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1

“Take a factory,” Ab said. “It’s the same sort of thing exactly,” What kind of factory Chapel wanted to know.

Ab tipped his chair back, settling into the theory as if it were a warm whirlpool bath in Hydrotherapy. He’d eaten two lunches that Chapel had brought down and felt friendly, reasonable, in control. “Any kind. You ever worked in a factory?”

Of course he hadn’t. Chapel? Chapel was lucky to be pushing a cart. So Ab went right on. “For instance—take an electronics-type factory. I worked in one once, an assembler.”

“And you made something, right?”

“Wrong! I put things together. There’s a difference if you’d use your ears for one minute instead of that big mouth of yours. See, first off this box comes down the line, and I’d stick in this red board sort of thing, then tighten some other mother on top of that. Same thing all day, simple as A-B-C. Even you could have done it, Chapel.” He laughed.

Chapel laughed.

“Now what was I really doing? I moved things, from here to there….” he pantomimed here and there. The little finger of the left hand ended at the first knuckle. He’d done it himself at his initiation into thek ofc twenty years ago (twenty-five actually), a single chop of the old chopper, but when people asked he said it was an industrial accident and that was how that goddamned system destroyed you. But mostly people knew better than to ask.

“But I didn’t make anything at all, you see? And it’s the same in any other factory—you move things or you put them together, same difference.”

Chapel could feel he was losing. Ab talked faster and louder, and his own words came out stumbling. He hadn’t wanted to argue in the first place, but Ab had tangled him in it without his knowing how. “But something, I don’t know, what you say is … But what I mean is—you’ve got to have common sense, too.”

“No, this is science.”

Which brought such a look of abject defeat to the old man’s eyes it was as if Ab had dropped a bomb, boff, right in the middle of his black, unhappy head. For who can argue against science. Not Chapel, sure as hell.

And yet he struggled up out of the rubble still championing common sense. “But things get made—how do you explain that?”

“Things get made, things get made,” Ab mimicked in a falsetto voice, though of the two men’s voices Chapel’s was deeper. “What things?”

Chapel looked round the morgue for an example. It was all so familiar as to be invisible—the slab, the carts, the stacks of sheets, the cabinet with its stock of fillers and fluids, the desk…. He lifted a black Identi-Band from the clutter on the desk. “Like plastic.”

“Plastic?” Ab said in a tone of disgust. “That just shows how much you know, Chapel. Plastic.” Ab shook his head.

“Plastic,” Chapel insisted. “Why not?”

“Plastic is just putting chemicals together, you illiterate.”

“Yeah, but.” He closed one eye, squeezing the thought into focus. “But to make the plastic they’ve got to—heat it. Or something.”

“Right! And what’s heat?” he asked, folding his hands across his gut, victorious, full. “Heat is kinetic energy.”

“Shit,” Chapel maintained. He massaged his stubbly brown scalp. Another argument lost. He never understood how it happened.

“Molecules,” Ab summed up, “moving. Everything breaks down to that. It’s all physics, a law.” He let loose a large fart and pointed his finger, just in time, at Chapel’s groin.

Chapel made a smile acknowledging Ab’s triumph. It was science all right. Science battered everyone into submission if it was given its way. It was like trying to argue with the atmosphere of Jupiter, or electric sockets, or the steroid tablets he had to take now—things that happened every day and never made sense, never would, never.

Dumb nigger, Ab thought, feeling friendlier in proportion to Chapel’s perplexity. He wished he could have kept him arguing a while longer. There was still religion, psychosis, teaching, lots of possibilities. Ab had arguments to prove that even these jobs, which looked so mental and abstract on the surface, were actually all forms of kinetic energy.

Kinetic energy: once you understood the meaning of kinetic energy all kinds of other things started becoming clear.

“You should read the book,” Ab insisted.

“Mm,” Chapel said.

“He explains it in more detail.” Ab hadn’t read the entire book himself, only parts of the condensation, but he’d gotten the gist of it.

But Chapel had no time for books. Chapel, Chapel pointed out, was not one of your intellectuals.

Was Ab? Intellectual? He had to think about that one for a while. It was like wearing some fruity color transparency and seeing himself in a changing booth mirror, knowing he would never buy it, not daring even to walk out on the sales floor, but enjoying the way it fitted him anyhow: an intellectual. Yes, possibly in some other reincarnation Ab had been an intellectual, but it was a goofy idea all the same.

Right on the button, at 1:02, they rang down from ‘A’ Surgery. A body.

He took down the name in the logbook. He’d neglected to start a new page and the messenger hadn’t come by yet for yesterday’s, so he entered Time of Death as 11:58 and printed the name in neat block letters: NEWMAN, BOBBI.

“When can you get her?” asked the nurse, for whom a body still possessed sex.

“I’m there already,” Ab promised.

