Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  “This fellow,” the Chairman explained, “has a show on public television, a lot of talk. I can’t go on it. He’s too smart for me.” He turned back to the letters before him. “And this is the university president?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here?” he asked.

  “Yes.” He signed as instructed. She ran his life. “The car is downstairs now,” she said.

  “I’m on my way out, Jack, which I’d forgotten. Why don’t you take a ride with me to the heliport?” He picked up his briefcase. “I want some company.”

  “Where’re you headed?” I asked amiably.

  “I’m going to give a speech at my granddaughter’s college.”

  “What’s the message?”

  “Haven’t read what they wrote for me yet. Globalization, the changing American economy, you know, the usual. Today’s wisdom. Baked up just right.”

  We rode down to the garage in the elevator. The Chairman said nothing.

  “You understand my problem, don’t you?” I ventured. “Why I need some time to talk with you?”

  He watched the red digital numerals of the floors flick downward.

  “No, I’m not sure that I do.”

  “I’ve been assigned to broach a subject with you. We began something of the conversation the other night—”

  “I don’t remember,” he said.

  And maybe he didn’t. He’d had a hell of a lot to drink that night and may have had even more after I left. His car was idling at the curb by the elevator and we got in, facing each other. In a minute we were inching through traffic toward the East Side.

  “As you no doubt know,” I began, “there are many new possibilities in markets around the world. Some of those markets are wide open and some are not. A couple of other international companies have very good complementary markets, complementary to ours, I mean—”

  “We talked about this?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “In fact, you were beginning to argue that—”

  The Chairman’s eyelids closed halfway and I wasn’t sure if he was leading me on. “Didn’t I tell you something about terror?” he said casually. “Something along those lines?”

  The car crawled past Third Avenue and stopped at the light. We watched the women, the wind billowing and pressing their skirts. I love that little valley in women where the legs and the belly meet. The Chairman was looking at the women too. I decided to just jump in. “I need to talk to you about the proposed merger of this company with Volkman-Sakura,” I said. “This is why I’ve been assigned to you. You know this. But I think you don’t want to talk about it—”

  “You know,” the Chairman interrupted me, “I realized something today. I realized that uncertainty behaves very much like classical physics.” He was stalling me, like a boxer clinching so close that the other man can’t get in any good blows. “Uncertainty—call it risk—is moved from one entity to another. It’s the basis for insurance, but it has—it has a more subtle plasticity to it. We may move risk from one person to another, we leverage other human beings in order that they may assume our risk . . .” His eyes traced the pedestrians on the sidewalk. “We—”

  “I’m asking for an hour of your time,” I insisted, “ninety minutes, tops. Sometime this week. I’ll make my pitch. I’m assigned to do that.”

  “No,” he said coldly. “You are assigned to do whatever I tell you. To talk as required. To be silent as required.”

  In anger and shame I turned my head toward the window. The car edged toward the East River. We arrived at the heliport and the Chairman waited until his luggage had been put on the helicopter. He found a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth as the helicopter’s engines started to whine. His cool blue eyes peered into mine.

  “Do you like messing around with me this way?” I blurted.

  “No,” he said. “It’s very unpleasant. But your Mr. Morrison is messing, as you put it, around with me.” He huddled in the lee of the open car door and lit the cigarette with a lighter. “I would prefer to say ‘fucking with.’ That would be the correct idiom. Mr. Morrison is fucking with me. That’s more to the point, don’t you think?”

  Now I was scared. “One hour,” I said. “Just one hour, you and me, no Mrs. Marsh hovering around.”

  “You made quite a negative impression on her.”

  “One hour.”

  The Chairman looked at his cigarette and took a hard draw, his eyes squinting in the sudden release of smoke that followed, and said, “You’re already scheduled. Thursday evening at six. And in the meantime, I should say that while I’ve figured out why I was sent you, you would do well, my terrorized friend, to figure out why you were sent to me.”

