The Franchiser

1

It would have been wrong to call. The message was clear enough. He was needed in Riverdale, they said. To call, even to ask what was wrong, could be read as extenuation, a sort of plea bargaining. It had been their arrangement — his, the twins’ and triplets’—to serve, forever to come through, simply to be there when the chips were down, the mutual designated hitters of each other’s lives, the gut priorities of love. Yet did he love them? Had they loved him? How well? Was it not rather into a life-long category of mascot that they had enlisted him? (This thought out while still on the flight to LaGuardia, so, as far as he could determine, no damage done, those instincts still alive in him, for all the haywiring of his nerves, to set aside the at hand, the this, then this, then that sequences of his life, by which he meant, of course, his plans.) Yet emergency had its advantages, too. It took, like so many weeks in the sun, years off. There was, it was impossible to mistake it, a kind of bittersweet glamour in the big-time, big-stuff catastrophes of interruptions and drastically changed plans. He thought of scenes in pubs in certain films of the forties — Finsberg’s years — of men and women in nightclubs, in rich men’s mansions, their lawns and ballrooms done up in prom prospect, their dreamy society dance bands driving out the world, covering it with moony fox-trot and the claims of love. Then someone makes an announcement, the host himself, perhaps, that honest, understanding squire of a man. “It’s war, ladies and gentlemen.” Or glances at a scrap of paper the butler has handed him, nods, thanks his servant, signals his orchestra leader — it is almost prearranged, this transoceanic seriousness that shouts from his eyes like an agreement — and the music stops, though comically the drummer, looking down, still continues to work his traps and top hat and snares and the fiddlers bow their instruments and the saxophones croon till, hearing the silences around them, they look up, surprised as people on whom jokes have been played, and a few last dregs of music, even after they have stopped, clatter like dropped marbles, an orchestra tuning up in reverse, and, in the silence, the man finally speaks, almost apologetically. “The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor.” “The barbarians are at the gates.” “The British are coming.” “The Visigoths have entered Marseilles.” And the dancing partners push off from each other as if it were a step in the dance. “I have to get back to my unit. I’m sorry.” And a hundred young officers the same. And inside all this seriousness and farewell, within this altered mood while life zeroes in on the tragic, a joy, too. A joy and pride in deflection, in being deflected. Decamped. Debouched. No time really for the last embrace, kiss, which is, one feels, suffered, the young bloods reduced somehow to nephews again, their girlfriends avatar’d to well-meaning aunts. Yes. Years off. Years. So if he didn’t call, if he went automatically to his Finsberg unit, maybe it was no feather in his cap after all. He was returning to Riverdale a younger man than he had left, and perhaps it was not so much that he loved the Finsbergs as that he hated his life.

Well, he did. He thought he did. What had happened to him. (His unbecoming, he meant, pulled back through geologic time to neanderthal condition. Perhaps his jaws would clamp and he would be unable to walk upright or use tools. Cold, cold, the descent of Ben, his pre-Leakey, pithecanthropic fate.) And yes, was pleased, was certain that whatever was waiting for him in Riverdale — he hadn’t called; “if it’s at all possible,” the message said; he hadn’t called, was that why? was “if it’s at all possible” the loophole of extenuation that could have kept him in Oklahoma City had he called and discovered what? that no one was worse off than himself? — it would be better than what he left behind. For all he had left behind — the lion’s share of his clothing, of course, his valises, the motel room he continued to pay for even though he would not be occupying it, his precious car, the latest of the late-model Cadillacs — was his itinerary. Which was what he had in lieu of a life. His ridiculous itinerary like an old treasure map, his itinerary, no master plan or blueprint but only his itinerary like a mnemonic string round his finger. Only that. His itinerary. He could have wept.

When the plane landed in St. Louis for a fifteen-minute stopover, he briefly considered deplaning, calling New York, for if it wasn’t necessary that he come, then his coming was all the more an admission of his, Flesh’s, need to come. If he was ready to admit that, then he was ready to admit it all. That his life hadn’t worked. How awful. How terrible.

He had flown first class, and while they were still on the ground he asked the stewardess for a drink. It was against federal regulations, she said. He could not be served till they were in the sky. “Sorry.”

“I understand. It’s all right. I will be served in the sky,” he said.

And was drunk — martinis — when he landed at LaGuardia. (Only two cocktails were permitted a passenger — more federal regulations — but he worked out a deal with a man across the aisle who didn’t drink.) And whiled away the two hours not with the headset or the magazines but by looking out the window, studying an America he was too far above to see. Studying the American heavens over Oklahoma, over Missouri, over Illinois, over Indiana, over Ohio, over Pennsylvania, seeing (or not seeing) from one angle what he knew so well from another, and feeling — wasn’t it odd? — its ultimate homogeneity, a homogeneity squared, the final monolithism of his country, the last and loftiest franchise, the air, the sky, all distinctions, whichever remained intact, whichever he had been unable to demolish in his capacity as franchiser, as absent, as blasted away as the tactile capacities of his poor mother-fuck fingers and his lousy son of a bitch hands.

“Cole?” Ben said.

“It’s Lorenz, Ben,” Lorenz said.

“Hi, Ben.”

“Hello, Gus-Ira.”

“I’m Moss,” Moss said.

“What’s happened?” One of the godcousins shrugged. “Jerome?” Ben said.

“Maxene,” Maxene said.

“I don’t get it,” Ben said. “What’s happened?”

“Folks change, Ben.”

“Is that you, Noël?”

“Yes,” Noël said.

“Jesus,” Ben said. It wasn’t anything he could actually put his finger on — but what was, eh? — but in the two or three years since he had last seen them all together they had changed. Though they were unmistakably brothers and sisters, even unmistakably twins and triplets, and even just possibly still unmistakably identical twins and triplets rather than simply fraternal, something had altered, the coarsening of a feature here, the flattening of another there; and now that they no longer looked absolutely alike he had, for the first time since he had known them, difficulty telling them apart. When he had mistaken Lorenz for Cole, Moss for Gus-Ira, and Maxene for Jerome, a few of the sibs had begun to make those nervous overtures of the nostrils and edges of the mouth prefatory to crying. (Christ, he thought, their identicals are in remission.)

“Hey,” Ben said, “hey.”

“It’s just that I’m pregnant,” Gertrude said. “That’s all. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m pregnant, I’d still look the same. When Ethel was pregnant with Anthony-Leslie she changed, too. Then afterward she, she—” Gertrude’s jaw trembled.

“Hey,” Ben said.

“I was never the same afterward,” Ethel said.

“It’s got nothing to do with pregnancy, Gertrude. It’s got nothing to do with pregnancy, Ethel. I never got knocked up, but it’s the same story. With me it was teeth. I had a couple of bad teeth that had to be pulled. The dentist made a bridge. I couldn’t get used to wearing it. My mouth — I don’t know — My mouth changed. It settled. Like a house.”

“Your mouth looks fine,” Ben said. He wasn’t certain whom he was addressing.

“Yeah? Does it? Yeah? I go into a men’s room and they think I’m the cocksucker.”

It had to be Oscar. He had seen Irving in St. Louis and “the cocksucker” was what they called the mincing, epicene Sigmund-Rudolf, whose disease it was to act like a fairy but be none. It had to be Oscar. It was like being a participant in a brain teaser, set down live in some puzzle condition. Three men of equal intelligence stand in a straight line one behind the other. They may not look around. A fourth man comes by. He has five hats, three white and two black. He puts a hat on each man and says he will give a hundred dollars to the man who can first say what color hat he’s wearing. The first man in the line tells him the color of the hat on his head and wins the hundred dollars. What color is his hat and what is his reasoning? Cole, Lorenz, Gus-Ira, Moss, Jerome, and Noël had been accounted for. The person had said “men’s room.” Ben had seen Irving just weeks ago in St. Louis. Sigmund-Rudolf was called “the cocksucker.” It had to be Oscar. So now he lived on the high pure level of the logical. Ben Flesh like the featureless and perfect character in a conundrum. It had to be Oscar.

“It’s true,” Kitty said. “Something happens.”

“Kitty?”

“Uh huh.”

“Hello, Kitty.”

“It’s true. Hello. Something happens. You prime it out. In your thirties. You go off like milk.”

“Well, I think you all look just fine,” Ben said. It was so. They would be what now? The youngest thirty-four, the oldest forty. Why, he was only forty-eight himself — though he thought of himself as older — and they had somehow become his contemporaries. Yet it was so that they looked fine, their paunches and heft only signals of the good uses to which life had put them. Evidence. The smoking guns of their existence. And if this made them less magical, it made them, for him, only a little less magical. (Then he did love them.) To them apparently a miss was as good as a mile, however.

“Well,” Gus-Ira said, “at least we all feel lousy. We’ve discussed it. Identical lousy.”

“Nonsense,” Ben said, wanting them, he discovered, as much like the old them as they wanted it themselves. “You’ve still your Finsberg esprit de corps.”

“We’ve gone back to jungle,” Mary said. “Nature has reclaimed us and green crap pushes up through the cracks in our sidewalk.”

“I came eighteen hundred miles,” Ben said. He was asking for an explanation.

“Another thing,” Jerome said.

“The clothes,” Helen said.

“We don’t even have” Jerome said

“our figures,” Maxene said.

“I don’t think Ben wants to—” Lorenz said.

“A size here, a size there,” LaVerne said.

“It makes a difference”

“in the styles.”

“That’s when we first noticed,” Kitty said.

“Because,” Helen said, “oh, not that we always dressed alike, but when we did—”

“When we were kids and still all living together,” Mary said.

“Yes, then,” Helen said, “but afterward, too. On special occasions.”

“Yes. Well,” Noël said.

“Because there is something in color,” Patty said, “because there is something in color related to size, implicit in pattern demanding its shape. How would a curly tail look on a rabbit, do you suppose? Or the stripes of a tiger on the fur of an ape?”

“Hey,” Ben said.

“We grew—” LaVerne giggled, “apart.”

“Stop it,” Oscar said.

“Right,” said Moss.

“You don’t fool us, sisters,” Gus-Ira said.

“Bastards,” Cole said.

“Yes, well, what do you expect?” LaVerne asked.

“Lotte broke the fucking set,” Noël said angrily. “That’s what you’re thinking.”

“Ah,” Ben said.

“So cut out the sizes crap,” Sigmund-Rudolf said. “Cool it about the Dress Code.”

“They want one of us to die,” Noël said. “They think that would change things, even the score in the Magic Kingdom.”

“Don’t be silly,” Gertrude said. “That’s not what we mean. It isn’t.”

“It isn’t,” the girls said.

“We grew apart,” LaVerne said again.

“Only Ben. Only you’re the same, Ben,” Ethel said.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m not the same.”

“You are,” Oscar said.

“I’m sick,” Ben said.

“Sitting down,” Noël said, “it’s an invisible disease.”

Ben looked at Noël sharply. “You are silly,” he said. “Gertrude’s right, it isn’t what they mean.” He was speaking to all of them.

“Nobody wants anybody dead,” Mary said. “That’s ridiculous.”

“How do you live, Ben?” Gus-Ira asked. He supposed it was Gus-Ira. He was straining to keep them separate.

“You know how I live.”

“No. How do you live? Where do you go?”

“You know how I live. You know where I go.”

“We’ve grown apart,” LaVerne said.

“This one’s in Texas, that one’s in Maine,” Cole said. “And once a year, twice, you check in, drop a card, touch base. We get a call, meet for dinner, have a few.”

“It was better,” Sigmund-Rudolf said, “when you were still getting it from the sisters.”

“I never minded that,” Oscar said. “That wasn’t important.”

“No,” Helen said.

“I came eighteen hundred miles,” Ben said.

“How do you live? Where do you go?”

“I live along my itinerary,” Ben said.

“Joey,” Kitty sang softly, “Joey, Joey.”

“Yes,” Ben Flesh said, “sure. My life like a Triptik from the AAA. Here today and gone tomorrow. What is all this? Why are you behaving so? You know about me. I love you, for God’s sake. What is all this?”

“The showdown. Only the showdown.”

“The little stuff, Ben. Tell us the little stuff.”

“Outdoorsman,” Jerome said, “give us the inside dope.”

“Only what your life is like. Do you take a paper? What do you do about laundry? Is there Sarasota in you? Some winter quarters of your heart, hey?”

“I take all the papers,” Ben said quietly. “I buy magazines from the newsstand. I watch the local eyewitness news at ten. Everywhere they have blue flu I know about it. Where garbage isn’t collected. There’s something for you, if you want to know. There’s no garbage in my life. Except what collects in the car. The torn road map and the Fudgicle wrapper, the silver from chewing gum. But by and large I’m garbageless. I miss it, you know? The maid comes in and makes up the room. The Cokes come from machines in the hall and the dirty dishes go back to Room Service. Mail’s a problem. I use the phone. I don’t vote. Not even an absentee ballot. I could never meet anybody’s residency requirements. The franchiser disenfranchised. I file my taxes, of course. I use my accountant’s business address as my domicile. This? Is this what you mean? What you want? I have neurologists in twenty states, internists in a dozen, dentists in four. (One of my suitcases is just medical records.) There’s same-day service, so laundry’s no problem. Dry cleaning isn’t. But my bowels don’t know what time it is and buying clothes can be tough if there have to be alterations. Where do they deliver, what happens if the fit’s no good? Nah, there ain’t no winter quarters. Am I getting warm?”

“Riverdale,” one of them said.

“What?”

“Riverdale. You could have used Riverdale. As your domicile.”

“As easily Riverdale as your accountant’s business address.”

“I was never asked. Nobody asked me.”

“Oh, Ben,” Patty said.

“Well, it’s not the point really,” Lorenz said.

“What’s the point, Lorenz?” Ben asked.

“Did we have to ask you? Is that where you were standing? On ceremonies like a station of your itinerary?” Mary said.

The girls fussed over him. One took his hand. Another hugged him, a third kissed his cheek. But Ben was more interested in what the brothers were doing. There seemed just then to be a conspiracy of tolerance among them, the soft ticking glances of a deferred cruelty. These looks darted from each to each like a basketball passed around a circle. Maybe it was what one of them had said it was, the showdown. It seemed a theatrical term, but it was a theatrical family. He nodded to the girls, acknowledged their concern for his feelings, but moved carefully away from them and toward the brothers.

Ben and the family were in the big living room. There were theatrical posters behind framed, glare-proof glass, the musical comedies and dramas that Julius had dressed. “I did come eighteen hundred miles,” Ben said. Then it occurred to him how far they must have come. As LaVerne had said, they’d grown apart, as Cole, this one’s in Texas, that one’s in Maine. The Finsbergs had long ago taken their show on the road. There were second companies, third, eighth, and eleventh all over the country by now. Only two of the women and three of the men still lived in New York. Helen had moved to London last year. They must have traveled a greater distance than the circumference of the earth to get here. Thousands had been spent on air fares. “What’s the occasion?” he asked.

“The occasion?”

“Why are we here?”

“Didn’t you know?” Ethel said.

“It’s the unveiling.”

“The unveiling.”

“Of Estelle’s stone.”

“And Lotte’s.”

“But they died years ago, at least Lotte — Isn’t the unveiling usually on the first anniversary of the—”

“Yes,” Helen said. “But there was that business of the suicide.”

“The girls were very angry,” Gus-Ira said.

“Angry?”

“The boys, too,” Mary said. “You were furious, Sigmund-Rudolf.”

“Angry? Furious?”

“Water under the bridge,” Sigmund-Rudolf said.

“Angry? Furious?”

“He doesn’t understand,” Patty said.

“Of course not. How could he?”

“No.”

“No,” Ben said. “I don’t think I do.”

“We were identical, Ben,” Noël said.

“Identical,” said Maxene. “Human MIRV’s blooming from a single shaft.”

“As like as grapes on a cluster.”

“Identical.”

“Who gave the lie to snowflakes.”

“To fingerprints.”

“To keys on pianos.”

“If one of us boys had died, only another of us could have made the identification.”

“We would ask, ‘Are you here, Gus-Ira?’ ‘Are you here, Cole?’ ”

“Calling the roll.”

“Subtracting from nine.”

“That’s how we’d work it.”

“I could have identified you,” Ben said.

“Identical.”

“Homogenized as milk.”

“Of course we were angry.”

“Certainly we were furious.”

“Because”

“when Lotte took”

“her life”

“it was like saying”

“we”

“all would.”

“We shoved her in the plot.”

“And left her grave unmarked.”

“We were so mad.”

“Then when Mama died and we returned for the funeral”

“we saw that we’d changed,”

“grown apart.”

“It was silly to stay angry. We were different now anyway. What Lotte did,”

“there was no guarantee”

“that we’d do”

“too.”

“And besides”

“we hadn’t,”

“had we?”

“So we counted Lotte’s death”

“starting from then”

“and waited a year”

“and counted Mama’s death starting from”

“the anniversary”

“of Lotte’s.”

“And waited a year.”

“A double stone ceremony.”

“Because that was only fitting.”

“Because Mama herself always did everything”

“by twos or threes.”

“I didn’t know any of this,” Ben said.

“Well, there you are,” Oscar said.

“Sure,” said Jerome.

“How could you?” one of the boys and one of the girls asked.

“I was your godcousin,” Ben said. “I was closer to you than I am to my own sister.”

“Good old Ben,” one of the girls and one of the boys said. They looked at him.

Of course, he thought, if they had grown apart from each other, then how much further must they have grown apart from him? It was like his eighteen hundred miles compared to their trip around the world. So that’s what it was, a question of family. That’s why the girls had let him sleep with them, why it made no difference finally to the boys. He recalled Julius’s last words to him. He wasn’t one of them.

“So, Ben,” Jerome said, “how’s business?”

“What?”

“Business. How’s business? What do you make of the economy?”

“The economy?”

“We’d like to hear your side of things, get your viewpoint.”

“We would, Ben,” Sigmund-Rudolf said. And, oddly, those who weren’t already sitting hurried to take seats. Only Ben was standing.

“Give us the lowdown.”

“The view from the field.”

“We want to hear just what you think. Would you mind?”

“Well, I—”

“Just how bad do you think it really is?”

“How much worse—”

“Hush. Let Ben tell it.”

“Go ahead, Ben.”

“Yes, Ben. Go ahead. Tell us. How’s business?”

And he told them.

What did he tell them? What could he tell them? That after all these years, after his years at Wharton and his time on the road, after all the deals he had done, the profits turned like revolving doors, and his negotiations with banks, writing and reading letters of intent, contracts, after paying due bills and collecting debts, after picking his people and selecting his locations, and learning his several dozen trades and making what had come to be, starting from scratch, from the G.I. Bill and the serendipitous fillip of his godfather’s fortunate deathbed shove, his money, that — well, that he knew nothing of business, that he was no businessman but only another consumer, like them, he supposed, like anyone. A franchiser. A fellow who had chewed such and such a hamburger — McDonald’s, Burger King, A & W, Big Boy — at such and such a lunchtime, who licked such and such an ice cream — Howard Johnson’s, Baskin-Robbins, Carvel, Mister Softee — during such and such a heat spell or when this or that drive for something sweet had struck him, gratuitous as pain or melancholy, who sought out this or that gasoline station — Shell, Texaco, Sunoco, Gulf — when the gas gauge on one or another of his Cadillacs had been more or less on Empty (as his stomach had been more or less on Empty, as his sweet tooth), who lay down in such and so a motel — Best Western, Holiday Inn, Ramada, Travelodge — when his body had been empty of energy and his spirit of all will save the will to rest, squinting through the dusk and darkness at the sign shining above the Interstates. Who came to sell, almost always, what he had already first used, tried, bought himself — not excepting the Jacuzzi Whirlpool, not excepting the stereo tape deck in his automobile, not excepting the One Hour Martinizing that cleaned his lonely laundry, not excepting the Robo-Wash that bruised the dirt from his car — and all of it testimonial to nothing finally but his needs, to need itself. So they were asking the wrong fellow. He was no businessman. They were asking the wrong fellow. He was not in trade. Or if he was, then it was only because he did business as some people painted pictures — by the numbers. It was already there, all of it, all of them. “The greeting card,” he said, “was invented for me. There’s no franchise,” he pointed out, “called Flesh’s.”

“Skip it, Godcousin,” Cole said. “How’s business? When’s the economy going to turn around? What about the prime rate? What’s with the energy crisis?”

