Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

“What’s Frances got to do with it?”

“Nothing. Except she’s part of your cure, that was your idea. And this place, this is part of your cure, too. You were exactly the right man for the job. That’s right. You . Because your genes crackle like static electricity in the presence of schmutz, cleaning syrups, and your indoor heat waves. Your fate is to scrub, scour, mop, wring out, to run the world through the mangle. You dip, rinse, sluice, and douche. You don’t hate niggers, you’re in love with the cleaning lady! For Christ’s sake, look around you, you’ve put together a harem in here. When you die laundresses will stick you in a tub and lower you in fuller’s earth.”

“It’s a sickness.”

“Yeah yeah.”

“Yes.”

“You kinky dummy! Earth turns you on. Look at your fingernails. You look like you’ve been on your hands and knees in the garden.”

“Why do you talk to me like this? Aren’t we friends?”

“Friends?”

“Aren’t we?”

Ben took Irving’s face in his hands.

“The same nose, eyes, lips, teeth, ears. The same hair. The same give to the flesh, the same resistance. I close my eyes and I feel your tan. The same tan.”

“The same?”

“As your sisters’.”

“Are you on about that again?”

“Ah no, lad, of course not. Slip on something from a polyethylene bag. We’ll kiss. You’ll drive in drag to Kansas City with me. We’ll stop at rest areas on the Interstates and neck. We’ll put two straws in our Coke. We’ll sip and giggle.”

“Jesus, Ben. I’m kinky? What are you?”

“A family man.” He raised his voice. “A family man. The whole damn Finsberg family. A family man!”

“Listen,” Irving said, “I’ll stay on until you can get someone else.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Or I’ll look. I’ll find somebody trustworthy.”

“Okay. All right. Whatever.” He was waving his right hand as if it had cramped, shaking it back and forth at chest level, clenching and unclenching his fist.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Paresthesia.” Ben started to laugh.

“What? What is it?”

“Poetic justice, symbolism. Irony and fate. Life’s rhyming couplets, its punch lines. The goblins that get you when you don’t watch out.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Needles and pins. What form does, what made us what we are today. Cloth of our cloth, etc. Me. I’m the Finsberg Memorial Library! They stitched it in my body and used my nerves for thread. I’m a fucking pin cushion!”

From Wolfe’s mouth to God’s ears.

He’d been driving for hours, on his way from his St. Cloud, Minnesota, Dairy Queen to his Mister Softee in Rapid City, South Dakota — his milk run, as he liked to call it. His right hand had fallen asleep and there was a sharp pain high up in the groin and thigh of his right side.

Mornings he’d been getting up with it. A numbness in his hand and hip, bad circulation, he thought, which left these damned cold zones, warm enough to the touch when he felt them with the freely circulating blood in the fingers of his left hand or lifted his right hand to his face, but, untouched, like icy patches deep in his skin. Perhaps his sleeping habits had changed. Almost unconsciously now he found the right side of the bed. In the night, sleeping alone, even without a twin or triplet beside him, the double bed to himself, some love-altered principle of accommodation or tropism in his body taking him from an absent configuration of flesh to a perimeter of the bed, a yielding without its necessity or reason, a submission and giving way to — to what? (And even in his sleep, without naming them, he could tell them apart.) To ride out the night sidesaddle on his own body. (No godfather Julius he, not set in his ways, unless this were some new mold into which he was pouring himself.) Pressing his head — heavy as Gertrude’s marrowless bones — like a nighttime tourniquet against the flesh of his arm, drawing a knee as high up as a diver’s against his belly and chest, to wake in the morning cut off, the lines down and trailing live wires from the heavy storm of his own body. Usually, as the day wore on, the sensation wore off, but never completely, some sandy sensitivity laterally vestigial across the tips of his fingers, the sharp pain in the region of his thigh blunted, like a suction cup on the tip of a toy arrow. Bad circulation. Bad.

Unless. Unless — Unless from Wolfe’s mouth to God’s ears.

He checked into the Hotel Rushmore in Rapid City and asked the clerk for a twin-bedded room. And then, seeing the width of the single bed, requested a rollaway be brought, narrower still. This an experiment. In the narrow bed no place to go, his body occupying both perimeters at once, returned as it had been in the days before he’d shared beds, the pillow beneath his head almost the width of the bed itself, tethered by a perfect displacement, lying, it could be, on his own shadow. But in the morning the sensation still there, if anything worse, not to be shaken off. (Never to be shaken off.)

And a new discovery. At Mister Softee handling the tan cardboard carton of popsicles, as cold to the touch of his right hand as dry ice. He thought his blood had thickened and frozen. Something was wrong.

He got the name of a doctor from his Mister Softee manager, saw Dr. Gibberd that afternoon, and was oddly moved when the doctor told him that he would like him to go into Rapid City General for observation.

A black woman took him in a wheelchair to his bed.

It was very strange. Having voluntarily admitted himself to the hospital, having driven there under his own steam — his 1971 Caddy was parked in the Visitors’ lot — and answered all the questions put to him by the woman at the Admissions Desk, showing them his Blue Cross and Blue Shield cards, his yellow Major Medical, he had become an instant invalid, something seductively agreeable to him as he sat back in the old wheelchair and allowed himself to be shoved up ramps and maneuvered backward — his head and shoulders almost on a level with his knees — across the slight gap between the lobby carpet and the hard floor of an elevator and pushed through what he supposed was the basement, past the kitchens and laundry rooms, past the nurses’ cafeteria and the vending machines and the heating plant, lassitude and the valetudinarian on him like climate, though he had almost forgotten his symptoms.

“Where are we going? Is it much farther?”

“No. We almost there.” She shoved the brass rod on a set of blue fire doors and they moved across a connector through a second set of fire doors and past a nurses’ station, and entered a long, cinder-block, barracks-like ward in which there were perhaps fifteen widely spaced beds down each side of a broad center aisle. Except for what might be behind a folding screen at the far end of the ward, the beds were all empty, the mattresses doubled over on themselves.

“This is the boondocks,” Ben said. “Is it a new wing?”

“You got to ask your doctor is it a new wing,” she said and left him.

A young nurse came and placed a hospital gown across the back of the wheelchair. She asked Ben if he needed help. He said no but had difficulty with his shirt buttons. Unless he actually saw his fingers on them, he could not be sure he was holding them.

“Here,” she said, “let me.” She stooped before him and undid the buttons. She unfastened his belt. “Can you get your zipper?”

“Oh sure.” But touching the metal was like sticking his hand into an electric socket. The nurse made up the bed. He sat back down in the chair and, watching the fingers on his right hand, carefully attempted to interlace them with the fingers on his left.