THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror

by Thomas M. Disch

  But just as light is sometimes better understood as particles than as waves, so with the soul; sometimes, in certain extraordinary circumstances, it will establish fixed residence not at a depth but in a place: a locus, or focus. In Giselle’s case it was in the corpus callosum of her husband’s brain. The corpus callosum is the bundle of fibers that links the brain’s two hemispheres. Its function is to regulate, pattern, and cross-index the flow of all conscious and unconscious thought. Admittedly, this tells us little about the corpus callosum. Enough for now to note that it is there, the deepest point, as it were, in the stream of Robert Glandier’s consciousness, and there, caught in it as in a net, was Giselle, full fathom five.

  Having only moments before been conscious of such sublime vistas, having so lately won free from the confinement of the grave, it was all the more tormenting to be imprisoned again and to have no notion of how it had happened or how long it might go on. Resistance was not possible, for there was nothing she could exert her will against. She felt as though she had been suspended in a black, viscous fluid, which was subject to sluggish eddies, currents not so much of hot and cold as of degrees of ill health, malice, and fear—patterns of turbulence in the diseased mind of Robert Glandier as he groped his way toward a reciprocal awareness that his wife had returned from death to haunt him.

  CHAPTER 21

  In the oven the cheese nubbles on top of the pizza were just starting to get gloppy, and the kitchen was full of its smell. So what could explain the smell of burning chocolate, vanished now but still distinct to memory? Nothing explained it. This, however, was not an acceptable verdict, and Glandier, returning to his bowl of potato chips, applied himself to solving the mystery. A vagrant odor from a neighbor’s kitchen? Hardly likely. An olfactory hallucination? Glandier did not like to think himself susceptible to such things, but it was a fact recognized by science that the mind could have short circuits just like computers. So he thought he’d smelled chocolate: was that any different, really, from the way the melody of some old song can pop into a person’s head for no good reason? It was not, and the mystery was filed under “Solved.”

  Even so, when he raised the green beer bottle to his lips, he did so hesitantly, as though it might contain something other than beer. And there was, when he let it wash, fizzing, across his tongue, something about the aftertaste it left, a kind of staleness. A second taste was, if anything, odder—behind the coldness and the carbonation a flavor almost of pond water.

  Fuck it, he thought, I’m coming down with a cold.

  He picked up the remote control from the end table, switched on the TV, and flipped soundlessly from channel to channel. Nothing, nothing, and nothing again. Too late for the news and too early for serious titillation. Maybe he should treat himself to a Beta-Max with some of Joy-Ann’s money. Just the idea was enough to start signals of arousal sparking. His cock stirred in its cocoon of Munsingwear; his jaw dropped, his mouth grew dry; the rhythm of his breathing altered. God damn it, there had to be something on television that could do the trick!

  He flipped channels again and hit the end of a Buick ad, the eagle spreading its feathers as it alights on the car’s trademark. Glandier must have looked at the same image a hundred times and never even noticed it. Why should it have suddenly become so unsettling? Why didn’t it come to an end? How many times did the fucker have to flap its wings before it got where it was heading? Just as Glandier was beginning to suspect that the problem might be in his equipment, not the TV’s, the Buick ad faded and the entertainment commenced. It was a pursuit adventure about a blue Chrysler being chased by a red Thunderbird. The Chrysler swerved around a bend; the Thunderbird followed, squealing. The Chrysler whizzed through an intersection against the light, just missing a large van. The Thunderbird braked and spun about a full 360 degrees. The Chrysler pulled off the highway, and for the first time the camera approached close enough to let Glandier see the driver’s face.

  She smiled at him. Her lips were a dark, rusty red, like blood that has begun to dry. Her hair swayed in motions slow as the eagle’s spreading wings. Slowly she removed her sunglasses, slowly raised blue-tinged eyelids to look at him. There was nothing of love or forgiveness in her recognition—only contempt, accusation, derision. He wanted to kill again, and swift as that wish he found her in his arms, not an image on a screen but a physical body alive and writhing. Her fingers tugged at his belt, undid his fly. He made no attempt to repulse her or resist, in part from a fear that to do so would make the apparition more real, but also from an intuition that no harm was intended him, only pleasure.