“Oh,” Ben Flesh said, “the economy, the prime rate, the energy crisis.”

“Are you businessman enough to tell us something about that stuff at least?”

“That stuff, yes. But not because I’m businessman enough. The economy is spooked. There’s a curse on free enterprise. The prime rate grows big as shoe sizes in large men’s closets. Ten, ten and a half. Eleven.”

“You don’t see it coming down?”

“Like a belt buckled by someone troubled by his weight. On a diet. Off it. This hole one month”—he touched his belt—“this one”—he moved his finger toward the buckle—“the next. It makes no difference. I don’t understand the prime rate. But it makes no difference. I don’t think so.”

“You were left the prime rate.”

And that, he saw, was what frightened them. “Yes.”

“That was your inheritance.”

“Yes. I know. Yes. I don’t understand about it. It’s only a decision. Thinking makes it so. It doesn’t mean much. Hard money, soft. I don’t know. It’s only an attitude. Don’t you think so?” He was very tired. If they were going to the unveiling he wished they’d go. He too. That would be something to see. Lotte’s stone. Estelle’s. He had to ask them something.

“When I die,” he said.

“What?”

Hadn’t they heard him? He had probably spoken too softly. “I say,” he said, “when I die—I know we haven’t talked about this — To tell you the truth, I haven’t even thought about it — When I die, could I be buried with the Finsbergs? In your plot? I have no place to go. I mean,” he said, “it’d be a hell of a thing if I had to be stowed in my accountant’s office. — You know? I’d like it, I’d like it stipulated that I could lie with you people.”

“Gee, Ben,” Lorenz said, “that’s a hell of a thing to say. I mean, why do you want to talk like that? Die, lie with us? I mean, what kind of crap is that supposed to be? You’ll dance on our graves.”

“Like Fred Astaire,” Ben said.

“Come on, what’s this horseshit?” Oscar said.

“I have no place to go,” Ben wailed. “I understood your questions about business. I know my name isn’t Finsberg. I know you’re troubled by the prime rates, what your dad did. His putting you under an obligation to me. You don’t have to worry about that. — I’d buy the plot. — I’d pay whatever…You guys are in my will. My sister is. I’m closer to you. My parents are under the ground in Chicago. I’ve known you longer. I could make it a condition of my will. I wouldn’t do that. Why do I say a thing like that? You’ll get the money anyway. I swear to you. I just thought—”

“Don’t be so damned morbid,” Gus-Ira said irritably. “What’s this talk about dying? What’s this horseshit about burials?”

“I want you to promise,” Ben said. “What about it?”

“Once you’re dead what difference does it make?” Noël said. “I don’t see what difference it makes. I mean, I don’t care. They can burn me for all I care. Maybe I’ll give my body to science. What are you worried about? Once you’re—”

“What about it?” Ben demanded.

“Well, it’s just that this isn’t the time,” Moss said quietly.

“For Christ’s sake,” Patty said, “the Finsberg plot’s big as a fucking football field. Lie with me.”

“Patty,” LaVerne said.

“He lies with me,” Patty said. “That’s a good idea. I want that,” Patty said. “Lie with me. Ben lies with me. You got that? You got that, you sons of bitches?” she screamed at her brothers. She took Ben’s hand. He said something she couldn’t make out. “What? What’s that?”

“I said,” he said, “I want to talk business. I’m no businessman, but I know all there is to know. I want you to know, too. I’m talking to you, Noël. I’m talking to Cole and Gus-Ira and Oscar and Sigmund-Rudolf and Moss and Lorenz. You, Jerome, I’m talking to you. Because I see what it is here. Lotte’s dead — Estelle. I see what it is here. The men have the votes.”

“The votes,” Sigmund-Rudolf said, “oh, please.”

“The men have the votes,” Ben said. “I’m answerable to the corporation. All right. You want to know about business? You want to be filled in, I’ll fill you in. The economy. All right. The energy crisis…There isn’t enough.”

“Come on, Ben,” Lorenz said.

“I’m talking energy,” Ben said. “There isn’t enough. There isn’t enough in the world to run the world. There never was. How could there be? The world is a miracle, history’s and the universe’s long shot. It runs uphill. It’s a miracle. Drive up and down in it as I do. Look close at it. See its moving parts, its cranes and car parks and theater districts. It can’t be. It could never have happened. It’s a miracle. I see it but I don’t believe it. The housing projects, for God’s sake, the trolley tracks and side streets, all the equipment on runways, all the crap on docks. Refineries, containers for oil, water tanks on their high tees like immense golf balls. The complicated ports with their forklift trucks and winches. All the hawsers, tackle, sheets, and guys. All the braided, complex cable. All the gantry, all the plinth. The jacks and struts all the. The planet’s rigging like knots in shoes. The joists and girders, trivets, chocks. Oh, oh, the unleavened world. Groan and groan against the gravity in stuff. How’s business? How’s dead weight? Archimedes, thou shouldst be living at this hour! How do we handle the barbell earth? With levers and pulleys and derricks and hoists. With bucket brigades of Egyptian Jews tossing up pyramids stone by stone. How’s business? They’re not hiring in Stonehenge, they’re laying them off in the Easter Isles. How’s industry? Very heavy.

“Where shall we get the churches, how shall we have the money for the schools and the symphonies and stadia, for the sweet water and railroads, all the civilized up-front vigorish that attracts industry and pulls the big money?

“It ain’t in me. I couldn’t have made the world. I couldn’t have imagined it. My God, I can barely live in it.

“Though it may be a franchiser, I think, who’ll save us. Kiss off the neighborhood grocers and corner druggists and little shoemakers. A franchiser. Yes. Speaking some Esperanto of simple need, answering appetite with convenience foods. Some Howard Johnson yet to be.

“But I don’t know. There isn’t enough energy to drive my body. How can there be enough to run Akron?”

“Oh, Ben.”

“But I may lie with you? You heard her, Cole; you’re a witness, Lorenz. I may tuck in with Patty. I have her word.”

“You have her word,” one of them said.

“What’s all this shit about dying?” Ben said. “For God’s sake, cheer up, we’re going to an unveiling.”

They did not withdraw their pledge, their father’s pledge, to guarantee the prime rate. Though he had to pledge not to test them — in truth, he had rarely done so, except at the beginning — and when he left Riverdale nothing had really changed. Though he knew he had been given warning, was on notice, posted ground, thin ice. The boys had the votes.

2

He resumed his tour, his businessman’s Grand Rounds. From Oklahoma City he went to Amarillo, Texas, from Amarillo to Gallup, New Mexico, and then to Albuquerque. He did Salt Lake City and Elko, Nevada (where he made a two-hundred-mile dogleg to Boise to trade in his car for a ’75), and pushed on, Cadillac West, to Sacramento, California. Up through Oregon he traveled — Eugene, Portland — and climbing Washington — Seattle, Bellingham. Resting there, breathless, slouching along the broken coastline’s broken jaw like the underedge of a key. It was now high summer.

Never, having told the Finsbergs that he was no businessman, was he one more consummately. At a time when the country was dragging the river for its economy, when inflation and stagflation and depression were general, he calmly carried on his shuttle finance.

Nor am I talking merely about money now. For if I told the Finsbergs that I was no businessman, at least one of the things I meant was that it was money I had never properly understood. By which I mean coveted in sums large enough to make a difference. By which I mean rich. By which I mean so many things: seeking the tax shelters like lost caves, Northwest Passage, the hidden, swift currents, all those fiscal Gulf Streams that warm the cold places and make fools of the latitudes, topsy-turvying climate with the palm trees of Dublin and Vancouver’s moderated winters. Swiss banking my currency, anonymating it behind the peculiar laws of foreign government. Hedging against inflation with diamonds, gold, pictures, land. Seeking hobby farms or going where the subsidies were, the depletion allowances, all loophole’s vested, venerable kickbacks. Though I am not disparaging, have never disparaged, the value of money and understand full well, understand with the best of them — the richest and poorest — that peculiar sensation of loss and even insult concomitant with — not picking up checks; that’s never bothered me; no, nor getting stuck with the bad end of an unequal division, paying for wine I didn’t drink, splitting down the middle the cost of appetizers or desserts I never ordered, the lion’s share of the food going to the couple I am with (I am alone) but paying anyway, dollar for dollar, as if what is being paid for is a wedding gift one goes in on with a pal or a present for a secretary in the office, say, who’s going to Europe for the first time; and not even purchase, springing for an admired but overpriced jacket or shirt, yet feeling anyway because I do admire it, that I have gotten the best of it somehow, have only given money and gotten goods, fabric — the leakage of money: the terrible disruption of sensibility if, in a taxi, in the dark I have mistaken a ten for a five or a five for a single. Or breaking a fifty or even a twenty, disturbing the high, powerful round numbers of currency, and feeling actually wounded, or at least unpleasantly moved, irritated, insulted, as I say, suffering inordinately, as if from a paper cut or a chip of live cigarette dropped on my skin. Mourning like God my lost black-sheep bucks. Getting nothing for something’s what’s terrible. Misplacing change or not being able to account for twelve dollars which I knew I had. Oh awful, awful. Ruined, wiped out. A hole in my substance.

But just that I never dreamed of being wealthy, never expected it, never did what would have to be done to be it. And I’m not poor-mouthing the big dough, money so important it ceases to be money, becomes — what? — capital, some avatar of asset and credit and reserve and parity, all the complicated solvency of diversification and portfolio. Let them fiddle the tariffs at their pleasure, for the fiduciary is only another foreign language to me, and I leave to others the ins and outs of tare and cess and octroi. All that I ever wanted was enough cash. Death duties never bothered me, only death. (And even at that, even with all my opportunities, all my missed chances, still I have had to do with the stuff. More than most. A guy with his money “tied up.” Think, think: a fellow with tied-up money. Knotted dough, bread braided as challah. Ben Flesh like those strapped Croesi. Well, not in their league, of course, not even in the towns which hold their ball parks, but nevertheless, except for living expenses — high on the highway — with the rest of that fraternity, what I have all in the frozen assets of the frozen custard: the rent and payrolls and equipment and insurance, the petty cash, all the incidentals.)

But because in the last leg of my journey, on notice as I was, warned as I was, politely ultimatum’d, cautioned by the boys and only tenuously laissez-faire’d by the girls, who did not have the votes now anyway, Lotte’s suicide having shifted the balance of power and adulterated their fabulous consanguinity in some, to me, fathomless way — and how struck, hurt I had been to see them differentiated at last, to see their diversification, the awful introduction of nuance into their Finsberg portfolio — I knew that for the first time since the war, when I had put in those long-distance calls to my dead, killed parents — who died, as I lived, on the highway — that I was alone. That something had been withdrawn in Riverdale, taken from me, the godcousinship which had been my ace-in-the-hole, my letter of credit to the world, the carte blanche smeared, shmutzed, and that I had only one peeled wire of connection left, Patty’s IOU. That I could lie beside her in death like a puppy at the foot of a kid’s bed.

So what else was there to do? What choices did I have? Why, only to put on my decorous act of business-is-business propriety. To try to live as they had tried to teach me to live at Wharton. To try, as if I were cramming for an exam, to recall those principles of business administration, finance, and double-entry sobriety which are only finally solid solvency’s serious style.

For the fact is that in all those years he had merely gotten what he wanted — enough cash. That he had spread himself too thin, that there had been too many split ends. Mister Softee in the frozen north, a Robo-Wash in a neighborhood where half the cars were destined to be repossessed, a Radio Shack in a Kentucky town where reception was lousy and there was only one FM multiplex station, a Baskin-Robbins in a section of Kansas City too far from any neighborhood for there to be kids, a dance studio in a part of town where people wouldn’t even walk at night, a dry cleaner in a wash-and-wear world. As if he could live forever, outlast the phases, eras, and epochs of faddish geography and sociology. Like a player of Monopoly who built his hotels on Baltic and Mediterranean and Ventnor Avenues, say, all those low-rent districts of the spirit, whose strategy it was to go to jail as often as he could, to stay there as long as he could, and to win by attrition. Some strategy. Who did not turn out to have the body for strategies of attrition, for whom attrition was a reflexive disease. Who, going such distances, could not go the distance. Some strategy. And all it ever got him was all he ever wanted: enough cash, lolly, dough, brass, spondulicks — the ready. And if he bought and sold so much, if he was so active, perhaps, too, there was something else he wanted, something nobler and more spiritual even than enough cash: something no less than empire itself — to be the man who made America look like America, who made America famous. What had he called it for the murderously divided twins and triplets? Oh yes. The “Esperanto of simple need.” Convenience necessity and the universalized appetite. And if the outskirts of Chicago resembled Connecticut or Tulsa Cleveland and Cleveland Omaha and the north the west and the west the south and east, why he’d had a finger in it, more than a finger — some finger! — a hand. Some hand. There wasn’t a television in all the thousands of motel rooms in which he’d slept which wouldn’t show him in the course of a single evening at least two sponsored minutes of the homogenized, coast-to-coast America he’d helped design, costuming the states, getting Kansas up like Pennsylvania, Georgia like New York. Why he was a Finsberg! A Julius and his own father Flesh, too, loose and at large in his beautiful musical comedy democracy!

Yes. Loose. At large! Those were the operative words now. So what else was there to do? What choices did I have? None but to dredge up Wharton, recalling the patter like a foreign language.

“Yes, sir?”

“I’d like a word with Friendly Bob Adams, please, Miss. My name is Ben Flesh.”

“Ben,” friendly Bob, spotting him, said, “I expected you last week. When you didn’t come I tried to—”

“I’m sorry. I should have gotten you on the blower. I had to fly back to New York on some rather urgent business. I hope this isn’t an inconvenient—”

“No, no, of course not,” Adams said, smiling and taking his hand warmly. “Harriet, this is Mr. Flesh. Harriet’s our new receptionist, Ben.”

“How do you do, Harriet?” Harriet smiled. “She looks a crackerjack girl, Friendly. What happened to — it was Jean, wasn’t it?”

“She turned sourpuss, Ben. She wouldn’t let a smile be her umbrella. I had to get rid of her.”

“Of course. Nice to see you, Harriet. Miss—”

“Lapaloosa.”

“Look at the teeth on her, Ben. When she grins.”

“Very good to have you with us, Miss Lapaloosa. Oh, say, Adams, since I am running late, it might be a good idea if we skipped lunch this time. I’d like to take some things up with you.”

“Of course, Ben. Why don’t we go back to my office?”

“Splendid,” Ben said. Then, in his manager’s office, he let him have it.

“Cash flow,” he said, “hard times.”

“Demand has never been—”

“Hard times. Hard. The price of money to us. Ten cents on the dollar. The truth-in-lending laws. Price tags on our dollars like notarized statements from the appraiser.”

“But demand, Ben, the phone never stops ringing. They don’t care, Ben, they don’t. You think someone down on his luck comparison shops? We do the arithmetic for them, we show them the vigorish like a cop reading them their civil rights, and they still don’t care. ‘Where do I sign?’ they want to know. ‘How soon do I get the money?’ ”

“And this doesn’t make you suspicious? Wipe that smile off your face, Friendly. This doesn’t make you suspicious? You’ve got a good heart, you weren’t cut out to be a shylock. Schmuck, of course they don’t care. They know about bankruptcy. Sylvia Porter tells them in the papers.”

“But the credit checks, Ben, we run credit checks, we know exactly—”

“Yesterday’s newspapers, kid, history. Yesterday’s news, last year’s prospecti. The times have changed on them, their mood has, their disposition. A depression comes, the first thing that goes, after the meat on the table, after the fruit in the bowl, the first thing that goes is optimism, the belief they can pay back what they owe.”

“We can garnishee—”

“What? What can we garnishee? Their unemployment checks? Their workman’s compensation? What can we garnishee? Their allowance from the union? What, what can we garnishee? The widow’s mite? The plastic collateral? What can we garnishee? We going to play tug-of-war with the dealer to repossess the car? We take their furniture? Their color TV? And do what? We got a warehouse? We got storage facilities? Tracts of land in the desert for all the mothball fleet of a bankrupt’s detritus? Credit checks! On what? Old times? The good old days? It doesn’t make you suspicious white-collar guys come to you for dough? College graduates? The class of ’58? That doesn’t bother you? Your ear ain’t to the ground? Take your credit checks in the men’s toilet. Hear what they’re saying in those circles. Sneak up behind them where they eat their lunch, taking their sandwiches from a paper bag, their milk from mayonnaise jars, because these are the people never owned a lunch pail, a pencil box of food, who wouldn’t recognize a thermos unless it was beside a Scotch cooler on a checkered cloth spread out on the lawn for a picnic. Fuck your credit checks, cancel them they bounce. Overhear the rumors they overhear — the layoffs, the open-ended furloughs coming just after the Christmas upswing, the plants closing down in this industry and that, and only a skeleton crew to bank the furnaces, only the night-watchman industry booming because we live in the time of the looters, of the plate-glass smashers, in the age of the plucked toaster from the storefront window and somebody else snitches the white bread. This is the credit you’re running down? No no. They won’t pay. They can’t. And they don’t care.”

“But so far…”

“Sure so far, certainly so far. So far is no distance at all. I’m shutting us down, I’m getting us out. Even now I am negotiating with banks and savings and loans and even with shylocks to buy up our paper at a discount.” Friendly Bob Adams had stopped smiling. It was the first time Flesh had seen him unhappy. It was very strange. His expansiveness gone, he seemed not so much sad as winded. Ben gave him a chance to catch his breath. Adams shook his head slowly. He moved from behind his desk and past the safe where they kept the money and to the window, where he looked out onto the street.

“You’ll find something,” Flesh said. “I tell you what. If nothing turns up you can always come back to me. I’ll find a place for you in a different franchise. I’m not getting out of everything. I’m simply taking stock, inventorying my situation, trimming my sails. Don’t worry. You’ll be all right. I swear to you.”

“It isn’t that,” Adams said.

“It isn’t what?”

“It isn’t that. I wasn’t thinking about myself. I can make it.”

“Sure you can,” Ben said.

“It isn’t me.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Sure,” he said. He looked stricken.

“What is it?”

“Miss Lapaloosa,” he said. “You know me, Ben,” he said, “my make-up. I’m sunshine soldier, summer patriot.”

“Yes?”

“Jean was different. When she turned sourpuss I had to let her go. She depressed me. She tried my friendliness.”

“You want me to fire Miss Lapaloosa? Is that it?”

“You saw,” he said. “That smile. That was from the heart, Ben.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’ll do it,” I said.

“Would you?”

“No problem.”

“That’s swell, Ben. That’s a load off my chest.”

“She’s as good as out on her ass this minute.”

“You’re all right, Ben,” Friendly Bob Adams said.

And giving them the benefit of his best judgment at Railroad Salvage.

“It’s all wrong,” he said, walking with his manager up and down the big hangar-like room, past the bins of canned goods, the stands of steamer trunks and open drawers of hardware — nails, tacks, screws, bits of pipe, washers, bolts, and nuts — like boxes of font, the appliances, mixed, blenders next to portable radios, side by side with steam irons, waffle irons above pressure cookers, toasters and hot plates and bathroom scales laid out on shelves like prizes in a carnival booth. Past the toys, the bins of practical jokes — fake dog poop, joy buzzers, dismembered suppurating fingers, whoopee cushions — like a warehouse of toy pain and joke shit. Through wall-less, shuffled rooms of cheap furniture, kitchen tables set up beside bedroom sets and next to raised toilet seats, vanities, double basins, sinks heavily fixtured as consoles in control towers next to porch furniture, lawn — swings, hammocks, chaise longues, big barbecues like immense cake dishes — beside living rooms that melded into each other, stocky Mediterranean alongside Mapley Colonial and near art-deco Barcaloungers, stack tables, glass and aluminum pieces, a dozen different kinds of lamps. Polyglot as the site of a tornado. “It’s all wrong, it won’t do.”

“Business hasn’t been bad, Mr. Flesh. Sure, the economy’s in a bind right now. Things are a little tight, but our figures are only marginally behind last year’s. Down maybe 7 or 8 percent, but there’ll be an upturn. The President says, his advisers think—”

“It won’t do. Bring a hammer. Get a nail.”

“A hammer? A nail?”

“Have you got a piece of glass somewhere? From costume jewelry. Fetch a zircon.”

“But I—”

“Do it,” Flesh said.

