“Listen, run downstairs and tell Williken to hold Juan on the line until… ” One of his shoes was missing.
“He left, Dad. I told him you couldn’t be interrupted. He seemed sort of angry and he said he wished you wouldn’t give people his number anymore.”
“Shit on Williken then.”
His shoe was way the hell under the bed. How had he …?
“What was the message he gave you exactly? Did they say who’s looking for this Newman fellow?”
“Williken wrote it down, but I can’t read his writing. Margy it looks like.”
That was it then, the end of the world. Somehow Admissions had made a mistake in slotting Bobbi Newman for a routine cremation. She had a policy with Macy’s.
And if Ab didn’t get back the body he’d sold to White … “Oh Jesus,” he whispered to the dust under the bed.
“Anyhow you’re supposed to call them right back. But Williken says not from his phone ‘cause he’s gone out.”
There might be time, barely and with the best luck. White hadn’t left the morgue till after 3 a.m. It was still short of noon. He’d buy the body back, even if it meant paying White something extra for his disappointment. After all, in the long run White needed him as much as he needed White.
“Bye, Dad,” Beno said, without raising his voice, though by then Ab was already out in the hall and down one landing.
Beno walked over to the foot of the bed. His mother still hadn’t moved a muscle. He’d been watching her the whole time and it was as though she were dead. She was always like that after his father had fucked her, but usually not for such a long time. At school they said that fucking was supposed to be very healthful but somehow it never seemed to do her much good. He touched the sole of her right foot. It was soft and pink, like the foot of a baby, because she never walked anywhere.
Leda pulled her foot away. She opened her eyes.
White’s establishment was way the hell downtown, around the corner from the Democratic National Convention (formerly, Pier 19) which was to the world of contemporary pleasure what Radio City Music Hall had been to the world of entertainment—the largest, the mildest, and the most amazing. Ab, being a born New Yorker, had never stepped through the glowing neon vulva (seventy feet high and forty feet wide, a landmark) of the entrance. For those like Ab who refused to be grossed out by the conscious too-muchness of the major piers, the same basic styles were available on the side streets (“Boston” they called this area) in a variety of cooler colors, and here, in the midst of all that was allowed, some five or six illegal businesses eked out their unnatural and anachronistic lives.
After much knocking a young girl came to the door, the same probably who had answered the phone, though now she pretended to be mute. She could not have been much older than Beno, twelve at most, but she moved with the listless, enforced manner of a despairing housewife.
Ab stepped into the dim foyer and closed the door against the girl’s scarcely perceptible resistance. He’d never been inside White’s place before and he would not even have known what address to come to if he hadn’t once had to take over the delivery van for White, who’d arrived at the morgue too zonked out to function. So this was the market to which he’d been exporting his goods. It was less than elegant.
“I want to see Mr. White,” Ab told the girl. He wondered if she were another sideline.
She lifted one small, unhappy hand toward her mouth.
There was a clattering and banging above their heads, and a single flimsy facs-sheet drifted down through the half-light of the stairwell. White’s voice drifted down after it: “Is that you, Holt?”
“Damn right!” Ab started up the stairs but White, light in his head and heavy on his feet, was already crashing down to meet him.
White placed a hand on Ab’s shoulder, establishing the fact of the other man’s presence and at the same time holding himself erect. He had said yes to Yes once too often, or twice, and was not at this moment altogether corporeal.
“I’ve got to take it back,” Ab said. “I told the kid on the phone. I don’t care how much you stand to lose, I’ve got to have it.”
White removed his hand carefully and placed it on the banister. “Yes. Well. It can’t be done. No.”
“I’ve got to.”
“Melissa,” White said. “It would be … If you would please … And I’ll see you later, darling.”
The girl mounted the steps reluctantly, as though her certain future were waiting for her at the top. “My daughter,” White explained with a sad smile as she came alongside. He reached out to rumple her hair but missed by a few inches.
“We’ll discuss this, shall we, in my office?”
Ab helped him to the bottom. White went to the door at the far end of the foyer. “Is it locked?” he wondered aloud.
Ab tried it. It was not locked.
“I was meditating,” White said meditatively, still standing before the unlocked door, in Ab’s way, “when you called before. In all the uproar and whirl, a man has to take a moment aside to … ”
White’s office looked like a lawyer’s that Ab had broken into at the tag-end of a riot, years and years before. He’d been taken aback to find that the ordinary processes of indigence and desuetude had accomplished much more than any amount of his own adolescent smashing about might have.
“Here’s the story,” Ab said, standing close to White and speaking in a loud voice so there could be no misunderstanding. “It turns out that the one you came for last night was actually insured by her parents, out in Arizona, without her knowing. The hospital records didn’t say anything about it, but what happened is the various clinics have a computer that cross-checks against the obits. They caught it this morning and called the morgue around noon.”
White tugged sullenly on a strand of his sparse, mousy hair. “Well, tell them, you know, tell them it went in the oven.”
“I can’t. Officially we’ve got to hold them for twenty-four hours, just in case something like this should happen. Only it never does. Who would have thought, I mean it’s so unlikely, isn’t it? Anyhow the point is, I’ve got to take the body back. Now.”
