Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

He wondered if he shouldn’t attempt some rapprochement with the driver, at least lower the window which separated them. Then thought no, it was a bad idea, a sign of weakness, the worst thing he could do. Let Druff sit in aloof luxury, distant, behind bulletproof glass, pulled along his streets like a Caesar in a Triumph. Meanwhile, meanwhile, the dirty son of a bitch could plot to his traitorous, mingy little heart’s content. It would keep him occupied.

So, feigning indifference, Druff sat back, inappetent, a commissioner most high, vaguely colonial, almost military, a visiting fireman, a “Guv,” any touring, pidgin-English’d muckamuck and grand panjandrum, in fact, who ever showed the flag or put a dinner jacket on in the jungle. Reviewing his Streets and — What’s this? What’s this? What’s wrong with this picture?

Amazed. Flabbergast. Astonished.

Maybe they’d gone five blocks. It was almost four o’clock in the morning. It could have been rush hour. Well, not rush hour but the nervous edge of it, rush hour’s fuzzy, fish-nor-fowl atemporal margins. The traffic of people who want to beat the traffic. And drove with the same jumpy, tailgating, lane-changing abandon. These people might have been refugees, the first to hear news of a disaster on the Emergency Broadcast Band. Were enemy planes on their way to drop the Big One? Had there been an “event” at the nuclear power station? Was it meltdown? Had a freight car been derailed, was it bleeding toxic waste? Druff, attempting to switch the radio on, fumbled with some controls. He touched the eject button on the tape deck. He pressed “open” and the drawer on the compact disc player slid out. Perhaps the driver controlled the radio. Druff lowered the window between them. “Quick,” he said, “turn on the radio.” Music from an easy-listening station filled the car. “No,” Druff said, “change the station. See if there’s news.”

“News on the hour,” the chauffeur said.

“Just see.”

It was all music on FM. On AM it was mostly music with an occasional talk or call-in show.

“What’s happening?” Druff asked. “Where’s all this traffic coming from?”

“Which traffic?”

“What do you mean ‘what traffic?’ This traffic! Just look at these streets. If it isn’t bumper-to-bumper yet, it’s damn near. I’ve never seen it like this.”

Dick said nothing.

“I wonder where the traffic came from,” the commissioner muttered and almost pressed his face against the window. It was as if he were in some principal city he’d heard about but never seen. It was as if he were taking in the sights. He stared in wonder at lines of automobiles stopped at cross streets waiting for the lights to change, at individual cars jimmying their way into the flow, from curbs, from alleys and parking garages. On either side of him he could see drivers and passengers in other vehicles glance his way as they pulled alongside him and tried to make out who was riding in the important-looking limo. He stared back as curiously. It was the middle of the goddamn night. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“It’s a service economy,” Dick snapped waspishly. “In case you haven’t heard.”

“It’s the middle of the night,” he told the man. “In case you haven’t noticed.”

“Oh, I noticed,” Dick said. “I noticed, all right. I notice lots of things.”

“I notice,” Druff said coolly, restoring a proper pH balance to their relationship, but then, unwilling to take him on in his condition, added, “I still don’t understand about the traffic.”

“Well, it’s the nurses,” said the spy.

“The nurses.”

“Changing shifts. The nurses changing shifts.”

Druff, no stranger to hospitals — his several pneumothoraxes, his heart bypass surgery — said, “They come on at seven in the morning, at three in the afternoon. They come on at eleven at night.”

“That’s all changed,” his driver said companionably. “They come on at three in the morning, and again at eleven. They come on at seven at night. It’s experimental. It plays hell with their menses unless they have the middle shift, the eleven-to-seven one, but the thinking today is that PMS gives them an edge. It’s supposed to be good for the patients.”

“Is this true?”

“It would be easy enough to check out, wouldn’t it?” Dick said smugly.

“Don’t you worry,” the commissioner said, “I’m going to check it out.”

“Do that,” Dick said.

“They can’t all be nurses.”

“Of course they aren’t all nurses. They’re bakers. Haven’t you noticed the rolls and bread taste better recently? Sweeter? Fresher? It used to be the bakers came in at two, two-thirty to heat up their ovens, roll out their doughs. Now they go in an hour later, more. It’s cutthroat but it’s the consumer who benefits. The deliverymen couldn’t care less. They get to sleep an extra hour, so the Teamsters got no kick coming either.”

He had noticed. The bread did taste better.

“It’s nurses and bakers,” Druff said.

“It’s nurses and bakers. It’s guys who roll up your morning paper and stick them in those little plastic wrappers. There’s an industry that’s tripled in the last few years.”

“Tripled.”

“Sure,” Dick said. “The New York Times gets delivered nationwide. The Wall Street Journal, USA Today. At least tripled. And what about the guys who have to drive their trucks to the airport to pick up those papers when they come in on the flights? And what about the guys who service those trucks? Or the men and women who print up the wrappers or carry them to the distributors?

“It’s kids riding home from delivering pizzas, managers of fast food joints from closing up. Sure,” he said, “these days it’s a service-oriented economy. It’s poor saps on night shifts and minimum wage.”

The City Commissioner of Streets looked away from the traffic and into the sky for a fireball. It was easier to believe in a sneak attack and a mushroom-shaped cloud than in much of this stuff. It was what he’d only recently been telling someone in a dream, that the world was getting away from him, that all its new amenities were overbearing somehow, and seemed, here, at ground level, under the colored, blinking warning lights on the tops of all those tall buildings, beneath the tangled flight paths of all those planes, guiding them, passing them on, like a kind of crowd control.

Druff thought he could see Dick’s eyes watching him in the rearview mirror. He seemed to be waiting for some sort of response. “Well,” he said, “it just seemed to me there was a lot of traffic for this time of night.”

“Sure,” Dick said acidly, “it’s chauffeurs driving their playboy bosses home from a night on the town.” Using the control in the front of the car, he drove the window back up between them.

Druff, in traffic, a bit fearful, isolated in the false, municipally dispensated coze of his glass and leather booth, confused, puzzled by the bad cop/good cop/bad cop avatars of this bad cop and less-than-civil servant, invoking the MacGuffin with fervid, almost hot Hail-Mary hope, thrown by the loyalties, the suspect, undermined, indeterminate allegiances in the general air and who’d, within the hour, arisen from the bed of a buyer to whom, for nothing, he’d given secrets and promised streets and so whose own allegiances were compromised and perhaps, if the MacGuffin in question was an avenging MacGuffin, should maybe have been a touch more chary about just whom he wanted there in the back seat with him, if only because of the old Let-him-who-is-without-sin proprieties and, if he needed other reasons, because, too, he understood about two-edged swords and the hedged consequences of magic, knowing if for no other reason than that he was a fifty-eight-year-old man already disappeared into his tailoring, six-sevenths, at the outside six- sevenths, but, in a guy with his history of blebs and leg stenotics and the long, jammed zippers of his arteries, more likely nine-tenths, more likely ten-elevenths, most likely fifty-eight — sixtieths or even fifty-eight — fifty-ninths gone, that it was easier to spring a rabbit from a hat than to stuff one back in again, but invoking it (Him, Her, the Muse of his plot line) anyway, like some jeopardized Samson shoving the stone furniture around. Because he hadn’t slept, see. Because he hadn’t slept even if within the hour he’d arisen from the Glorio bed and perhaps even scarfed a wee nosh of a nap in an armchair in the Glorio lobby. Because he hadn’t slept and looked like hell and felt like shit and was vulnerable as a chicken to the fox in the front seat. “Cary Grant,” he silently prayed, “thou shouldst be living at this hour!”