His manager whispered something to a stock boy who was passing by. When the boy returned Flesh took the hammer from him, beckoned them both to follow. The kid caddied Ben’s zircon, his nail.

They returned to the bins of canned goods. Ben set a can of peas down on the cement floor and, stooping, carefully slammed at the top of the can. “See?” he said, holding it up, “now it looks damaged. Hand me the nail. See,” he said, “you make a little scratch on the label. Don’t tear it all off, just a little scratch.” He straightened up. “Here and there. I don’t mean everything. But here and there. Use the zircon to scar the glass tabletops, the legs of coffee tables. Get tools that etch your driver’s license into metal. Burn long numbers on the back of TV sets. They’ll think stolen goods. Be careful. Don’t cut yourself. I don’t want anybody hurt.” He looked at them. “Goodwill Industries is killing us, they’re busting our brains. All right, I’m not really frightened of Mr. Goodwill Industries. Mr. Goodwill Industries is in for a kick in the ass, too. People aren’t so quick in these times to clear out their junk. They’ll make do. They won’t rifle their wardrobes or wring out their basements. Mr. Goodwill Industries is living on borrowed time. His sources are drying up. That’s when we make our move.

“For people need junk,” he said. “There’s a hunger for the secondhand, the used, the abused. I don’t understand this need — me, give me a shiny motel by the side of the road and be a friend to man. But others, our others, the people who come here, there is a flotsam tropism in such people. The jetsam set. A longing deep as lust for the overboard, the castoff, what’s found in the plane wreck, what’s seared in the riot or ruined in the hold. The dead man’s new suit, the suicide’s coat, her shoes and her slip. People want such things. They have a sweet tooth for remnant, for rubbish, remainder. All the derelict and marooned, the ditched and scavenged. Debris, dregs, lees. Dregs addicts. All the multitudinous slag of the ordinary. Is it economy that puts this thirst in them? I don’t know but I don’t think so. I think acquisition, some squirrel vestige in the instincts, something miserly and niggardly, basic but not base, the things of the world as heirloom. The world as heirloom, handed down and continuing. History’s hugged dower. A sort of pin money in the shit in the attic.

“Bang the canned goods. Put little holes in the shirttails. Dent the toasters, nick the toys. We’re Railroad Salvage, all aboard. We’re Railroad Salvage. Give them train wreck, give them capsize, give them totaled, head-on and what’s spilled to the road from the jackknifed rig.

“Is this good business?” It was as if he were appealing to the Finsbergs rather than to his help. “Is this sound business practice? Efficient management? Solid policy?”

As everywhere he went these days he was thinking of Finsbergs, addressing Finsbergs when he addressed his managers, their auras with him like cartoon consciences.

“I want,” he told his people at Fotomat, “to see the pictures.”

“The pictures?”

“The pictures, the photographs, yes.”

“That’s invasion of privacy, it’s like opening someone’s mail.”

“We’re professionals. We’re developers here. It’s a customer service. Quality control. An audit. Show me,” he said, when they had shut down for the evening and he was assured no customers would come to claim their snapshots — it was a small butke of a building, a Checkpoint Charlie, a Mandelbaum Gate thing, a booth in the open center of a shopping mall—“Bring me a viewer for the slides, a magnifying glass for the contact prints.”

“Mr. Flesh—”

“It’s an audit, I tell you.”

It was. Of American life. The human condition as it relaxed, as it sat for its portraits at birthday celebrations and family reunions, at weddings and picnics and summer vacations — it was just past the season of summer vacations — at special celebratory dinners and homecomings — soldiers, sailors with their duffels up on their shoulders, perched there like the parrots of adventure.

“Look, look,” he said, providing the commentary, lecturing them like a man with home movies. “See, here’s the snowman in the yard, the children in leggings, in mittens on strings. See? Look how the girl has grown. How much higher her shoulders seem against the fence in the background, how the hedge has flowered. Oh, God, it’s the same roll. Three seasons on the same roll. Their aboveground pool stands closed like a piece of giant canned goods — see, see the tarp — yet in this one it’s open. The neighbor kid splashes. Oh oh. Three seasons. One roll of film. My. My oh my. Three. And only one roll shot.

“Look, look here. Black and white. And — what’s this name? — Daigle. Daigle’s pictures are black and white, too. And Libby’s. And Rosenthal’s. Wheat’s are, Colameco’s. Black. Black and white. Tch tch.”

“Black and white’s a faster film, Mr. Flesh.”

“Of course it is. Yes. But — oh, oh,” he groaned, “these are outdoors. Outdoors and black and white!”

“Some photographers prefer it. It’s better at stopping action.”

“These are people,” Flesh cried. “These are people, not photographers. And what, you need a fast film for this? Can’t you see? It’s their house. They’re selling their house. What’s the address here? Let’s see the envelope. Two sixty-one Crownsville. Where’s that? What sort of neighborhood? Changing I’ll bet. Sure, that must be it. See? Here in this picture, the kids in the street, two of them black. The neighborhood’s changing, the film’s black and white. All over the same story. Oh the inroads and encroachments. Posing their houses for realtors’ books. This block is busted. You can kiss it goodbye.”

“I don’t—”

“They have Polaroids. The blacks. They have Polaroids! It’s only natural, what do you think? They’re impatient. They‘ve had to wait. They have Polaroids. They want results. They hold the film in their hand and watch the faces bloom like flowers. It reminds them of Madam Palmyra’s crystal ball. We’re ruined, ruined.”

“Mr. Flesh, do you think you could hold the photographs by the edges? If the customer sees—”

“We’re ruined,” Ben said, “we’d best cut our losses. See? See the strain on these people’s faces? Uh oh. I don’t like it. I don’t like the looks of this.”

“The looks of what, sir?”

“The monuments. Something about the monuments. Here, hold the viewer. Look at the Herman Schieke family. The Schiekes at Yellowstone, Old Faithful going off behind them like a liquid firework. At the rim of the Grand Canyon. Here, look, some Schieke kid standing on a petrified log in the Petrified Forest. And, here, this one, Herman himself probably, the photograph angled so Schieke’s face appears beside the Presidents’ at Mount Rushmore.”

“That’s a darned good picture,” his manager said.

“Good? Good? You don’t understand? We’re living in the last days. Schieke thinks so. He’s making a record. These pictures, the others, the ones in Europe, they all say the same. They say, ‘We were there. Us. Here’s the proof.’ Because they never expect to go again! It’s a last fling. Open your eyes. It’s a last fling in the last days. Because a man of confidence doesn’t mar a Colosseum with his worn-out children — why, the whole family’s there; worse, worse and worse; they’ve asked some stranger to take the picture — unless he believes he’ll never return. In London the same. In Paris, in Greece. Terrible, terrible, a terrible thing these terrible times. It’s lucky I saw these. We know what to do.”

“What to do?”

“Shh, go, go home to your families, I’ll close up, I have work. I’d rather be by myself just now. Go. You can pick up the keys at my motel in the morning.”

“But…”

“It’s best that you go. I’ll be honest with you. I don’t like it. I’m forced to sell. I’ll give you wonderful references. Maybe I can get the new man to take you on. Have you saved money? Maybe you can go in with someone and buy me out. I want only what I paid. Go home, think about this. Sleep on it. Discuss with your wife.”

Then, alone, by a Tensor lamp on a desk in the qualified dark, he sat, rummaging the photographs like a numismatist, prying detail from his customers’ lives. That they had dogs, cats, gerbils, plants. Tapping, for the first time it could have been — he’d lied to his manager, he didn’t intend to sell; this wasn’t good business; he was as bad a franchiser as ever, as indifferent to his prospects as ever, as distant as ever from motives of money and as close to his single interest, the backstage Finsberg propinquity to staged life, his need to costume his country, to give it its visible props, its mansard roofs and golden arches and false belfries, all its ubiquitous, familiar neon signatures and logos, all its things, all its crap, the true American graffiti, that perfect queer calligraphy of American signature, what gave it meaning and made it fun — into a ring of the domestic. Father’s chair, the television/stereo/tape recorder hidden in its monstrous cabinet like a Murphy bed in the wall, some teenager’s set of drums in the family room, the boy’s name like lush spangled fruit on one face of the bass, palms on the taut skin, dice, champagne glasses, the painted liquid jaundiced as specimen and the bubbles rising like smoke signal, tilting up and back like a stupa of suds. He saw crosses on walls, pictures of long-tressed Christs, here and there a menorah in a breakfront overwhelming the miniatures — he passed his magnifying glass over these — around it. Mah-Jongg sets, decks of cards, poker chips, chess boards, magazines, Reader’s Digest condensations like grammar-school dictionaries. Where the rug was worn, where the paint was peeling. The landscapes above the sofas — he could tell which ones had been done by the wives — and the framed glass portrait photography on the mantels. What newspapers they took, what the news was months ago. Tapping into a ring of the domestic. Seeing behind the principals — it could have been Asia it was so strange to him — boxes of soap flakes, pails, brushes in the cabinets beneath the kitchen sink, the iron elbow joints of plumbing. Seeing kids’ bedrooms, the pie slices of pennants, ship models, model airplanes. A daughter’s collapsed doll looking breathless, unconscious against the baseboard. Seeing — there would be company — heaped coats, wraps upon a bed in the master bedroom. Formal poses — children sitting in pri-mogenitive succession on a sofa. A wife fixing her hair, a husband shaving. (The medicine cabinet, ointments saved years, the last chipped pills of ancient prescriptions, yellowing aspirin, toothbrushes caked with paste.) And it forcibly struck him. Why, I have lived my life like an outdoorsman. Itchfoot the Peddler, Westward the Itinerant, Footloose Flesh, Ben Bum, the Horizon kid. Not to have been — this was true, excepting childhood, excepting the Finsbergs and Riverdale — inside, indoors, even as a guest; never to have bought, never to have rented, never to have lived in an apartment, to have signed a lease, lived a lodger. How does it happen, I wonder, that I have never killed anyone, that I am not a wanted man?

“I think,” he told his H & R Block man, “that I shall have to shut down this office.”

“It’s the off-season, Mr. Flesh, that’s why it seems so slack. From January to May you can’t hear yourself think. The phones never stop ringing. Most of our off-season work is audits, people called in to bring their records down to IRS, go over their returns. The spot check, you know? I’ve got twenty appointments of that nature this month alone.”

“I’m sorry,” Ben said.

“Mr. Flesh, there’s a saying, ‘The only thing you can be sure of is death and taxes.’ This is a sound business, Mr. Flesh.”

“I’m sorry.”

“If you’ll just look at the commissions, even in these off-months—”

“Where’s the return in returns?” he asked. “Look,” he said, “I know you do a good job. But that was yesteryear. You own your own home? Rent?”

“We rent, but—”

“You don’t get around like I do. I’m Wharton, I know things. My ear’s to the ground like the white line on the highway. They’re closing the loopholes, they’re graduating the taxes, gaudeamus igitur. Texas Instruments has us by the short hairs. With the pocket computers any kid can figure his old man’s taxes. They teach this shit in school now. Like good citizenship. Like Driver Training. Anyway, what’s the matter, you never heard of the Taxpayers’ Revolution? Shh, listen, they’re dumping tea in the harbor.”

“But without a warning, with no notice—”

“Finish your case load. Take twice your commission. Triple. We’re closing shop, we’re going out of business, everything must go.”

“But—”

“I told Evelyn Wood the same. What, you think you’re a special case? I told Evelyn Wood, I told her, ‘Eve, there’s trouble in Canada, in the forests. The weather’s bad, the stands of trees are lying down. There’s no wood in the woods, Wood. The pulp business is mushy. Where’s the paper to come from for the speed readers to read? They’re reading so fast now they’re reading us out of business. Publishing’s in hot water. Magazines are folding, newspapers. (What, you never heard of folded newspapers?) If we want to keep up with the times we have to slow down, go back to the old ways. We have to teach them to move their lips.’ ”

“Mr. Flesh—”

“A month, I give you a month’s notice.”

Which was good business. And now he was conscious always of Finsbergs on the other end of his line. He performed for them. His best foot forward. Living as if within the crosshairs of their sharp-shooter observation and understanding. Every move a picture. His deals dealt for them more than for himself. Like a kid behaving for Santa Claus.

At night he dreamed of them, changed now, grown apart, the shifting sand-dune arrangement of their bone structure — all gone now their ’50’s and ’60’s tract-house mode — their features left out overnight in a human weather, hair colors changing, styles, growing piecemeal paunches, gestures, asses, the girls moving toward some vague Estelledom while the men grew more like Julius and less like each other. An expanding-universe theory of Finsbergs. The Big Finsberg Bang. In his dream he was like some archaeologist at the Finsberg digs, reconstructing their old mass individualism, only with difficulty putting them together, a painstaking labor. Not something for someone with his hands. All the king’s horsing them. And getting somehow the idea that if he could only shape his franchises in some more coherent way — this occurred to him: that if he could pace the routes from New York to Chicago, from St. Louis to Denver, Omaha to Los Angeles, Fort Worth to Dallas, Boston to Washington, planting the land mines of his franchising in such a way as to coincide with a traveler’s circadian rhythms, his scientifically averaged-out need to pee, eat, rest, distract himself with souvenirs from Stuckey’s and Nickerson Farms or get off the main route for a bit and go to town — all would be well, he would clean up, regain the respect of the boys, the love of the girls, and that respect and love for him would somehow force them back into their old odd single magical manifestations. But it was too hard, a job for a younger man, a healthier. All wouldn’t be well, the Finsberg features would never again collect at the true north of their old selves. There was no way.

All he could do was tack, trim. Sacrifice Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics and H & R Block for Dunkin’ Donuts. Trading them off like baseball cards. If a depression came, Dunkin’ Donuts would prosper. He felt that. He knew that. That was good business. With what he got for the franchises he dumped, he reinvested heavily in doughnuts and coffee.

Then the price of cream shot sky-high and sugar went through the fucking roof.

3

It was early 1975. The banks had begun to chip away at the prime rate, every two or three weeks bringing down the boiling point of money, its high tropical fevers, a quarter percentage point here, a half percentage point there. The temp tumbling like a crisis in old-time films. The price-of-money fix was in. The gnomes of Zurich and the Fed had put the brakes on. Gold, legal to own, went begging. Stocks recovered ground in their long Viet/guerrilla/Hundred Years War.

By his recent good husbandry, Ben Flesh had divested himself of many of his investments, adjusting his strange portfolio, his eggs in fewer baskets now than they had been for years. Money in the bank. The Finsbergs protected. A high wall of the respectable around them while his health failed daily, his own energy crisis unresolved, his body still demyelinating a mile a minute. Like a thaw revealing litter, garbages, horror.

He spoke with two or three Finsbergs daily, pressing them with his new goduncle love, the phone a genuine expense. (He subscribed to a WATS line, got special rates, dialing his coded numbers even at the public phones in gas stations and drugstores.)

Not wanting to nuisance them, as aware as any tentative, cautious, unsure-of-his-ground lover of the thinness of his welcome. So coming at them from another side, not deferent, not submissive. No Lear, no Stella Dallas. Not Père Goriot. Not asking for their healths, giving his.

“My testicles are acting up,” he told Gus-Ira. “They feel weighted. A very peculiar sensory symptom. Annoying. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s as if I had loaded dice for balls. Or like those, you know, Mexican jumping beans.”

“That sounds uncomfortable.”

“Oh yeah. It is. I take a few steps and I feel the locks tumbling in my parts. I come and I feel magnets colliding. I piss and the ball bearings get out of line.”

“Terrible. I heard that Moss—”

“But it’s still chiefly sensory, I think. Oh my balance isn’t that terrific. I trip but I don’t always go down. I can touch my finger to my thumb. But what’s the good of kidding? I’ll be on steroids in a year — two at the outside. All I’m really holding out for is the opening of my Travel Inn. I’d like to get that under my belt. If it isn’t one thing it’s another. Now the damned electricians are out on strike. But there’s talk of settlement. It could be open by this summer if they get down to business. Almost everything’s ready, the furniture will be coming in, the TV’s. It’s just the electricians holding us up. It’s going to be terrific, Gus-Ira. My biggest thing yet. I want you and the family as my guests for the opening. Hold July open.”

“That sounds swell, Ben. We’ll certainly try to make it.”

“That’s a promise now.”

“Sure. We’ll try.”

“What’s this about Moss?”

“Moss?”

“You said you heard that Moss something something.”

“Oh. Maxene was telling me that he may have his driver’s license revoked.”

“Yes?”

“The insurance company is talking about canceling his policy. There’ve been some claims against him.”

“ Boy, the nerve of those guys. You pay your premiums — and those are some premiums. Believe me, I know. You pay your premiums, dent a few fenders, and they want to close you down. Sore losers. I can’t get life insurance because of the M.S.”

“Well—”

“The underwriters. Letters from a half dozen of the best neurologists in the country. I’ve seen the letters. Beautiful. Like good references. Like advise and consent on a shoo-in Secretary of State. The companies turn me down.”

“Really?”

“They turn me down. Or want ridiculous premiums. I wanted to take out a million dollars. You know the premium those putz-knuckles are asking?”

“A million bucks? Why would you want to take out a million-dollar insurance policy?”

“My God, Gus, you have to ask something like that? For the kids, for you guys, but it’s out of the question. They want a hundred twenty-five grand a year to cover me. Fucking whore-hearts. My neuros tell them it’s sensory…Hell, their own neuros tell them it’s sensory and they’re still betting I won’t live eight years.”

“A hundred twenty-five thousand. That’s wacky.”

“Goofy.”

“ Incredible.”

“Well, what the hell, I’ll be on steroids in a year, my face out of shape as a whore’s pillow. Lopsided as hobgoblin. Still, I could last years strapped to the wheelchair. But I guess I see their point. The payments. How would I keep up the payments?”

“Gee, Ben, when you talk like that—” Kitty said.

“Don’t you worry, baby, just don’t you worry. You guys are provided for. Have I ever cost you a nickel?”

“I hate to hear—”

“Have I cost you a nickel? Was there ever a time I didn’t pay back? Did I ever once have to come to you and say, ‘Boys, girls, I can’t handle the payments, go to bat for me.’?”

“Come on, Ben.”

“Not once. Not one time. Dad put you under an obligation and I’m obligated.”

“Please.”

“No. I’m obliged. All right,” he told Mary, “it ain’t the Ottoman Empire, but Monaco maybe, San Marino perhaps, whatever they call those postage-stamp republics they have over there. Something like that my tidy enterprises. For you, for Lorenz, for Helen, the others.”

“Speaking of Helen,” she said as if she wanted to change the subject.

“No no. Don’t be embarrassed by my love. Please, Mary. Take it or leave it, but don’t be embarrassed. And how do you like this? My old guy rhetoric, my stage-door style? Call me Pop and give me high marks for loyalty.”

“Loyalty? Loyalty to what, Ben?”

“To what? To you. To you, Irving. To you like a toast. To you. Listen, I’ve taken plenty of loyalty lessons over the years. I’m a Finsberg patriot, hip hip hooray. Maybe loyaler,” he said to Cole, “than you guys have been. Oh, not to me. I don’t complain. All I got to complain are my toes tingling in my shoes like I’m walking barefoot in sandstorms. All I got to complain are my fingernails tickle. That my electricians don’t settle — but I heard the Fed mediators are in on it now. There may be a break soon. I think August at the outside for the opening of my Inn. You can come, right? My guests. There’s never been a Flesh/Finsberg Franchise Gala. What, you think I’d ask you to a Baskin-Robbins opening? You should fly in and look at the flavors before they melt? Though, you know,” he told Gertrude, “it might have been worth it. The colors of those ice creams! Chocolate like new shoes, Cherry like bright fingernail polish. We do a Maple Ripple it looks like fine-grained wood, a Peach like light coming through a lampshade. You should see that stuff — the ice-cream paints bright as posters, fifty Day-Glo colors. You scoop the stuff up you feel like Jackson Pollock. There have been times — listen to me — there have been times it’s busy, I’m tired from a trip, my symptoms are crawling in my ears like ants, and I go back of the counter to help out. I roll up my sleeves and I get cheerful. Cheerful. I whistle while I work. No kidding,” he told Patty, “I take one look at the ice-cream acrylics and I’m happy as Looney Tunes. I almost forget my teeth have goose bumps.”

“Goose bumps?”

