Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

“Do you stock batteries for hearing aids?”

The man, who had a sort of mechanical but, on the whole, rather soft hospital-corners way of moving, turned lightly away from the commissioner and disappeared down an aisle crowded with an assortment of miscellaneous boxes. Druff felt rekindle his old admiration for the pharmacist’s tight-lipped professionalism and efficient, silent ways. (I, he thought, reminded of Charlotte’s bill of particulars, could use me a little of that.) And in moments was back, a variety of batteries extended on a kind of jeweler’s tray for Druff’s inspection.

The City Commissioner of Streets, ignoring them for the moment, attempted to make eye contact.

“You have a choice,” said the pharmacist. “Mercury, zinc, or silver oxide.”

“Three delicious flavors,” Druff said. (Sure it was unwarranted, but maybe the man felt superior. And supposing the druggist’s professionalism wasn’t sincere? Suppose there was something judgmental in it? Maybe the pharmacist even remembered him from the day before? “Yeah,” he could imagine him telling some cop, “that’s him, that’s the one. That’s the old man who came in and bought a rubber off me.” Though Druff, still only on the edge of crime, could not really imagine the circumstances. And, anyway, it was better to needle and do one’s riffs of fluent gabardine than to be brought down — Ham ‘n’ Eggs, his pals; the cold, spoiled food he had left untouched in the coffee shop. It was better to dish it out than receive.) Again he attempted to engage the druggist’s eye. “Too bad you have to work on a Saturday.”

“We keep the same hours as the department stores.”

Druff nodded, then went up practically into the guy’s face, backing off only after it occurred to him that the pharmacist might think he was fishing for compliments on the basis of his purchase yesterday afternoon.

Nah, he thought, he doesn’t remember. Maybe, Friday nights, they get a run on old fuckers. I must be a type. But a type who’d spring for a French letter one day and come back the next for help with his hearing aid? Druff was furious.

“It’s not for me,” he said. “It’s for another party. Look. See? Nothing up this ear, nothing up that one.”

“Sir,” said the pharmacist.

“Or maybe you think I left it in my other suit. Is that what you’re thinking? Turn around then. No, go on. It’s all right. Go on, turn around,” demanded crazy Druff, the political liability. “Say something in your softest voice. See if I don’t pick it up.”

“Siir,” the pharmacist, still facing him, protested.

“No, really. Go on.” Sighing, the druggist started to turn. “You sighed!” Druff jumped in. “There. You just sighed. I heard you. Would a deaf-o pick up on something like that?”

“No, I suppose not,” the druggist said quietly, his back to the commissioner and looking, in his strictly cosmetic white lab coat, like an actor in a holdup. Catching Druff off guard.

“Oh hey,” the City Commissioner of Streets said, “I’m sorry. Look, turn, face me again. It’s not what you think. I’m not normally like this. I’m under a strain. It’s a long story, but don’t worry, I won’t bore you with it. There’s no excuse for my behavior. None whatsoever. Well, there is, but there wouldn’t be any excuse for me unloading it on you. There could never be any excuse for that. Let’s just say I’m off my feed. And I am, too. Waitress in a coffee shop deliberately brought me my hamburger and fries after I specifically asked her to wait until after I’d placed this call. Then I got hassled about the call (which, incidentally, was totally unsatisfactory) and, when I got back, there it all was, everything I’d asked her to — I sound a little nutso to you, don’t I?”

“No, not at all.”

“Well, you’re humoring me. In your place I’d probably do the same. Well, I would do the same. No probably to it.” (God, Druff was thinking, how do I get out of this? I’ll probably have to send this guy flowers to make it up to him.) “Now,” he said, “about those batteries…”

The druggist held out the tray and Druff touched one of the batteries, tumbling it with his finger as one might roll diamonds on a black cloth. “That one’s a mercury,” the pharmacist said and Druff snapped his hand back.

