334

by Thomas M. Disch

  Chapel smiled. The little miracles were starting to unfold themselves in his blood stream, but that was almost beside the point. The point was simple: They were dying: he was alive. He had survived and they were bodies. The spring sunlight added its own additional touch of good cheer to the here of heaven and the now of six a.m.

  In an hour he would be home. He’d rest a while, and then he’d watch his box. He thought he could look forward to that.

  Heading home down First, Ab whistled a piece of trash that had stuck in his head four days running, about some new pill called Yes, that made you feel better, and he did.

  The fifty dollars he’d got for the Newman body brought his take for the week up to a handsome $115. Once he’d seen what Ab was offering, White hadn’t even haggled. Without being necrophile himself (to Ab a body was just a job to be done, something he carted down from the wards and burned or—if there was money to burn instead—shipped off to a freezing concern) Ab understood the market well enough to have recognized in Bobbi Newman a certain ideal quality of deathliness. Lupus had taken a fulminant course with her, rapidly destroying one internal system after another without, for a wonder, marring the fine texture of the skin. True, the disease had whittled face and limbs down to bone thinness, but then what else was necrophilia about? To Ab, who liked them big, soft, and lively, all of this fuss over corpses was pretty alien, yet basically his motto was “Chacun à son goût,” though not in so many words. There were limits, of course. For example, he would willingly have assisted at the castration of any Republican in the city, and he felt nearly as passionate a distaste for political extremists. But he possessed the basic urban tolerance for any human peculiarity from which he stood a good chance of making money.

  Ab considered his commissions from the procurers to be gifts of fate, to be spent in the same free spirit that fortune had shown showering them on him. In fact, when you totted up the various MODICUM benefits the Holts were disbarred from by virtue of Ab’s salary, his real income wasn’t much more (without these occasional windfalls) than the government would have paid him for being alive. Ab usually managed to sidestep the logical conclusion: that the windfalls were his essential wage, the money that made him, in his own consciousness, a free agent, the equal of any engineer, expert, or criminal in the city. Ab was a man, with a man’s competence to buy whatever, within bounds, he wanted.

  At this particular April moment, with the traffic so light on the avenue you could drink the air like a 7-Up, with the sun shining, with nowhere in particular to be until ten that night, and with $115 of discretionary income, Ab felt like an old movie, full of songs and violence and fast editing. Boff, smack, pow, that’s how Ab was feeling now, and as the opposite sex approached him from the other direction, he could feel their eyes fastening on him, measuring, estimating, admiring, imagining.

  One, very young, very black, in silvery street shorts, stared at Ab’s left hand and stared at it, as though it were a tarantula getting ready to crawl right up her leg. (Ab was everywhere quite hairy.) She could feel it tickling her knee, her thigh, her fancy. Milly, when she was little, had been the same way about her father’s missing finger, all silly and giddy. Mutilations were supposed to be passe now, but Ab knew better. Girls still wet themselves feeling a stump, but guys today were just too chickenshit to chop their fingers off. The macho thing now was a gold earring, for Christ’s sake—as though there had never been a 20th Century.

  Ab winked at her, and she looked away, but with a smile. How about that?

  If there were one thing missing from a feeling of pure content it was that the wad in his pocket (two twenties, seven tens, and one five ) was so puny it almost wasn’t there. Before revaluation a three-body week like this would have put a bulge in his front pocket as big as another cock, a comparison he had often at that time drawn. Once Ab had actually been a millionaire—for five days running in July of 2008, the single most incredible streak of luck he’d ever had. Today that would have meant five, six thousand—nothing. Some of the faro tables in the neighborhood still used the old dollars, but it was like a marriage that’s lost its romance: you said the words but the meaning had gone out of them. You looked at the picture of Benjamin Franklin and thought, this is a picture of Benjamin Franklin. Whereas with the new bills $100 stood for beauty, truth, power, and love.