“This M.S. is no respecter of feelings. It blitzkriegs the nerves, gives your hair a headache. You think there are splinters in your eyes and the roof of your mouth has sunburn. But what the hell, the electricians are close to settling, the union representatives are seriously considering the latest proposals, they may bring them to the rank and file for a vote. Then — who knows? — five, six weeks’ work and you can call it a Travel Inn. You’ll be there, of course. I’m expecting all the kids. It’ll be like old times.”

“With Jerome the way he is—”

Jerome? Jerome’s fine. Shipshape. I already invited Jerome. I spoke to Jerome last week.”

“He hadn’t gone in for the tests last week.”

“What tests? He didn’t say anything about tests. He never mentioned tests. What’s going on with Jerome?”

“That’s what they’re trying to determine, Ben. I don’t understand it. Supposedly we’ll know in a few days.”

He called Jerome but there was no answer.

He called Helen.

“Christ,” she said thickly, “who the hell is this?”

“It’s Ben. Did I wake you? Gosh, I’m sorry. It’s only just past midnight here. I didn’t think you’d be asleep yet. You’re what, nine o’clock in Los Angeles?”

“I sound like the time and temperature lady to you, jackoff?”

“Hey, Helen, it’s Ben. It’s Ben, darling.”

“ ‘Hey, Helen, it’s Ben,’ ” she mocked. “Jeepers, douchebag, you’re some fucking bore. I spoke to you a month ago. You told me your knuckles had temperature. What’s up now, you getting electric shock in your snot?”

“It’s about Jerome, sweetheart.”

“Screw Jerome.”

“Helen, have you been drinking? You know how you get when you’re drinking.”

“Mind your business. What do you think this is? You some kind of wise guy? Nuts to you. Wanna fight? Get off the planet.”

He’d been calling them, feeding them his symptoms, the heavy weather, all the isobars and thunderheads of his multiplying sclerosis. (It was crazy, but it was as if the days when his paresthetic hands had troubled him, when his skin crawled in anything but natural fibers, when the nerves in his feet sent out shoots of electric quiver, had been a golden age, the halcyon good old days of manageable discomfort.) Now his body shipped a queer illicit cargo of intolerable contraband sensation. Things no torturer could make up. His body a host to amok feeling — and all still below the level of pain, things not pain, as if pain, as he remembered it, was only a matter of the degree of things honed and sharp, tender through sore to pinched, some verb wheel of friction and thorned flesh, only the surgical cutlery of bruise, nip, sting, stitch, ache, and cramp. Pain, he thought, he could take. Or could have afforded the addiction that would have purchased relief. These other things, these new proliferating sour dispensations were something else and lived, thrived — he knew, he’d tried them — beneath all the powerful analgesics — Demerol, codeine, laudanum, morphine. And had held back from his godcousins the really big stuff, the monstrous that he dared not put in words, dared not try them with. Held back all that was unimaginable: sounds that tickled his eardrums; his tongue rubbed raw in his saltwater saliva; the steady, constant Antarctic cold of his hands and feet and eyelids — he could not endure air conditioning and wore thick furred gloves in even the hottest weather — the impression he had that his body was actually striped like a zebra’s, the dark strips of skin and flesh, or what he imagined were the dark strips — he could see that he was not really striped — heavier somehow than the light, harder to negotiate in gravity; the sensation he had that he was wet deep inside his body, wet where he could not get to it — like someone with an unreachable itch — where he could not dry it with towels or rub it with toilet paper, though he tried. Though he wiped and wiped himself, he felt always as if he sat in some medium of diarrhea, minced, oozy, slippery shit. Also, his olfactory system was faultily wired so that he hallucinated tastes and smells, confused them crazily with their sources till finally, experimentally breaking the code, he ordered desserts and cakes at dinner if he felt like seafood, seafood if his body craved meat, meat if he had a taste for something sweet. Had not told them any of this who kept on now — he couldn’t say why, couldn’t account for why he did not kill himself, or had not died — by dint of a will and a set of motives he knew to be as illusory and unfounded as his impression that his body was striped.

“I have arrived,” he told Oscar, “at a stage of my life where I must manufacture reasons to keep going,” but not explaining this further, certainly not giving any indications that his love for them might be one of those reasons. But perhaps he did not believe this himself.

Was worried. Concerned. Not hurt (everything beneath pain). Even though he knew they knew where to find him, where he hung out to keep his eye on the landscapers and supervise the movers who daily brought the suites of motel furniture, where he oversaw the construction of the swimming pool and sauna and signed for the television sets he had bought over a year before from Nate Lace at the Nittney-Lyon, and kept a weather eye out for any nuance of movement in the impasse with the electricians, and conducted the business of all his remaining baker’s-dozen franchises throughout the country, become a sort of Nate Lace himself now, holed up, at once waiting and doing business. And still they didn’t call. Even though they knew of his illness (though not its degree, he having spared them that, spared them, even as he spoke to them, when he, that is, called them, the terrible symptoms of speech itself: that talking, making sounds, seemed to chafe the soft insides of his cheeks, raising blisters). Not even forgiving them. What was there to forgive? They’d told him. They’d grown apart.

“Loyaler,” as he told Irving, “than you guys have been, not even to me, I’m not in it, but to each other. Growing apart. What was it, you didn’t watch your diets? You let yourselves go? Genes, genes like that, like you had, are holy. A responsibility. Once-in-a-lifetime genes. To be protected. What’s the matter? You’re Finsbergs. Don’t you know anything about endangered species?”

“But why complain to me?” Irving said. “Jesus, Ben, I’m the one who held on. Don’t blame me,” racially prejudiced Irving said, “for the mongrelization of this family. Sure, I married a darkie, but damn it, Ben, I’m the only Finsberg who hasn’t changed. I look the same. A year older but still charting the Finsberg course, still with the old twin and triplet telemetry and trajectory. It was them. I’m right on target for what would have been the manifest destiny of Finsberg evolution. Gee, Ben, I didn’t grow apart.”

“I know,” Flesh said, “I know, Irving. You’re a good boy, a nice man, but how could I say such things to the others? To the ones who did let themselves go? Who did grow apart? Forgive me, pal, I’m just letting off steam.”

And the more worried, the more concerned — Jerome’s tests — the less there was to forgive anyone. Perhaps they didn’t want to upset him, felt they needed to protect him, as he protected them from his darkest symptoms. So he didn’t call. He stopped calling. Waiting for good news, waiting for the strike to be settled, waiting for something nice to tell them for a change.

It was settled in April. Ben nodded to the man who told him and went immediately to the telephone.

He called Gus-Ira. When the ringing stopped and he heard the connection completed, he began talking at once. “We’re cooking, the rank and file ratified and the boys will be…” There was a voice against his own voice. “Gee, I was so excited,” he said, “I didn’t even say hello. It’s me, Gus-Ira, it’s Ben. Say, I just…”

“…and that’s just for starters,” Kitty’s voice said, “you haven’t heard the…”

“Kitty, is that you? Hi, it’s Ben. There must be some freak connection. How are you, Kitty dear, how are you, Gus-Ira? ”

“…thing is he doesn’t stop. I think someone should call him off, tell him that (a) number one…”

“Kitty? Gus-Ira?” Ben broke in.

“…our own troubles, and (b) number two…”

“Hello? Hello?”

“ water is thicker than godblood.”

“Can’t you hear me? This is a freak connection. Hello?”

“…and Patty’s grandstanding that time: ‘He can lie beside me.’ All right, I know she said it to get him off our backs, but statements like that only encourage him. These damned phone calls. I tell you, he’s a sick man. I tell you? He tells you. How much longer do you think he can continue to function? I mean it. He expects to stay in Riverdale and have the family care for him. Do you realize what that would mean? The man’s a bore with his love and loyalty. And not just Riverdale. You won’t escape. It’ll be Ben Flesh, the traveling invalid, Ben Flesh…”

“Hello?”

“…shlepping his roadshow symptoms around the Finsberg bases like King Lear. A month or so in Riverdale. Then we parcel-post him to Noël in San Antonio. Dying on the circuit, only instead of doing his Grand Rounds on his own time and at his silly franchises it’ll be at our places, we’ll be his franchises, and don’t kid yourself, it’ll end up being at our expense, too. The man has no head for figures.”

“No,” Ben said involuntarily, “I have a head for figures. Hello?”

“Well, I won’t have him,” Kitty’s voice said. “And I’ve spoken to Lorenz and Gertrude and Cole. I’ve spoken to Moss, Maxene, Oscar, Irving, and poor Jerome.”

“Poor Jerome? Why ‘poor’ Jerome? What’s wrong? Kitty? Gus-Ira? Hello?”

“…feel the same. So I’m calling to tell you, Gus-Ira, I won’t have him, no one will. And my thinking is, there ought to be a solid front on this thing. We’ve got to get it together, we’ve got to be prepared. Ben will take any advantage. Okay, when we were kids it was different, he even filled a need, I suppose, but now we’ve got our own families. I won’t have him, Noël won’t, none of the girls, none of the boys I’ve spoken to. So the next time he calls, try to give him some inkling. No one wants to be actually rude to the old man, no one wa—”

Her voice broke off in the middle of the word. It was as if there had been a sudden power failure, or, rather, as if the lights in one part of the house, the living room, say, had suddenly gone out while the lights in the dining room continued to burn, for Flesh could still hear the crepitation of connection. Perhaps she was catching her breath, he thought, perhaps she was biting her tongue. Water is thicker than godblood? Than godblood?

“No,” Ben Flesh said into the phone, “you’ve got me wrong, Kitty. A man organizes his life around necessities, principles. Only some people, me, for example, are born without goals. There are a handful of us without obsession. In all the world. Only a handful. I live without obsession, without drive, a personal insanity even, why, that’s terrible. The loneliest thing imaginable. Yet I’ve had to live that way, live this, this — sane life, deprived of all the warrants of personality. To team up with the available. Living this franchised life under the logo of others. And do it, these past years, under impossible burdens of discomfort. Have some feelings, Kitty, have a little pity, Gus-Ira. What, you think I like these random patterns? I’m irregular as the badly toilet-trained. The strange, the personal have been spared me. Nothing happens but disease. Nothing…”

“Hello,” Gus-Ira said jovially, “this is Gus-Ira Finsberg. I’m sorry that I’m not in to take your call. This is a recording. If you’ll wait for the little electronic beep and leave your name, number, and message, my Phone-Mate 270 will record you for two minutes and I’ll get back to you just as soon as I return.” There was a pause. Ben heard the beep.

“It’s me, Gus,” he said, “it’s Ben. Your Phone-Mate 270 is fucked up. Probably you put the reels in backward. You were never mechanically inclined, Gus-Ira. Even as a little boy. Goodbye.”

Gus-Ira called.

“Ben,” he said gloomily, “oh, Ben.”

“It’s all right,” Ben said, “don’t feel bad. Kitty’s a bed wetter. I consider the source. Don’t fret, Gus,” he said. “Only tell me, level, do you feel that way? Kitty’s—”

“Kitty’s dead, Ben,” Gus-Ira said.

“What?”

“She died. She’s dead.”

“When? How? What are you…”

“She bought it, Ben. She chafed to death.”

“She…?”

“All those years of wetting herself. C₅H₄N₄O₃.”

“Is this a code? Gus-Ira? Is this a freak connection?”

“C₅H₄N₄O₃. It’s uric acid. The basic component of gout, of kidney stones. The salts of piss, Ben. She’d been thrashing them into her thighs for a lifetime. In effect, she’d driven kidney stones into her capillaries and flesh. They blocked the blood. Uremia, too. Uremic poisoning. Her body choked on her pee. She chafed to death.”

“She died of pee-pee?”

“That’s about it, Ben.”

“Of sissy? Of number one?”

“Yes,” Gus-Ira said, “tragic.”

“Death by tinkle?”

“We were shocked.”

“I don’t know what to…”

“We never thought. We were shocked.”

“Gus-Ira, I’m so sorry. If there’s anything….”

“We knew it would happen, we just never thought — it just never occurred to us that — She used to read in bed. We’d tell her, we’d plead with her, ‘Kitty darling, get yourself grounded. Suppose you dozed off, suppose you’re lashing about and your bedlamp falls over. If the wire is worn, if there’s a hairline crack in the insulation’ ”

“In the insulation?”

“She could have been electrocuted in her urine, Ben.”

“Jesus.”

“So we always anticipated, we just never thought she’d chafe herself to death. You never know.”

“I don’t,” Ben Flesh said, “I can’t — Listen, is Kitty in Riverdale?”

“They’re shipping her body to LaGuardia. I’m flying in today. I’ve been out of town. I’m out of town now. They had to call me in Cleveland. When I heard, I asked if anyone had gotten in touch with you. Helen didn’t know. There’s a lot of confusion. When something like this happens…I figured I’d take a chance. I hate having to break news like this, but you had to know.”

“Yes,” Ben said, “thanks, thank you for calling. I’ll, I’ll get up to Riverdale. I’ll see you this evening.”

They said goodbye.

So he hadn’t heard. He’d been out of town and hadn’t heard Kitty’s bitter message about him on the Phone-Mate. He felt Gus-Ira was an ally and was immediately ashamed that he could feel such cheap relief when poor Kitty lay dead. Poor Kitty. What he’d said was now true and he did consider the source. She had been chafed; even as she’d complained of Ben to Gus-Ira, she had spoken out of her chafed, worn, cricket irritability, a woman rubbed a lifetime the wrong way. Poor Kitty. And then he thought of something else she’d said on Gus-Ira’s device. “Poor Jerome,” she’d said. He’d forgotten about the tests. He called Jerome and got Wilma, his godcousin’s wife, a girl he’d met only once. The woman was crying. He felt bad that he had not been closer to his godcousins’ families. “I’m sorry,” Ben said when he had explained who he was, “I just heard about it. I appreciate how torn up you must be. How’s Jerome taking it, Wilma?”

“Who is this?” she shrieked. “Who is this son of a bitch?”

“It’s Ben,” he said. “I told you. We met once when I was coming through Fort Worth. I took you and Jerome to dinner.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” she demanded fiercely. “The man’s dead and you ask how he’s taking it? What kind of a son of a bitch…?”

“Dead? Who’s dead? Kitty’s dead. Who’s dead?”

“Jerome’s dead. My husband. Oh, God,” she wailed. “Poor Jerome.”

“Jerome? Oh, Wilma,” he said. “Oh, Wilma. I didn’t…I meant about Kitty. Jerome’s dead, too? Jerome? When? What happened? Oh dear. How? What happened?”

He had died that morning. Wilma had been with him. It was the tests. The Fort Worth doctors were not satisfied with the explanation about Jerome’s lifelong chronic constipation. They suspected cancer of the bowel, the colon. They didn’t buy the theory that his body simply didn’t produce enough fecal matter. They thought a virus or some kind of tapeworm must be attacking, devouring his godcousin’s shit. The tests were enemas which produced nothing but the soapy water they had just shot up his behind. High colonics. Oil enemas. They fed him roughage and gave him massive doses of the most powerful laxatives. They put him on a sort of potty and made him stay there until he went. It was like being toilet-trained, Wilma said. His legs went to sleep, his arms and hands. He begged to be put back to bed, but they insisted they had to find out what was causing his constipation. They named a dozen diseases that could kill him if they weren’t able to analyze, not the normal, beautiful stools he faithfully produced every two weeks, but the incipient shards they were now convinced were incubating morbidity in his gut. They had to find out what was destroying these. They could not reach it, take samples, with even the longest of their instruments. Cutting into the intestine was too dangerous. The roughage, the potent laxatives were the only way, the last resort. He had to stay on his giant potty until he did his duty. Wilma was with him. He squeezed and squeezed. Poor Jerome. He tried to cooperate. He forced himself, he labored. (It was like labor, like giving birth.) The tests killed him. The laxatives were too potent. He shat out his empty intestines, his long red bowel of blood. Death by caca. Death by crap.

And so one was dead of bed wetting. And one of constipation. Number one, Ben thought. Number two.

He wanted Jerome’s body sent to New York. Wilma couldn’t think. He made the arrangements with Fort Worth himself. He would handle everything — death’s take-charge guy.

He gave funerals away as others might bring a coffee cake to the mourners, or a Jell-O mold. “It’s the least I can do,” he said and gave away funerals as perhaps his godfather Julius might once have papered the house for an ailing show. Left and right he gave them away. So many were dying.

Moss rented a car at the airport to drive up to Riverdale. He and it were totaled when he smashed broadside at forty-five miles an hour into the side of an oil truck made out of a particular metal alloy his perfect, beautiful eyes could not see.

Helen, in her grief, drank heavily. The Finsbergs hid all the liquor and she left the house in a black mood looking for a tavern. She hailed a taxi. They tried to follow, but lost her in traffic. The police called from the morgue. She had found a place on Eighth Avenue, a hangout for whores, pimps, and degenerates. She drank more heavily than ever — a hell of a binge — and in her foul mood picked a fight with a very butch bull dyke. The dyke tried to defend herself as best she could, but Helen, made vicious by drink, was hitting her with everything she had. The poor bull dyke was terrified and broke a beer stein on the bar and cut Helen’s throat with it before Helen could choke the life out of her.

“It was self-defense,” the police said. “Everybody in the bar will swear to that. We don’t think you have a case.”

“We know,” Noël said, sobbing heavily. “Sometimes she got like that. She was a mean drunk.”

“Couldn’t handle the stuff, eh?” the cop said sympathetically. “ That’s too bad.”

“Oh oh,” Noël said and, in his grief, plunged his long nails into his hair, scratching fiercely at his cradle cap.

The doctor said it must have been the bacteria he picked up in the morgue that caused the blood poisoning he rubbed into his head like shampoo and killed him.

The Finsbergs were inconsolable. In their sorrow they closed their decimated ranks and turned once more to Ben.

“We don’t” Lorenz said,

“understand,” said Ethel.

“We were always” Sigmund-Rudolf said,

“musical comedy sort of”

“people,” said Patty, La Verne, and Maxene.

Ben nodded.

It had all happened so quickly — five deaths within thirty-six hours — that even Ben could not absorb it. He asked the people at Riverside Chapel to stall, to prepare the bodies for burial, of course, but to keep them in a sort of holding pattern before they were interred. He did not tell the twins and triplets that he was waiting for all the returns to come in, an official body count.

“Mr. Flesh,” said Weinman, the Director at Riverside, “what can I say at a time like this? You and the family have my deepest sympathy.”

“Thank you,” Ben said.

They were in the coffin room, a sort of display area for caskets not unlike an automobile showroom. The coffins, open toward one end, looked oddly like kayaks. Ben wanted identical caskets for the twins and triplets — cherry walnut, the best.

“We don’t have them,” Weinman said. “Something like this, so unusual, we just don’t have that many in stock. There’s the floor sample and the two in the basement, and that’s it. I suppose I could call Musicant in Lodi, New Jersey, he might have one, but he’s the only other funeral home in this part of the country that handles this particular item.”

“We need five,” Ben said, “maybe more. The floor sample, the two in the basement is three.”

“I’ll call Gutterman-Musicant, but if they won’t give me a wholesale price, well, I’m afraid you’ll have to absorb the cost, plus, of course, our legitimate profit.”

A young man was walking among the caskets. He was red-eyed, unshaved. He looked as if he had a cold. One of Riverside’s salesmen walked along silently beside him. The man stopped beside a dark walnut coffin. “This one?” he asked, his voice breaking.

The salesman, who wore a bright plaid-patterned suit, glanced at the coffin, at the young man in blue jeans. “The price is at the foot.”

“Thirty-five hundred dollars? So much?”

“It’s walnut. There are no nails. As I explained, the price is inclusive. You get the preparation of the body, you get the use of our chapel. The cheap coffins are down this way.” The salesman moved off.

“This one is beautiful. It’s like a, like a bed. Like a berth the porter makes up on a sleeper. It’s beautiful. My mother loved beautiful things. Me you can burn up, but my mother — thirty-five hundred dollars.” He looked toward the salesman, who was standing beside a stained pine box. The young man went toward him.

“Take the walnut,” Ben Flesh said thickly.

The boy turned around. He looked at Ben. “It’s thirty-five hundred dollars,” he said.

“I own the franchise,” he said. “Sons don’t have taste like yours today. We’re discontinuing the model. I just told my funeral director, Mr. Weinman.”

