THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror

by Thomas M. Disch

  “Who said Jack is crazy?”

  “Well, what would you call it: normal?”

  “No, but the important thing for us to remember,” Judy said, “is to act as though nothing at all strange has happened. No remarks, no funny looks. Just pretend that nothing happened.”

  “Really?” Maryann looked dubious. Her hand rested on the handle of the back door of the Sheehy house. “Don’t you think it might be better to reach out and try and communicate to him? I mean, you saw Ordinary People. The problem there was that people refused to discuss their problems.”

  “Oh, I’ll discuss Timothy Hutton’s problems with him any day. But I’m not going to discuss frog-killing with Jack, not if I can help it.”

  Berryman put his hand over Maryann’s, trying against the irresistible pressure of her solid flesh to keep the door from opening. But the door opened, and one after the other Jack’s destined victims walked inside to their slaughter.

  “You did your best, John,” said a voice from nowhere.

  It was, he realized, Adah Menken’s voice, and with that realization she appeared by the Sheehys’ back door, wearing her costume for the role of Mazeppa—a white broderie bedspread cinched at the hips by a broad leather belt, another hunk of the bedspread wrapped about her head, a magnificently betasseled bolero jacket, and flesh-colored tights with white wrestling boots.

  “I suppose,” he said dourly, “I should go in there.”

  “No, John, it’s gone beyond the point where we can hope to help them. I’m not a believer in predestination, but there is such a thing as the point of no return.”

  There was a longish silence as the two poets contemplated the mute siding of the house. Then Maryann let loose a blood-curdling scream as she went into the bathroom and discovered her father’s dismembered torso in the bathtub.

  “And Giselle?” Berryman insisted, turning his back on the Sheehy residence, resigned to the extinction of that family. “Don’t try to tell me there’s no way we can help her.”

  Adah looked down at the grass, abashed. “In some ways, I’m afraid, Giselle has already passed beyond our help—or out of our ken. Beyond, at least, the reach of language.”

  “But she’s alive still,” Berryman insisted. “In the sense that we are?”

  “Oh yes. Alive as that tree. Which is why (you remind me) it would be wise if we took a shoot, or a clipping. It knows now where she is and how she can be attacked. We had better forestall such a possibility.”

  There was another scream (Judy’s) inside the Sheehy residence, and then the sound of a banister railing snapping. (But not the ensuing thud of a body to the floor below that one might have expected, for Judy had taken a firm grip on a supporting baluster and was bludgeoning her brother’s head with it.)

  Berryman and Adah crossed the lawn to the willow by the ornamental pool, there to strip from it some dozen of its switchlike branches and weave with them a kind of garland.

  Maryann, meanwhile, locked inside the bathroom with her dismembered father, continued to scream and to beat at the door.

  “Now,” said Adah, in her most authoritative tone, “it is time that I returned to Paradise, and I intend to take you with me. But first, John, you must give me back that ring. There’ll be no more shape-shifting. You can’t enter heaven looking like a refugee from a Hammacher-Schlemmer catalogue.”

  Berryman surrendered the magic ring and became in that instant himself again, a blinded poet in a shabby, bloodstained tweed jacket. “How do we get there?” he asked.

  “We’ll have to climb. And as there are no ladders in the immediate vicinity, I suggest that we climb this tree.”

  Berryman laid his hand on the tree’s bark. “Will she feel us climbing?”

  “Not in any very human sense. But never mind her. Self-help begins at home. Find the lowest cleft with your fingers—so. Now lift your left foot and put it in the stirrup I’m making with my hands.”

  Berryman followed her bidding, and soon he was climbing from limb to limb of the willow, which bent and bounced and swayed under his weight but always went on and up, like the proverbial beanstalk.

  Jack Sheehy, meanwhile, had at last succeeded in gouging out the eyes of his elder sister and was now dousing the carpet of the upstairs hallway with gasoline.

  Maryann, in the bathroom, was pounding a bottle of mouthwash against the glass of the Thermopane window, which Jack had earlier sealed shut with quick-bonding glue. The bottle shattered, and Maryann fell to the floor weeping tears of despair.