“It can’t be done.”
“Has somebody already… ?”
White nodded.
“But could we fix it up again somehow? I mean, how, uh, badly … ”
“No. No, I don’t think so. Out of the question.”
“Listen, White, if I get busted over this, I won’t let myself be the only one to get hurt. You understand. There are going to be questions.”
White nodded vaguely. He seemed to go away and return. “Well then, take a look yourself.” He handed Ab an old-fashioned brass key. There was a plastic Yin and Yang symbol on the keychain. He pointed to a four-tier metal file on the far side of the office. “Through there.”
The file wouldn’t roll aside from the doorway until, having thought about it, Ab bent down and found the release for the wheels. There was no knob on the door, just a tarnished disc of lock with a word “Chicago” on it. The key fit loosely and the locks had to be coaxed.
The body was scattered all over the patchy linoleum. A heavy rose-like scent masked the stench of the decaying organs. No, it was not something you could have passed off as the result of surgery, and in any case the head seemed to be missing.
He’d wasted an hour to see this.
White stood in the doorway, ignoring, in sympathy to Ab’s feelings, the existence of the dismembered and disemboweled corpse. “He was waiting here, you see, when I went to the hospital. An out-of-towner, and one of my very … I always let them take away whatever they want. Sorry.”
As White was locking up the room again, Ab recollected the one thing he would need irrespective of the body. He hoped it hadn’t gone off with the head.
They found her left arm in the coffin of simulated pine with the Identi-Band still on it. He tried to persuade himself that as long as he had this name there was still half a chance that he’d find so
mething to hang it on.
White sensed Ab’s renascent optimism, and, without sharing it, encouraged him: “Things could be worse.”
Ab frowned. His hope was still too fragile to bear expression.
But White began to float away in his own mild breeze. “Say, Ab, have you ever studied Yoga?”
Ab laughed. “Shit no.”
“You should. You’d be amazed what it can do for you. I don’t stick with it like I should, it’s my own fault, I suppose, but it puts you in touch with… Well, it’s hard to explain.”
White discovered that he was alone in the office. “Where are you going?” he asked.
* * *
420 East 65th came into the world as a “luxury” coop, but like most such it had been subdivided by the turn of the century into a number of little hotels, two or three to a floor. These hotels rented rooms or portions of rooms on a weekly basis to singles who either preferred hotel life or who, as aliens, didn’t qualify for a MODICUM dorm. Chapel shared his room at the Colton (named after the actress reputed to have owned the entire twelve rooms of the hotel in the ’80’s and ’90’s) with another ex-convict, but since Lucey left for his job at a retrieval center early in the morning and spent his afterhours cruising for free meat around the piers the two men rarely encountered each other, which was how they liked it. It wasn’t cheap, but where else could they have found accommodations so reassuringly like those they’d known at Sing-Sing: so small, so spare, so dark?
The room had a false floor in the reductionist style of the ’90’s. Lucey never went out without first scrupulously tucking everything away and rolling the floor into place. When Chapel got home from the hospital he would be greeted by a splendid absence: the walls, one window covered by a paper screen, the ceiling with its single recessed light, the waxed wood of the floor. the single decoration was a strip of molding tacked to the walls at what was now, due to the raised floor, eye-level.
He was home, and here, beside the door, bolted to the wall, quietly, wonderfully waiting for him, was his twenty-eight-inch Yamaha of America, none better at any price, nor any cheaper. (Chapel paid all the rental and cable charges himself, since Lucey didn’t like TV)
Chapel did not watch just anything. He saved himself for the programs he felt really strongly about. As the first of these did not come on till 10:30, he spent the intervening hour or two dusting, sanding, waxing, polishing, and generally being good to the floor, just as for nineteen years he had scoured the concrete of his cell every morning and evening. He worked with the mindless and blessed dutifulness of a priest reading his office. Afterwards, calmed, he would roll back the gleaming floorboards from his bed and lie back with conscious worthiness, ready to receive. His body seemed to disappear. Once the box was on, Chapel became another person. At 10:30 he became Eric Laver, the idealistic young lawyer, with his idealistic young notions of right and wrong, which no amount of painful experience, including two disastrous marriages (and the possibility now of a third) ever seemed to dispel. Though lately, since he’d taken on the Forrest case … This was The Whole Truth.
At 11:30 Chapel would have his bowel movement during an intermission of news, sports, and weather.
Then: As The World Turns, which, being more epic in scope, offered its audience different identities on different days. Today, as Bill Harper, Chapel was worried about Moira, his fourteen-year-old problem stepdaughter, who only last Wednesday during a stormy encounter at breakfast had announced to him that she was a lesbian. As if this wasn’t enough, his wife, when he told her what Moira had told him, insisted that many years ago she had loved another woman. Who that other woman might have been he feared he already knew.
It was not the stories that engaged him so, it was the faces of the actors, their voices, their gestures, the smooth, wide-open, whole-bodied way they moved. So long as they themselves seemed stirred by their imaginary problems, Chapel was satisfied. What he needed was the spectacle of authentic emotion—eyes that cried, chests that heaved, lips that kissed or frowned or tightened with anxiety, voices tremulous with concern.