“Look, I don’t want to bargain,” the boy said.

“Who’s bargaining? It’s a sin to give a discount on a coffin. It’s against our religion. I just told you. Take it. It’s free.”

“I can’t…”

“You can’t?” Ben roared. “You can’t? You can’t, get out. Your mother loved beautiful things and you can’t? It looks like a bed made up on a sleeper, and you can’t? You can’t? You can’t give Mom a ride in the dirt? You can’t?” He turned to the salesman. “Burn it. Burn it! He don’t want it, burn it. I told you yesterday we were discontinuing. He don’t want it for nothing, everything all inclusive, the preparations, the chapel, the flowers, the death certificate in triplicate, the notice in the Times, the hearse and limo, burn the goddamned thing.”

“The flowers,” the salesman said, “the notice in the Times, the cars are — All that’s—”

“All inclusive,” Flesh said, “all inclusive is all inclusive, all death’s party favors. Burn it,” he shouted.

“No,” the boy said, “if you’re going to burn it…I mean, if you’re really going to burn it—”

“All right, then,” Flesh said. “Fix him up.”

“Hey, listen,” the boy said, “thank you. I mean, well, thank you. I…”

“Look, please, we’re doing inventory here.” He turned to the salesman. “Take him. Write up the papers. ”

The young man came up to Flesh and extended his hand. “Hey…” he said.

Ben took his hand but couldn’t feel it. “Listen, what can I say at a time like this?” Flesh said. “You and the family have my deepest sympathy.” Weinman looked at him. “Look,” Flesh told him, “about the cherry walnut — it makes no difference. Just so they’re identical. They grew apart, but they died together. Identical boxes. That’s a must.” He turned to go, then looked back at Weinman. “You make them look real, you understand? Real. It takes make-up, all right use make-up. They know the smell. These are boys and girls grew up backstage. Make-up wouldn’t dishonor them. They wouldn’t faint from pancake powder. All their lives they lived behind the costumes of their faces. But real. No waxworks. You’ll do your best, yes, Weinman?”

There were no more deaths. All the returns were in. At the graveside he thought about this. Three of the girls were dead. (He included poor, bored Lotte, who had childhood diseases as an adult, and who, in her suicide, had died of her peculiar symptoms, too — tantrum.) Three of the boys. The two houses were in equilibrium again. The checks and balances. No one had the votes now, and he was safe. And ashamed of his safety.

In their grief — their noses and eyes swollen with tears and floating behind faces puffed with sorrow like people pouting into balloons (for they had identical emotions as well as identical taste buds, identical hearts, tempers, sympathies, sensibilities) — they were as alike as ever, differing more from their dead sibs than from each other. Weinman’s people had done a good job. The look of waxworks had been unavoidable, but cosmetics suited them, death’s rouges and greasepaints, its eyeliners and facials — all its landscape gardening, all its prom night adjustments. They might have been Finsberg chorus girls and boys seen close. Fleshed out in their morticianed skin, identical as skulls.

The rabbi, the same man, now grown old, who had officiated at Julius’s funeral twenty-five years before, and then at Lotte’s and at Estelle’s, said the prayers.

Then Ben stepped forward.

“One died of tantrum, her grownup’s colic, and one of pissed beds, and another angrily tight. One of constipation and one of freak eyesight and one massaged poison into his cradle cap.” He thought he knew what they were thinking. How they wept as much from contemplation as from loss. How Gertrude thought of her gravid bones and La Verne of her organs strapped like holsters to her rib cage, how Oscar brooded over his terminal compulsive speeding and Sigmund-Rudolf about his epicenity. How Mary wondered what to make of her inability to menstruate and Ethel of her heart in its casket of tit. Each mourning for each and for his own doom. As he was moved by his multiple sclerosis, his own flawed scaffolding of nerves. Everyone carried his mortality like a birthmark and was a good host to his death. You could not “catch” anything and were from the beginning yourself already caught. As if Lorenz or Cole, Patty, Mary, or himself carried from birth the very diseases they would die of. Everything was congenital. Handsomeness to suicide. “There are,” he said, “no ludicrous ways to die. There are no ludicrous deaths,” and, weeping, they all held each other as they made their way from the graveside like refugees, like people blinded by tear gas, and stumbling difficult country.

He mourned the full time. A few had to leave early but he stayed on in the house in Riverdale. His position in the family restored now, they believed he would outlive them. (It had given them a new respect for him, their own sudden sense of having been condemned altering their opinion, his promise that there were no ludicrous deaths oddly reassuring to them.)

Stayed on for a week to sit an improvised, crazy shivah, in which Ben played the old ’78’s, original cast recordings from their father’s hit shows: Oklahoma! Lady in the Dark, Showboat, Brigadoon, and Bloomer Girl. Allegro. Call Me Mister. Carousel. Finian’s Rainbow. All of them.

Listening, concentrating, as if at a concert, as if stoned. Not “ You’ll Never Walk Alone” or any of the songs of solace that Ben, or any of them, might have expected, not “Ol’ Man River,” or any of the you-can’t-lick-us indomitable stuff, not even the showstoppers—“Soliloquy,” “My Ship”—but the chorus things, the entire cast, all the cowboys and their girls singing “Oklahoma!” the veterans singing “Call Me Mister,” the elf and townspeople singing “On That Great Come and Get It Day,” the fishermen and their families doing “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over.” It was, that is, the community numbers that reinforced them, the songs that obliterated differences, among men and women, among principals and walk-ons, not the love songs, not even the hopeful, optimistic songs of the leads who, down and out, in the depths of their luck, suddenly blurt their crazy confidence. Again and again it was the townsfolk working as a chorus, three dozen voices singing as one, that got to them, appealing to some principle of twin- and triplet-ship in them, decimated as their ranks now were. The odd bravery of numbers and commonality, a sort of patriotism to one’s kind. And Ben, more unlike them than ever, now he looked so old and felt so rotten, as cheered and charmed as any of the Finsbergs could have been.

And talking, talking non-stop, neither a stream of anecdote nor reminiscence nor allusion to their dead brothers and sisters, nor even to themselves, but a matrix of reference wholly out of context to their lives, telling them, for example, of the managers of his franchises, people they hadn’t met, didn’t know, had never heard of, people, he realized, he himself rarely thought of except during the five or so days a year he spent with each of them during his Grand Rounds.

“I go,” he said, “with the Dobbs House heart, with the counterman’s White Castle imagination, his gypsy’s steam-table life. Hillbillies, guys with nutsy tattoos on the insides of their forearms. People called Frankie, Eddy, Jimmy — the long e of the lower classes. Men with two wives and scars on their pusses, with clocked socks and black shoes. One guy, the manager of my Western Auto, was totally bald, and instead of a wig he sprung for a head of tattooed hair. From fifteen feet you couldn’t tell it from the real thing. It had a tattooed part, I remember, and when sideburns came in back in the sixties he had them added on; only the color, the dye, wasn’t an exact match and it looked a little goofy.

“But that’s where I pick them. My middle-management people from the barrel’s bottom. Bus depots my employment agencies, the waiting room of the Cedar Rapids railroad station. If you can’t find reliable people there, you can’t find them anywhere. You didn’t know that? Oh, sure. Certainly. An eye out always for guys who pump quarters into jukeboxes and bang the pinball. I cover the waterfront, I hire the handicapped.

“Yes, and your dropout always your best bet, battered children from broken homes and alcoholism in the bloodlines like a thoroughbred’s juices. Bringing on line entire generations of those who live with expectations lowered like the barometric pressure, who neither read the fortune cookie nor spell out even their own horoscopes in the funny papers. Can you imagine such indifference? Not despair, not even resignation finally, just conditioning so complete you’d think bad luck was a congenital defect or a post-hypnotic suggestion. Yes, and the statistical incidence of failure Euclidean, pandemic. These are the people I work with, who work for me, these are my partners, the world’s put-upon, its A.W.O.L.’d and Article 15’d and Captain’s Masted, its chain-ganged and undesirably discharged, all God’s plea-bargained, all His sharecropper’d migratory-worked losers, His scummy, heavily tail-finned Chevrolet’d laid-off. Last hired, first fired. This is company picnic we’re talking, Softball, bratwurst, chug-a-lug’d beer. The common-law husbands of all high-beehived, blond-dyed, wiry waitresses and check-out girls.

“And I as fairy godfather to them as Julius to me. Having to talk them into it. Having to talk them into even talking to me, talk them into listening to my propositions, who think at first I’m just some queer — and that itself working to my advantage, because they think I’ll buy them beers and they’ll pretend to go along with me, thinking: Afterward, when he makes his move, I’ll hit him on the head, roll him in the alley — looking for action, rough trade, God knows what. And using even that, their low opinion of me — always kept to themselves, always suppressed and even, in an odd way, polite, not ever, you understand, condescending, simply because I’m well dressed and well spoken and outrank them good-luckwise, which they mistakenly take for a sort of talisman or voucher, Good Housekeeping’s Seal of Approval, the earnest money of my faggot-or-no-faggot superior humanity — confronting them with it, hitting the nail smack bang dab on the head like the palmist or astrologer they don’t go to, not because they’re not superstitious — they’re superstitious: Catholic saints on their fundamentalist Protestant dashboards, rabbits’ feet, dice adding up to seven whichever way they’re turned — but because they don’t believe they have a fate, and behind that, the bottom line of that, not really believing that they even have a life — such patient people, such humble ones — laying it all out for them, their plans to rob me, to knock my head even as they maintain a genuine respect, for me, for the clothes I wear, so that afterward what they’ll remember of the knockabout won’t be the body contact but the feel of my wool suit and silk shirt and rep tie and felt hat and the soft leather of my shoes. Second-guessing their plans and conspiracies, an armchair quarterback of my own muggings and beatings. And all that just to get their attention!

“And only then, when I have it, hitting them with what even they can see is just good business, no scheme, no wild-ass proposition, no sky-high pipedream, but a plan. Plain as the cauliflower on their ear, true as a calendar.

“That who was there better in this world to bet on than guys who have nothing? References? I don’t want references. If anything the reverse. Records let them show me. Strange, unexplained lacunae in their curriculum vitae. Bad write-ups from Truancy, Credit, Alimony Court. Then convincing them that they can do the job, a lead-pipe cinch for persons like themselves who had, some of them, actually used lead pipes, or anyway pickaxes, handles, the tough truncheons of the strikebreakers, the ditch digger’s hardware, who’d horsed the unskilled laborer’s load, and done the thousand shit details, all the infinite cruddy combinations. ‘Putz,’ I’ve said, “you’ve hauled hod and worked by smells in the dark the wing nuts of grease traps. What, you’re afraid of a pencil?’ ‘I never got past the fifth grade,’ they’d say. ‘Terrific,’ I tell them, ‘then you know your multiplication tables. Long division you can do. Calculus there’s no call for in the Shell-station trade.’ ‘But I ain’t no mechanic,’ they object. ‘Who? You? No mechanic? A guy who jumps wires and picks locks? You’re fucking Mandrake. Look, look at the hands on you. Layers of dirt under the nails like shavings from the archaeologist’s digs. Enough grease and oil in the troughs of your knuckles to burn signal fires for a day and a night. You? No mechanic? You got a feel for leverage like Archimedes. Don’t crap me, pal. Don’t wear my patience. You’re a bum, you know character. You can hire trained mechanics from the Matchbook Schools of Repair. I’m making you Boss, you can sit back and interview guys who take jet engines apart.’ ‘But why me? I’m a nobody. Why would you give me this chance?’ ‘Because you’re a nobody. I raise your expectations like a hard-on. Where else can I buy the loyalty and devotion I’m looking for if not from a nobody like you?’

“And this way with all of them — the fast-food franchises, the goods and services, the Roto-Rooter and Burger King. This my edge as much as the prime rate: that if you want somebody who’ll work like a dog you get a dog. And no one in the business with better employee relations, no one with as good an efficiency record. Because we’re talking business, you see, small shopkeep and the bourgeois heart. Certainly. Yes.”

“Yes,” Gus-Ira said.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s late. I’m wearing you out. I’ve worn myself out. We’ll talk more in the morning.”

But Gertrude died. Even with some of the Finsbergs gone, dead, or returned to their homes in other parts of the country, the Riverdale house was still quite full: the twins’ and triplets’ wives and husbands and their small children crowding the huge home. Ben offered to stay in a motel, but the others wouldn’t hear of it. They doubled up, rented cots from Abbey Rents. Ben himself sleeping with his godcousins’ small sons and daughters in Julius’s and Estelle’s old room, the big bedroom lined with Porta-cribs and rented cots and looking oddly like some specially outfitted casualty ward.

One of the wives said she’d heard Gertrude say she felt sort of grotty and that she thought she’d take a shower, but the bathrooms were occupied, all but the maid’s, which had a deep tub but no shower. They found her in the morning. She had drowned. From her position — her belly to the bottom of the tub — and from a discrete kneecap-shaped dent in the Cashmere Bouquet, they determined that she had evidently dropped the soap and was searching for it on her hands and knees in the cloudy water. Apparently she’d struck the bar with her knee, slipped, and gone under. With her heavy marrowless bones she’d been unable to raise herself.

“She couldn’t swim of course,” Cole said.

“Well, she had wonderful form, but she couldn’t float,” Ethel said.

“She never took baths,” Irving said.

“Doctor’s orders,” Lorenz said.

“Just sponged herself off in the shower,” said LaVerne.

“Why couldn’t she wait till a shower was free?”

“She was always impatient.”

“She was a damned fool,” Cole said. “You know, you have an affliction like that, a frame like the Petrified Forest, you take a bath you’re just asking for it.”

“She died,” Ethel said, “a gangster’s death.”

“A gangster’s death? Oh no, darling, she was just a little careless is all. Don’t say she died a gangster’s death,” Ben said.

“A gangster’s death, yes,” Ethel said, “like some hoodlum in a cement kimono, a lead coffin, steel galoshes. Oh no,” she sobbed, “it’s awful, it’s so grotesque.”

“There are no ludicrous deaths,” Ben said.

“There are,” she cried. “Oh, Ben, there are. We die them.”

“Don’t jinx us,” Irving said. “Why do you talk like that? Are you trying to jinx us? I think we should bury Gertrude and get the hell out of here before anything else happens. It’s been some week.”

They looked at racially prejudiced Irving. They seemed to agree with him. Even Ben agreed. Gertrude was cremated and it took three men to carry her ashes.

“Slag,” the funeral director said. “I never saw anything like it. The woman was slag.”

They left New York after the funeral. Ben went back to his Travel Inn site. Where there was a message from Lorenz.

Bad weather in St. Louis had caused Irving’s flight to be diverted to Chicago. Bad weather in Chicago had caused it to be diverted to Detroit. The weather in Detroit was beautiful but Irving, out of sorts from his tiring journey, died there in a race riot of his own devising.

Ethel had a simple, or limited, mastectomy. They got all the cancer but accidentally cut off her heart.

Cole complained of headache one morning and was dead that afternoon. The autopsy revealed that his brain was crawling with termites.

Sigmund-Rudolf called.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Ben said.

“Listen to me, Ben, it’s—”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

…important.”

“I don’t want to hear it. No,” Ben said, “I’m hanging up. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Ben, listen, will you?” Sigmund-Rudolf said.

“I don’t want—”

“There are only a few of us left.”

“…to hear it! I’m not listening to this!”

“There are only a few of us left and the prime rate is going up and down like a Yo-Yo. Father couldn’t have anticipated when he wrote his will that so many of us would die.”

“I won’t hear this,” Ben said. “I don’t want to hear about one more death. I won’t listen. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Nobody’s dead, Ben. I mean nobody else. Gus-Ira, Lorenz, Oscar. Myself. La Verne, Patty, and Mary. Maxene. We’re still alive, Ben. Nothing’s happened to us.”

“Nobody else has died?”

“No. I’m trying to tell you.”

“Gus-Ira and Lorenz? Oscar? Patty? La Verne and Mary? Maxene? You? You’re all well? ”

“We’re fine. I’m trying to tell you.”

“That’s all right then.”

“Sure. It’s just that Father couldn’t have known. When he stipulated that we’d guarantee your loans — There were eighteen of us. Ten are gone. Listen, Ben, you’re welcome to live in Riverdale. Everyone’s agreed on that. God knows, none of the rest of us wants the place, but that other stuff, the prime interest thing, we can’t go along with that anymore. We’d be spreading ourselves too thin. You’re on your own, Ben. I mean, I know you’ve never stuck us for a penny, but with so many gone, with conditions the way they are, the risk is too great. We can’t hold your paper, Ben. You understand, don’t you? Don’t you, Ben?”

“I don’t want to hear it!”

4

In Ringgold, Georgia, the prime rate was 7½ percent. Elsewhere it was 8 percent, 8¼, 7¼, 9. Ben had never seen anything like it, the economy heavily fronted, arbitrarily banded, whorled with high pressure and low, laid out like yesterday’s weather on the meteorological map in today’s paper. All climate’s swayback boundaries like wavy strokes of chocolate on scrunched layer cake, the jigsaw arrangements of contested territory. Freak, unseasonable economy.

He needed additional funds. The strike, cost overruns, forced him to take out a second loan. He wanted more, but all Modell Sanford would let him have was an extra $125,000. He offered his ice-cream interests, his Dairy Queen and Baskin-Robbins and Mister Softee, as collateral. (They were already into him for his Western Auto and his Taco Bell. Indeed, almost all his franchises were pledged, hostage to the success of the motel.)

Sanford had asked to see the list again, his portfolio of franchises.

“The One Hour Martinizing,” the banker said, “the One Hour Martinizing and the ice-cream parlors, and we’ll shake hands, part friends, and have us a deal.”

“Not the dry cleaners,” Ben had said.

“Well, heck,” Modell Sanford said, “I don’t see why you’d stick at that. I don’t figure you have you more than twenty, twenty-five thousand tied up in that place.”

“Sentimental. The One Hour Martinizing is of sentimental value to me.”

“Yeah, but lookee, friend, you’re about fifty thousand shy.”

“But you’d have the motel,” Ben said. Modell was dubious. “All right,” Ben said, “here’s what we’ll do. Keep the ice creams, forget about the dry cleaners, and I’ll put up my Cinema I, Cinema II.”

Modell Sanford looked at him.

“Mr. Ben, that’s funky. Them theaters is worth ’bout a quarter million. They your biggest asset. You a serious businessman. Why’d you want to make a deal like that?”

“Because I’m very confident. I feel very confident about the Travel Inn venture. Look, Mr. Sanford, it’s my risk. You can run an audit on the theaters. I’ll pay for it myself. If everything isn’t exactly as I’ve represented it, throw me out. Take all my flavors and the two picture houses and the motel, too.”

“Don’t have to run no audit. Just have to make one phone call to my credit people in Oklahoma City. All right, Mr. Flesh, you come on in tomorrow morning and I’ll give you my decision.”

The decision was yes, of course. And since the banker didn’t wish to take advantage of him, Ben was permitted to withdraw his Dairy Queen stand. But before he drew up the papers, Modell Sanford reintroduced the One Hour Martinizing. For some reason he fixated on the dry-cleaning plant in Missouri, perhaps because he sensed that Ben was telling the truth about its importance to him. Flesh was incensed. He said that if Sanford still wanted the One Hour Martinizing he would take back all his ice-cream businesses, plus his Cinema I, Cinema II. He refused to budge. “I’ll borrow money in Chattanooga,” he said.

“Interest rate’s a point higher in Chattanooga.”

“Fine,” Ben said.

“Oh, come on now,” Modell Sanford had said, “what you want go grandstanding me, what you want get so hot for? This motel is gone be good for you and good for Ringgold, Georgia. Tell you what, you promise to make sure all your help is Ringgold folks and I’ll drop the One Hour Martinizing.”

“Where we stand?” Ben asked. “I forget.”

The banker explained where they stood and they shook hands and signed the papers.

By the time the Inn was ready, he had had to take out a third loan. His godcousins, as Sigmund-Rudolf had warned, withdrew their support. Ben would not contest their decision in court, but by now his investment in the Inn was so great that all his franchises, the One Hour Martinizing included, were hostage to it, his businesses held for ransom.

Lorenz’s temperature dropped from its constant 102.4 degrees to 98.6. He hung on for three weeks and froze to death.

Though the surviving Finsbergs were all invited to the opening, none could come.

