these, studying them while they wait for the show to break.

The movie’s thick carpets, a bright, gentle meld and tie-dye of color giving ground to color like the progress of landscape, laws of geography. My movie’s toilets, its Women’s rooms and Men’s, with its urinals white as pillowcase, its stalls of decorator colors not found in nature, and its tiny discrete colored tiles like squares on a board game, its modern, functional sinks with their cockpit fixtures, their wonderful dials for hot water, cold, the pushbutton for soap pink as bubble gum. Paper-towel dispensers built into the walls like pewter mailboxes. My movie’s toilets’ textured walls with my movie’s toilets’ motifs, its indirect lighting and its hidden, gentling sound system that plays the themes from big hits at the box office.

Have I mentioned my movie’s sign? An immense white rectangle of tabula rasa, split down the middle by a length of black metal — CINEMA I, CINEMA II — and looking like a domino in a negative. The simple statement of the titles—The Longest Yard, The Gambler—in sharp black letters like the font of scare headlines, brooding and important as assassination or a declaration of war. The name of one actor up there, or none at all. This is my single whimsy: From time to time I call my manager. “What’s playing?” I ask. He knows I mean, “What’s coming soon?” “Godfather Part II,” he’ll tell me. “I’ll get back to you,” I’ll say. I do my homework. “We’ll go with Robert De Niro.” “It’s Al Pacino,” he tells me. “They’re doing a major piece in Time. Al Pacino is hot.” “Robert De Niro.” “We’ll catch shit from the distributor. It’s in the contract. We’ve got to put Pacino up there. It would only confuse people.” “They know by now. They know how I operate. They’ll love it.” It’s the truth. My sign has read “That’s Entertainment, Ann Miller”; “Airport, Helen Hayes.” And people do enjoy it. If they even notice. They think they’re in on some inside joke. And the film buffs — the Draper Lake Mall is close to Norman, where the University of Oklahoma campus is located — somehow have the idea that seeing a big commercial blockbuster — the only pictures I ever show — at Cinema I, Cinema II somehow endorses the film, makes it Cahiers du Cinéma material, themselves — what’s the word? — cineasts. But the truth is, I do not intend it as a joke, or even as a means of drawing people to my theater. (Though it may have that effect, I think. In the early fifties certain independent exhibitors took the chains to court on the grounds that their exclusive right to show particular films was in restraint of trade. People can go almost anywhere to see my movies. I saw in the paper that The Longest Yard and The Gambler are playing in at least five different first-run houses in the greater Oklahoma City metropolitan area.) It is an act of willfulness on my part, a blow against my franchise being. To see if I can take such blows. That go against the homogeneous grain of my undifferentiated heart. I cannot. But this is how I worry my loose tooth, push against my character, isometrize habit and inclination and the interchangeable parts of my American taste. I am really more comfortable that the sign reads “The Longest Yard, Burt Reynolds; The Gambler, James Caan.” I am glad that the girls behind my candy cases look like ex-babysitters, my ushers like high-school seniors who lack force, who will go on to junior colleges or take their courses at the extension centers of the state university. I am glad I show blockbusters, all the “PG’s” and “R’s” of our collectivized soul and Esperanto’d judgment.