  The red lips parted. The blue-tinged eyes looked up into his face, as though asking permission or awaiting command. He nodded his head, and she started to give him a blow job. At first he just lay inert in the relaxed curve dictated by the recliner, but then, yielding to the momentum of his need, he slid lower.

  Now her mouth was pressed to his mouth, and he could feel all particular awareness dissolve into one grand continuous slurp of need and greed forever gratified, renewed, fulfilled. He shot his load, and closed his eyes, and when he opened them she was gone. His bottle lay on the rug beside the recliner in a still-foaming puddle of beer. The potato chips were scattered everywhere, the bowl shattered in four pieces. The dip was spread over his pants and on his hands and in his pubic hair.

  In the kitchen he could hear his wife stacking dishes in the cupboard and singing, rather loudly, the new commercial for Geritol.

  “Get yourself a bottle of Geritol,

  Geritol, Geritol.

  Get yourself a bottle of Geritol,

  And the walls come tumbling down.”

  Jesus Christ, he thought, either I’ve really gone off my rocker or I have just fucked a ghost. The idea that he could be going crazy made him uncomfortable, even a bit afraid, though only in a rational way, the way one would fear a bankruptcy impending in the distant future. Another part of him reacted with a weirdly straightforward satisfaction. Quite simply, he hadn’t had such a good solid spine-tingler in ages, and if it was a ghost he’d been fucking, then good for him and good for the ghost. He was ready already for a second helping.

  CHAPTER 22

  “Father Windakiewiczowa?” Bing Anker dropped his shoulder bag into the aisle seat and leaned across the middle seat to offer his hand to be shaken. “It is Father Windakiewiczowa, isn’t it?”

  The old priest, out of his collar and wearing a rumpled gray suit, blinked owlishly through wire-framed lenses and submitted to Bing’s recognition. “I’m afraid I don’t quite—um, recall…”

  “Bing Anker: Joy-Ann Anker’s son.”

  The priest nodded, though Bing was certain, from the vagueness still in his eyes, that no bells had been rung.

  “Is this seat taken?” Bing lifted the straps of the seatbelt and slid into the middle seat. “Such a nice coincidence. Are you still at Our Lady of Mercy, Father Windakiewiczowa?”

  The priest nodded. “Um, Mr. Anker, wouldn’t you be more comfortable, if—”

  Bing quickly switched to solemnity. “Oh, I never thought—you haven’t heard the news, have you? My mother died. Just this morning. No warning.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Reluctantly the priest adjusted his manner from annoyance at Bing’s having taken the seat beside him instead of the aisle seat (the plane, after all, was virtually empty) to condolence and availability. He had not expected his holiday to give way so quickly to pastoral duties.

  “It was a blessing, really,” said Bing, cinching the seatbelt with a grimace of satisfaction at his ever-unconquerable thinness. “She’d suffered so terribly. And there surely can’t be any doubt as to her going to heaven. Though she may have to spend a little time in purgatory, since she died without receiving the Last Sacrament. But that doesn’t really matter, does it, Father—if a person has lived a holy life?”

  “Of course,” said Father Windakiewiczowa uneasily.

  “Maybe you’d like to say a rosary with me!” Bing suggested
brightly. “In her memory? Or is that something I ought to provide an offering for? It’s all so awful—I’m returning home practically broke, and I have no idea where I’m going to stay. But I can’t really fail to show up for my own mother’s funeral, can I? Maybe you’ll be saying the mass. That would be a truly strange coincidence, wouldn’t it?”

  The flight attendant tapped Bing on the shoulder and asked him to put his shoulder bag under the seat. Then she took orders for drinks. Bing asked for rosé wine, and Father Windakiewiczowa ordered two Bloody Marys. Then, to forestall Bing’s further nattering, Father Windakiewiczowa took out his breviary and excused himself: he had to read his office.