  As though his bankroll were a kind of magnet dragging him there, Ab turned left on 18th into Stuyvesant Town. The four playgrounds at the center of the complex were the chief black market in New York. In the facs and on TV they used euphemisms like “flea market” or “street fair,” since to come right out and call it a black market was equivalent to saying the place was an annex of the police department and the courts, which it was.

  The black market was as much a part of New York (or any other city), as basic to its existence, as the numbers from one to ten. Where else could you buy something without the purchase being fed into the federal income-and-purchase computers? Nowhere was where, which meant that Ab, when he was flush, had three options open to him: the playgrounds, the clubs, and the baths.

  Used clothing fluttered limply from rack after rack, as far as the fountain.

  Ab could never pass these stalls without feeling that Leda was somehow close at hand, hidden among these tattered banners of the great defeated army of the second-rate and second-hand, still silently resisting him, still trying to stare him down, still insisting, though so quietly now that only he could hear her: “Goddamn it, Ab. can’t you get it through that thick skull of yours, we’re poor, we’re poor, we’re poor!” It had been the biggest argument of their life together and the decisive one. He could remember the exact spot. Under a plane tree, just here, where they had stood and raged at each other, Leda hissing and spitting like a kettle, out of her mind. It was right after the twins had arrived and Leda was saying there was no help for it, they’d have to wear what they could get. Ab said fuckshit, no, no, no kid of his was going to wear other people’s rags, they’d stay in the house naked first. Ab was louder and stronger and less afraid, and he won, but Leda revenged herself by turning her defeat into a martyrdom. She never held out against him again. Instead she became an invalid, weepy and sniveling and resolutely helpless.

  Ab heard someone calling his name. He looked around, but who would be here this early in the day but the people from the buildings, old folks plugged into their radios, kids screaming at other kids, babies screaming at mothers, mothers screaming. Half the vendors weren’t even spread out yet.

  “Ab Holt—over here!” It was old Mrs. Galban. She patted the space beside her on the green bench.

  He didn’t have much choice. “Hey, Viola, how’s it going? You’re looking great!”

  Mrs. Galban smiled a sweet, rickety smile. Yes, she said complacently, she did feel well, she thanked God every day. She observed that even for April this was beautiful weather. Ab didn’t look so bad himself (a little heavier maybe), though it was how many years now?

  “Twelve years,” said Ab, at a venture.

  “Twelve years? It seems longer. And how is that good-looking Dr. Mencken in Dermatology?”

  “He’s fine. He’s the head of the department now, you know.”

  “Yes, I heard that.”

  “He asked after you the other day when I ran into him outside the clinic. he said, have you seen old Gabby lately.” A polite lie.

  She nodded her head, politely believing him. Then, cautiously, she started homing in on what was, for her, the issue. “And Leda, how is she, poor thing?”

  “Leda is fine, Viola.”

  “She’s getting out of the house, then?”

  “Well no, not often. Sometimes we take her up to the roof for a bit of air. It’s closer than the street.”

  “Ah, the pain!” Mrs. Galban murmured with swift, professional sympathy that the years had not been able to blunt. Indeed, it was probably better exercised now than when she’d been an aide at Bellevue. “You don’t have to explain—I know it can be so awfu
l, can’t it, pain like that, and there’s so little any of us can do. But…” she added, before Ab could turn aside the final thrust, “… we must do that little if we can.”

  “It’s not as bad as it used to be,” Ab insisted.

  Mrs. Galban’s look was meant to be understood as reproachful in a sad, helpless way, but even Ab could sense the calculations going on behind the brown, cataracted eyes. Was this, she asked herself, worth pursuing? Would Ab bite?

  In the first years of Leda’s invalidism Ab had picked up extra Dilaudin suppositories from Mrs. Galban, who specialized in analgesics. Most of her clients were other old women whom she met in the out-patient waiting room at the hospital. Ab had bought the Dilaudin more as a favor to the old pusher than from any real need, since he got all the morphine that Leda needed from the interns for next to nothing.

  “It’s a terrible thing,” Mrs. Galban lamented quietly, staring into her seventy-eight-year-old lap. “A terrible thing.”

