Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

“Well yes,” Kitty said, “but I don’t know anything about business. I trust your judgment.”

“I just want you to see. I don’t want you to trust my judgment. You shouldn’t go into things with your eyes closed. Wait, Kitty, it’s just a bit farther. We’re almost there.”

He turned off Queens Boulevard and went out Jamaica Avenue. They had to go more slowly now. There was much traffic. It was a densely commercial street. He honked at the double-parked trucks. They drove along under the elevated tracks, saw the shower of sparks from passing trains burn themselves out like meteors, shooting stars. They proceeded past Laundromats, $5 a pair shoe outlets, gas stations, Chinese restaurants, taverns.

“Where is this place?”

“It’s only a few more minutes.”

And turned into the Robo-Wash. He maneuvered the Cadillac carefully into place, guiding it gently as he could to the struts and chocks. They were in an odd cinder-block building like a tiny covered bridge, the walls tapestried with machinery, the ceiling veined with pipes that ran overhead like rods for shower curtains. Flesh read the instructions:

1. Make certain front wheels are properly aligned with T-bar. Both tires must be in contact with metal chocks.

2. Turn off ignition.

3. Car must be in neutral.

4. Lower window on driver’s side and insert 50¢ in slot. Quarters or half dollars only.

5. Raise all windows! Do not touch brakes or steering wheel.

“You’ve got to watch this, Kitty. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

He slipped seven quarters into the machine.

“But that’s $1.75. It says fifty cents.”

“This will give us a better opportunity to see what it can do. Raise your window. Is your window up?”

“Yes.”

“Here we go then.”

They heard a subterranean growl as some sort of metal hook rose below them, engaged and grappled the axle. “She’s locking it,” Ben said. “It’s amazing. It adjusts universally. Like the tone arm on a phonograph that mixes ten- and twelve-inch records.”

Then there was a long hiss like the sound of air escaping from a tire.

“Oh, Ben,” Kitty said.

And then, as the car began to be pulled forward, sheets of water, panes of it — the extra dollar and a quarter, Ben thought happily — slapped at them from every direction at once, like waves, like a riptide, and so thick that the illusion was they were indeed in the sea under water, Kopechne’d. Detergent added now, dropping like snow, foaming the windows, frothing their vision, Kitty grabbed his hand and squeezed.

“Something’s wrong,” she said, “the extra money you put in, you must have jammed it or something. Oh, Ben.”

While the car rocked back and forth — he had not turned off the ignition, had left it in drive; it was being tugged back as it strained against the hooks; Kitty, of course, hadn’t noticed — the heavy brushes came out of the walls, closing in on them like the trick rooms of matinee serials. The timing was off, the brushes embracing the car even as the water continued to shoot out of every pore in the pipes, crushing the detergent against the windshield, twirling, lapping at the car like the bristled tongue of some prehistoric beast. Kitty had both arms around his neck. “Please, Ben. Oh God. Please, Ben. When does it stop?”

“I don’t know. Something’s wrong,” Flesh said, pressing the brake and causing them to lurch forward. “Jesus, do you think it’ll crush us? I can’t see out.” It was true. The interior was almost totally dark.

The brushes were all about them now, scraping the long sides of the car, settled on the roof, rolling and bumping as the Cadillac, in drive, threw their timing off still further and Ben pulled at the bottom of the steering wheel with one hand. From his side he lowered his electric window a bit. “I want to see if—” Then lowered Kitty’s.

“Ben, let’s get out,” Kitty said nervously. “It’s beginning to come in. We’ve got to get out.”

“We can’t,” he shouted over the sound of the water and the grunt and grinding of the brushes, “we’d never be able to open the doors. The brushes are up against us. Even if we could get out, the bristles would tear us to pieces.”

“Oh, God. Oh, Ben,” Kitty screamed. “When does it stop?”

“We’ve still got to go through Rinse,” Ben yelled.

“ What? ”

“ Rinse. It’s part of the cycle! ’

And that’s — Kitty practically in his lap now, her arms thrown about his neck like a drowner, her legs capturing his as though she meant to shinny up him to safety — when he felt the warm trickle of her pee as it rolled down his thigh and knee and splashed against his shoes and puddled the thick carpet of his Cadillac.

So he knew why he’d approached her. For his priviness to those wild dreams that no man but himself shared, not of the dead, not even of sex, but simply of excitement, Kitty’s kiddy spook-house conjurings, her fervid invocation of plight, trap, and wicked pitfall that froze her reason and loosened her urine, to induce in her that high-strung roller coaster, snap-the-whip, loop-the-loop, vertiginous vision he’d somehow recognized in her from the beginning — known would be there — but till now had never seen. He shoved the lever into neutral, shut off the engine.

“It’s like this at night, isn’t it?”

“Oh, Ben.”

“At night. In the dark. This is how it is then, isn’t it?”

“Please.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said. She was whimpering.

“It’s all right,” he told her, “the brushes, they’re just cloth, the bristles are smooth as chamois.”

“Oh, Ben.”

“It’s all right,” he said, “everything is fine. Look, Kitty dear, they’ve already gone back into the walls.”

“Oh, Ben,” she said. “Oh, Ben, oh, you son of a bitch.”

She raised no objection when he told her brothers and sisters about his Robo-Wash proposition. But it was a long time before she would speak to him again.

He drove the remaining 120 miles to Kansas City without the tape deck or radio. Oh my oh my but he had the memories.

Ghiardelli Square in San Francisco. Atlanta’s Underground. Yes, and Hartford’s Constitution Plaza. Louisville’s Belvedere. Minneapolis’s Mall and L.A.’s Century City. Denver’s Larimer Square and Chicago with its Old Towns and New Towns. The Paramus Mall in New Jersey. Lincoln Road in Miami Beach — a bad example. Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle — a good one. St. Louis with its Laclede’s Landing. The new Cincinnati. The new Detroit, Milwaukee. Albany’s billion-dollar civic center.

What was not highway was Downtown, the New Jerusalem. America’s Malls and Squares and Triangles like figures in geometry. Just the white man fighting back. Regrouping. Floating promises with bond issues. What had been white and then black was now white again. Phoenixy. The old one-two. Real estate’s chemotherapy, its surgical demolitions and plastic surgery. Like a cycle in nature or a rotation of crops. Allowing the blighted inner cities to lie fallow, the cores to oxidize — all those Catfish Rows of the doomed. Then Reclamation, Rehabilitation, Conversion, Salvation. Resurrection. The Tokyoization of the United States, the Boweries beaten into Berlin showcases. As if America had lost a war, a lulu, a Churchillian son of a bitch. We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the streets, we shall fight them on the slums and on the ghettos. We will never surrender. We will smear them. But as if we hadn’t, didn’t, and the worst had happened, the bottom dropping out of victory. And were now being reparated, mollified, kissed where it hurt and made better. Given this — what? — Democracy and these — what? — monuments of the mercantile, these new Sphinxes and new Pyramids, these new wonders of the world. And everything’s up to date in Kansas City.