Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

“What’s wrong? Why do I put you off so? We’re perfect strangers.”

“We ain’t strangers,” the man said.

“I never saw you till this morning.”

“We’re not strangers. I been shut up with fellows like you decades. Crook, all crimes are crimes of passion. Adventure lays in the bloodstream like platelets. We’re not strangers. Get a normality. Live on the plains. Take a warm milk at bedtime. Be bored and find happiness. Grays and muds are the decorator colors of the good life. Don’t you know anything? Speed kills and there’s cholesterol in excitement. Cool it, cool it. The ordinary is all we can handle. Now beat it. Goodbye.”

“Listen—”

“God’s unlisted number, God’s toenails and appetizers! I told you, mister, get out of my way.” Flesh raised the electric window and drove off.

A few miles down the road he spotted another hitchhiker. His heart was still pounding from what the convict had said and he felt under some compulsion to stop for this new stranger, a fellow — he’d slowed to study him while he was still a couple of hundred feet away from the man — in his late twenties, Ben judged, without parcels or luggage and dressed not for the road — a mile or so back Ben had spotted an abandoned late-model Pinto on the shoulder of the highway, its doors closed and hood raised — but like a man with car trouble.

“Get in,” he said. “Run out of gas?”

“Yes,” the young man said, “or something with the engine. The last sign I saw said there are service stations at the next exit. I figure that would still be about ten miles or so up ahead.”

“I’ll take you.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

“No trouble,” Ben said.

And then the nice young man in the good clothes — it was closer to twenty miles than to ten — began to address Ben in public-service announcements.

“Only you can prevent forest fires,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I was just thinking,” the young man said, “only you can prevent forest fires.”

“Me?”

“Well. You and me. You know — us.”

“Uh huh.”

“Another thing. We should keep the drunk driver off the highway.”

“Yes,” Ben said.

“And hire the handicapped.”

Ben nodded and pressed down on the accelerator.

“More accidents occur in the home than anywhere else.”

“Yes, I heard that.”

He took a tube of Rolaids out of his pocket and extended it toward Ben.

“No thanks.”

“No?” The young man took one from the roll and put it into his mouth. “I keep this and all medicines out of the reach of children,” he said, chewing.

“That’s good,” Ben said. He drove even faster.

“Unh unh,” the young man said. “Slow down and live.”

It was odd. It was what the other one had been trying to tell him, too.

“Yep, discrimination in housing is not only wrong, it’s illegal. Save the children,” the man said. “Get your pap test, and remember,” he said, “if you’re an alien you have to register your address by January 16. Forms are available in any post office.”

When Ben reached the exit he took him to the first service station.

Sure, he thought, back on the highway, the manageable ordinary, yes. And where was it to be found?

Under the unicorn fast asleep.

He had said big deal his remission was back, big deal he could shuffle a deck of cards, but in his motel room in Oklahoma City he used and savored his suddenly recovered powers.

He trawled his right hand over the brocade spread, digging his fingers pleasantly into its rough plains, bristled as underbrush or stubble. He knew that his nerves were lying to him, that his brain had scrambled his sense of touch, that his fingertips moved over only temporarily coded textures, but there was a lump in his throat, and he was happy. This was the only reality he needed, had ever needed, to receive sensation in its more pleasant disguises, quenching after three years his nerves’ long thirst for the smooth, the soft. Happy is he, he thought, for whom gunny is as silk, burlap as cashmere, wool as percale, instead of — his experience of the past years — the other way around. He would have browsed textbooks of textiles like large tomes of wallpaper samples, would willingly have caressed all dry goods, all bolts, rolls, lengths, and swatches. He wanted jute between his fingers, sackcloth, linen, cambric, mohair. He longed to touch toweling, vicuna, worsted and jersey, tweed, homespun, duffel and mull. Serge, he thought, flannel. Muslin and calico. Chintz. He would have set his fingertips against the grain of sharkskin and dimity, gingham and voile, handled poplin and madras, satin and taffeta, the chiffons and the velvets. Corduroy, tulle, organdy, lace. Grosgrain, chenille. He was a sucker for seersucker, would have felt felt.

Oh oh, he thought, son of his tailor pop and godson of many-costumed Finsberg, how queer a fit my punishment has been. How unsuitable. How wickedly fate has taken my measure. For three years and more, health’s yokel, its clock-sock boob, fetching stares from the natives, those fashion plates, all the customized robust. Men and women with muscle tone, good color, sound tactile good sense, their protein levels in the Swiss banks of being. What I have missed! How deprived! And of all the fabrics the one most missed was woman’s, and next to that, perhaps even before it, the natural feel of his own now middle-aged skin.

He took himself in hand. Entered the shower. (He would not use soap, had no need for the protective glaze of lather.) Adjusted the temperature of the water with the thermostat of his body, his skin like a good thermometer, registering for the first time in years hot as hot, cold as cold, lukewarm as ecstasy. And focused the showerhead like a portrait photographer, shooting with needlepoint, fine spray, the splat of raindrop and heavy weathers of cloudburst. His body calling a spade a spade, even with his eyes closed discriminating, calling out the f-stops of velocity and feeling, feeling — God, had that gone too? had that abandoned him? — a strange sensation now, something new under the sun, no, something rerecognized — feeling wetness , distinguishing dampness, all the marvelous degrees from dry to soaked, the splendid spectrum of humidity.

And when he left the shower stall — he had no need for the traction of bathmats, his balance, which had been slipping away now for months, had returned — he dived into the thick motel bath towels no longer rough to his skin as sandpaper or ground glass or cat-o’-nine-tails. He rubbed himself down, however, with a pulled-punch vigor, making the stinging noises of hygiene — bah rruh , prrrt, shashashashasha — but holding back at last, fearful lest he accidentally press some raw nerve which would, like a linchpin tumbler falling into place in a lock, cause his brain to renege on his remission and return his body to its zipper condition. So he dried his scalp gently, even as he made his curious warpath movements, and ventriloquized the whoops and yaps of a remembered zealousness. And combed his hair wet.

And froze, alarmed and despairing because there was suddenly a queer, faintly burning, salt-in-wound sensation in the outside corners of his eyes. Oh, Christ, he thought. “Oh, God,” he said, “time’s up. I have counted my chickens. Death is not mocked.” And touched the tender spots where the gates of his disease were still open, where his M.S. had stood stupidly in the draft. And the tips of his forefingers came away wet. “Why, they’re tears ,” he said in the profoundest wonder he had ever known. They’re tears and I felt them, my skin as honed as that! Feel them, feel them, delicate and baroque as the tracings of snails or the feathery strands of spiders. “Thank you,” he said. “Thanks. Thank you.” And lay naked on the bed, his skin taking the full force of the impression of the spread, imagining he could feel the warm reds and cool blues and neutral browns of its pattern beneath him, while the tears — he would not touch them, would not stanch them — flowed and flowed and finally stopped. And he could feel, enjoy, their evaporative lift. And even the molecular heft of the salt they left behind.