  Wisps of smoke from the burning wool-and-acrylic carpet seeped in under the bathroom door.

  “Are you still behind me?” Berryman called out, and Adah replied, reassuringly, that she was. “It seems we’ve been climbing longer than there could possibly be a tree to climb.”

  “We’ll be there soon,” she promised.

  He reached up into the void and felt for another branch of the willow and wrapped his fingers about it and pulled himself some inches higher, feeling with his right foot for a lower branch. Ahead of him he could sense a difference in the enveloping darkness, a kind of flickering below the spectrum of visible light, and a coolness rippled up from his feet and along his spine, then bounced from brain to fingers in patterns ever more quick and complicated, like the wave patterns at the bottom of a pool as a rainstorm begins. “Are we there yet?” he demanded.

  “Any moment now,” she soothed.

  Meanwhile, in the Sheehys’ burning home, Jack opened the small window near the ceiling of the family room in the basement. He reached into the birdcage that he had bought only that afternoon at the Willowdale Mall, trying to encourage the parrakeet within to hop onto his finger. The parrakeet refused to cooperate. It hopped from its perch to the floor of the cage, then up its feed dish, squawking angrily, determined not to light on Jack’s insistent finger. The room was filling so quickly with smoke that Jack could scarcely see what he was doing from the smarting of his eyes. At last he thought to lift the cylinder of metal bars up from their plastic base and upend it. After its most dire protest, the bird flew free of the cage, circled the room twice in confusion, and then as the halfling fled his body and Jack collapsed, asphyxiated, to the floor, it found its way through the window and out into the evening air, where, in the distance, it could hear the first shrill ululations of the approaching fire engines.

  CHAPTER 56

  “I’m in charge of the entire earth?” Joy-Ann marveled. “That’s hard to believe!”

  “Somebody has to do the job,” said Adah, “and I’ve been at it since 1868. Surely that’s long enough.”

  “But why me? I was never anything but a housewife.”

  “Well, you know what Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount.”

  “What did he say? I was never very good at memorizing those things.”

  “It’s there on the wall behind you.”

  Joy-Ann spun around her swivel chair and looked at the sampler that hung on the gray metal wall. It was the twin to the sampler that had been in her hospital room when she’d first awakened in Paradise, but instead of a rainbow and elm trees and flowers, this one depicted the earth as it appeared in NASA photographs, with all the names and boundary lines erased, its shadowed hemisphere hazing into night, its blue oceans marbled with cloud. Springing up from the immensities of its land masses were stupendous spiral staircases, ornately carved and thickly encrusted with precious stones, by which a myriad blissful souls ascended and descended. Arching over all, in letters that twinkled like stars, were the words of the Third Beatitude:

  BLESSED ARE

  THE MEEK

  FOR THEY SHALL

  INHERIT THE EARTH.

  “Meek!” Joy-Ann shrieked. “Why, I’m the last person anyone would ever call meek!”

  “There’s one other qualification for the job: it has to go to someone who enjoys what the earth has to offer. You’d be surprised how many people get to Paradise and just want to scoot right along to realms of light. No nostalgia at a
ll for what they’re leaving behind. I thought for a while when Colette died— Are you a reader of her books, by the way?”

  Joy-Ann shook her head. Colette who? she wondered. Somehow she knew better than to ask.

  “Well, I thought that she, of all people, would agree to relieve me of the job. But no, she just wanted to ascend onward and upward. Candidly, at that time, I didn’t particularly want to go into retirement.”

  “What’s changed your mind since then?”

  “This business with the Sheehy family. The injustice of it! I don’t ever want to be mixed up in that sort of thing again.”

  Joy-Ann nodded. “That’s pretty much the attitude the Sheehys take themselves, that it was terribly unfair. But they blame Jack. I’ve tried to explain to them that Jack wasn’t responsible for anything that happened, that he did the bad things he did because a terrible demon had got hold of him. But his father seems to think I’m inventing excuses. The boy’s mother just sits there crying, and the two girls give me stony looks. As though it were my fault! I told them they’re not going to leave that waiting room until they at least agree to talk with the boy. He’s so upset, poor thing. He had no idea of anything that was happening till the moment he woke up in the burning house. Then a few moments later he was dead. You’d think they’d feel sorry for the little fellow.”

