The Good Humor Man

by Andrew Fox

  My father was paid very well. As part of his work agreement, he’d signed a contract which swore him to secrecy; Colonel Parker didn’t want the world to know that Elvis’s new-found svelteness was due to anything other than rigorous self-improvement. But, in addition to the personalized gifts Elvis gave him, my father kept another souvenir of his brush with fame. He’d assured Colonel Parker and the others that he would properly dispose of the fat, blood, and stomach contents he’d extracted from Elvis. Nearly eleven pounds of it had been suctioned out by my father’s cannula and captured in a large vacuum jar. Unable to carry it with him on the plane back to Los Angeles, he boxed up the jar very securely and shipped it to his office. “Elvis-in-a-Jar,” stabilized by an infusion of xenon gas, joined our household a week after my father arrived back home.

  Three weeks later, Elvis died in a bathroom in Graceland. My father received another urgent call from Colonel Parker and flew back to Memphis immediately. Although my father’s signature is not the doctor’s signature on the death certificate, he performed the autopsy, and he was involved in the ensuing coverup.

  The world learned that Elvis had died of heart failure. But the real cause was internal bleeding of the stomach cavity, exacerbated by the disastrous interactions of his unregulated drug regimen with the antibiotics and coagulants he’d begun taking after his surgery.

  In the public eye, the deceased Elvis was quickly transformed from an over-the-hill pop star to an American deity. And my father’s purloined souvenir suddenly became the most incalculably valuable relic since the Holy Grail.

  The medley of Elvis gospel songs on the radio comes to an end. I turn the radio off. The night air has changed from pleasantly brisk to chilling as I speed past shopping malls, car dealerships, and movie palaces as deserted and guano-stained as Mayan ruins. I turn the heater up another notch and try to ignore the desolation outside my windows.

  When I arrive home, blinking red diodes on my answering machine tell me I have three messages waiting. There’s a strange odor in the room, faint but unpleasant. Maybe a vial of medication leaked in my examining room?

  The first message is from my cousin Cindy, reminding me about the Hanukkah dinner she’s having at her house tomorrow night. She hints that I should expect a plateful of her famous latkes, her holiday potato pancakes fried in natural, full-fat oil.

  The second message is from Mitch.

  “Hey, Lou? Look, I’m just calling to check in on you. You gave us a real good scare in Mex-Town, buddy. That’s the closest we’ve come to losing somebody since that dust-up near the county border eighteen years back. I know you were out of it yesterday, said some things you probably didn’t mean. Hey, give me a call when you’re feeling up to it, okay? We need to talk.”

  After pressing the Delete button a second time, the third message comes on. I recognize the British-tinged voice immediately.

  “Hello, Dr. Shmalzberg? This is Ravi Muthukrishnan from the Department of Agriculture. I am calling you on Thursday at twenty minutes before five in the afternoon. I did not receive a return call from you either yesterday or today. I passed by your home this morning, hoping to find you available. I was supposed to return to Virginia this evening, but I have delayed my flight by one more day in hopes of speaking with you personally. I cannot impress upon you too forcefully the importance of our speaking. Once again, my telephone number at the Hotel Nixon is…”

  My first impulse is to delete the message. But I find myself fumbling for pen and paper, then jotting down the number. I need to tell him to stay the hell away from my father. And maybe I’ll have the energy to squeeze some answers out of the officious young prick. Tomorrow. After I’ve slept for a month.

  But Mitch… him I need to draw a line with. Tonight, while I still have the will. I can’t talk with him in person. I’m at my lowest; he’d only have to exert a fraction of his intensity to argue circles around me. So instead of calling his home, I call the machine at his shop.

  “Mitch… this is Louis. I wanted to let you know I’m all right. I was up north earlier, when you called, visiting my father. Look… this isn’t easy for me to say. I’m resigning from the Good Humor Men. What happened in Mex-Town… I don’t want you to think I’m resigning because I got hurt, because I’m afraid. I am afraid, but not of that. I’m more afraid of the kind of man I’ve let myself become.”