He wondered what age it would be. “Bobbi” was an older type name but there were always exceptions.

He booted Chapel out, locked up, and set off with the cart to ‘A’ Surgery. At the bend of the corridor, right before the ramp, he told the new kid at the desk to take his calls. The kid wiggled his skimpy ass and made some dumb joke. Ab laughed. He was feeling in top shape, and it was going to be a good night. He could tell.

Chapel was the only one on and Mrs. Steinberg, who was in charge tonight, though not actually his boss, said, “Chapel, ‘B’ Recovery,” and handed him the slip.

“And move,” she added off-handedly, as another woman might have said, “God bless you,” or “Take care.”

Chapel, however, had one speed. Difficulties didn’t slow him down; anxieties made him go no faster. If somewhere there were cameras perpetually trained on him, viewers who studied his slightest actions, then Chapel would give them nothing to interpret. Loaded or empty, he wheeled his cart along the corridors at the same pace he took walking home after work to his hotel on 65th. Regular? As a clock.

Outside ‘M’ Ward, on 4, by the elevators, a blond young man was pressing a urinal against himself, trying to make himself piss by groaning at his steel pot. His robe hung open, and Chapel noticed that his pubic hair had been shaved off. That usually meant hemorrhoids.

“How’s it going?” Chapel asked. His interest in the patients’ stories was quite sincere, especially those in Surgery or ENT wards.

The blond young man made an anguished face and asked Chapel if he had any money.

“Sorry.”

“Or a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke. And it’s against the rules, you know.”

The young man rocked from one leg to the other, coddling his pain and humiliation, trying to blot out every other sensation in order to go the whole way. Only the older patients tried, for a while at least, to hide their pain. The young ones gloried in it from the moment they gave their first samples to the aide in Admissions.

While the substitute in ‘B’ Recovery completed the transfer forms Chapel went over to the other occupied unit. It held, still unconscious, the boy he’d taken up earlier from Emergency. His face had been a regular beef stew; now it was a tidy volleyball of bandages. From the boy’s clothes and the tanned and muscly trimness of his bare arms (on one biceps two blurry blue hands testified to an eternal friendship with “Larry”) Chapel inferred that he would have had a good-looking face as well. But now? No. If he’d been registered with one of the private health plans, perhaps. But at Bellevue there was neither staff nor equipment for full-scale cosmetic work. He’d have eyes, nose, mouth, etc., all the right size and sitting about where they ought to, but the whole lot together would be a plastic approximation.

So young—Chapel lifted his limp left wrist and checked the age on the Identi-Band—and handicapped for life. Ah, there was a lesson in it.

“The poor man,” said the substitute, meaning not the boy but the transfer. She handed Chapel the transfer form.

“Oh?” said Chapel, unlocking the wheels.

She went round to the head of the cart. “A subtotal,” she explained. “And… ” The cart bumped gently into the door frame. The bottle swayed at the top of the intravenous pole. The old man tried to lift his hands but they were strapped to the sides. His fingers clenched.

“And?”

“It’s gone to the liver,” she explained in a strange whisper.

Chapel nodded somberly. He’d known it must have been something as drastic as that since he was routed up to heaven, the 18th floor. Sometimes it seemed to Chapel that he would have saved Bellevue a lot of needless trouble if he’d just take all of these to Ab Holt’s office straightaway instead of bothering with the 18th floor.

In the elevator Chapel paged through the man’s file. WANDTKE, JWRZY. The routing slip, the transfer form, the papers in the folder, and the Identi-Band all agreed: JWRZY. He tried sounding it out, letter by letter.

The doors opened. Wandtke’s eyes opened.

“How are you?” Chapel asked. “Do you feel okay? Hm?”

Wandtke began laughing, very softly. His ribs fluttered beneath the green electric sheet.

“We’re going to your new ward now,” Chapel explained. “It’s going to be a lot nicer there. You’ll see. Everything is going to be all right, uh …” He remembered that it was not possible to pronounce his name. Could it be, despite all the forms, a mistake?

Anyhow there wasn’t much point trying to communicate with this one. Coming up from surgery they were always loaded so full of whatever it was that there was no sense to anything they said. They just giggled and rolled their eyes around, like this Wandtke. And in two weeks, cinders in a furnace. Wandtke wasn’t singing at least. Lots of them sang.

Chapel’s shoulder started in, a twinge. The twinge became an ache and the ache thickened and enveloped him in a cloud of pain. Then the cloud scattered into wisps, the wisps vanished. All in the distance of a hundred yards in ‘K’ wing, and without his slowing, without a wink.

