Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“That’s one way of looking at it.

“Two!” he announced.

“Which brings us to the traffic signal on Kersh Boulevard. (How does Meg Glorio Way strike your fancy?) Oh, yes, the fatal stoplight itself. That pedestrian-activated ‘attractive nuisance’ about which we’ve heard so much, and that anyone, particularly anyone who’s just spotted a lone, obviously foreign, obviously Arab-looking young lady, could just step up to at will and activate with the same casual and discretionary ease with which one turns on a radio. Recall the conditions on the night of the so-called accident. Was it raining? Were the streets slick? Was there fog? What was the phase of the moon? (Someone’s going to have to look this shit up.) And if the person in question happens to be of a different religious or political persuasion from the Shiite Muslim in question, what’s to prevent him or her not from pressing the button on the fatal stoplight, but from not pressing it? What’s to prevent such a person from holding Su’ad back when the light was green in her favor, or from throwing her to the wolves when the light was against her? And suppose such a person had an accomplice? Now this is a big city, a major market. The accomplice could have been anyone, of course, but let’s say for the sake of argument it was Mikey. He hits her, runs her over, and it’s good night nurse all over again!

“Farfetched? You think so? Let me remind you it was once farfetched to think we’d ever have the scientific wherewithal to put a man on the moon!

“Normally, I might rest my case, but these are not normal times.

“Three!

“The traffic signal was itself at fault.

“Lookee here. The timer inside the box was defective. One of Su’ad’s Sunni enemies tampers with the signal so it can’t change colors, the critical wiring on the doodad for Go becomes entangled with the critical wiring on the gizmo for Stop. Your green won’t turn green, your red won’t turn red. It just hangs there on amber. It’s rigged so that both the driver’s and the Shiite’s patience run out at exactly the same time. Mikey starts up, Su’ad starts out. Know what we’re talking about here? Talking about the fatal conditions for bingo bango, good night nurse.

“Oh, I don’t have to spell it out for you. There are hundreds of possibilities, dozens, several.

“Four!

“She was a terrorist. Mikey finds out about it and doesn’t like the idea of becoming involved with someone who spills innocent blood. He runs her over. Open and shut. Prima facie b. b., g. n. n.

“Bear with me. Five and I’m finished.

“Because so far all I’ve presented, no matter how persuasive it’s seemed, has been circumstantial. But five. What about five?

“Suppose as I’ve suggested that Su’ad and Mikey didn’t fight. Suppose they didn’t race, the one on foot, the other in the car. Let’s further suppose that no one noticed her at the light and pushed her out into the street and under the wheels of some oncoming car driven by an accomplice. Let’s even suppose that Mikey didn’t run her over. Are you with me so far? All right then. What if there wasn’t even anything wrong with the traffic signal and nobody’s patience ran out, what then? What if she didn’t die at the hands of either mischief or mischance? What if she wasn’t even a terrorist? Or what if she was but Mikey didn’t know it? What if she was a terrorist, but, in the course of reading the American press saw the error of her ways and became so upset with herself that she settled into a deep depression and determined to take her own life? What if she enlisted the aid of our simple, smitten, good-hearted Mikey to help her do herself in?

“What, I ask you, if it was self-murder? What, that is, if it was a case of simple Su’adicide!

“Think about it. Think about it!”

“Wake up, Druff,” said Margaret Glorio, “it’s time to go to school.”

Only he was awake, of course. Had been, sort of, since somewhere between his second and third arguments. Even if he didn’t immediately understand who was shaking him, even if, in his confused, hypnagogic wakefulness, he didn’t always understand where he was, or knew only that it was somewhere dreadfully, disgracefully off-limits, he was awake. Awake enough, at any rate, to recognize his clothes at the foot of the unusual sofa bed, the stylish sheets, awake enough as he stepped into his pants and put on his socks and shoes and buttoned his shirt and tied up his tie and arranged his jacket around him to comprehend where he was, even as he recognized Margaret and recalled their evening together and blew her a kiss, mouthing “Good night, Margaret dearest. I love you, darling. You’ve captured my heart, my heart, and I’ll call you in the morning,” and took in the long, splendid red nightgown that only two or three hours earlier he’d helped to take off her and held as she stepped back and let him behold her glorious ash-blond bush and firm, trained, unforgettable all. Awake enough, even in the dark, to have registered finally what, excited as he’d been by all the stir and jiggle of his glands and all the bumps and grinds of his unprepared imagination, he had not even seen in the light, some tentative, on-trial, thirty- day, money-back guarantee texture to the decor, or, no, nothing on-trial or thirty-day or even guaranteed to it at all, so much as — see how awake, see how fine his fine distinctions — experimental, some run-up-the-flagpole quality, a feel in the furnishings almost of demographics, of customer-satisfaction surveys, almost, that is, as if the buyer, like some hero of science, had first to work out on herself the exact dosages and precise indications of these surroundings, some environment of the new and venturesome, of the questionable and dangerous, he was able to guess at, anxious and hurried as he was, and in the dark, remember, and only from the dark’s graduated, particular finishes and thicknesses, the bold colors of the walls and carpeting, drapes and slipcovers, working up even the studio apartment’s queer lamps and appliances from what appeared to him — or, rather, didn’t even actually appear to him — not even as black shapes finally so much as almost sonar interferences and encumbrances. That’s how awake, that’s how alert! Even as he stepped, intuiting where it would have to be from the room’s dark, almost invisible silhouettes and pitchy mass, directly up to the designer telephone and dialed, by terrible, instinctive, ruinous rote, Dick, his driver, the spy.

“Hello?” came the worried, sleep-ridden voice, so thickly accented with semiconsciousness that Druff almost couldn’t quite recognize it at first and paused, waiting for it to go on. “Hello? Hello? Who’s this, who’s there?” Gradually the cop’s voice came into rich, angry focus. “Is that you again? Give me a break. How many the fuck times I have to tell you don’t call me. You know what time it is? Hello? Come on, what is it? What shit did you get into now? All right, all right, I ain’t mad. If you’re calling this time of night you probably got a reason. What is it this time, you dent a fender, scratch the paint, run a stop? Man, they’re gonna lift your license one of these days. They’re gonna strip you of your privileges.”

Druff, furious, said calmly, “It’s your employer, Bobbo Druff. It’s your City Commissioner of Streets.” He gave Margaret Glorio’s address, even the number of her apartment. (See how awake? See how alert?) “But I’ll wait in the lobby,” he said. “Stop by the canopy at the front of the building. Don’t leave the car. I’ll see the limousine and come out.”

Ms. Glorio had turned on a freestanding leather lamp beside the sofa bed.

“Gee,” she said, “and here I thought I was under no obligation. No salesman would call, or telltale, embarrassing taxis show up at the door. Here I thought my reputation was all safe and sound and that Mary Sally — what’s your wife’s name again?”