  So there it was: inside two weeks Morrison had set me upon Volkman-Sakura, whose executives, having seen all the Broadway shows and eaten in the best restaurants, and sampled, no doubt, the finer call-girl services, were now starting to negotiate in earnest, and the Chairman had allowed me to be set upon him by Morrison, and I had set myself upon Hector Salcines, who, oddly enough, had not as yet made use of the phone number provided him by Ahmed, and whose estranged and beautiful wife was now learning to live in my Brooklyn brownstone.

  There was plenty to worry about. But the weather was good, the Mets looked like they might win a few, and most important, as the trees along my street leafed out, Dolores and Maria quickly established the first patterns of a new life and seemed to have forgotten the turmoil that had brought them to my door. I began to trip over small toys around the house and found that during the day Maria had taken certain of my belongings and put them elsewhere: I discovered my best leather shoes being worn by a teddy bear, my starched shirts taken off the dresser and laid down like playing cards on top of my bed. Dolores was also moving things around—the toaster to a different plug in the kitchen, the silverware arranged, for once, by fork, spoon, and knife. I said nothing and she took my silence as tacit approval. Day by day she seemed better, happier. The pallor of exhaustion had left her face completely. Her eye had healed and she had gained a little weight, which I could see in her breasts and hips especially and which enhanced her voluptousness. It was hard not to stare. Of course I thought constantly about sex with her, but I forced myself to remember what she had said that first evening in my house. And there was one moment when I realized that the situation remained emotionally volatile: Maria was helping put plates on the dinner table and she took four, not three, off the counter. She set them carefully at each place and said, almost to herself, “Maybe if I put a plate here, Daddy will come.” She looked hopefully toward her mother, but Dolores answered flatly: “Maria, you and Mommy already talked about this.” And nothing more was said. None of us looked at each other. Maria did not cry. My heart was breaking for her.

  But that was just one sad moment in the midst of a great gust of activity as a new household was being created. Dolores asked me if she could do the shopping, since she didn’t have much to do except take Maria to the park in the afternoon. So I gave her my account card for the local supermarket and soon the kitchen was stocked with a new variety of foods, vastly different from the unimaginative staples I usually bought. She was cooking all kinds of things now: tostones, rojas, pink beans, and something she called mo-fongo, a Puerto Rican dish made of a pile of fried plantains, beans, and pork, with chicken broth poured over it. The house smelled different, it smelled better. Every morning at six-thirty, Maria’s little feet drummed up the stairs. “Jack, get up!” she commanded happily. And she would wait in my bedroom while I showered and got dressed in the bathroom and then I would ask her to pick out a tie for me. And, then holding her carefully, I would carry her downstairs. And now, while the radio played marimba and salsa in the kitchen, I ate chewy Jamaican spice toast with cereal or the eggs Dolores still kept cooking for me, scrambled or fried. It had been so long since Liz died that I had forgotten about the domestic routine—the sound of water running elsewhere in the house, a door bei
ng closed on another floor, the need to empty the trash more often than once a week. My electricity bill tripled, as the refrigerator was opened and shut more often, as the television played during the day, as Dolores ran the blender in the kitchen, as Maria turned on lights and forgot to turn them off. The gas bill went up—stove and hot water. I loved it. Where it was going to lead I didn’t know. But I was happy now, happier than I had been in a long time.

  Yet that was not all. Not nearly, as I discovered after I realized that the house was getting hot, as it always did early in May. Old Mrs. Cronister had explained that this defect was caused by the placement of the maple trees too far to the rear of the garden; the sun now climbed high enough that it warmed the back of the house much of the day. Even though the building didn’t have central air-conditioning, the furnace system included an electric fan that was supposed to circulate air through the registers in the walls. The fan wasn’t operating, however. One of those evenings, after I’d worked late and come home around midnight, I went down to have a look at it. I passed Dolores and Maria’s apartment—the door was shut, as I’d expected. They had gone to bed and I continued down the stairs. The basement was a cool, dark space. On the street side, if you bent down in the gloom and raked your fingers across the crumbly, century-old concrete floor, you would find small chunks of coal from the era when the coal trucks used to deliver through the ground-level coal chute on the front of the house. I had never swept up all the old coal, liking the comfort of it, the history of it. I fiddled around with the fan, unable to get it going. The wiring was frayed and ancient and I tracked it across the basement ceiling toward the main line, over and around water pipes and defunct telephone wires, and while walking with my chin up and eyes on the posts and joists of the floor above me, I walked directly beneath Dolores’s room, and heard her say, “Oh, come on.” Then nothing. There was no telephone in Dolores’s room. The sound had traveled from her room through an open vent that fed into a sheet aluminum heating duct that carried her voice perfectly. I heard her speak again, just a sound, with an exasperated, insistent edge to it, almost a whimper as if she had hurt herself. Then there was silence, half the squeak of a bed spring. Then another whimper, then a low, throaty sound, a voice I’d never heard her use. “Oh come on.”