“Jeez,” he said, “mercury. That’s the shit fucks the tuna fish, ain’t it? Imagine what it’d do if it leaked into your ear.” (Thinking this is how I make it up to him, not how I get out of it.) “I guess the zinc,” Druff said. “Half a dozen.”

The pharmacist nodded. “They’re a little more expensive, but they drain down more slowly than those others when not in use.”

Druff sorry to have gotten off on the wrong foot with him. Admiring, if not exactly liking him, his command of the hardware, his vast inventory, better than Druff’s. Who barely recognized the names of the streets and was lost altogether in the neighborhoods. And who now, the zincs locked into three blister packs inside the pharmacy’s little plastic tote he carries in his hand, aimless and feeling vaguely abandoned on what have proved to be his rambling, roved and drifting highways and byways, a mite dizzy from all the unexpected topspin of his swerved, off-course tangentials and the almost random eccentrics of his wide, bent bearings, his sideslips and compromised trajectory, his mangled yaw and imperfect pitch, what he’s increasingly come to think of as the open itinerary of his private detective’s route on what he cannot stop himself from thinking of as a late, MacGuffin-forsaken Saturday afternoon, realizes he has to choose. What’s it to be then, eh? In the absence of Ol’ MacGuffin, come, he supposes, to represent the spirit of narrative in his life (sort of), shut down for the weekend (more or less), nothing was pushing him, slamming him off the dime. There was, that is, no gun at his head just now. And so, unless he’s to go home (not, he’s sure, such a bad idea, and doesn’t he, incidentally, have Rose Helen’s hearing-aid equipment right there on his person to turn his divagations into at least the look of an errand?), he is suddenly faced (if he doesn’t count the batteries) for the first time today with the problem of destination.

Druff (influenced by hunger, the pull of the turkey working in the oven, the built-ins and add-ons of Rose Helen’s robust fixings) examined his options. To his mind he had three. He could go home. Two, he could pay a call on Margaret Glorio, maybe kill two birds, pitch a little woo if he was lucky, and pull a surprise carpet inspection. Or he could drop in on Doug, his backup limo driver. Where in God’s name, he wondered, did that one come from? And determined at once, since he couldn’t answer this perfectly reasonable question, to get his ass over to Doug’s. Well, why not? It was out of his hands now. He was working on instinct. Surrendered, handed over, going with the flow, which, in the absence of MacGuffin, was all he could use for narrative spirit, a gun at his head, the wild tumult, the pushing and shoving at the top of his dime.

And, hailing a taxi, read off Doug’s numbers to the cabbie from the book of useful addresses he kept like any old-timey salesman in a pocket of his suit coat. Thinking — he was Streets Czar, he was known to the cabbies — how nice, how pleasant it would be to be lectured, called to account, shoptalked, man-to-man’d. Though Druff didn’t think much of his chances. The town, with its high concentration of private cars and its network of interstates — over time, the city had become this sort of trade route — window to this, doorway to that, “The Nation’s Threshold,” according to the Chamber of Commerce — wasn’t the best place in the world to set up in the taxicab business. Street cabs didn’t ordinarily do well here, the only decent franchises being those at the airport and hospitals. And his driver, an immigrant, some refusenik type from the Eastern bloc, didn’t seem particularly interested. Druff examined his photograph, read the thick capital letters of his difficult name from the laminated hack license posted above the taxi meter. (And that’s another thing, Druff, fifty-eight years old, fifty-nine his next birthday, thought. Did they rig those things? On one of his father’s cars, a big, green 1947 Hudson after the war, he remembered a button right there on the floorboard. All you had to do to change the station on the car radio was press your foot on the button. Why couldn’t such a device be placed in cabs to jump the numbers showing in the little fare windows? Or maybe do something to the gears in the meter? The steady ticking that already sounded not like seconds clicking off but almost like the accelerated buzz of time itself? It was an ancient mystery to the City Commissioner of Streets. Like what geishas would do for you, whether they went down. Or the degree to which wrestling was fixed.) And sighed. And felt the tickle of his powerless old stupidity like the first symptoms of a chest cold.