  “You have a waiting room?” Adah asked in a tone of commendation. “Where is it?”

  Joy-Ann indicated the door Adah had entered by. “Right there. At first I tried working at home, but I found that that made most people uncomfortable. They’re used to dealing with institutions, and when they come here, where everything can be so strange at times, the shock isn’t so great if they find themselves in an office-type environment. Also, just from my own personal point of view I like it better this way. I realized, when you asked me to pinch-hit for you, that what I’d really always wanted was to have a career: a desk, and an office with my name on the door, and responsibilities. Of course, at first it was a little daunting. There are millions and millions of people dying every year, and while not all of them need special attention, a lot do. But then I thought of what you told me about eternity and there being no need to rush. So I just take my time, and eventually it all gets done.” She smiled. “Knock on wood.” And rapped her knuckles on the veneer of her immense desk.

  “Oh, one last thing before I forget.” Adah bent over and removed from her carrier bag the garland of willow branches, now unwoven and wrapped in crinkly florist’s paper. “These. Keep them watered, and see that they get a bit of sunlight from time to time, but don’t overdo it. And when they’re quite healthy, take just a teeny-tiny piece out of one leaf and plant it in an embryo from the list of available embryos. And that should do the trick.”

  “What trick will it do?” Joy-Ann demanded, with some alarm.

  “It’s a way for Giselle to be reincarnated.”

  “You mean she has to go through another entire life?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Will she be able to remember anything from her first life?”

  “She’s left all that behind already, I’m afraid.”

  “Not even her name.”

  “No. But her soul is still her own and no one else’s.”

  Joy-Ann regarded the posy of willow branches sorrowfully. She sighed. “I suppose I should get a vase for it.”

  Adah nodded. She held out her hand in farewell.

  “The ring,” Joy-Ann reminded her.

  “The ring, of course. I almost forgot.” She wiggled a finger down into the bodice of her tight-fitting bolero jacket and retrieved the magic ring. She handed it to Joy-Ann, who put it on her own left-hand ring finger.

  They shook hands and then, more affectionately, kissed each other’s cheeks.

  “Goodbye,” said Joy-Ann. “Have a nice time in heaven.”

  “Goodbye. Enjoy yourself. Don’t work too hard.”

  “Oh, I will, and I won’t. Which reminds me: when you go out—”

  “Yes?” Adah stood by the partly opened door.

  “Ask the Sheehys to come in here again. They’ve been waiting so long, and there aren’t any magazines out there. I’ve looked all over, but I can’t find a newsstand anywhere.”

  “There are books in Paradise,” Adah explained, “but no magazines. I’ll send them in.”

  She stepped into the waiting room and smiled at the Sheehys. “You can go in now,” she told them.

  Mr. Sheehy scowled at her, and Mrs. Sheehy dabbed at her tearful cheeks with a Kleenex. Both girls made disdainful smirks at the Mazeppa costume.

  Thank God, Adah thought, I am quitting this job forever. She left the waiting room with a little sashay of liberation—and almost collided with John Berryman (no longer blind but very nearsighted), who was waiting in the outer corridor.

  “Ready?” he asked her.

  “I couldn’t be readier.”

  “Then it’s up, up, and away!”

  “Excelsior,” she concurred.

  CHAPTER 57

  While he waited for Giselle’s remains to be brought to the Dove Room, Glandier spent his time in one of the larger enclosed courtyards upstairs, listening to canned music and reading a promotional brochure for Schinder’s Memorial Gardens. This courtyard was devoted to a single sculpture by Helmut Vliet that looked, to Glandier’s untutored eye, like the aftermath of a bombing raid on a used-car lot. The tortured shapes of particolored steel were somewhat softened by the addition of potted ferns and a central fountain. From an esthetic point of view Glandier abominated Schinder’s Memorial Gardens, as he abominated any art that was not clearly subordinated to commercial purposes, but he had been unable to persuade the management of the cemetery where Giselle had originally been buried—or rather, mis-buried—to cremate her exhumed body. They would only re-bury it in the plot for which it had originally been intended. Whereupon Glandier told them he would take his business elsewhere. After several telephone inquiries, Schinder’s had been the only mortuary willing to provide the service Glandier required.