“But I don’t care about the prime rate thing,” Ben told them on the telephone. “I don’t even blame you. We’re still godcousins. Please,” he said. “Please come. Let’s be together.”

Patty promised to try to make it, but even she did not show up. Ben meant it, understood, and forgave their reluctance to co-sign for him — the motel would cost about a million dollars — but was hurt when not a single Finsberg would accept his invitation.

The truth was, they would not go out. They were afraid to die.

Ringgold, Georgia, population 1,381, is a mile east of Interstate 75, less than ten miles south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Interstate 24 crosses 75. It is 539 miles north of Orlando, Florida, and Disney World.

Ben Flesh had chosen it for the site of his most important venture with a good deal of exactitude and care. Indeed, almost five years before, even before Disney World had officially opened in October 1971, or Interstate 75 and 24 were completed, Flesh had consulted the Automobile Association. He had wanted to know near which large city a family of four, starting out from the Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Columbus metropolitan areas and hoping to make it to Disney World in two days, might be likely to stop for the night. Chattanooga, Tennessee, seemed, according to all the parameters that could be known at the time, the most probable location. Though it would be a long, difficult drive from Chicago or Cleveland, it was merely a pleasant day’s ride from Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Columbus, and an absolutely leisurely one from Cincinnati. There were, however, either built, or projected, or already under construction, four Travel Inns in Chattanooga. A fifth would have been redundant. Flesh looked at his maps again.

Of course, he’d thought, the state line. Chattanooga sat exactly on Tennessee’s straight, ruled southern border like a house on a blueprint. The state line, America’s and distance’s gravitational pull, and Georgia, beneath it, even northern Georgia, the South, the deep South like a trench in the ocean. The South for those vacationing Midwesterners anyway, their one-night stand and grits for breakfast in Dixie, an edge to the trip, for somehow one knew, even if one had never been there, that Florida was not the South. Florida was the deep East, and Tennessee was not southern either but merely defunct hillbilly, some queer smudge of country and industry. Georgia was the South, Georgia was where they would stay, the father driving, breasting — if not for the romance, then for the accomplishment — one more state line, one more milestone, like a runner busting a tape.

He felt that way himself; traveled as he was, he felt that way himself, a mystique about state lines, a sense one had that there was something not just foreign but perhaps even illicit, perhaps actually illegal, about the devices offered there. They were, for a few miles this side and a few miles that, free ports of a kind, where ordinary ordinance and day-to-day due process could be fudged — law’s and territory’s olly olly okshen free, an odd three-mile limit where fireworks were openly sold, gas discounted, and liquor and cigarettes offered at reduced prices, where kids could drive cars at fifteen, and couples got married without waiting for blood tests, where you could bet on horses or purchase lottery tickets and the pinball machines paid off in cash, where whorehouses thrived and gambling in roadhouses. West Memphis, Arkansas; West Yellowstone, Montana; Covington, Kentucky; Crown Point, Indiana; Calumet City, Illinois — American Ginzas. Wide open, but somehow cutting both ways and watch out for the speed traps. And everything up front, Wisconsin pushing its cheeses at you once you left Illinois, Florida its oranges, Georgia its pecans, Louisiana its pralines.

So it would be on the Georgia side of Chattanooga, yet close enough to pull in the Tennessee television stations. It was astonishing, once one stopped to think about it, that all the motels were not in Ringgold, Georgia. To Flesh, who had worked it out, who, once the Interstates were complete and Disney World had opened, had actually hired drivers, starting out in Indianapolis and Columbus and St. Louis, to tail families driving south — he paid reservation clerks in various motels around the park for names and anticipated arrival times — it seemed inevitable. How delighted he’d been when report after report came back: Chattanooga, they stay in Chattanooga.

But that was before the Yom Kippur war, that was before the oil embargo, that was before the energy crisis, that was before the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit had been imposed nationwide. That was before, finally, the two-day drive from St. Louis or Chicago or Indianapolis or Columbus to Disney World had become a three-day drive. Come on, he thought, come onnn, Cincinnati!

Oh, he thought, farseeing Flesh, prophetic Ben, oh, oh, the Ezekielized connections, the, to him, visible network of causality. Dial the phone in Texas, it rings in Paris. (And yet, and yet, if it turned out I was mistaken, why, I was honestly mistaken, nobly mistaken, for this is the way things are done in the world. He thought of polls, straw votes, telephone samplings, trial balloons, sneak previews with their audience-reaction cards, consumer research, feasibility studies, all enterprise’s three-spoon tests. Of handicapping the world, of infinite possibility like hats in the ring, of flags run up flagpoles to see who salutes, of all ever-diminishing options which reduced themselves at last to a sort of Hobson’s choice, the inevitable if-this-then-that sequences of science and syllogism. Nobly mistaken. For if I paid off room clerks in Orlando, if I had Impalas tailed and station wagons, and studied the progress of the Interstates, or, more, connived — and I did — to discover where they would be, where the exits would be placed, learning the distances between gas stations, between rest areas, toilet facilities, the Gas/Food/Lodging synapses of American physiology, reconnoitering the as yet no-man’s-land and enemy lines and possible beachheads of the tourist buck — the images military because the discipline was — if, that is, the bulk of my accomplishment was mere dog-soldier spadework, why then at least the cause for it was anchored in inspiration. Disney World, I thought, when I first heard it proposed, when the name was itself a trial balloon, my God, it will draw Americans like flies to sweets, entire families — for surely, I recognized, no one, no one would go to such a place alone; this was something collective; there was something exponentially tandem in the very prospect of such a journey, and one could almost forget about single rooms or even tables for two; this would be big, big—and I shall have to get roll-away beds, Porta-cribs, playground equipment, candy machines, comic-book stands, refrigeration units for bottles, formulas. Noble. In a way, heroic, even epic.

Of course noble. Of course heroic. Of course epic. For I was in the big time now. Up there, at least in spirit, with Aeneas, Brigham Young, Penn and Pike and Penrose, with Roger Williams, Theseus, Dido, Brutus, and Peter the Great and Alexander, Czar of all the Alexandrias. With Moses and Paul and Del Webb and Bugsy Siegel. With Disney himself, the Disney of Anaheim no less than the Disney of Florida. Up there, at least in spirit, at least on their wavelengths, with all those Founders, legendary and historic, with a sense of timing and prophecy on them, perfect pitch for the potential incipient in what lesser men might have looked on as hills, desert, swampland, stony ground. There in spirit and brotherhood with whoever it was who first said, “Let there be Chicago, let it be here.” That long line of visionaries who defoliated jungle simply by giving it their attention, who, looking at mountains, saw fortresses; at valleys, the laws of gravity pulling sweet water. Who second and third guessed the shabby givens of place and impediment, Johnny Appleseeds of commerce and government and a dozen God’s countries, swell places to raise kids or nice to visit.

Having, that is, what they had — criteria, standards, the surveyor imagination, the blueprint heart.)

Ringgold, Georgia, with its labor force of busboys, waiters, maids, auditors, desk clerks, and the rest, its honest day’s drive from major cities of the north and midwest, its blunt smack dab existence almost exactly between the points of origin and destination, was, would have been, and would be again, if there was lasting peace in the Middle East, if OPEC came round and detente worked, the perfect place for Flesh to pitch his now million-dollar tent. And how far off was he, anyway? Less than two hundred miles. (Atlanta would be the logical stopping point on the second night of the now three-day drive to Disney World.) What’s two hundred miles? In a universe that was probably infinite, what was two hundred miles? Not a stone’s throw, not a good spit, less than a lousy molecule of space. What’s two hundred miles? Bank-fuckruptcy, that’s all.

And even that anticipated by bright Ben, by farseeing Flesh. After, admittedly, he had already committed, after the land had been purchased, bulldozed, and the foundations were laid and the buildings almost up. So it wasn’t really too late. Things could be done. He could, for example, together with the Motel Owners’ Association of Greater Chattanooga and the Ringgold Chamber of Commerce, arrange to bribe all the state troopers of Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana not to stop speeders, or the high-ups in the highway departments of those states not to post speed limits. Sure, sure he could. Or, shifting emphasis, capture the Lookout Mountain trade, the Rock City clientele, the Incline Railroad and Confederama crowd. The See Seven States set. Oh yes. But he meant it. For once he had gotten the gist, picked up the seismological vibes of his earthquake times, even, that is, before the Finsbergs had begun to die — his invitations to them to join him there as his guests had been, well, love, of course, but in part, at least, his way of papering the house — and while he marked time waiting for the electricians to return, he had begun to write copy for his brochures, brochures which appealed directly to those visitors to Chattanooga’s tourist attractions: “Now that you’ve seen seven states, why not sleep in one of them tonight? Spend your evening in America’s newest Travel Inn — Travel Inn, Ringgold, Ga.” “Enjoy Lookout Mountain? Now Lookout for Travel Inn, Ringgold, Georgia — the world’s newest!” To passengers on the Incline Railroad: “Inclined to recline in luxurious accommodations? Call Ringgold, Ga.’s Travel Inn’s Famous Courtesy Car toll free. Spend the night in America’s Newest Travel Inn.” “You’ve seen Confederama. Enjoy an evening in the Gateway to the Old South — Ringgold, Georgia’s Travel Inn. Old-fashioned Southern Hospitality in Old Dixie’s newest Travel Inn.”

And took the copy, together with photographs and an architect’s sketches, to printers in Chattanooga. And his best slogans to a firm in Atlanta which printed bumper stickers. (These he would give to employees in the souvenir shops of Rock City and Confederama and Lookout Mountain and all those other places, paying them to slap them on out-of-state cars in the parking lot while their owners were out seeing the sights.)

Except that he was oddly — inasmuch as he did not yet understand why he should feel this way — disturbed that he should do this (not because of the licking he expected he might have to take, not because of the reverses — he’d had reverses — not even because he could not stand up to adversity), feeling what he took to be sort of commercial queasiness at such methods. Then he understood, the meaning as clear as prima facie dream. That — that he had come out of the closet, stepped out from under, and taken leave of, his anonymity. No longer Mister Softee, no longer Fred Astaire, no longer Colonel Sanders’s lieutenant or just another subject of the Dairy Queen, but Ben his-own-self Flesh, out in the open, standing up to be counted. Travel Inn or no Travel Inn, dis-, as it were, enfranchised. Cut off and grown apart as the suddenly changed features of the twins and triplets. Which, too, he had now begun to understand. As he was beginning to understand their oddball deaths. (Maxene died. She, whose hair had begun to thin while she was still a girl, and who had had to wear wigs woven from her brothers’ and sisters’ barbered locks, had become completely bald. She lost her cilia, her eyebrows and lashes, lost her pubic hair, the tiny hairs in her behind, all the downy hair along her legs and arms that defended the pores, the protective bristles in her nostrils that could no longer screen and trap the tiny particles and bacterial motes that, now she was only skin, invaded her system and killed her. The news came to him on a postcard from Patty: “Dear Ben, Maxene bought it. She lost all her hair and died, one could say, of terminal baldness. Maybe the wigs we gave her to wear from our clippings were some sort of hairy homeopathy. You think? With so many of us gone, there just wasn’t enough hair to make her wigs anymore and she died. The boys have the votes now. Love. P.”)

As he was beginning to understand everything. Everything. Seeing, in the shadow of Lookout Mountain, all connections and relations, all causes linked to their effects like some governing syntax of necessity and fate.

It was clear, for example, that with two-day trips become three-day trips and three-day trips four and five, and so on, the country had been stretched, an increment of distance thrust between any two points. He foresaw a lowering of public standards, taste’s tightened belt, the construction of cheap cut-rate motels like the tourist cabins of the thirties, meager, frill-less. (The frill is gone.) What was happening was almost glandular. The scale of things was changing, space compounding itself like the introduction of a new dimension. He should have had a Wayco parking garage, he’d be sitting pretty. Without any additional outlay of cash he could, in two or three years, when most of Detroit’s cars would be smaller, actually have increased the capacity of his garage by at least a third. It was the expanding universe here, America’s molecules drifting away from each other like a blown balloon, like heat rising, the mysterious physical laws gone public. That was how to think now. (Though perhaps Wharton had known, suspected something when they had tried to drum into his head terms like “volume” and “mass.”)

Take food, for example. Because of the increasing cost of energy, the day was coming when there would be sliced loaves of prepackaged toast. Industrial toast. People would be eating meat the day they bought it. Which would mean more shopping. Which would mean more walking. Which would mean more shoes. Which would mean more resoling, more replacement of heels. Or sturdier shoes, women walking around like practical nurses. Which would mean other ways to flaunt their femininity, which would mean tighter blouses, tighter skirts, more cosmetics, brighter colors, newer dyes.

It was all set out. The new dispensation. But not for him. Not for Ben. He was an old-timer. If he lived he would live crippled in the new world, would tch tch and my my at its strange new ways. Modern times county-courthousing him, old-timering his personality, shoving shucks in his vocabulary, thrusting by gollys into his mouth, whooshes, goldarns, I’ll be’s, all the phony awe and mock disgust. For he knew no other way, only the old vaudeville routines of the stagy quaint. Why, this was a problem. Gee whiz, shucks by golly whoosh goldarn. I’ll be. I’ll be.

I’ll be old.

This alone had not occurred to him.

I’ll be old. And I won’t know how.

And it was frightening to him as it had been when as a small boy he knew that one day he would be grown up and he hadn’t a clue how he would handle that either, convinced he was the only child in the world who would not know how to be an adult. Yes, and he’d been right. What sort of an adult had he been? A halting, stumbling one (and don’t forget his disease, his M.S., which was perhaps merely the physical configuration of his personality) who made up adult life as he went along. Was he married? Did he have children? Family? Only a dead godfather and an ignored sister, only godcousins—that strange fairy-tale crew. Who were now only a remnant, fragmented, scattered, marginal as Shakers.

His godcousins like a chorus line or the chosen sides of childhood. How could there ever have been eighteen of them? How could they have been identical? How could they have guaranteed his loans, unconditional as magic wishes? How could he have taken all the girls for lovers and all the boys for pals? How could they have had those fantastical diseases, illness like signature, like customized curse? How could they have died off of mean drunkenness, bed wetting, monkey-wrench bones, baldness, termites, prejudice, constipation, cradle cap, and all the rest? Was all that imagined? No. None of it. He’d told them there were no ludicrous deaths. He’d been right. There was only ludicrous life, screwball existence, goofy being.

Well, he thought, I’d best get on with it, and phoned the bank manager and went into town and recruited his staff. The wives of farmers would be his maids, their teenage daughters and sons his waitresses and busboys, the poor whites of Ringgold his bellboys and clerks and maintenance people. A pick-up combo culled from the unit school’s marching band his Entertainment Nitely. The mother of the man who ran the Gulf station his chef and the girls and men laid off at the nearby carpet factories his kitchen help.

5

RINGGOLD, GA. INNKEEPER: BENJAMIN FLESH P.O. BOX 18 (30702) 404-727-4312 INN-DEX: 225

I-75 @ Ringgold/Chickamauga Exit. Dwntn I mi. Lookout Mtn 6 mi. Chickamauga Nat’l Mil Pk 4 mi. Color TV. Pool open May-Sept. Dixieland Room Restaurant. Live Entertainment. Babysitters. Kennels.

2 Stories. 150 Rooms. Suites. Meeting Rooms to 100.

1 Person, 1 Bed, $12 to $16. 2 Persons, $19 to $22. Extra Person, $3. Full American Plan Available @ $14 Additional per Person. Tax 3 %.

He opened for business July 22, 1975, four months after his original target date.

He was, he realized, nowhere. It was not a place. Not geographically viable. It had been, he supposed, before the Interstate had cast down its pale double lanes of coming and going with their white margins and their long stuck Morse of broken dashes—l’s, t’s, m’s, and 5’s — down the center of the highway like great cement stitches — forest, foothills, frontier. A trace, perhaps, for deer, bear, or that Indians passed through to be somewhere else. But it was not a place. As most of earth was not a place. It took its significance from its proximity to Ringgold, to Chattanooga, to Chickamauga (which itself had become a place 112 years before and then only for a few days, for only as long as it took the Confederate and Union soldiers to kill each other, and was then returned, after the battle, to nowhere again). But even after the road had been laid, it was something, somewhere, seen only in passing, not even observed — for it was not spectacular, pleasant country enough but never spectacular — so much as registered peripherally, there only in the marginalia of the eyes. So it was not a place until he made it one, until he had spent money to clear, chop, bulldoze, raze, as if place lay sunken beneath stone, trees, brush, the natural cloud cover of ordinary unbeautiful earth.

And now, in the fullness of his expended fortune and of a time that went back to a time before his disease had declared itself — so ambitious had he been in those days, Ben, the empire builder, the from-sea-to-shining-sea kid connecting the dots, Howard Johnson to Burger King, Burger King to IHOP, IHOP to Midas Muffler — he had made it — what? A sort of place. A feeder or way station of place — Chattanooga, Atlanta, Disney World. A sort of place as Collinsville, Illinois, was a sort of place outside St. Louis. (As the Sunoco service station which went up only after Ben had built his motel was.) As all suburbs were only a sort of place throughout the world. Throughout the solar system. (As the moon was only a sort of place because of its relation to earth.) Everywhere place sucking sort of place into its orbit.

And this, on the day he opened, is the sort of place it was:

First of all, nothing spectacular. In keeping with the sort of place it was before the furrows of Interstate had been turned.

From the outside a bracket of double-storied buildings like immense rows of mailboxes in a lobby. Brushstrokes of gold stucco the color of drying sand veneered the pile of cinder blocks that framed each unit — a wide wall of intersecting Thermopane set in aluminum splints the color of warships.

The corridors were just wider than the passageways in steamers and a long runner of carpet deep and rich as flowerpot supported a design like the thick geometry on a bandanna.

The rooms endlessly repeated themselves behind each door on either side of each corridor on each floor of each building. Eleven rooms long at the top and bottom of the bracket (times two times two), sixteen rooms long on one floor of the long center building (times two) fifteen (times two: here were the pair of suites) on the other.

Two beige headboards like the carved, distressed lengths of a child’s casket were mounted like trophy at the level of one’s belt on the wall and presided above an illusion of bed — box springs, mattress, thick metal frames set into large inverted “nails” like the panties on lamb chops — that was sustained by bright caramel paneled, olive bedspreads studded with a long, unbroken ganglion of print stem and leaf and flower, a Möbius strip of fabric vegetation repeated on the thick lined drapes (the lining vaguely the texture of good shower curtains). There were two captain’s chairs upholstered in a tough Naugahyde the shade and texture of the cushion on a physician’s chair in a consulting room. The cushions, like the mounted headboards, were inseparably joined to the chairs, as almost everything in the room was locked or bolted to something else. (A wooden wall mounting like a forearm and fist — the wood, like all the wood in the room, the color of the skins of Idaho potatoes — clenched a lamp. The mirror, the notches of its frame like those in harmonicas, was locked flush with the thin wallboard. The room’s two paintings — one tenuously abstract, bold, black-stroked bark, a jagged vertical timber against a clouded, milky silver; the other strongly representational, a tobacco-colored barn that seemed to float on a field of 24-carat wheat, scratchy black trees like the tank traps on Normandy beaches, a sky blue as water in a swimming pool, Van Gogh’s huge black birds like widely spreading W’s — were screwed steadfastly into the wall above each headboard. A lamp on thick linked chain looped like immense fob from two fixtures in the ceiling. The television set was locked in its clawed metal tee and seemed tied to the wall itself by a broad-gauge rubber cable.) The only other furniture was a wide nightstand between the two beds; a table next to the drapes whose octagonal top bloomed from phlebitic newel; a long low dresser with two deep drawers and a composition top — the same that surfaced the night-stand and table — which looked exactly like the leather corners on a desk blotter. There was a chair on casters. There was a two-headed lamp on the nightstand. There were electric sockets like surprised hobgoblin. There was a plastic wastebasket the color of chewing gum. There was a telephone exactly the shade of ham in a sandwich, with a red message bulb blossoming from it like a tumor. There was a thermostat with a knob for High, Medium, and Low; there was a wake-up buzzer, a grill for the heating and air conditioning, a carpet the color of coffee grounds, a Bible opened to Psalms 105 and 106. There was a rough ceiling the texture of sandpaper magnified a hundred times. There was a white plastic ice bucket and four plastic glasses in a plastic tower. And a dashboard of bathroom fixture, bottle opener sunk like a coin-return slot into a wide projecting vanity, its contact paper a ruled cirrus of grain not found in nature. A shiny toilet-paper dispenser with an extra roll in the chamber. Butterscotch slabs of tile like so many pieces of toast above the bathtub and a foolscap of successively smaller towels and cloths folded like flag in a vertical rack. A spotlight of heatlamp. A grill like a speaker set in the wall. Outside the bathroom was an open recessed closet with chrome-plated pipes and slotted key rings of hanger. The metal door with its locks and chain link of bolt, its reversible multilingual DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from the doorknob by the narrows of a perfect punched-out pear. And the framed glass fine-print innkeeper statutes of the state of Georgia, two long columns like the tiny font in accounts and dispatches from the front in old newspapers — one big Welcome and a hundred codicils of warning. The Room.