  What the hell, Ab thought. It wasn’t as if he were broke.

  “Hey, Gabby, you wouldn’t have any of those things I used to get for Leda, would you? Those what-you-call-ums?”

  “Well, Ab, since you ask … ”

  Ab got a package of five suppositories for nine dollars, which was twice the going price, even here on the playground. Mrs. Galban evidently thought Ab a fool.

  As soon as he’d given her the money, he felt comfortably unobligated. Walking off he could curse her with buoyant resentment. The old bitch would have to live a damned long time before he ever bought any more plugs off her.

  Usually Ab never made the connection between the two worlds he inhabited, this one out here and the Bellevue morgue, but now, having actively wished Viola Galban dead, it struck him that the odds were strong that he’d be the one who’d shove her in the oven. The death of anyone (anyone, that is, whom Ab had known alive) was a depressing idea, and he shrugged it away. At the far edge of his shrug, for the barest instant, he saw the young, pretty face of Bobbi Newman.

  The need to buy something was suddenly a physical necessity, as though his wad of bills had become that cock and had to be jerked off after a week-long abstinence.

  He bought a lemon ice, his first ice of the year, and strolled among the stalls, touching the goods with thick, sticky fingers, asking prices, making jokes. Everywhere the vendors hailed him by his name when they saw him approach. There was nothing, so rumor would have it, that Ab Holt couldn’t be talked into buying.

  2

  Ab looked at his two hundred and fourteen pounds of wife from the doorway. Wrinkled blue sheets were wound round her legs and stomach, but her breasts hung loose. “They’re prizewinners to this day,” Ab thought affectionately. Any feelings he still had for Leda were focused there, just as any pleasure she got when he was on top of her came from the squeezing of his hands, the biting of his teeth. Where the sheets were wrapped round her, however, she could feel nothing—except, sometimes, pain.

  After a while Ab’s attention woke Leda up, the way a magnifying glass, focusing on a dry leaf, will start it smoldering.

  He threw the package of suppositories onto the bed. “That’s for you.”

  “Oh.” Leda opened the package, sniffed at one of the wax cylinders suspiciously. “Oh?”

  “It’s Dilaudin. I ran into that Mrs. Galban at the market, and she wouldn’t get off my back till I’d bought something.”

  “I was afraid for a moment you might have got it on my account. Thanks. What’s in the other bag, an enema bottle for our anniversary?”

  Ab showed her the wig he’d bought for Beth. It was a silly, four-times-removed imitation of the Egyptian style made popular by a now-defunct TV series. To Leda it looked like something you’d find at the bottom of a box of Xmas wrapping, and she was certain it would look the same way to her daughter.

  “My God,” she said.

  “Well, it’s what the kids are wearing now” Ab said doubtfully. It no longer looked the same to him. He brought it over to the wedge of sunlight by the bedroom’s open window and tried to shake a bit more glitter into it. The metallic strings, rubbed against each other, made soft squeaking sounds.

  “My God,” she said again. Her annoyance had almost betrayed her into asking him what he’d paid for it. Since the epochal argument beneath the plane tree she never discussed money matters with Ab. She didn’t want to hear how he spent his money or how he earned it. She especially didn’t want to know how he earned it, since she had, anyhow, a fair idea.

  She contented herself with an insult. “You’ve got the discrimination of a garbage truck, and if you think Beth will let herself be seen in that ridiculous, obscene piece of junk, well… !” She pushed at the mattress until she was sitting almost upright. Both Leda and the bed breathed heavily.

  “How would you know what people are wearing outside this apartment? There were hundreds of these fucking things all over the playground. It’s what the kids are wearing now. What the fuck.”

  “It’s ugly. You bought your daughter an ugly wig. You have every right to, I suppose.”

  “Ugly—isn’t that what you used to say about everything Milly wore? All those things with buttons. And the hats! It’s a stage they go through. You were probably just the same, if you could remember that long ago.”