I enjoy my customers. (My Travel Inn isn’t open yet, but I look forward. It will be the capstone of my career, I expect.) I enjoy watching them, being among them. Better than the Fred Astaire folks, the DQ and McDonald’s trade, One Hour Martinizing, the Jacuzzi Whirlpool bunch — arthritics — my Radio Shack and Chicken from the Colonel clientele. I prefer them to the patrons of any of the franchises I’ve owned. It’s the grandest part of my Grand Tour. This is the public I love. Oh, not the weekly matinee crowd so much, the Golden-Agers and widows and kids cutting school. The night-shift bunch and all those of the off-center life who come to my movies to nurse their wounds, or to sit quietly in my dark. (I have heard them weeping at my comedies.) But this is a Friday night, the seven o’clock show. In the lobby I mingle with the cream of my American public. Who have driven the Interstates to come here, the wide four-lane bypasses, the big new highways, median’d, cloverleafed, the great numbered exit signs every two and a half miles, every mile and half and quarter mile, the off-ramps that segue to on-ramps, such and such North, so and so South, over the great concretized, bulldozed no-man’s-lands of the new America. Shuttling at fifty-five miles an hour, sixty, better, past, through, the almost invisible suburbs, under the overpasses with the fine, clean names — Birch Road, and River, Town and Country Lane, Five Mile Road, Country Club Causeway (Port Wonderful, Heaven on Earth Way, Earthly Paradise Park, Good Life Gardens: this is not satire, only the realism of our visionary democracy) — going by so fast that the cyclone fences are a blur, the back yards and barbecues, the aboveground and in-ground pools seen as through a scrim, the cheesecloth vision flattering as mirrors in the suburban Saks Fifth and branch Neimans that perch the landscape, the low high schools like architects’ sketches. The prize-winning glass churches. Driving to the movies in their splendid, multi-thousand-dollar machines, and snappy, perky compacts — these would be the younger people — like bright sculptures or cars like tennis shoes. Where have all the headlights gone? What, has night been done away with? Where are the windshield wipers? What, it ain’t gonna rain no more, no more? See the aerials of the car radios laminated in the windshield glass, the ruled rear-window defrosters like blank sheet music, unfilled-in scales.

Two and a half dollars they pay, three, handing over their tens and their twenties with more nonchalance than people inserting tokens into subway turnstiles. A beautiful people, a confident, lovely paired public, casually well groomed and boisterously gracious, the clothes of the men bright as tattoos, of the women color-coordinated as the appointments in bathrooms. Later they will go to the International House of Pancakes and work their way down the sweet stacks and through the exotic combinations, experimental, choosy as chemists among the alembics of syrups. Polishing it all off, cleaning their plates. What could be better, more innocent? Their hunger piqued, whetted, honed, keened by the emotions in the film they’ve just seen, hunger an emotion itself now, at nine-thirty, at midnight. The cathartic omelet, the denouement of waffles and sausage and coffee.

“Do you want to go over the stats, Ben?” Cliff Lockwire, my manager, asks. “It’s remarkable. The economy’s supposed to be in a slump, but it hasn’t affected attendance much. Not that I can see. The other exhibitors tell the same story.”

“The play’s the thing.”

“Yeah. Hah. Want to see the stats?”

“Later.”

“I wanted to ask you about an idea for kiddies’ matinees on Saturday mornings and school holidays. I hate a dark theater.”

“Later, Lockwire. It’s show time. I’m going to look around.”

“You want to see a picture? I’ve got some calls to make. You want to see a picture? The Longest Yard. Terrific. The Gambler, good but too sophisticated, you know? I was a little disappointed. I thought it would do better than it has. I bought it for two weeks with a third-week option, but I don’t think I’ll pick it up. But if you want to see a picture—”

“I just want to look around.”

“The place is clean as a whistle, Ben. This crew is terrific. Your shoes don’t stick to the floor. We Scotchgard the seats once a month. They’re as good as the day we opened. Farts bounce off them. The image is bright, the sound is excellent.”

“Who am I, the Inspector General? I’m a mingler, I mingle. Make your calls. I just wanted to look at the auditorium. I’m absolutely all business. I want to get a sense. I think in the dark.”

“In the dark?”

“You didn’t know that? Oh yes. Go, go to your office. I’ll think in the dark and get a sense and be back to you in half an hour.”

Who thinks in the dark? The blind? I enter my movie’s auditorium.