It wasn’t bursitis, that much seemed certain. It came and went, not in flashes, but like music, a swelling up and then a welling away. The doctors didn’t understand it, so they said. Eventually it went away, and so (Chapel told himself) he had nothing to complain about. That things could have been a lot worse was demonstrated to him all the time. The kid tonight, for instance, with the false face that would always ache in cold weather, or this Wandtke, giggling like he’d come from some damned birthday party, and with his liver changing itself all the while into some huge, horrible growth. Those were the people to feel sorry for, and Chapel felt sorry for them with some gusto. By comparison to such wretched, doomed creatures, he, Chapel, was pretty lucky.

He handled dozens every shift, men and women, old and young, carting them here and there, up and down, and there wasn’t one of them, once the doctors had done their job, who wouldn’t have been happy to change places with the short, thin, brittle, old black man who wheeled them through these miles of scabby corridors, not one.

Miss Mackey was on duty in the men’s ward. She signed for Wandtke. Chapel asked her how he was supposed to pronounce a name like that, Jwrzy, and Miss Mackey said she certainly didn’t know. It was probably a Polish name anyhow. Wandtke—didn’t it look Polish?

Together they steered Wandtke to his unit. Chapel connected the cart, and the unit, purring softly, scooped up the old body, lifted, and stuck. The unit shut itself off. It was a moment before either Chapel or Miss Mackey realized what was wrong. Then they unstrapped the withered wrists from the aluminum bars of the cart. The unit, this time, experienced no difficulty.

“Well,” said Miss Mackey, “I know two people who need a day’s rest.”

5:45. This close to clocking out, Chapel didn’t want to return to the duty room and risk a last-minute assignment. “Any dinners left?” he asked the nurse.

“Too late here, they’ve all been taken. Try the women’s ward.”

In the women’s ward, Havelock, the elderly aide, dug up a tray that had been meant for a patient who had terminated earlier that evening. Chapel got it for a quarter, after pointing out the low-residue sticker Havelock had tried to conceal under his thumb.

NEWMAN, B, the sticker read.

Ab would have her now. Chapel tried to remember what unit she’d been in. The blonde girl in the corner who couldn’t stand sunlight? Or the colostomy who was always telling jokes? No, her name was Harrison.

Chapel pulled one of the visitors’ chairs over to the window ledge. He opened the tray and waited for the food to warm. He ate from one compartment at a time, chewing at his single stolid speed, though the whole dinner was the consistency of a bowl of Breakfast. First the potatoes; then, some steamy, soft meat cubes; then, dutifully, a mulch of spinach. He left the cake but drank the Koffee, which contained the miracle ingredient that (aside from the fact that no one ever returned) gave heaven its name. When he was done he shot the tray downstairs himself.

Havelock was inside, on the phone.

The ward was a maze of blue curtains, layers of translucence overlapping layers of shadows. A triangle of sunlight spread across the red tile floor at the far end of the room: dawn.

Unit 7 was open. At one time or another Chapel must have carted its occupant to and from every division of the hospital: SCHAAP, FRANCES, 3/3/04. Which made her eighteen, barely. Her face and neck were speckled with innumerable scarlet spider nevi, but Chapel remembered when it had been a pretty face. Lupus.

A small gray machine beside the bed performed, approximately, the functions of her inflamed liver. At irregular intervals a red light would blink on and, quickly, off, infinitesimal warnings which no one heeded.

Chapel smiled. The little miracles were starting to unfold themselves in his blood stream, but that was almost beside the point. The point was simple: They were dying: he was alive. He had survived and they were bodies. The spring sunlight added its own additional touch of good cheer to the here of heaven and the now of six a.m.

In an hour he would be home. He’d rest a while, and then he’d watch his box. He thought he could look forward to that.

Heading home down First, Ab whistled a piece of trash that had stuck in his head four days running, about some new pill called Yes, that made you feel better, and he did.

The fifty dollars he’d got for the Newman body brought his take for the week up to a handsome $115. Once he’d seen what Ab was offering, White hadn’t even haggled. Without being necrophile himself (to Ab a body was just a job to be done, something he carted down from the wards and burned or—if there was money to burn instead—shipped off to a freezing concern) Ab understood the market well enough to have recognized in Bobbi Newman a certain ideal quality of deathliness. Lupus had taken a fulminant course with her, rapidly destroying one internal system after another without, for a wonder, marring the fine texture of the skin. True, the disease had whittled face and limbs down to bone thinness, but then what else was necrophilia about? To Ab, who liked them big, soft, and lively, all of this fuss over corpses was pretty alien, yet basically his motto was “Chacun à son goût,” though not in so many words. There were limits, of course. For example, he would willingly have assisted at the castration of any Republican in the city, and he felt nearly as passionate a distaste for political extremists. But he possessed the basic urban tolerance for any human peculiarity from which he stood a good chance of making money.

