David Wallace - Broom of the System

“The climax consists of McTeague, the dentist, handcuffed to the corpse of his malevolent foe, Marcus Schouler, in the middle of a desert.”

“Desert? Handcuffs? Corpses? Oh shit. Andy! Andy!”

“Andy? No, Schouler.”

“Rick…”

“And as she taps it, ever so gently, taking care not to hurt him any more than she has already, she looks at the dentist’s motionless face and sees a single tear emerge from one partly sedated eye and course down his cheek until it is silently absorbed by a cotton bandage. She, too, weeps, with no sound…. And she produces a pair of handcuffs, which she had gone to enormous expense and embarrassment to buy… and… joins herself… to the wrist of the theoretical dentist, his inefficacious wrist…”

“What are you doing? Let me go !”

“… with the deep oiled… click of the handcuffs.”

“Jesus, Rick. This is it. You get these off right now. You get me out. I’ve told you I hate this torture and pain stuff, and you just don’t care! You’re a sick man!”

“Torture and pain? Lenore, I forgive you.”

“Forgive what, for Christ’s sake? Help! Andy! Neil!”

“Lenore!”

“God damn it, Rick, this is it. No talking, even. I wanted to talk, I said let’s talk Rick, but no, so now forget it, I’m sorry but that’s it.”

“We are now joined, my center and reference! In negation and discipline! Our bodies are husks!”

“You just better have the key. God, Andy, see if he’s got the key. ”

“What the fuck’s going on here?”

“Can’t you see? He’s locked us together!”

“Look you little wiener, cough up the key to these things or your ass is grass.”

“You are fired, Lang! You are dismissed!”

“Fuck being dismissed. You let this little lady go.”

“Lenore, we will shrink into husks together. We will bleed in the sky. See it?”

“Wanger, is he crying? Is the little sucker crying?”

“Shut up, Neil.”

“Rick, please don’t. Let’s just talk about it. Don’t sit in the sand and cry. Everybody can see. Let’s stand up.”

“We’ll be joined in the light of the sky, Lenore. See the light of the sky? The dawn and sunset will be fed from our veins. We’ll be spread all over. We’ll be everything. We’ll be gigantic.”

“How fucking pathetic.”

“Shut up, Neil.”

“Larger than life.”

“Look here, R.V., let’s just stand on up and talk this over, and unlock all this shit.”

“She is handcuffed. to a corpse, in the Desert. Don’t you see the… irony?”

“Want me to just get a cop, here, Wanger?”

“If she weren’t three-dimensional, she wouldn’t be caught! Don’t you see? A three-dimensional husk!”

“I think old R.V.’s just lost a few cards out of a certain deck, Lenore. ”

“Rick.”

“That’s where we’ll be. We’ll be prodigious enough to feed the whole sky! Don’t you see? And whose fault is it, after all?”

“Aw, Rick, don’t you see? Fault just doesn’t enter into it at all.”

“Exactly. Exactly. It’s no one’s fault. We all agree.”

“Rick…”

“Lenore sugar doll I care about you. I do. I don’t care who knows it. I care about you as a person. R. V. can put all the shit on you he wants. You’re mine now. I don’t care if the whole world knows it. Hey y‘all! I care about this little lady right here!”

“We’re in the sky. We can’t hear you.”

“Fuck off, R. V. Look, Lenore, I’m gonna go ahead and just break the chain on these things. OK? I think I can break ‘em. I’ve broke shit like this before.”

“Go ahead and try, Lang. You just go ahead and try it, and see what happens!”

“Is that OK, Lenore?”

“….”

“You ready?”

The time last night when Lenore Beadsman cried in front of Andrew Sealander Lang was the first time she had ever cried in front of anybody else, at all.

Rick Vigorous has cried in front of lots of people.

Disorder asserted itself in the lobby of the Bombardini Building soon after Lenore Beadsman arrived, in a nearly unprecedented state of piss-off, to clear her personal items out of the Frequent and Vigorous/Bombardini Company switchboard cubicle.

Candy Mandible was at the board, filling in briefly for Mindy Metalman, who’d been installed as a temporary at the say-so of Rick Vigorous, and who was for starters supposed to work the day shift today, Saturday, but who had, this morning, finally been able to get hold of Dr. Martin Tissaw, the oral surgeon, Lenore’s landlord, at home, in East Corinth, and had dashed over at lunchtime to see him, to talk about “birds, miracles, dreams and professionalism, not necessarily in that order,” as she’d said to Candy when Candy came in to relieve her. Mindy’s call had awakened Candy at Nick Allied’s Shaker Heights home, where Candy had spent an unhappy night waiting for Allied, who was supposed to return from a product-evaluation trip with his stenographer around midnight, but never had, and hadn’t even called.

The thing is that even before Lenore and Lang arrived, Candy Mandible was getting a hard time of it from any number of sources. There was, for example, Judith Prietht, who had weekends off because the Bombardini Company switchboard was down from Friday night to Monday morning, but who usually came on into the lobby on Saturday anyway, to knit shapeless sweaters and listen to her radio and watch the Erieview shadow move along the lobby walls, and who had today actually brought in her cat, which, when Judith saw that it was Candy at the console, she was for obvious reasons very anxious to introduce to her. And so Judith was hanging around the outside of the cubicle, hefting the cat, being bothersome and artificially nice, and dropping all sorts of heavy hints about blessings and autographs and partnership. Her new idea was to have the Reverend Hart Lee Sykes deliver a personal blessing to the cat, whose name was apparently Champ, and who was the single most obese cat Candy had ever seen, anywhere, but anyway who was supposed to receive the blessing, personally, while he placed a chubby paw on Judith’s television screen. Judith told Candy that Reverend Sykes made time for a viewer-touching-the-screen moment in every installment of ‘The Partners With God Club,’ believing that theologically and economically important Sykes/viewer communications could be established this way.

There was also the matter of Clint Roxbee-Cox, who had kept calling Candy at Nick’s place last night, and not saying anything, and who was now doing the same thing at the F and V board, although he must have had to call many times just to get through at all, because the Frequent and Vigorous switchboard situation was worse than ever. Mindy was too new to get really pissed off yet, but Candy had just about had it with the switchboard. Not only was she getting illegitimate calls for other places, with Fuss ‘n’ Feathers Pet Shop and Cleveland Towing both enjoying unprecedented volume, but now the board had taken to lighting up and ringing and beeping her console phones for what appeared to be no reason at all, with no one on the other end, at all, just static, which was distinguishable from an illegitimate but still human Roxbee-Cox call by the breathing that was a prominent feature of the latter. The phones simply would not shut up, and Candy couldn’t shut down the console, because she didn’t have a ratchet wrench. With great reluctance she tried calling to complain at Interactive Cable, and was informed that Console Service Technician Peter Abbott should at that very moment have been on his way over to the Bombardini Building, by way of Enrique’s House of Cheese, to relate news of some importance to the appropriate Frequent and Vigorous personnel. Ms. Peahen had already been contacted, and they were trying to reach Mr. Vigorous.