The houselights are still up. I take a seat, change it, change a third time. The crowd is a good one, but no sellout. Here and there the seats are empty, the auditorium like an incomplete crossword, the vacant seats like dark squares on a puzzle, five down and three across like a roomful of L’s of the absent. There is music, sourceless, anonymous, background, standards flattened to international Palm Court arrangements, the ticky ticky of the snares and cymbals vaguely Latin, all percussion’s cushioned bumpy paradiddle, the roof-garden strings urban alfresco, the hotel horns of high-society bands, debs coming out, thousands to charity. I like it. It is the music in elevators and department stores and doctors’ waiting rooms. It is the music of all shopping-centered air-conditioned space, an anthem of the universal. In Norway it’s in people’s ears like wax. Hip hip hurrah for the brotherhood of man. They’re playing our song, Finsberg’s brassy showstoppers tamed, declined to lame fox-trot, the threatless noise of motivational research like the soothing pasteurized pastels of walls in women’s prisons. (My movie’s walls are colorless. I mean, I do not know their color. They are neutral, I’d guess, as primed canvas behind a landscape. Right now concealed spots blue the auditorium like east twilight, golden the curtains like a glass of beer.) All about me I hear a snug delicious chatter like peppertalk around an infield. I cannot quite catch what’s being said, but I know that it is optimistic, spoofing, vaguely — they’ve come in pairs, in pairs of pairs, the engaged, the double dating, the married — flirtatious, mock aggressive. It’s the sound of prosperous good humor. (The prime interest rate is through the roof and counting, rising like tropical fever into the treacherous red end of the dial face, but here, in my movie, the talk is manic, the will chipper, bright as the checks and plaids of their styles. Why is it I think the men are dressed in Bermuda shorts? They aren’t, yet they have about them this Miami and island aura, a heraldry of the golf course and day trip, this cruise nimbus.)

“What do you like, chocolate-covered cherries? I’ll bring chocolate-covered cherries. I’ll bring caramels and lollipops. I’ll bring licorice and jujubes. I’m the tooth-decay fairy and what I say goes.”

“I won’t eat it.”

“Take it home to the kids in a doggy bag, Ginny. A souvenir from Uncle Pete like saltwater taffy from the boardwalk. Anybody else? Last orders. Time, gentlemen. Anybody else? All right, that’s it then.” People up and down the row are laughing.

“He’s very nice,” I tell Ginny.

“Pete’s sweet,” she says.

“Pete’s a sweet tooth,” her husband says.

“No,” I say, “he’s a good man in a good mood.”

Pete’s wife and his two friends look at me. I am an intruder, but an older man, well-dressed, clean. Alone on the aisle, perhaps someone recently widowed. They let me in under their mood as if it were an umbrella.

“The best,” Ginny’s husband says.

“What business are you folks in?” (Where do I get my nerve? From my remission.) It is a strange question, but what can I do to them, a clean, older, well-dressed, wifeless man? They will answer, but before they can I reach into the pocket of my suitcoat and take out four passes. (My fingers can do this. Blind they can find the flap of the pocket, lift it, go in with all five fingers extended, no pinky unconsciously snagged on the lip of the pocket, discriminate between my car keys and the paper passes, count out four from the dozen I have taken from Lockwire, and bring them out.) “Here,” I say, “I happen to have the franchise for this theater. I’d like you to take these passes and use them at your convenience.”

“Say,” Pete’s wife says, “are they really passes?”

“Sure,” I say. I give them to her. “Pass them on. Pass on the passes.”

She looks at them. “They’re real.”

“What did you think, counterfeit? You’ll see they’re not good on Friday or Saturday nights, but otherwise there are no restrictions.”

“Well thanks.”

“I’m a good man in a good mood.”

“Well thanks.”

“What business? What line of work?”

“I’m a supervisor with Southwestern Bell,” Pete’s friend says.

“Name’s Eckerd.” He looks down at the passes. “Mr. Lockwire?”

“Oh no. No no. Mr. Lockwire’s my manager. I’m Benjamin Flesh. I’m not normally in the Oklahoma City area. I’m here on business about the theater. I’m here on show business.”

“Oh,” Eckerd says. “I didn’t think you sounded like an Okie. Got an Eastern accent, sort of.”

“We’re all Americans.”

“Well, that’s so,” Eckerd says. “This is my wife Ginny, and that’s Angie Solberto. Pete, Angie’s husband, has Solberto’s Pharmacy in the Draper Lake Mall.”

“That so? Solberto’s? I parked nearby. That’s very nice.” We shake hands. (Hands!) “Yes,” I say, “all Americans. There are over fifty thousand people throughout our land who will see this picture tonight. Who are going to watch Burt Reynolds as he whips his team of convicts into shape. In New York, a different time zone, they’re already seeing it. The game’s already started. In California they’re still picking up their babysitters, but fifty thousand of us and tomorrow another fifty thousand. And over the course of the week say another seventy-five thousand, and in a month maybe close to a million people. That’s what holds us together, you know.” Pete had come back and we were formally introduced. He’d heard of me. Owning Solberto’s, he knew Lockwire and he’d heard of me.