  Dolores was masturbating. I was sure of it. It started again, the bed springs rasping ever so lightly. Who was she fantasizing about? Hector? Someone else? My neck hurt as I stared at the old wooden beams above my head. I measured my breathing, afraid she would hear me beneath her, realizing that Dolores Salcines was coming back to life.

  NINE

  “YOU WANT TO SEE WHAT I GOT?” DIFRANCESCO ASKED ME over the phone, wheezing a little. “I’m set up and I’m starting to get some stuff.”

  “Is it in German?”

  “Looks like it. Better bring your German dictionary.”

  “Messenger the faxes to me.”

  “No. Messengers keep very good records.”

  I could only retrieve the intercepted faxes in person, DiFrancesco insisted. A matter of security. So I took down his address and then a cab to Canal Street in Chinatown, down where you can buy just about anything, or a piece of it, on the street. I’ve seen new engine blocks for sale down there, dentist’s tweezers by the box, shotgun shells without the pellets, motorboat sonar systems, plastic buttons by the thousand gross. The card read DIFRANCESCO ENTERPRISES, 568A CANAL STREET. Number 568 was a windowless metal door next to a fish store. It was locked. I saw a buzzer and pressed it a couple of times. The door opened a half inch, no more.

  “Aahwhadoyawant?”

  An eye moved furtively at shoulder height behind the door. I was dressed too well to be a detective and too conservatively to be a Mafia guy.

  “I’m looking for this person.”

  I pressed the card up against the crack. The door opened a few inches and a hand came out and snatched the card. Then the door shut again and I heard the chunk of a bolt. I banged on the door. Nothing. Everything smelled of fish. I stepped back out on the street and looked up at the secondand third-story windows, one of which was sealed off with plywood, save for a small homemade stack pipe that belched a whitish smoke every few seconds. All sorts of illegal industry went on in buildings like this. The fact that I was here was absurd, this wasn’t how international corporations did business. And worse, while I was here Beales was at the Plaza in the negotiating group.

  “You! Mister sir!” came a voice. A Chinese woman in her fifties beckoned to me and I followed her into the storefront on the other side of the metal door, past air compressors, crates of onions, and beach chairs, and through a small office where several children played. She stopped at a stairwell and pointed up. It didn’t look promising, it looked like the kind of stairwell that suckers in good business suits with wallets full of credit cards should never walk up. But then she nodded insistently, and from a fold of her dress produced the business card I’d slipped through the crack of the door moments earlier. So I climbed the stairs, my feet heavy on the old treads. At the top was a small door plastered over with Grateful Dead stickers. I knocked.

  “Open!” DiFrancesco’s voice.

  I pushed inside. Hunched in front of one of perhaps a dozen computers, half of which were missing their cases, DiFrancesco typed furiously, dressed only in a gigantic pair of black gym shorts that said UNIVERSITY OF IOWA HAWK-EYES on them. His beard was tied off with a rubber band into a ponytail. A gold rosary was beached on the immense orb of his belly. About five hundred empty Pepsi cans littered the room.

  “So you blew downtown for some examples of hackitude,” he wheezed, not taking his eyes from the screen.

  “This is the real you, no doubt.”

  He laughed. “You got it.”

  “This is where you work?”

  “My sanctum insanitorium.”