  Schinder’s (the brochure explained) represented a twofold evolution in the funeral industry. First, with regard to the practical business of interment and cremation, Schinder’s offered facilities that were efficient, thrifty, and free of the tasteless pomp and ostentation of conventional funeral arrangements. Secondly, with respect to the more intangible values associated with the commemorative function of a cemetery, Schinder’s philosophy was to create, as much as possible, the ambience of a museum of contemporary art. Not (the brochure insisted) a mere potpourri of casts and copies, the originals of which were to be found only in European collections, but a tribute to the achievements of America’s greatest contemporary artists, the artists who had brought Modernism to the New World and here made it yield its richest harvests.

  To achieve this visionary purpose Graham Schinder, the sole heir of the Schinder meat-packing and milling fortune, had spent more than $65,000,000 over a period of twenty years, assembling a collection of American art of unique refinement and importance. The gardens, courtyards, and pavilions of the Memorial Gardens displayed notable paintings by Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns, Helen Frankenthaler, and Morris Louis, as well as the most extensive collections in the world of the sculptures of David Smith, Louise Nevelson, Marisol, and Helmut Vliet. (Vliet, the brochure noted, had been a close personal friend of Mr. Schinder and had contributed to the conception and design of the Memorial Gardens.) The Gardens had been cited by the Academy of American Architects as the most innovative and distinguished cemetery of the twentieth century.

  What all the brochure’s PR added up to, for Glandier, was a price tag four times greater than he’d had to spend for Giselle’s previous plot. In return, Giselle’s ashes would be accorded some few cubic inches of elbow room in the Nevelson Cinerarium and her memory honored by the never-to-be-noticed tribute of having her name engraved on the long brazen list of the Remembered that graced its entrance. Glandier th
ought that Schinder might more aptly have been called Swindler, but even so he was grateful for the opportunity of having the remains of his wife’s body burnt and pulverized. Only a countervailing wish to avoid an argument with Joy-Ann (who had thought cremation sinful) had prevented Glandier from having his wife’s body cremated the first time around. Most murderers would express a similar preference for cremation, as it affords a sense of closure that mere burial can never equal.

  At last a blond girl in a dark dress, whose name he forgot as soon as she introduced herself, led Glandier down two flights of stairs, along a dim-lighted corridor, and into the Dove Room, which was the most nondescript mortuary chapel he’d ever seen. There were some four or five small pictures on the walls, and the few pieces of furniture looked like they’d come from a garage sale.

  “Where are the doves?” he asked.

  “The paintings in this room are all by Arthur Dove,” the blond girl explained, without the trace of a smile.

  “Oh.”

  “Here,” the girl explained, in the manner of an airline stewardess performing the incantations of a takeoff, “is the sound system. There are nine channels, and the musical selections are noted on this card. Here—” She touched a black plastic button that put Glandier in mind of the pin-reset button at a bowling alley. “—is this switch that activates the trolley on which the casket—” She placed her hand gently on same. “—will travel into the crematory chamber. And now, as I understand that you’ve requested to make this last farewell privately, I will leave you with your wife. The room is yours for the next half-hour. Please accept my sincere sympathy.”

  Glandier wondered if he ought to tip, but she’d gone out the door before he could reach for his wallet.

  Alone with his wife’s corpse, he allowed himself a moment to gloat before he punched the button that would send her into the flames. Already he had seen to the disposal of the wood from the willow tree that he had paid to have cut down, as per the instructions left him (in an envelope tucked under the bedroom phone) by Jack Sheehy. Good to his promise to instruct Glandier in the means to prevent his further haunting either by his wife or any of her otherworldy delegates, Jack had told him to burn both her fleshy remains and her etheric body (contained within the willow’s wood). Then, having delivered that note, he had accomplished the slaughter of the Sheehy family, which (with its attendant relevations) had sprung Glandier from jail.