He would sit on the mattress, propped on cushions, four feet back from the screen, breathing quick, shallow breaths, wholly given over to the flickerings and noises of the machine, which were, more than any of his own actions, his life, the central fact of his consciousness, the single source of any happiness Chapel knew or could remember.
A TV had taught Chapel to read. It had taught him to laugh. It had instructed the very muscles of his face how to express pain, fear, anger, and joy. From it he had learned the words to use in all the confusing circumstances of his other, external life. And though he never read, or laughed, or frowned, or spoke, or walked, or did anything as well as his avatars on the screen, yet they’d seen him through well enough, after all, or he would not have been here now, renewing himself at the source.
What he sought here, and what he found, was much more than art. Which he had sampled during prime evening hours and for which he had little use. It was the experience of returning, after the exertions of the day, to a face he could recognize and love, his own or someone else’s. Or if not love, then some feeling as strong. To know, with certainty, that he would feel these same feelings tomorrow, and the next day. In other ages religion had performed this service, telling people the story of their lives, and after a certain lapse of time telling it to them again.
Once a show that Chapel followed on CBS had pulled down such disastrous ratings for six months running that it had been canceled. A pagan forcibly converted to a new religion would have felt the same loss and longing (until the new god has been taught to inhabit the forms abandoned by the god who died) that Chapel felt then, looking at the strange faces inhabiting the screen of his Yamaha for an hour every afternoon. It was as though he’d looked into a mirror and failed to find his reflection. For the first month the pain in his shoulder had become so magnificently more awful that he had almost been unable to do his work at Bellevue. Then, slowly, in the person of young Dr. Landry, he began to rediscover the elements of his own identity.
It was at 2:45, during a commercial for Carnation Eggies, that Ab came pounding and hollering at Chapel’s door. Maud had just come to visit her sister-in-law’s child at the observation center to which the court had committed him. She didn’t know yet that Dr. Landry was in charge of the boy’s case.
“Chapel,” Ab screamed, “I know you’re in there, so open up, goddammit. I’ll knock this door down.”
The next scene opened in Landry’s office. He was trying to make Mrs. Hanson, from last week, understand how a large part of her daughter’s problem sprang from her own selfish attitudes. But Mrs. Hanson was black, and Chapel’s sympathy was qualified for blacks, whose special dramatic function was to remind the audience of the other world, the one that they inhabited and were unhappy in.
Maud knocked on Landry’s door: a closeup of gloved ringers thrumming on the paper panel.
Chapel got up and let Ab in. By three o’clock Chapel had agreed, albeit sullenly, to help Ab find a replacement for the body he had lost.
3
Martinez had been at the desk when the call came from Macy’s saying to hold the Newman body till their driver got there. Though he knew that the vaults contained nothing but three male geriatric numbers, he made mild yes-sounds and started filling out both forms. He left a message for Ab at his emergency number, then (on the principle that if there was going to be shit it should be Ab who either cleaned it up or ate it, as God willed) got word to his cousin to call in sick for the second (two to ten) shift. When Ab phoned back, Martinez was brief and ominous: “Get here and bring you know what. Or you know what.”
Macy’s driver arrived before Ab. Martinez was feeling almost off-balance enough to tell him there was nothing in storage by the name of Newman, Bobbi.
But it was not like Martinez to be honest when a lie might serve, especially in a case like this, where his own livelihood, and his cousin’s, were jeopardized. So, making a ment
al sign of the cross, he’d wheeled one of the geriatric numbers out from the faults, and the driver, with a healthy indifference to bureaucratic good form, carted it out to his van without looking under the sheet or checking the name on the file: NORRIS, THOMAS.
It was an inspired improvisation. Since their driver had been as culpable as the morgue, Macy’s wasn’t likely to make a stink about the resulting delay. Fast post mortem freezing was the rule in the cryonic industry and it didn’t pay to advertise the exceptions.
Ab arrived a bit before four. First off he checked out the log book. The page for April 14 was blank. A miracle of bad luck, but he wasn’t surprised.
“Anything waiting?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s incredible,” Ab said, wishing it were.
The phone rang. “That’ll be Macy’s,” Martinez said equably, stripping down to street clothes.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?”
“It’s your baby now.” Martinez flashed a big winner’s smile. They’d both gambled but Ab had lost. He explained, as the phone rang on, the stopgap by which he’d saved Ab’s life.
When Ab picked it up, it was the director, no less, of Macy’s Clinic, and so high in the sky of his just wrath it would have been impossible for Ab to have made out what he was screaming if he hadn’t already known. Ab was suitably abject and incredulous, explaining that the attendant who had made the mistake (and how it could have happened he still did not understand) was gone for the day. He assured the director that the man would not get off lightly, would probably be canned or worse. On the other hand, he saw no reason to call the matter to the attention of Administration, who might try to shift some of the blame onto Macy’s and their driver. The director agreed that that was uncalled for.
“And the minute your driver gets here Miss Newman will be waiting. I’ll be personally responsible. And we can forget that the whole thing happened. Yes?” Yes.
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