The music stopped in the middle of a phrase and an image came on the screen while the lights were still up. I rose. “Enjoy the picture, folks. It was nice talking to you. Mr. and Mrs. Eckerd, Mr. and Mrs. Solberto.”

“Aren’t you going to—”

“Oh dear me, no, I’ve seen it. Wonderful meeting you. You seem very nice. Like you know what you’re doing.”

“Hey, shh,” someone said behind me.

“Yes, sorry. Yes of course. Quite right. Enjoy the picture. I’m sorry, sir. It’s just the trailers, only the coming attractions. A lot of late-model cars being destroyed. I saw that one, too. Well, again — it’s been a genuine pleasure. We’re all Americans. We all love Burt. He reaches something in each of us, and though he’s the star, we needn’t take a backseat. Not for a minute. How competent people are! How their authority bespeaks some grounding in natural law itself, God’s glorious injunction to be. My godfather was wrong, I think. Life not only is not flashy, a kick in the head of the rules of probability, it’s normal, fixed as thermostat.”

“Hey, buddy—”

“Come on, mister, up or down, in or out. We paid good money.”

“Efficiency and integrity around like the gases and elements. How we do our homework, every mother’s son of us. Enjoy the picture.”

“Come on, will you?”

“Yes, yes, I’m going.” I backed up the aisle. On the screen—Freebie and the Bean—cars were screeching around corners and slamming through plate-glass windows, flipping over guard rails, and landing on cars below like bombs dropped from planes. “We’re all Americans. Look, look. Do you spot the motifs? This couldn’t have happened before the Yom Kippur war and the energy crisis. We’ve become disenchanted with our automobiles. This too will pass.”

“Fella, if you don’t shut up—” a man said. Lockwire was beside me and I beside myself.

“Enjoy the picture. You know? I think Burt Reynolds once lived in Oklahoma. I think I read that somewhere.”

“Hey, Ben,” Lockwire said, “what is it? Come on.”

“Lockwire,” I whispered, “did someone report me to the manager?”

I retreated with him up the aisles, my face to the screen and quiet now, as he gently held me. “Take it easy, Ben,” he said. “Take it easy.”

“Yes. I will,” I said softly. We were standing at the back near the doors. “Wait. Just a minute. Wait. I just want to see this part.”

On the screen it said, “Cinema I Feature Presentation,” and then there was the big animated image of a sort of gear, like the sprocket flywheel of a wristwatch, or like a kid’s mandalic picture of sunshine. It turned around and around, ticking to weird electronic whistles and beats. “Yes. This is the part.” It was supposed to represent a projector spinning off film like line from a fishing reel. It was the logotype of Cinema I, Cinema II, and all over America in the eastern time zone and the central, mountain, and Pacific ones, people were watching it, as if Greenwich Mean Time itself were unwinding, unwinding. But it was the gears, the gears with their deep notches and treacherous terrible teeth that held me, that translated the zippered nerves which were just then coming unstuck again, the remission remissed, in my hands and fingertips, in the stripped caps of my knees and the scraped tines of my ears, loose as rust, as nuts and bolts in the blood.

It was to be his last remission, and he was to remember it like a love affair, like some guarded, precious intimacy, parsing it like a daydream, an idyll, the day he broke the bank at Monte Carlo. (And would dream about it, too, the dreams realistic but with a certain cast of sepia-tone nostalgia, like dreams of dead parents, bittersweet with love and recrimination.)

Lockwire had thought he’d gone crazy of course, and in a way he had, though not crazy so much as heroically excited — M.S. is a stress disease — his febrile talk like the aura of migraine, the incoherics of inspiration. But in a minute he was all business: More than ever. His plans and off-the-cuff schemes a desperate attempt to make a connection to his health, fear’s black coffee.