  I start shaking, and I’m not even talking to him in person. “Mitch, I’m supposed to be a doctor. Tuesday… Jesus Christ, the day before yesterday I killed a man. Not directly. But if I hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t be dead. I just… I don’t believe in what we’re doing anymore. This has been building for a long time.

  “Don’t call me tonight or tomorrow morning. I’ve got to rest. I’m sorry, Mitch. I hope this won’t come in the way of our friendship.”

  I hang up. There; you’ve committed yourself. My head is pounding. Better gulp down some Tylenols before I retreat to my bed.

  There’s a bottle in the medicine cabinet. The bathroom is even cooler than my office. Strange.

  I stare at myself in the mirror above the sink. Have I lost weight? My face looks the same to me. The same bags beneath the eyes; the same loosening folds of flesh beneath my jawline.

  I keep a bathroom scale next to the toilet. Stepping onto it, I wait for the numbers to swirl around to 177, my steady weight since I was forty years old.

  The needle stops at 168 pounds.

  If I were to shrink at the rate of one inch per month, and the rest of the world were shrinking at the same steady rate around me, I’d never notice.

  It’s cold in this room. I feel a breeze where there shouldn’t be one. In the mirror, the gray-checked shower curtain flutters behind me.

  I pull back the shower curtain. The window above the tub is broken.

  The strange, unpleasant odor I noticed before gets much stronger. I recognize it now. The aroma of a lit clove cigarette.

  “I’ve been waiting some time for you to return, Dr. Shmalzberg. I hope you will forgive that I have not straightened up the clutter I created in your bathtub. Americans of your class usually employ domestic help for such things, I believe.”

  He’s standing in the doorway. Turkish-looking — copper-colored face, thick black mustache, hair like glossy black plastic. Head shaped like a block of granite; no neck, or maybe it’s hidden by that silk scarf/ necktie. Shorter than me, but much broader across the shoulders, and younger. He’s wearing a finely tailored suit of expensive sharkskin silk. Flecks of ash from his cigarette fall onto my hallway carpet.

  “Who the hell are you?” Useless question — I know who he is. He’s the second man. The visitor who didn’t sign the visitors log. His French-tinged accent is the clincher.

  “My name is unimportant.” He smiles, revealing teeth that seem too white and too large, and flicks a long ash into my sink. He douses it with a quick burst of water from the faucet. “Think of me as an emissary. My home is a European province of the glorious, restored Caliphate. My master is the ruler of that province. He has sent me to acquire a cultural relic, a relic which I have every reason to believe you possess. The means of this acquisition he has left entirely in my hands.”

  I stare briefly at those hands. His nails are manicured and clean, obsessively so. But the fingers those nails are attached to are thick as blood sausages, and the knuckles are as weighty-looking as bolts on a bulldozer. I can’t imagine those hands playing a violin, or probing the delicate, fat-laden inner reaches of a woman’s thigh with a cannula. But I can imagine them doing less pleasant things.

  Still, a man can only be pushed so far. “Get the hell out of my house, before I call —” He could crush my fingers before I dial 911. “— before I signal for the police to come. I’m a very important man in this town. With important friends.”

  He smiles indolently, then takes a long, leisurely drag off his cigarette. Surprisingly, he takes care to exhale away from me. “This signal — that would be the Bat Signal, yes? You have a
hidden button beneath your desk — or perhaps here, next to your lovely porcelain toilet — that you press, and a large man dressed in a black costume arrives quickly, bursts through the door, and renders me senseless with a severe beating? Would that be correct?”

  His eyes flash in a manner not unfriendly. “Please forgive me, Doctor. I am a great admirer of your American cinema heroes, ever since I was a lad. I did not mean to belittle you.”

  “What do you mean to do?”

  “What I mean to do, Dr. Shmalzberg, is entirely up to you.” His small, intense eyes, filled almost entirely by black pupils, never leave mine. “My purpose is to return to my country bearing the last preserved remains of the Noble Blessed Troubadour. Reports gathered by my country’s Ministry of Intelligence, added to my own investigations, have led me to you. Cooperate, and it is within my power to make you a very wealthy man. Refuse to cooperate, and it is within my power to make you a very sad man, indeed.”

