The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you jog?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew. I knew you did. You smoke?”

  “No.”

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

  “I think one of the interns…”

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

  “Why do you loathe your body so?”

  “What’d it ever do for me?”

  “Will you be all right now?”

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

  “Yes?”

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

  “You don’t know what you have.”

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

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

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

  “Who’s that? Who’s there?”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jolly good. They’re rather splendid.”

  “Thanks.”

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

  “Why’s that?”

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

  “I’m sick.”

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

  “This is a tropical medicine ward?”

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

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

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

  “What do you have?” Ben asked.

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

  “What was odd?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You said, ‘Odd that.’ What was odd?”

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

  “I don’t think I understand what—”

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

  “All right,” Ben said.

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

  “Yes.”

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

  “You want me to come back there?”

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

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

  “Yes?” Ben said.

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

  “Come back of it.”

  “Yes. Would you just?”

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

  “Leukopenia, check,” the Englishman said.

  “My God, you’re bleeding all over.”

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

  “Maybe I’d better call the nurse.”

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

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

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

  “This never happened before?”

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

  “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Mister Softee.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve the same doctor.”

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

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

  “They were already bonkers,” Flesh said irritably.

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

  “Shit.”

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

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

  “Everyone in RAF called it Brit Honduras.”

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

  “I’ll say what I bloody well please.”

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

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

  “Don’t say anything.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “That needle was big as a pencil.”

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

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

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

  “Is it my tests? Are my tests back?”

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

  “A phone call? Gibberd?”

  “No.”

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

  “A man.”

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

  “Mr. Flesh?”

  “Yes?”

  “Zifkovic.”

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

  “How you feeling, sir?”

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

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