  Father Windakiewiczowa was steadfast in this reverent purpose all through takeoff and for the next fifteen minutes, but when the liquor cart at last reached row 21 he had to make a choice. He succumbed to his carnal appetite, whereupon, as he’d feared, Bing folded up the airline magazine he’d been reading and resumed his air of bland conviviality.

  “Dare I ask, Father—were you lucky?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Bing winked knowingly. “Were you lucky? This is why people visit Vegas, generally—to get lucky. There’s no sin in it, is there? Leastways not if you’re a Catholic. That’s one thing that has to be said for Catholicism: they leave you room to breathe. One can gamble. One can booze. And one can—Well, that’s about it, really, but it’s something. So, tell me, were you lucky?”

  “No,” said Father Windakiewiczowa, “I wasn’t.”

  “Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Bing unscrewed the cap from his bottle of Gallo rosé, poured it into the plastic tumbler, and offered a toast. “Here’s to your better luck next time.”

  “And to the memory,” said Father Windakiewiczowa, not without consciousness of malice, “of your mother. May she rest in peace.”

  “To Mom,” Bing agreed warmly.

  “And were you lucky?” the priest demanded.

  “Me?” Bing tittered. “Oh, I’m just an employee. I call out the numbers at Old Pioneer Bingo Parlor on Searles Avenue, out near Woodlawn Cemetery, if you know where that is. So luck doesn’t really enter into it for me. Except that I consider myself lucky to live in Las Vegas.”

  “You like Las Vegas, do you?” the priest asked in a tone he usually reserved for the confessional.

  “Oh, I’m crazy for it. I think Las Vegas is the secret capital of the country. The one place democracy actually works. You think I’m kidding, don’t you? Not at all. Stand by any crap table or roulette wheel and look at the mix of people around you. Where else in the world will you find millionaires on speaking terms with ordinary riffraff like me? Not in very many churches, for all their talk of brotherhood. No, the real melting pots these days are the casinos, and I think it’s because people can express their deepest feelings there. The comparison Father Mabbley always draws—” Bing broke off and looked at the priest slyly across the top of his tumbler. “Did you happen to meet Father Mabbley while you were there by any chance? He’s the pastor of St. Jude’s. No? Next time you’re there you must hear one of his sermons. Especially if you’ve been on a losing streak. Father Mabbley will cheer you up more than three watermelons.

  “Anyhow, to return to his comparison.” Bing took a sip of his rosé and resumed. “Father Mabbley says that for lots of people Las Vegas serves the same purpose as a pilgrimage to Lourdes. First, there’s the hope for a miraculous cure, which in this case is financial rather than physical, but the idea in both cases is that God should intervene on a material level. Some miracles are performed, enough to keep the reputation of the place alive, but the real importance of a pilgrimage isn’t whether your prayers are answered, it’s the fact that they’re expressed, the fact that something is felt at absolute gut level. Even if it’s only despair—despair for one’s material condition, that is. Because the next step after despair is freedom. Once you realize that all the work you’ve been doing, and the money you’ve been trying to save, and the mortgages, and the car payments—once you realize that that’s all just crap, then you can begin to feel spiritual freedom.”

  “Well, it’s an interesting theory,” said Father Windakiewiczowa, “but somehow I can’t quite believe that a priest… Father Mabbley, you say his name is?”

  Bing, who had the happy facility of getting drunk on very little alcohol, spluttered into his wine, and then (the joke was all the funnier because it could not be shared: Father Mabbley’s nickname among a large circle of his parishioners was Queen Mab, but try and explain that to Father Windakiewiczowa!) spluttered again. “Excuse me, Father,” he got out at last. “Something went down the wrong tube.”

  Father Windakiewiczowa glared at Bing, as though in prelude to a reprimand, but short of reminding him, again, of his mother’s death he could think of nothing to bring to bear. Instead, he reached up and switched off the light above his seat. “Well, if you’ll excuse me, Mr.—um—”

  “Anker. Bing Anker.”

  “Yes. Well. I think I’ll try and grab some sleep. I’m a little worn down and—”

  “Oh, surely, Father. Let me turn out my light too. But there is one thing before you do go to sleep: I was hoping you’d hear my confession.”