In the small lobby with its registration desk the carpet is patternless, a blend of deep russets and failing greens pale as money. A crown of chandelier above the furniture. A palimpsest of dark low Mediterranean table, notched, carved as old chest, wood nailed across woodlike artisan’d slabs of condemnation. Two lamp tables beside the couch, higher but with the same vague apothecary effect, the tables studded with rounds of brass the size of shotgun shells, the lamps that stand it a sequence of diminished and expanded wooden pots and dowels. (It is a Hindu confection of a universe — the world on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, the tortoise on a lotus, the lotus on the sea.) The long faint and patient curve of the brown velvet couch between the lamp tables no greater than the natural slouch and slump of a man’s shoulders. There are four red lounge chairs of a slightly purplish cast like the cherries in chocolate-covered cherries. Velour, they seem to refract light, but it is only the oil slick of conflicting weave, weave set against weave like a turbulence of fabric. Where the buttons are set in the chairs’ soft backs, cracks radiate like geologic flaw. At the other end of the lobby — the furniture makes walls, creating an illusion of parlor — are four deep vinyl chairs exactly the shade of ripe tomato and glossy as shined shoes.

Rising above the southern wall made by two of the strange velour lounge chairs a large display board is fastened to the wall. The ledge at the bottom, like the ledges in banks where one makes out deposit and withdrawal slips, holds brochures like a miniature newsstand (points of local interest, Disney World literature, and, under glass, seven typed index cards with the addresses and times of worship of Ringgold’s churches: Seventh Day Adventist, Pentecostal, Southern Baptist, First Christian Church, Church of Christ, Church of Jesus Christ the Son of God, Church of God the Father of Jesus Christ). Above the ledge is a jagged globe of the world like a flattened, fragmented eggshell — Africa west of the United States, Australia between South America and Madagascar. The map is shaded, shows the off-white of sea level, the pale green of plains, the deep greens of hill country, the rusts of high ground. To the left of this a wheel radiates six 100-mile concentric circles of map that spin about Ringgold, Georgia, the center of the world.

He is more comfortable in the public rooms, the dark lounge with its mural Chickamauga and carriage lamps and the plain lumber of the bar like the gray timber of outhouse. Feels there the anticipation preceding a party, or, no, the sense rather of readiness, preparedness, some soldier security in the ordnance of bottles — the Scotches and bourbons and blends and gins, the handsomely formed bottles of liqueurs with their lollipop liquids, the brandies like the richly colored calligraphy on beautiful invitations (and thinks, too, of ink in old ledgers, letters, checkbooks), the vermouths and wines. The labels on the bottles are like currency. Even the glasses with their upright cords and sheaves of swizzle stick. Even the bowls of peanuts and pretzel. The bar itself a fortification, the gunmetal IBM cash register like some weapon of ultimacy, the cocktail napkins like gauze, like bandage, the infantry of glasses. The uniformity is reassuring. (The competent barman in his gold jacket, a very veteran of a fellow with all the sergeant major’s crisp demeanor.) The clean ashtrays, eighteen inches apart, with their closed blue Travel Inn matchbooks. Everything. The handles of the draft beer like detonators. The refrigerator units for cans and bottles. The ice machine. The cocktail shakers. The round measured jiggers on each bottle. Everything. Even the black cushioned ledge eight inches wide that travels the edge of the bar like a soft coping. Everything. The pleasant scent of the booze, a masculine cologne smelling oddly of air-conditioned afternoons in a cinema. Yes. All is readiness, all the equipment of business and seduction and solace. (Flesh is no drinking man, but even he can appreciate the peculiar decorum here, the clean, surgical rituals of such place. More than anything else there is that quality in the lounge, an aura of spiffy, readied operating theater. He supposes banks have this sort of potentiality before they open for business in the morning, that planes do before they board passengers for the day’s first flight.) Whatever, it is pleasant to take the air here, to see the spotless precision of the stools, correct as chorus line, disciplined as dress parade. (It is the way, too, his motel rooms look before anyone occupies them.) To take the air, deep-breathing the rich oxygen of contending liquors.

And likes, too, the restaurant — the Dixieland Room — the tables with their dinner-party aspect, the white overhanging tablecloths pleated as skirt and the bright blot of the deep blue napkins pitched as tent, discreet as wimple beside the place settings, the perfectly aligned silverware. He is pleased by the clean plates, the cups overturned on their saucers, and admires the tall mahogany salt-and-pepper shakers, the tiny envelopes of sugar in bowls at the center of the table by the netted red glass of candleholders. He likes the ring-a-rosy of captain’s chairs that circle the large round tables, enjoys the solid confrontation of chairs about the tables set for four and two, notices with something like surprise the knock-kneed angle of the chair legs. And sits to a sort of practice lunch, reads, the butter set before him, stamped BUTTER, the letters so smudged they look like Hebrew characters.

He walks the grids of the new plaid carpet.

He looks about him at the strange, dark, implemented walls. (No effort has been made to fit the restaurant’s decor to its name. The plans had been drawn up long before, before the two-day trip became a three-day trip.) They bristle with weapon, with ancient farm equipment, with plow and ax and hoe, with things he cannot name, all earth’s agricultural backscratchers, all its iron-age instrument, its homely spade, pick, harrow, sickle, and pitchfork, all its cultivant tool, its cusps and its blades like the housekeys of ground and rock and dirt.

Yes. He is pleased. He is proprietary. More than with anything he has yet franchised. He owns all this. Owns the spare, no-nonsense meeting rooms with their accordion walls. Owns the long banquet tables and metal card chairs that wait for the Kiwanis of Ringgold, for Ringgold’s Jaycees and Vets of Foreign Wars, for its ecumenical prayer breakfasts. Owns the swimming pool with its thousands of gallons of water pale green as lettuce, the blue-and-white rope floating through the blue-and-white buoys. Owns the turquoise-trimmed diving board, the surface of the board studded with friction, the shiny ladders that grow from the deck like great staples. All the contour pool furniture, the lounges of sunbath and the lanyard weave chairs, the beach umbrellas that rise through holes in the round all-weather tables on notched broad-gauged spindles and blossom above their scalloped fringe into a dome of bright pattern like wallpaper in kitchens. Owns the big Ford shuttle bus. Owns the playground equipment. Owns the 170 or so telephones. (He was, he realized, nowhere. If by nothing else he knew this by the hollow ratchety sound of the dial tone, the shrill feedback of voices like echo in tunnels. A phone company in exile. Mary was dead, the one who couldn’t menstruate. Mary was dead. She had complained of a tummyache, and when, after a week, it had not gone away, she entered the hospital for tests. She died on the operating table during the exploratory. They found a compost of ova, compacted, rubescent, hard as ball bearings, a red necklace of petrified gametes like a lethal caviar.) Owns — partly owns, rents the space for — the vending machine big as a breakfront — the Convenience Center. Behind the forty windows of the big console are collapsed bathing rings, water pistols, joke books, puzzles, nose clips like chewed bubble gum, swim caps, beach balls, lighter fluid, packets of Confederate money, decks of cards, nail clippers, Chap Stick, panty hose, toothbrushes, Modess tampons, Tums, hair spray and hand lotion, sewing kits, aspirin and Alka-Seltzer, Pepsodent and rubber combs, Vitalis, deodorants, shaving cream, razors and blades, Aqua Velva and a mystery by Peter M. Curtin.

Owns the Travel Inn Grand Sign like a big blue flag trimmed in a curving fringe of bright 150-watt bulbs. A thick metal shaft, or “flagstaff,” supports the sign, its long looped neon like glowing rope. A huge T burns at the top of the pole on a squat wick and is caught in a web of flaring bolts of fluorescence. It is the ultimate trademark, so huge it is potted in its own landscaping, a long mortared planter five bricks high.

He owns it all. Yet in a certain sense, though it’s his, it’s his by charter. A dispensation, some paid-for grace-and-favor arrangement like Maryland, say, before the Revolutionary War.

Richmond is a hard taskmaster. There is a ninety-three-acre Travel Inn University in eastern Virginia where his manager has been required to attend classes in motel management. Two weeks before the opening a team had been sent down to Ringgold to conduct field-training sessions for his employees. There have been dress rehearsals, dry runs.

Beds have been rumpled and remade. The kitchen has prepared each item on its menu. Waitresses have served dinner to the maids and bellmen and other surrogate guests. The dishwasher has returned his steak saying it is too medium. His chief maintenance man is called in to change a guest’s tire. His manager goes to his chef with a complaint from his bartender that her children are disturbing the people in the next room by playing the TV too loud. He thinks they may be jumping on the beds. He is as diplomatic as it is possible to be. The chef promises to see to it that the children behave. The manager is very understanding. The day desk clerk requests a babysitter for his small boy and hires the manager. A busboy complains of chest pains at three in the morning. The team from Richmond looks on approvingly. Flesh looks on approvingly. Inspired, he grabs a night auditor from the cashier’s office and tells her that he is worried about his puppy in the Inn’s kennels. He explains that the puppy, so recently taken from its mother, must be held while it feeds. The bookkeeper reassures him, says she will see to it that the request is relayed to his dining-room hostess. Ben asks a maid for the best route to Bar Harbor, Maine. Pretending drunkenness, he asks his bartender for one more for the road. The bartender suggests coffee. Ben becomes belligerent, makes a racial slur against white people. The bartender coaxes him into passivity, gently reminds him it’s time to settle accounts, and hands him his check to sign. Ben writes a hundred and fifty dollar tip across the bottom of his bar bill. The bartender crosses off the last two zeros, puts a decimal between the one and the five, and helps him to his room. A waiter from room service hands the news dealer, who places the Chattanooga and Atlanta papers in the Honor Box, a Master Charge card which the man checks against the numbers on the latest list of inoperative accounts that Master Charge sends out. Ben’s accordion player from the marching band asks the cashier to help carry the lifeguard’s wheelchair with the lifeguard in it up the stairs to the second-floor room they have taken. One of the men from Richmond drowns in the swimming pool. The telephone operator lugs him to the shallow end. They are all having a wonderful time.

“I’m,” a black housemaid tells the desk clerk, “Horace Tenderhall, General Sales Manager of the Volume Shoe Corporation of St. Louis, Missouri. I arranged with your people months ago that my people would hold our semiannual Southeastern Sales Conference here in Ringgold in preparation for the opening of the new fall line, and what do I find when I get here but that the meeting room where the meeting is to take place is all set up for a banquet with the Daughters of the Eastern Star? Now I have no intention of making a foofaraw, but I put down a $550 deposit and here my people are arriving on every other airplane that flies into Chattanooga and there isn’t any place to put them. Now whut you gone do ’bout dat?”

The driver of the courtesy car goes through a guard rail at the top of Lookout Mountain. Three people are killed and four are critically injured. Ben’s manager immediately contacts the four other Inns in the Chattanooga area on the Inn-Dex machine and, pressing their courtesy cars into service as ambulances, dispatches them to the scene of the tragedy. In this way they are able to save three of the critically injured guests.

The team from Richmond beams. Ben and the staff and the Richmond people shake hands all around and Ben throws a switch and the lights of the Travel Inn Grand Sign come on and the team is driven back to the Chattanooga airport in the courtesy car and the one thousand two hundred eleventh Travel Inn in the continental United States is officially open for business.

And three hours later no one has come.

The staff, which has nothing to do, drifts back into the lobby. His chef takes a place on the sofa. (The tables are set for dinner, the salads are crisping on a bed of ice, the side of beef warming on the steam table.) A few of the maids step out onto the driveway with the head housekeeper to watch the traffic on I-75. Ben joins them, has an idea, signals the maids and housekeeper back inside, addresses them and the rest of his help still seated in the lobby.

“Go out back,” he says, “where your cars are parked. Drive them around to the front. Park them where they can be seen. Two of you drive right up to the office, leave your cars in the driveway. Afterward,” he tells the housekeeper and her people, “open the drapes in every second or third room that faces the highway. Turn on the lights.”

Still no one comes.

“Well, it’s just only four o’clock,” John Shoe, his manager, says.

“They should be here by now,” Ben says. “Someone should be here.”

“Richmond is supposed to get us some guests. They’ve been alerted. I know that. They’ve instructed the toll-free number to divert some of the Chattanooga business our way.”

“I didn’t know that,” Ben says. “Why didn’t they say something?”

“Maybe it’s supposed to be a surprise,” his manager says.

The housekeeper has come back with the maids. The people have returned to the lobby after reparking their cars. Ben feels simultaneously in Lord of the Manor and Head Butler relation to them. His staff. His crew. His people. Ben’s men. “Suppose no one comes?”

“That’s not possible,” his desk clerk says.

“But suppose. Suppose no one comes? There’s no guarantee. I’m in over my head here.” It seems to him an astonishing admission. A strange way to talk to his employees. And something occurs to him. The notion of employees. In his life, except for the time he was in the army, he has always had employees. People dependent upon him for their living. He has always been Boss. It is a remarkable thing. Why, he thinks, I have been powerful. It’s always been my word that goes. I am higher than my father, who, before he was a boss, had been only a partner. How strange, he thinks, how strange to be a boss. How peculiar to tell others what to do, how mysterious that they do it. And how odd that so frightened a fellow, a man running scared, should command payrolls, control lives. Who had elected him to such office? Where did he get off? How many had worked for him over the years? Hundreds? At least hundreds. What could have possessed so many to do what he told them? A man who had not even come up from the ranks? Who had never lifted a finger? A mere beneficiary of someone else’s bad conscience? How many more must there be like him? he wondered. Baskin-Robbins hotshots who had no calling for ice cream? His life had reduced itself to what the dozen and a half people who stood before him in Ringgold, Georgia, could do for him. To what the men and women, total strangers, whizzing by on I-75 could. The 220 million or so Americans who hadn’t the vaguest notion who he was. (A franchiser, hiding behind others’ expertise, paying them for their names.) If they failed him he would fail. The banks would get him. He was struck by the enormity of things and had to tell them.

“Listen,” he said, “you don’t know. A lot’s at stake here. My God,” he said, “we’ve got a dining room, place settings, service for eight hundred. Think,” he said, “the linen alone. A hundred fifty rooms. Three hundred double beds. That’s six hundred pillows, six hundred pillowcases. The towels. Think of the towels and washcloths and bathmats. A thousand maybe. What are we into here? I’m a bachelor, I’ve got a thousand towels, three hundred sheets for three hundred double beds.”

“More,” his housekeeper said.

“What?”

“More. For every sheet and pillowcase and towel there’s another for when they get dirty.”

“Jesus,” Ben said, “I didn’t even think about that. Twelve hundred pillowcases. Jesus. Two thousand towels.” He thought of all the other Travel Inns, of all the rooms in all the Travel Inns. He took a Travel Inn Directory from the registration desk and opened it at random. It opened on pages 120 and 121—Michigan, Grand Rapids to Kalamazoo. There were seventeen motels with 2,136 rooms. He multiplied this by the 204 pages that listed Travel Inns in the United States. There were 435,744 rooms. “That doesn’t count Canada,” he said. “That doesn’t count Japan. It doesn’t count Mexico or Zaire or Indonesia. That doesn’t count Johannesburg or Paris or Skanes in Tunisia or Tamuning in Guam.

“Almost half a million rooms,” he said. “Service for three and a half million. That doesn’t count Ramada, it doesn’t count Best Western. It doesn’t count Quality. That doesn’t count Hilton, Travelodge, Hospitality Inn. It doesn’t count Rodeway or the Sheraton motels or Howard Johnson’s or the Ben Franklin chain. It doesn’t count Holiday Inn. It doesn’t count Regal 8 Inns, Stouffer, the Six’s, Day’s Inn, Hyatt, Master Hosts, Royal Inns, Red Carpet, Monarch, Inn America, Marriott. It doesn’t count all I can’t think of or those I don’t know. It doesn’t count the independents. It doesn’t count hotels. And it doesn’t count tourist cabins in national parks or places where the Interstates ain’t.

“What are we up to? Twenty million rooms? Twenty-five? What are we up to? What are we talking here? Service for 250 million? A ghost room for every family in America? And almost every one of them air-conditioned, TV’d or color TV’d, swimming-pooled, cocktail-lounged, restauranted, coffee-shopped.

“How will they find us? How will they know? What’s to be done? Yes, and occupancy rates never lower or competition stiffer. Go! Reroute traffic. Paint detour signs. Paint FALLING ROCK, paint SLIPPERY WHEN WET, paint DANGEROUS CURVE. Paint CAUTION, MEN WORKING NEXT THOUSAND MILES. Paint BRIDGE OUT AHEAD. How will they find us? What’s to be done?”

He wrung his hands. “See?” he said. “I wring my hands. I am wracked. I chafe. I fret. I gall. I smart and writhe. I have throes and am discomfited. All the classic positions of ballet pain.”

“Mr. Flesh,” his housekeeper, Mrs. Befilicio, says.

“Yes? What? You know a way? Something’s occurred to you? Say. Mrs. Befilicio? Anyone. Everyone.” He speaks over her shoulder to Mr. Shoe. “A suggestion box. Have Mr. Wellbanks put a suggestion box together for the employees.” Mr. Wellbanks is the chief maintenance man. “Mr. Wellbanks, can you handle that?” He turns to his employees. “There’s bonus in it for you. How will they know us? What’s to be done? How will they find us? Yes, Mrs. Befilicio, yes, excuse me.”

“It’s just that…”

“What? What is it just? It’s just what? Just what is it?”

“Well, sir, it’s just that it’s past four-thirty and the maids go off duty.”

He stares at the housekeeper. “They’ll take their cars? Remove their cars from the driveway?”

“Well, yes, sir, that’s probably what we’ll have to do. Yes, sir.”

“Yes,” Ben says, “of course. We’ll see you in the morning.”

And at six the two desk clerks go off duty. His cashier leaves. Mr. Wellbanks does. John Shoe says he’ll stay on awhile.

Two people come in but it is only Miss McEnalem and Mr. Kingseed, his night auditor and night clerk.

Then his first guests arrive.

The couple are in their thirties. The woman, who holds the car keys, speaks for them. The waitresses, the hostess, the man from room service, the chef and her assistants hang about to watch them register. John Shoe glances peremptorily at his personnel and lightly claps his hands together, dismissing them.

“Have you a reservation, Mrs. Glosse?” the night clerk asks.

“No. Do we need one?”

“How long do you plan to be staying with us?”

“Just overnight.”

“Oh,” the night clerk says, “in that case I think we can fix you up then. Room 1107.” He gives the Glosses their room key and tells them how to get there. The instructions, as Ben has always found them to be, though he has slept most of his life in motels, are extremely complicated.

“Excuse me,” Ben says, “I happen to be in the room next to yours. I was just going there. I’m the blue Cadillac. You can follow me.” They walk along with him as he goes toward his car. “You’re lucky,” Ben says, “that room happens to be poolside. The water’s terrific. I took a dip before dinner. Dinner was great. The prime ribs are sensational. They do a wonderful Scotch sour. I’m going to watch television tonight. There are some swell shows on. It’s color TV. The reception is marvelous. I may doze off though, the beds are so comfortable.” He drives around to the rear of the long central building, stops and waits for them to make the turn. When they are abreast of him, he lowers his electric window. “Yours would be the fifth room in from the end of the building.” They nod and drive on to where Ben is pointing. Flesh slips his car in just next to theirs in the otherwise vacant parking area. “It’s convenient, isn’t it? The parking.”

“Real convenient,” Mr. Glosse says.

