Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

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Ben Flesh is one of the men "who made America look like America, who made America famous." He collects franchises, traveling from state to state, acquiring the brand-name establishments that shape the American landscape. But both the nation and Ben are running out of energy. As blackouts roll through the West, Ben struggles with the onset of multiple sclerosis, and the growing realization that his lifetime quest to buy a name for himself has ultimately failed.

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“Where do you get this? What is this stuff?”

“Two million,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“Two million a year die. It’s a ball-park figure.”

“Only two million? I would have thought more.”

“Be patient. I told you. Twelve million have epilepsy.”

“I don’t see—”

“If thirty-eight thousand four hundred seventy died of diabetes, how many more have it and are still alive? Ten times that number, twenty? I should think twenty. Conservatively twenty. Be patient.”

“But—”

“And if twenty have diabetes for each one that dies of it, and diabetes is only the fifth biggest killer, how many people do you suppose live with bad hearts, with cancer growing in them like food turning in the refrigerator? Be patient. How many have Parkinson’s disease, how many VD?”

“Every other?”

“We’re standing water, fucking roosts,” Flesh said. “Plague builds its nests in us.”

“Gee,” Kingseed said, “put that way, it’s kind of depressing.”

“Kind of,” Flesh said. “There’s scarlet fever and muscular dystrophy and Hodgkin’s disease and a special strain of kid leukemia. There’s the heartbreak of psoriasis.”

“The doctor told me my pressure’s a little high.”

“There you go,” Flesh said.

“Gee.”

“And still they smooch.”

“What? Oh. Yeah.”

“They come calling, call coming, go courting, hold hands, sip soda through a straw, French kiss with their throats sore and their noses running.”

“My gosh.”

My gosh.”

Flesh stares blankly at the silent IBM typewriter and suddenly it begins to clatter out a message:

INN-DEX 225. INN-DEX 225. *¢&%#% $@*¢&%%#@!*& THE INN-DEX IS NOT A TOY! YOURS, INN-DEX OOO, RICHMOND.

Then the top button, like Hold on a telephone, fills with a square of solid yellow light. “We’re off the air,” Ben says. “Love Night’s over. Richmond pulled our plug. ”

“Will we get in trouble?”

Ben shrugs. He comes out from behind the registration desk and sits down in one of the velour chairs. He yawns.

It is Kingseed’s snores which finally awaken him. His clerk is sleeping with his face on the desk. It’s three-thirty. The man will have a stiff neck when he gets up.

Ben stretches. He can have slept no more than an hour and a half, yet is fully rested. He could go to his room now, but he doubts if he could sleep. Still, Kingseed’s heavy snores are unpleasant to hear, though he has no wish to wake the man, no wish either to disturb the night auditor working on her accounts in the small office behind the wall of keys and letter slots. He rises, intending to go to his room, when his eye is caught by the map on the big display board opposite the registration desk. The concentric hundred-mile circles make the states behind them a sort of target, twelve hundred miles of American head seen through a sniper-scope. He goes up to the map, to dartboard America, bull’s-eyed, Ptolemaic’d Ringgold. He examines it speculatively. And suddenly sees it not as a wheel of distances but of options. It’s as if he hadn’t seen it properly before. Though there are dozens of road maps in the glove compartment of his car, he has rarely referred to them. Not for a long while. Not since the Interstates had made it possible to travel the country in great straight lines. Why, there are signs for Memphis and Tulsa and Chicago in St. Louis now. Signs for Boston and Washington, D.C., in the Bronx. Seen this way, in swaths of hundred-mile circles like shades in rainbows, he perceives loops of relationship. He is equidistant from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico and Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Centralia, Illinois. He could as easily be in Columbus, Ohio, as in Petersburg, Virginia. New Orleans rings him, Covington, Kentucky, does. He is surrounded by place, by tiers of geography like bands of amphitheater. He is the center. If he were to leave now, striking out in any direction, northwest to Nashville, south to Panama City, Florida, it would make no difference. He could stand before maps like this one in other Travel Inns. Anywhere he went would be the center. He would pull the center with him, the world rearranging itself about him like a woman smoothing her skirt, touching her hair.

It was the start of his ecstasy attack.

V

He turns the ignition key. Hey, he’s down a few gallons. He sees that one side of the island of pumps nearest him is clear, but keeps his Caddy idling in neutral until he knows what the fellow in the Pontiac Grand Am just pulling in off the street means to do. It, too, is an out-of-state car — Minnesota. The land of sky-blue waters.

Ben smiles and waves expansively at the Grand Am to go ahead of him. The bells ring as Minnesota drives over the rubber line that signals the attendant. Jack comes back out and goes up to the driver’s side of the Pontiac, clears the gas pump, and carries the heavy hose toward the gas tank. Ben presses down the electric window on his side and leans his head out. “Can you get to her, Jack, or should I back off some?” he calls.

Jack looks at him quizzically. “No,” he says, “there’s room.”

“There’s room? You sure? It wouldn’t be any trouble for me to back it up a bit.”

“No,” he says, “that’s all right.”

“Okay,” Ben says, “think I’ll just stretch my legs a bit while I’m waiting.” He gets out of his car with difficulty. Jack has begun to wipe the windshield and Ben goes up to him. “She’s a scorcher, ain’t she?”

“Radio said 92 at noon,” the young man says.

“Ninety-two degrees! At noon? Is that a fact? She could bust 100 then.”

“I guess,” Jack says.

“Say, look there, will you?” Ben Flesh points to an elderly woman on the sidewalk who is holding a parasol above her head. “You don’t see that up north much,” he says. “It’s a good way of preventing sunstroke. I wonder why more people don’t carry sun umbrellas in weather like this. It’s kind of pretty, too, don’t you think?”

“Pretty?”

“Well, old-fashioned. Reassuring. Pretty, yes. I think so. Many folks carry sunshades around here?”

“Mostly the older women, I guess.”

“Well, that’s wonderful,” Ben says. “It’s very charming and genteel. That sort of thing makes heat itself charming.”

Jack asks the driver if he wants him to check under the hood and the man nods. He pulls out the oil stick and wipes it with a rag.

“Gee whiz,” Ben says, “will you look at all the machinery down there?”

“You’re down just over a half,” Jack tells the driver. “Shall I put in a quart?”

“Please,” the driver says, “and could you check the water level in my battery?”

“That’s a good idea,” Ben tells the man. “It probably evaporates on a day like this. That young man told me it was already 92 at noon today.”

“ It feels it. It must be almost 100 now,” the man from Minnesota says.

“You probably aren’t far off,” Ben says. He looks at the man. “But you know,” he says, “the hottest I’ve ever been was once when I was up in your part of the country.”

“Minnesota?”

“Well, South Dakota. Rapid City. This was a few years ago. 1971.”

“Yeah,” his friend says. “I think I remember. It was hot that summer.”

Hot ? It was in violation of the Geneva Conventions, it was so hot. It was brutal . And the air conditioning wasn’t of any use.”

“No?”

“Heck no. There were power failures. I was in the hospital at the time. This was when I had my multiple sclerosis diagnosed — I’m a multiple sclerotic — and though the hospital had its own generators, it wasn’t enough to drive the air conditioning and—”

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