  “Your confession,” said Father Windakiewiczowa with undisguised dismay. “Does that mean that you are still—um, a practicing Catholic?”

  “A believing Catholic, certainly,” Bing qualified. “As Father Mabbley says, there are no atheists in casinos.”

  “This Father Mabbley, he’s your usual confessor, I take it?”

  Bing nodded and continued, contritely, “I would have gone to Father Mabbley, naturally, but he was out, and I wanted to be on the first plane I could get. And then when I saw you it seemed, what’s the word? Providential.”

  “And you are—um, actually in need of confession?”

  Bing heaved a sigh. “Yes, Father, I’m afraid so. There are rather a lot of sins that are definitely mortal and some others right on the edge. So if I want to take communion at Mom’s funeral mass—and how would it look if I didn’t?—I’ll have to go to confession. Won’t I?”

  “How you look is not the issue. You must feel a sincere contrition and be resolved never to sin again.”

  “My goodness, I know that. I’m a graduate of Cretin, after all. Naturally, I’m dreadfully sorry for all my sins.”

  “Well. In that case.” With a sigh of admitted defeat Father Windakiewiczowa reached under the seat before him for his valise and removed from it a two-inch-wide strip of purple silk faced with white. “My stole,” he explained. He placed the stole around his neck, bowed his head, and made the sign of the cross.

  “In the name of the Father,” Bing recited, “and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been four years since my last confession and in that time I have done these sins.”

  “Please!” the priest hissed. “Whisper!”

  Bing bowed his head contritely and leaned toward the old man’s ear to whisper his sins. Father Windakiewiczowa interposed few questions, but even so the catalogue of Bing’s sins took fully twenty minutes to be told. When he was done, he was given a penance of twenty-five rosaries, the last of which had not been rattled off till the plane had landed and the last piece of luggage, which was Bing’s, had been retrieved from the carousel.

  “Well, that’s taken care of,” said Bing with satisfaction. He dropped the glass beads in his pocket and took up his canvas suitcase. “I’m pure again.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The darkness burst and she found herself—in human form and wearing a blue cotton dress—in the kitchen of the Willowville house. The refrigerator growled. The clock on the wall hummed. The light glared on the white enamel. It was as though she had been returned, unchanged, to the moment when, in this same kitchen, the world had suddenly been stood on its head and she had begun to see, clearly, the beauty and madness about her. Ah, but it was not the same. What had then seemed lovely and laughable n
ow fairly radiated menace. The very light from the recessed fluorescent fixture seemed dirty somehow, as though particles of that earlier enveloping darkness were mixed in with the waves of white.

  She could feel him pushing his body out of the recliner and walking heavily toward the kitchen, in the way one feels the sagging of bedsprings or the rolling of a boat. Part of her being was still embedded in his, a function of his deformed imagination. Another part was free and autonomous, but the nearer he approached the more tenuous that freedom seemed.

  He reached the doorway, saw her, and stopped. Just as when he’d come upon her at the Lady Luck Motor Lodge, she experienced contradictory extremes of dismay and of lassitude, the same refusal to confront, even by a word, the source of so much—hatred, could it be called? No, for it was too unfocused. Call it simply evil and never try to understand.

  “Fucking hell,” said Glandier.

  She would have fled or made herself invisible—anything to avoid further knowledge of him—but her freedom of movement was limited in ways not yet clear to her. As much as when she had writhed in the casket’s confinement, she was subject to laws she did not understand but to which her actions accorded with instinctive aptness.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” Glandier asserted in a tone of childish truculence, as though he might bully her into disappearing.

  Ah, if only it could be that simple! If only there were no knot between them. But ghosts, evidently, have no say in whether they will haunt someone, or whom they will haunt. Would the manner of the haunting be equally outside her control? she wondered. Would she have to hoot at him, and bleed, and rattle chains?

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” he demanded.

  A good question. Did she want to say anything to him? To scold him for having murdered her? Absurd. What would be the point of talking to him? Wouldn’t any speech between them serve to tighten the bonds that she would rather see dissolved?