This is what he said:

“I want smoking permitted back of the first ten rows. There’s to be no public announcement. You’ll continue to run the ‘Fire Regulations Prohibit Smoking in Any Part of This Theater’ footage, but don’t do anything about enforcement. In the beginning you can have one or two of the ushers light up. This will serve as a signal. When the inspector registers a complaint, offer him a self-perpetuating free pass. If he doesn’t go for it, call the Fire Commissioner. Discuss it with him. Mention one thousand dollars. If he gives you static, go back three spaces, play it their way.

“Candy: I want vending machines put in. No gum, of course. Gum fucks up a theater. Just good, relatively inexpensive stuff. Name brands. You can keep the soft-drink and popcorn apparatus where it is, but replace the candy with paperback versions of the books the movies are based on. With records of the score if it’s a good one. The Sting, for example, Love Story. As a matter of fact, stock up on all the good movie music. Get an inventory together. And movie mags: Silver Screen, Photoplay. Posters are very big. Get in some Robert Redfords, Marlon Brandos, W. C. Fieldses, that sort of thing. Why should the headshops get all the play? Let’s get off our asses, Lockwire. I want to make Cinema I, Cinema II a goddamned Grauman’s Chinese, a regular little Merchandise Mart of the spin-off. Use those shops in museums where they sell postcards, art books, and twenty-five-buck reproductions of famous statuary as your model, those goofy imported handmade toys. We’ll make the candy girl — that redhead — our curator. Take her uniform away. Get her a smock and a patch that goes on the shoulder that says ‘Volunteer,’ or ‘Friends of Cinema I, Cinema II.’ Something like that.”

“But…”

“I’m way ahead of you. You’re thinking about the movies, what happens if we try to turn the place into an art house. We don’t. We run the same stuff. Blockbusters. Every movie a picture. You even hear Al Pacino, Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Paul Newman, Redford, you grab. They make a James Bond sequel you raise your finger, jerk your earlobe. And after the Academy Awards don’t fart around with reruns, ads in the paper ‘Nominated for Seven Academy Awards.’ Forget that crowd. Go on to the next blockbuster. Roll it! You got TV?”

“TV?”

“TV. Television. You got TV?”

“Well, certainly. Of course. Who doesn’t have T—”

“In your office?”

“In my office? No. Not in my office.”

“Get a little Sony. Watch Merv. Watch Johnny. Watch Mike. Get up early in the morning. Watch Barbara, watch Gene. They told us about The Exorcist. They told us about Last Tango. They told us about Harry and Tonto. What, you think it’s only the energy czars go on those programs? Stop, look, and listen, Lockwire. If you hear about it twice, it’s a blockbuster. Three times and it’s S.R.O. They have a lot to tell us.”

“To tell us.”

“To tell them. Us. Them. They have the franchise on the public taste. I don’t know how they do it. Magicians. But they know. They know and know. An exhibitor can learn more from those five guys than from forty junkets to the screening rooms of Los Angeles and New York. I’ll give you a tip. Don’t ever for one minute trust your own taste. Don’t trust mine. Where do you think I’d be today if I trusted my taste? Trust theirs — Barb’s and Johnny’s, Gene’s and Mike’s. Trust Merv’s. Those fellows are geniuses!”

“We’ve been doing pretty well. I’ll show you the figures.”

“You don’t have to. The figures are beautiful. I could qvell from the figures. You’d show me figures I’d go ‘hubba hubba,’ I’d follow them blocks and buy them a beer. We’re talking business — turnover, overhead, buy cheap, sell high.

“I want free passes in every thousandth popcorn box. If they say the secret word at the box office, give them double their money back. Invent, inaugurate, introduce, make up. Let there be ‘Special Daylight Savings Time Matinee’; package deals — they pay two-fifty for the show at Cinema I, you take off seventy-five cents for a ticket to Cinema II. Cards. Print up reaction cards. They fill in the blanks, you give them a fifty-cent rebate. Four stars, three, two, one, a half. Let them feel like critics. You do different categories: lighting, best performance by an animal, an Indian, a bad guy, an orphan over nine. Stuff about costumes, crap about sex.

“Look, Lockwire, hound them, please. Stick a line in our advertising that we run only those films that have no radiation hazards.”

“But no films—”

“Then where’s the lie? What’s the harm? Break their bad TV habits. Hound them, please. Did you know that more people collapse while jogging than while watching a flick, that there are fewer deaths per hundred thousand in motion-picture houses than in airplanes, football stadia, bathtubs, beds, restaurants, or living rooms?”

