Thomas Disch - 334

“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.

“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.”