  “Oh, Milly! You’re always holding Milly up as though she were some kind of example! Milly never had any idea how—” Leda gave a gasp. Her pain. She pressed her hand flat against the roll of flesh to the side of her right breast, where she thought her liver might be. She closed her eyes trying to locate the pain, which had vanished.

  Ab waited till Leda was paying attention to him again. Then, very deliberately, he threw the tinselly wig out the open window. Thirty dollars, he thought, just like that.

  The manufacturer’s tag fluttered to the floor. A pink oval with italic letters: Nephertiti Creations.

  With an inarticulate cry Leda swiveled sideways in bed till she’d made both feet touch the floor. She stood up. She took two steps and reached out for the window frame to steady herself.

  The wig lay in the middle of the street eighteen floors below. Against the gray concrete it looked dazzlingly bright. A Tastee Bread truck backed up over it.

  Since there was no reproach she might have made that didn’t boil down to a charge of his throwing away money, she said nothing. The unspoken words whirled round inside her, a plague-bearing wind that ruffled the wasted muscles of her legs and back like so many tattered flags. The wind died and the flags went limp.

  Ab was ready behind her. He caught her as she fell and laid her back on the bed, wasting not a motion, smooth as a tango dip. It seemed almost accidental that his hands should be under her breasts. Her mouth opened and he put his own mouth across it, sucking the breath from her lungs.

  Anger was their aphrodisiac. Over the years the interval between fighting and fucking had grown shorter and shorter. They scarcely bothered any longer to differentiate the two processes. Already his cock was stiff. Already she’d begun to moan her rhythmic protest against the pleasure or the pain, whichever it was. As his left hand kneaded the warm dough of her breasts, his right hand pulled off his shoes and pants. The years of invalidism had given her lax flesh a peculiar virginal quality, as though each time he went into her he was awakening her from an enchanted, innocent sleep. There was a kind of sourness about her too, a smell that seeped from her pores only at these times, the way maples yield sap only at the depth of the winter. Eventually he’d learned to like it.

  A good sweat built up on the interface of their bodies, and his movements produced a steady salvo of smacking and slapping and farting sounds. This, to Leda, was the worst part of their sexual assaults, especially when she knew the children were at home. She imagined Beno, her youngest, her favorite, standing on the other side of the door, unable to keep from thinking of what was happening to her despite the horror it must have caused him. Sometimes it was only by concentrating on the thought of Beno that s
he could keep from crying out.

  Ab’s body began to move faster. Leda’s, crossing the threshold between self-control and automatism, struggled upward away from the thrusts of his cock. His hands grabbed her hips, forcing her to take him. Tears burst from her eyes, and Ab came.

  He rolled off, and the mattress gave one last exhausted whoosh.

  “Dad?”

  It was Beno, who certainly should have been in school. The bed-room door was halfway open. Never, Leda thought, in an ecstasy of humiliation, never had she known a moment to match this. Bright new pains leapt through her viscera like tribes of antelope.

  “Dad,” Beno insisted. “Are you asleep?”

  “I would be if you’d shut up and let me.”

  “There’s someone on the phone downstairs, from the hospital. That Juan. He said it’s urgent, and to wake you if we had to.”

  “Tell Martinez to fuck himself.”

  “He said” Beno went on, in a tone of martyred patience that was a good replica of his mother’s, “it didn’t make any difference what you said and that once he explained it to you you’d thank him. That’s what he said.”

  “Did he say what it was about?”

  “Some guy they’re looking for. Bob Someone.”

  “I don’t know who they want, and in any case…” Then it began to dawn: the possibility; the awful, impossible lightning bolt he’d known he would never escape. “Bobbi Newman, was that the name of the guy they’re looking for?”

  “Yeah. Can I come in?”

  “Yes, yes.” Ab swept the damp sheet over Leda’s body, which hadn’t stirred since he’d got off. He pulled his pants on. “Who took the call, Beno?”

  “Williken did.” Beno stepped into the bedroom. He had sensed the importance of the message he’d been given and he was determined to milk it for a maximum of suspense. It was as though he knew what was at stake.