“Are there?”

“Who knows, but that’s where to hit them, in their life span. That’s where they live. Where we all live. If you would know me, learn my blood pressure, count my cholesterol, and taste my lipids. If you would look into my heart, read my cardiogram. Check my protein level every five thousand miles. A man’s character is his health, Lockwire, and I feel crummy, Egypt, crummy.”

He had been pacing up and down in Lockwire’s small office, excited, thinking to slow the force of his new symptoms by ignoring them, by concentrating on business, making the staggered kidney-shaped journey about Lockwire’s desk, passing by the small, discreet safe, by the telephone-answering device that gave out recorded information about what films were currently being shown, their stars and ratings and show times. He looked at the telephone, glanced at Lockwire.

“Put it on.”

“Pardon?”

“Put it on. Let me hear.”

“It’s just a recorded announcement. It saves time, the girls don’t have time to—”

“Put it on.”

Lockwire fiddled with some buttons, played the tape. His voice said, “Thank you for calling Cinema I, Cinema II. Our feature presentation this week at Cinema I is The Longest Yard starring Burt Reynolds and Eddie Albert. The Longest Yard is rated R. No one under seventeen will be admitted unless accompanied by an adult. Performances of The Longest Yard will be at 1:00, 3:00, 5:10, 7:30, and 9:45. The feature at Cinema II is The Gambler, starring James Caan. Rated R, no one under seventeen may be admitted to The Gambler unless accompanied by an adult. Times are 1:15, 3:30, 5:50, 8:00, and 10:00. Cinema I, Cinema II is located in the Draper Lake Shopping Mall. Take Exit 11 off Interstate 35 or Exit 22 if you’re coming from U.S. 40. For additional information, please phone 736-2350. Thank you.”

“Again,” Ben said. “Again, please.” He listened to Lockwire’s recording a second time. “That’s what I mean,” he said. “Lacks zip. Where’s the pep?”

“Zip? Pep? It’s an information service, it’s supposed to be clear. People want to know what’s playing, when it goes on. They have to know if they can bring their kids.”

Flesh nodded. “You think if we sent him a cassette we could get Burt Reynolds to read the copy? ‘Hi, this is Dinah’s great good friend, Burt Reynolds. Thanks for calling Cinema I, Cinema II. The feature this week, etc., etc.’ Then he finishes with ‘Ladies and gentlemen — James Caan!’ ‘Thanks, Burt. Burt Reynolds, ladies and gentlemen, a terrific guy and a dynamite H-bomb flick. At Cinema II today, I’m doing The Gambler, which I really think you’d enjoy. I read seventy-eight scripts, some of which I thought might actually work for me, but when they showed me The Gambler I knew this was it. I mean like, wow, this is the sort of part an actor could wait ten years to do. And while I guess I shouldn’t be blowing my own horn, I think I’m as proud of myself and my coworkers as it’s possible to be. You can catch The Gambler at 1:15, 3:30, 5:50, 8:00, and 10:00. Take Exit 11 off good old Interstate 35 or Exit 22 if you’re coming from good old U.S. 40. Fight cancer with a checkup and a check.’ ”

Lockwire stared at him.

“Yeah,” Ben said, “what do you bet they’ll do it? You know how to reach these people. Find out and get back to me. It wouldn’t hurt to throw in a couple of Rona Barrett items either. Get back to me. I want to see lines. I want to see Oklahoma City policemen doing traffic control like it was the High Holidays and people are coming out of shul.”

Lockwire shook his head in wonder.

“Yeah,” Ben Flesh said, “that’s right. Get back to me.” And still the Jacuzzi Whirlpool was in the franchiser’s skin, Magic Fingers in his businessman’s tissue, all his body pinned and needled. Oh oh oh, his milled being, all his flesh grooved as the stem that winds your watch.

Back at the motel there was a message for him. He called the desk.

“Yes, Mr. Flesh, just a minute, please. I took it down myself. I put it — yes, here it is. ‘Please tell Mr. Ben Flesh that if it’s at all possible he should catch a flight out of Oklahoma City and come to New York. He is needed in Riverdale.’ ”