  There’s no sense in playing dumb. Unlike Muthukrishnan, he’s not being coy about what he knows. But he doesn’t know everything. “I don’t have it.”

  “Really? Your father made it quite clear to me that you do.”

  His mentioning my father makes my adrenaline rocket. “My father… suffers from McCrowley’s Dementia. Anything he said to you was thirty years out of date.”

  He appears to consider this, twisting the tip of his mustache. “During my many years of service to my Emir, I have become a keen judge of men and their truthfulness. Your father may not possess all of his mental faculties. But what he did not say, and the manner in which he did not say it, was most revealing. The faces of old men are exceptionally expressive.”

  He interlaces his fingers and tenses them. Cablelike tendons on the backs of his hands protrude through hairy, dark flesh. “You have the Troubadour’s preserved remains, Doctor. One way or another, I will obtain them.”

  “Damn it! I’m telling you, I don’t have them.”

  “Then please do me the favor of telling me what you have done with them.”

  His question, so obvious, brings me up short. When I sold the Elvis to the Graceland Foundation, the agreement I signed stipulated I would never reveal the preserved fat and stomach contents had ever existed. I could get myself off the hook so easily. But I can’t bring myself to tell this Franco-Ottoman that he needs to book a flight to Memphis.

  My hands are shaking. I ball them into fists. It’s not just fear I’m feeling — it’s anger and pride, family pride bound up inside an intense patriotism I haven’t felt in decades.

  My gut decides for me. I don’t want the Ottoman to have it. Nor Muthukrishnan. They’re foreign vultures come to pick America’s bones clean — devour the last bit of fat, pillage the final storehouse of treasure. I want to split his leering face with an axe labeled “Made in America.”

  Don’t you dare let it go, my father said. I never should’ve sold it. It belongs in the bosom of my family. The only one who is going to lay hands on the Elvis is me.

  “I sold it,” I tell him. “Twenty-six years ago, to a Canadian software magnate. He was living in Vancouver then. I recall reading that he died a few years ago. If you give me a few minutes to go online, I might be able to dig up his obituary.”

  “Ah. I see.” He puffs on his cigarette. This time, he blows the nause-atingly sweet smoke directly into my face. “Tell me, Doctor… why do I not believe you?”

  His words freeze my spine into brittleness. I prepare myself for pain. “Believe or disbelieve anything you want,” I manage to say. “You’re in a free country.”

  I watch those hands. I imagine what they can do to my profoundly exhausted body. For the moment, all they do is stub out the butt of his cigarette on the edge of my sink. “For a man with so much formal education, you show a shocking lack of wisdom. I have been watching you. You have built your life on fragile foundations, much like — what is that charming American expression? Like a ‘house of playing cards.’ All I need do is remove one of those cards, and the entire edifice of your existence comes crashing down. You would be wise to be thinking of this.”

  He offers me a curt bow. “Until our next meeting, Doctor. Please conclude your business in the lavatory. I will let myself out.”

  He leaves. I lean against the sink, all strength gone, feeling as feeble as the starving deer from last night.

  But my mind is afire. Strangely, part of me looks forward to the coming conflict. My life has grown stale, tired. So much of it a tissue of lies. Let him blow part of it away, if he can. I hardly know myself anymore. And what I know, I don’t like.

  But one thing I do know. “Touch one hair on my father’s head…” I hear myself say —

  My next words amaze me.

  “… and I’ll kill you.”

  CHAPTER 5

  I’m in the forest. Surrounded by starving deer. Their wavering legs are barely strong enough to hold them up.

  Mitch and Brad are here with me, armed with rifles. They’ve come to put the deer out of their misery.

  The woods explode with machine gun fire. Deer parts fly like confetti.

  Mitch and Brad are gone. Replaced by Muthukrishnan and the Ottoman. They’re the ones with the machine guns, the ones slaughtering the deer.