“Well, you folks get comfortable,” he tells them. “Maybe I’ll see you in the lounge later on. They’ve got a super combo. Really excellent. Young, but real pros. The kid with acne on drums is something else.”

The Glosses stare at him. “There’s free ice,” he says lamely. “In the corridor. Very cold.” Ben lets himself into his room and turns on the television set. He waits a few minutes, leaves by the door that opens onto the corridor, and returns to the lobby.

“Did anyone check in while I was gone?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” John Shoe says. “Some people named Storrs. A couple with kids.”

“Teenagers? Babies?”

“No. About ten, I guess. A girl ten, a boy about seven.”

He bites his lips. Teenagers would have been $3 extra apiece. A baby would have meant another dollar for a crib.

Ben sat with his manager in the small office behind the wall of room keys. He could hear everything that happened at the front desk, could hear the switchboard operator as she took wake-up calls. It was not yet midnight.

Ultimately twenty-seven rooms were let. Five to individuals, nine to couples, four to families with two children, five to families with one child. Four doubles went to sisters or to friends traveling together. There were seventy-two guests in the motel. The last room had been rented at twenty minutes to ten. It was an 18 percent occupancy rate. They broke even at 60 percent.

“Why don’t you get some sleep? Anyone traveling this time of night would just keep on going, I expect.”

“We’ll be killed,” Ben said.

“No,” his manager said. “They told me at school that unless you overlook a place like Niagara Falls, or you’re in one of the big towns, and only then if it’s some skyscraper setup that gets a lot of advance publicity and makes a mark on the skyline, you can’t expect to do much business the first month or so. At service locations like ours it could be three or four months before an inn takes hold.”

“Eighteen percent?”

“Eighteen is low.”

“They’ll kill us.”

“We’ve got fifteen reservations for tomorrow night, Mr. Flesh. That doesn’t include what comes in off the highway. Like today, for example. Only eleven rooms were reserved. We picked sixteen up off the street. Two rooms are staying over. We do just as good off the highway as we did today, that’s thirty-three rooms occupied. And you’ve got to expect we’ll get another ten reservations at least. That’s forty-three rooms.”

“Twenty-eight percent,” Ben said. They would kill him. It was so. This was the busy season, when people went on their vacations. It was different with his other franchises. Convenience foods, for example. Appetite was a constant. Appetite was seasonal, too, of course. It had its rush hours, its breakfasts and lunch hours and dinners. But it also had its steady increment of whim, the sudden gush of appetite, the cravings of highs and pregnancy, its coffee breaks and gratuitous lurching thirsts, its random sugar-toothedness, all the desiderata of gratification and reward. How had he so miscalculated? They would kill him. The 18 percent would climb to 28 percent, the 28 to 35, to 40, the 40 to 50 or 52. And level off. Things could be done, he knew, measures taken. The break-even point could be lowered, perhaps even met. There could be cutbacks among the staff, maids could be let go, some of the waitresses and kitchen help, one or two bookkeepers made redundant. People could double up on jobs. His debt could be slowly amortized by the piecemeal selling off of his other franchises. There were plenty of things that could be done. They would kill him. He would be killed.

“Why don’t you?”

“What?”

“Why don’t you get some sleep?” Shoe asks kindly.

“No no. You. Kingseed’s out front. He can take care. It’s interesting. Go home. I’d prefer it. It’s interesting to me. To be on this end of the motel. I figure I sleep 250, maybe 300 nights a year in them. But lobby life — This I know nothing about. Go get your rest. Tomorrow’s another day. I read that somewhere. This way, the both of us up, it’s too much like a deathwatch. Go on. Kingseed doesn’t need either of us. It’s just that I feel more comfortable minding it through its first night. Go on. Why should your wife be alone?”

Ben insisted and Shoe left.

“I think I’ll walk around a bit,” he told Herb Kingseed after a while, and went through the lobby past the closed lounge and closed restaurant to the long central building where all the guests had been given rooms. He walked along the corridor and came to 1109, his room. Through the door he could hear the television set still playing. He opened the door, went in, and turned the set off. He was about to go out again when he heard voices behind the thin wallboard.

“Suck me, suck me,” Mr. Glosse says.

“What’s this?” Ben says softly.

Mr. Glosse groans. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he cries. “I’m coming in your mouth. I’m shooting my dick off inside your face.”

“What’s this?”

“No no,” he pleads, “swallow it, swallow it. Don’t spit it out, what’s wrong with you? All right. It’s all over your lips. Kiss me, kiss me now.”

“What’s this?” Ben says. “What’s this?” He listens but can make out no other words.

He returns to the hall. Now he is conscious of the sounds that come from behind each door. He hears Mr. Kith, a single in 1134. He is talking to Elke Sommer. She is a guest on Carson’s program. He’d seen her when he went into his room to turn his set off. “Take that, Elke. Take that, you German bitch. How do you like my cock in your hair?” What’s this? Is he beating off against Nate Lace’s television set? Flesh puts his ear to the door and hears what sounds like meat being slapped against glass. He hears growls and the falsetto whimper of masturbate orgasm. What’s this? What’s this?

And blazes a trail down all the long corridor, stopping at each occupied room. He is able to remember exactly who is where. He listens at 1153. The Renjouberts’ room. A couple in their forties with a son about fourteen or fifteen.

“Shh,” Mrs. Renjoubert says softly. “Hush, darling. Be very quiet. Oh, that’s good. That’s very good. But be quiet. Oh, that’s lovely, sweetheart. Rub the other. Oh, oh. Shh. Hush, you’ll wake Daddy.”

What’s this? What’s this?

It is twelve forty-five when he goes to the Inn-Dex machine and sends his first message. He has the Travel Inn Directory open like a phone book beside him. He depresses the Enter button, sees the top light go on, and knows he is on the air. He punches the Inn-Dex code number and painfully taps out his message:

MAYDAY. MAYDAY. RINGGOLD, GA. TRAVEL INN CALLING VINELAND, N.J. IT’S LOVE NIGHT. IT’S LOVE NIGHT. AND HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING.

He tells Vineland about the Glosses, about Tim Kith in 1134, about the Renjouberts. He describes the goings on between the Buggle sisters in 2218. Finally it is too uncomfortable for him to type. His paresthetic fingers vibrate like flesh tuning forks and he asks Kingseed to take over for him. “Tell Vineland,” he tells Kingseed, “that Elly and Nestor Pewterball make love in the shower.”

“But, Mr. Flesh—”

“Send the message,” he commands.

“What do I say?”

“Dear Vineland, New Jersey, Travel Inn,” he dictates. “Elly and Nestor Pewterball of St. Paul, Minnesota, who checked in at the Ringgold, Georgia, Travel Inn at approximately 7:15 p.m. driving a — just a minute.” He goes to the records, slips out the Pewterballs’ charge sheet and registration form. “—driving a 1971 Olds Vista Cruiser, Minnesota plates J7 5-1414-R2, dinner charges $12.47 with tip, representing — let’s see, can you make this out, Kingseed? Does that say ‘Crossroads Furniture’? It does, doesn’t it? — representing Crossroads Furniture and paying by BankAmericard — am I going too fast?”

“Was that $12.47 with tip?”

“Right.” He repeats himself slowly, waits till Kingseed catches up. Talking so slowly he is aware of a certain thickness in his speech, the words slightly distorted, as if the sides of his tongue were curling, rolled up like a newspaper tossed on a porch. With effort he is able to flatten it again. “Mrs. Pewterball is a tall, slender, gray-haired woman, almost as tall as Nestor, who is perhaps six foot. Though I couldn’t hear all they said due to the interference of the shower, adjusted, I should say, to something like fine spray, full force, I was able to make out a good deal, Elly’s ringing yelps, Nestor’s laughter, Elly’s desire to have her genitals soaped, Nestor’s predilection for lathered buttocks. I take it that they were standing face to face. I take it that they used washclothes. I only hope they remembered to close the shower curtain and put it inside the tub. I only hope there was a bathmat on the floor.

“When they were finished they dried themselves off. From what sounded like the crinkle of tissue paper, I would say that Nestor was probably wearing new pajamas. This impression was reinforced by a compliment I heard Elly pass on to her husband, perhaps not a compliment so much as an affirmation of her own judgment and taste. ‘See’ she said, ‘those checks aren’t at all loud. They’re quite elegant, really. I like a pajama top you don’t have to button. With everything wash-and-wear, the buttonholes get all out of shape, Ness.’ She calls him Ness. I’m not at all certain that Elly wears anything to bed. At least I couldn’t hear her poking about in their suitcase and it seemed to me from the angle and pitch of her voice that she may have been the first in bed. I distinctly made out a sort of grunt when she removed the bedspread. This was before I heard the crinkle of tissue paper. What follows is rather personal and more than a little touching.

“When they were both in bed — and they slept in different beds, incidentally, for I heard Ness pull back his bedspread — and had turned off the lights — I could see the little strip of light go out where the door just barely misses meeting the carpet — and I was just about to go down the corridor to see what was with Marie Kripisco in 2240, I suddenly heard Mrs. Pewterball’s voice.

“ ‘Ness?’ she said. ‘Ness? Are you awake, darling, are you still up, dear?’

“ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘what is it, Elly?’

“ ‘I’m frightened,’ she said.

“ ‘Oh, El,’ he said, ‘I promise it will be all right.’

“ ‘But Florida, Ness.’

“ ‘It’s three years yet before I retire, El.’

“ ‘Yes.’

“ ‘The St. Paul winters.’

“ ‘I know.’

“ ‘All that snow.’

“ ‘I know.’

“ ‘We’ll make friends, El. There’ll be people there. Why, goodness, 95 percent of the people in those condominiums are from up north. People like us. And we’re just looking. Though I’ll tell you, El, prices are going up all the time. If we find something we really like, I think we ought to snap it up, make a down payment. That way, too, darling, we could take our vacations in the winter and rent it out when we’re not using it. And don’t forget, there’s a Crossroads branch now in North Miami Beach. With my discount we could furnish the whole place for under two thousand dollars. Golly, El, if we did rent it out, our tenants would be making the down payment for us.’

“ ‘It isn’t that, Ness. I get just as cold in the winter, I know we’ll make new friends, I even agree about the economics of the thing. It isn’t that.’

“ ‘Then what?’

“ ‘The water, Ness. The water’s so hard down there. Do you know how much effort it takes to work up a good lather? People our age? Sweetheart, have you any idea what the heck that’s going to do to our love life?’ ”

He contacts Huntsville, Alabama, contacts Lumberton, North Carolina, contacts Fort Myers, Florida. He tells on the Glosses, tells on Mrs. Renjoubert, on Kith and the Buggle girls and the Pewterballs, and relates the normative one-on-one passions of the Marshes and Mangochitnas. He has Kingseed patrol the corridors of the motel and sends the news to Wilmington, Delaware, that Ron and Minnie Cates, talking in their sleep, each call out the name of different lovers. “Oh, Hubert,” Minnie pleads. “Sylvia, Sylvia,” Ron Cates cries out.

“Wilmington, Wilmington,” he has Kingseed ask their Inn-Dex, “what’s this? I recall,” he has him spell out on Travel Inn’s world-wide reservation system, “coming across scumbags in forests, panties in wilderness, love’s detritus on posted land, everywhere the flotsam and jetsam of concupiscence scattered as beer can, common as litter. What’s this, what’s this? Everyone everywhere is evidence, datum. The proof is all about us. We’re the proof. Everyone at the Super Bowl a fact of fuck. Every schoolboy, each senator, and every officer in every army, all the partners in law firms, and anyone on a mailing list or listed in a phone book or cramming for the written part of his driver’s exam. Each civil servant and every Pope and all the leads in plays and films and all the walk-ons and everybody in the audience. Everyone with anything to sell and anyone with money to buy it and all the faces on the cash exchanged for it, and every old man and all the dead. And also every representation, every sketched face in the funny papers, and every piece of clothing on every rack in every store in the world. And even furniture. Every chair or table or lamp to read by and all the beds. Every sideboard where the dishes are put away and every dish as well as every machine ever made, the toaster and the nuclear submarine, and every musical instrument and every rubber comb and each piece of chewing gum and all the pot roast. As though the world were merely a place to hold it all, as if gravity and Rumania and history were only parts of some great sexual closet. The world as Lovers’ Lane, drive-in, back seat, front porch, park bench, and blanket on the beach. Am I right about this Wilmington, Delaware? How’s your love life? Over.”

And an answer came, Ben reading it like stock-market quotation as it ticked out on the Inn-Dex:

YES. YOU ARE. A CONVENTION’S IN TOWN. WE’VE SEEN EIGHT HOOKERS GET INTO THE ELEVATORS SO FAR. EARLIER THIS EVENING WE HAD A CALL FROM TOM KLEINMAN IN 317 OBJECTING TO THE NOISE THAT THE HONEYMOONERS, EARL AND DELORES SIMMONS, WERE MAKING IN THE NEXT ROOM. MR. KLEINMAN SAID HIS BOY, TOM, JR., ELEVEN, COULD HEAR EVERYTHING THAT WAS GOING ON BETWEEN THOSE TWO. HE ASKED THAT EITHER WE CALL THE SIMMONSES AND TELL THEM TO HOLD IT DOWN, OR PUT HIM AND TOM, JR., IN A DIFFERENT ROOM. WE COULDN’T DO THE LATTER BECAUSE WE’RE FULL UP — THE CONVENTION. AND WE WERE RELUCTANT TO DO THE FORMER BECAUSE, WELL, YOU KNOW HOW IT IS, YOU CAN’T CALL GUESTS UP AND TELL THEM NOT TO FORNICATE. IT IS THEIR HONEYMOON, AFTER ALL. WHAT MR. PITTMAN, OUR INNKEEPER, FINALLY DID WAS TO CALL EARL SIMMONS UP AND TELL HIM HE’D HAD A COMPLAINT HE WAS PLAYING HIS TELEVISION TOO LOUD. YOU HAVE TO BE DIPLOMATIC. BUT YOU PUT YOUR FINGER ON IT, RINGGOLD, THE WORLD IS A VERY SEXY PLACE.

They Inn-Dex’d Chicago, contacted Denver, rang up L.A. Everywhere it was the same story. Not even the time differential made any difference finally, Ringgold’s nighttime, California’s evening, love’s mood obliterating time and space and all zones erogenous.

They put out all-points bulletins, calling Fort Wayne, Indiana, Springfield, Missouri, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Burlington, Vermont, Wichita, and Great Falls, Montana and Albuquerque, Phoenix, and towns up and down the Pacific coast. It was the same. Sperm was in the air like — like humidity. Heavy breathing was and squeals like imprint sounds in nature. Love’s high-pressure systems and lows, its fronts and squall lines and small-craft warnings only a sort of generic weather at last. Everything reduced finally to the skin’s friction, the fusion of agents and objects and all the moleculars of love.

Flesh couldn’t stand it. He had hoped to be torn off the air, to have been comeuppanced, jammed like the Voice of America, warned by Richmond itself perhaps. What he had not wanted was endorsement, all hunches confirmed. He should like to have been told by Houston that, no, folks round there seemed tuckered out, content, after a long day’s drive from Lubbock or a rough flight from Cleveland, to shower, in clean p.j.’s take their dinners on trays from room service, watch the telly, read the local papers, doze off.

“What’s this, what’s this?” he asked Kingseed. “Look, look,” he said, taking up the long printout. “Oh my. Oh. Oh my oh my.”

“Why are you upset?”

“Why? Because love happens,” he said. “It really happens. It actually takes place. It occurs. Why am I upset? Because love is sweeping the country and lyrics are the ground of being, singing the literature of the ordinary, and romance is real as heartburn. Because guys score and stare at the women next to them and trace their fingers gently over their sweetheart’s eyebrow breaking like a wave. Twelve million are epileptics.”

“Sir?”

“Twelve million are epileptics. A million and twenty-one thousand three hundred and eighty died of cardiovascular diseases. Three hundred and nineteen thousand of cancer. A hundred eleven thousand were killed in accidents. Pneumonia and influenza knocked off seventy thousand. Diabetes thirty-eight thousand, four hundred and seventy. Bronchitis and emphysema and asthma thirty-three thousand. Twenty-nine thousand died of cirrhosis of the liver and seventeen thousand of birth defects. Kidney diseases got twenty thousand and hernias close to eight, for Christ’s sake. TB killed sixty-six hundred and there were twenty thousand homicides. And one died of heaviness and one of bed wetting and one of prejudice and another of cradle cap and one of constipation and one of a blindness to metal and another of orneriness and one of household pests and one of left tittedness and one of female hard-boiled eggs and another froze to death when his temperature hit 98.6.”

“Where do you get this? What is this stuff?”

“Two million,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“Two million a year die. It’s a ball-park figure.”

“Only two million? I would have thought more.”

“Be patient. I told you. Twelve million have epilepsy.”

“I don’t see—”

“If thirty-eight thousand four hundred seventy died of diabetes, how many more have it and are still alive? Ten times that number, twenty? I should think twenty. Conservatively twenty. Be patient.”

“But—”

“And if twenty have diabetes for each one that dies of it, and diabetes is only the fifth biggest killer, how many people do you suppose live with bad hearts, with cancer growing in them like food turning in the refrigerator? Be patient. How many have Parkinson’s disease, how many VD?”

“Every other?”

“We’re standing water, fucking roosts,” Flesh said. “Plague builds its nests in us.”

“Gee,” Kingseed said, “put that way, it’s kind of depressing.”

“Kind of,” Flesh said. “There’s scarlet fever and muscular dystrophy and Hodgkin’s disease and a special strain of kid leukemia. There’s the heartbreak of psoriasis.”

“The doctor told me my pressure’s a little high.”

“There you go,” Flesh said.

“Gee.”

“And still they smooch.”

“What? Oh. Yeah.”

“They come calling, call coming, go courting, hold hands, sip soda through a straw, French kiss with their throats sore and their noses running.”

“My gosh.”

“My gosh.”

Flesh stares blankly at the silent IBM typewriter and suddenly it begins to clatter out a message:

INN-DEX 225. INN-DEX 225. *¢&%#% $@*¢&%%#@!*& THE INN-DEX IS NOT A TOY! YOURS, INN-DEX OOO, RICHMOND.

Then the top button, like Hold on a telephone, fills with a square of solid yellow light. “We’re off the air,” Ben says. “Love Night’s over. Richmond pulled our plug. ”

“Will we get in trouble?”

Ben shrugs. He comes out from behind the registration desk and sits down in one of the velour chairs. He yawns.

It is Kingseed’s snores which finally awaken him. His clerk is sleeping with his face on the desk. It’s three-thirty. The man will have a stiff neck when he gets up.

Ben stretches. He can have slept no more than an hour and a half, yet is fully rested. He could go to his room now, but he doubts if he could sleep. Still, Kingseed’s heavy snores are unpleasant to hear, though he has no wish to wake the man, no wish either to disturb the night auditor working on her accounts in the small office behind the wall of keys and letter slots. He rises, intending to go to his room, when his eye is caught by the map on the big display board opposite the registration desk. The concentric hundred-mile circles make the states behind them a sort of target, twelve hundred miles of American head seen through a sniper-scope. He goes up to the map, to dartboard America, bull’s-eyed, Ptolemaic’d Ringgold. He examines it speculatively. And suddenly sees it not as a wheel of distances but of options. It’s as if he hadn’t seen it properly before. Though there are dozens of road maps in the glove compartment of his car, he has rarely referred to them. Not for a long while. Not since the Interstates had made it possible to travel the country in great straight lines. Why, there are signs for Memphis and Tulsa and Chicago in St. Louis now. Signs for Boston and Washington, D.C., in the Bronx. Seen this way, in swaths of hundred-mile circles like shades in rainbows, he perceives loops of relationship. He is equidistant from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico and Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Centralia, Illinois. He could as easily be in Columbus, Ohio, as in Petersburg, Virginia. New Orleans rings him, Covington, Kentucky, does. He is surrounded by place, by tiers of geography like bands of amphitheater. He is the center. If he were to leave now, striking out in any direction, northwest to Nashville, south to Panama City, Florida, it would make no difference. He could stand before maps like this one in other Travel Inns. Anywhere he went would be the center. He would pull the center with him, the world rearranging itself about him like a woman smoothing her skirt, touching her hair.

It was the start of his ecstasy attack.