  “For multinational corporations the world over?”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “A featurectomy in order to escape from a pessimal situation.” He typed furiously.

  “You mean you’ve got some sort of problem?”

  “Fucking dink maggotbox can’t deal with Chinatown. Too much dirty power.”

  I think he meant his computer. “Why are you in Chinatown, anyway?”

  “Because these Chinks, they can hide anybody anywhere,” he said, pushing a button on the computer and spinning around on his chair. “Chinks are the smartest people in the world, just in case you didn’t know that, except phone-freaks and crackers. Me, I’m not so smart. Except for computers, I am the stupidest person I ever met. So I got the Chinks to hide me.” He fiddled with a cable. “Vicious, too, when they want to be. The gangs down here are the toughest in the world.”

  “I still don’t get it,” I said. “You do work for companies like mine, from here?”

  “No, not technically. Well, technically, yes. But not on paper, no.” DiFrancesco shrugged his mountainous shoulders. “It’s all quantum bogodynamics,” DiFrancesco said. “When you got that, you got just about anything.”

  “How are you hidden? I found you pretty easily.”

  “See all these beige toasters and chiclet keyboards?” He pointed at the stack of computers. “They use something like six hundred kilowatts of electricity a month. I don’t pay the bill—there is no bill. I’m wired into the city. The Chinks can do this, though a lot of the power is dirty. Very bad for a hackintosh, too. They dug the fucking Ho Chi Minh Trail, they can do anything they fucking want with New York City.”

  “The Vietnamese and Vietcong built the Ho Chi Minh Trail, not the Chinese,” I said.

  He ignored me. “See that line there? Into the fax machine? NYNEX thinks that’s a public pay phone.”

  “What happens when they send the guy around to get the money out?”

  “They don’t send him, because I can hack into their service schedule for this switching station quadrant and tell the computer it’s already been serviced.” He eased himself
off his chair and walked over to another table. I followed him. “Aahh, don’t look too carefully at the stuff on this table, or else you’ll have a low regard for my character,” DiFrancesco said. Of course I looked anyway, and saw a stack of pornographic video tapes, all in their glossy boxes. “Aah, I knew’d you look.”

  “Believe me, I really don’t care,” I said.

  “I know it’s wrong but I can’t help myself. I’m a lonely guy. Lonely guys are forced to whack off all the time.”

  “How’re we paying you, actually?” I asked.

  “Certain automagical manipulations.”

  “Like what?”

  He shrugged. “You got a huge lunchroom on something like the six floor, right?”

  A couple of hundred employees ate there every day. I checked my watch. “Yes.”

  “And you got an execudroid dining room up on the five-hundredth floor, right?” Of course no building was that high. “So maybe they got to buy a lot of fish every week. Sword-fish for the most executively executive execudroids and some kinda garbage fish, cod or scrod or something, for the rest of them, right? Maybe they buy some fish from some of my Chink friends down here. Or maybe they make it look like they bought the Chink fish, with requisitions and all, and so most of that money goes to me.”

  I couldn’t imagine that Morrison would set up such a ridiculous subterfuge. “You’re full of shit.”

  “No, you’re the one in a bogosity potential field. You think what I said is out of the question? Every fucking droid corporation has some suit who sits in his office and tells the computer to pay the bills. These big old mainframes pump out checks twenty-four hours a day, a couple of hundred an hour. All you got to do is have a bill sent to the bill department with somebody’s signature on it. No big deal. Nobody keeps good records in the fish business—”

  “Fine,” I cut in. “How about the faxes?”

  He handed me a folder of faxes, all of them originating from the V-S fax machine at the hotel over the previous few days. V-S had German-language word-processing equipment in the hotel and the faxes duplicated the longer European stationery. My German was good enough so that I could read the messages rudimentarily. Most of the faxes, which seemed to have been dictated by Waldhausen, were to the V-S liaison with Deutsche Bank, the gigantic German national bank that provides financing to German corporations. This suggested that V-S had capital to draw on, but we knew that. The faxes said that following the first few days, the negotiations were proceeding “as anticipated, and we will proceed or delay as you direct.”