  A man walks out of the woods. The firing stops. He kneels by the dead deer, places his hand by each dead animal’s bloody muzzle, and puts something in its mouth. The deer stir, then rise. Now they’re as plump as pampered zoo specimens.

  The man looks at me. It’s Elvis.

  I open my eyes. It’s past one in the afternoon. My alarm clock has been bleating for the past three hours.

  I’m stiff and sore, but less so than yesterday. A glance at my phone tells me there’ve been no calls since last night. Surprising. I’d have expected Mitch to try reaching me several times by now.

  I limp back to my bedroom to pull on a robe. This old terry cloth robe is the most comfortable piece of clothing I own. It was a birthday gift from Harri.

  Harri. Harriet Lane… I’m not looking forward to talking with her, but I should take advantage of this lull between crises to call her.

  It seems like a hundred years ago when she was my lab partner, before she switched programs to molecular biology, with a concentration in human nutrition. There was always a certain… something, a sexual tension, between Harri and me. If Emily hadn’t already been in the picture — who knows?

  Harri got into the gene-splicing game with one of the half-dozen biotech and chemical firms that later became corporate parents of the MannaSantos combine. We went years without being in touch. Then, fourteen years ago, she reappeared in my life. I was a widowed country doctor trying desperately to keep my clinic afloat, hawking MannaSantos weight-loss products on the side to bring in some additional cash flow. Harri was project director for several of the products I was selling, and she saw my name on a list of distributors. She had never married. We were both in our midfifties then; perhaps the phrase “better late than never” drifted through her mind when she read my name.

  Harriet lived in the outskirts of Vegas. We began seeing each other, commuting between Rancho Bernardino and Las Vegas several weekends a month. Despite the distance, it might have worked. It might have worked, except for a legacy of my marriage, a family peculiarity which made it painfully obvious that I was my father’s son.

  One evening, after we had eaten dinner at my house and then fumbled through a session of heavy petting, Harri wanted to have a smoke outside. She went looking through my closets for a coat to wear. She found Emily. Rather, she found what I’d retained of Emily — the two vacuum jars filled with the fat I had lovingly liposuctioned from my wife’s hips, thighs, and buttocks over the final six years of our marriage.

  Perhaps if I’d been more quick-witted, I could’ve come up with some semi-plausible lie which would’ve satisfied her — after all, liposuction had been a major part of my medical practice before GD2, and I could’ve rationalized holding onto the two sam
ples of my work for the giving of historical lectures and so forth. But the clumsy, embarrassed foreplay we’d shared a half-hour before left me feeling vulnerable and open. The word “pervert” didn’t even occur to me.

  I told Harri everything. I told her all about Emily’s minor weight-gain during her midthirties; how we’d joked about my providing her a body-sculpting treatment for her birthday; how these little jokes had segued into reality; and how our sexual life together had come to revolve around unending cycles of self-encouraged weight-gain on Emily’s part, followed by loving, intimate, tender sessions of liposuction on mine.

  I should’ve expected Harri to react the way she did. Perhaps one needs to be part of my family not to feel a sense of revulsion; maybe my father and Emily are the only two people who could ever understand. Harri and I haven’t spoken since that night. Fourteen years ago.

  Her work and home numbers are still in my address book. I call Harri’s MannaSantos office number in Las Vegas. An unfamiliar man tells me he thinks she may be managing a different department. He transfers me to a receptionist, who recognizes Harri’s name without hesitation; she’s now the Technical Information Director for the Department of Customer and Community Relations. A few seconds later, I hear her voice.

  “Hello? Harriet Lane speaking.”

  Her voice hasn’t changed. It’s still nasal, oddly sexy, flavored with a strong dose of Long Island. Hearing it brings back a flood of memories — some exciting, some embarrassing as hell.

  “Harri? This is Louis Shmalzberg.”

  A heart-shriveling pause. “Louis Shmalzberg? As in Doctor Louis Shmalzberg?”