Ab considered his commissions from the procurers to be gifts of fate, to be spent in the same free spirit that fortune had shown showering them on him. In fact, when you totted up the various MODICUM benefits the Holts were disbarred from by virtue of Ab’s salary, his real income wasn’t much more (without these occasional windfalls) than the government would have paid him for being alive. Ab usually managed to sidestep the logical conclusion: that the windfalls were his essential wage, the money that made him, in his own consciousness, a free agent, the equal of any engineer, expert, or criminal in the city. Ab was a man, with a man’s competence to buy whatever, within bounds, he wanted.

At this particular April moment, with the traffic so light on the avenue you could drink the air like a 7-Up, with the sun shining, with nowhere in particular to be until ten that night, and with $115 of discretionary income, Ab felt like an old movie, full of songs and violence and fast editing. Boff, smack, pow, that’s how Ab was feeling now, and as the opposite sex approached him from the other direction, he could feel their eyes fastening on him, measuring, estimating, admiring, imagining.

One, very young, very black, in silvery street shorts, stared at Ab’s left hand and stared at it, as though it were a tarantula getting ready to crawl right up her leg. (Ab was everywhere quite hairy.) She could feel it tickling her knee, her thigh, her fancy. Milly, when she was little, had been the same way about her father’s missing finger, all silly and giddy. Mutilations were supposed to be passe now, but Ab knew better. Girls still wet themselves feeling a stump, but guys today were just too chickenshit to chop their fingers off. The macho thing now was a gold earring, for Christ’s sake—as though there had never been a 20th Century.

Ab winked at her, and she looked away, but with a smile. How about that?

If there were one thing missing from a feeling of pure content it was that the wad in his pocket (two twenties, seven tens, and one five ) was so puny it almost wasn’t there. Before revaluation a three-body week like this would have put a bulge in his front pocket as big as another cock, a comparison he had often at that time drawn. Once Ab had actually been a millionaire—for five days running in July of 2008, the single most incredible streak of luck he’d ever had. Today that would have meant five, six thousand—nothing. Some of the faro tables in the neighborhood still used the old dollars, but it was like a marriage that’s lost its romance: you said the words but the meaning had gone out of them. You looked at the picture of Benjamin Franklin and thought, this is a picture of Benjamin Franklin. Whereas with the new bills $100 stood for beauty, truth, power, and love.

As though his bankroll were a kind of magnet dragging him there, Ab turned left on 18th into Stuyvesant Town. The four playgrounds at the center of the complex were the chief black market in New York. In the facs and on TV they used euphemisms like “flea market” or “street fair,” since to come right out and call it a black market was equivalent to saying the place was an annex of the police department and the courts, which it was.

The black market was as much a part of New York (or any other city), as basic to its existence, as the numbers from one to ten. Where else could you buy something without the purchase being fed into the federal income-and-purchase computers? Nowhere was where, which meant that Ab, when he was flush, had three options open to him: the playgrounds, the clubs, and the baths.

Used clothing fluttered limply from rack after rack, as far as the fountain.

Ab could never pass these stalls without feeling that Leda was somehow close at hand, hidden among these tattered banners of the great defeated army of the second-rate and second-hand, still silently resisting him, still trying to stare him down, still insisting, though so quietly now that only he could hear her: “Goddamn it, Ab. can’t you get it through that thick skull of yours, we’re poor, we’re poor, we’re poor!” It had been the biggest argument of their life together and the decisive one. He could remember the exact spot. Under a plane tree, just here, where they had stood and raged at each other, Leda hissing and spitting like a kettle, out of her mind. It was right after the twins had arrived and Leda was saying there was no help for it, they’d have to wear what they could get. Ab said fuckshit, no, no, no kid of his was going to wear other people’s rags, they’d stay in the house naked first. Ab was louder and stronger and less afraid, and he won, but Leda revenged herself by turning her defeat into a martyrdom. She never held out against him again. Instead she became an invalid, weepy and sniveling and resolutely helpless.

Ab heard someone calling his name. He looked around, but who would be here this early in the day but the people from the buildings, old folks plugged into their radios, kids screaming at other kids, babies screaming at mothers, mothers screaming. Half the vendors weren’t even spread out yet.

“Ab Holt—over here!” It was old Mrs. Galban. She patted the space beside her on the green bench.

He didn’t have much choice. “Hey, Viola, how’s it going? You’re looking great!”

Mrs. Galban smiled a sweet, rickety smile. Yes, she said complacently, she did feel well, she thanked God every day. She observed that even for April this was beautiful weather. Ab didn’t look so bad himself (a little heavier maybe), though it was how many years now?

“Twelve years,” said Ab, at a venture.

“Twelve years? It seems longer. And how is that good-looking Dr. Mencken in Dermatology?”

“He’s fine. He’s the head of the department now, you know.”

“Yes, I heard that.”

“He asked after you the other day when I ran into him outside the clinic. he said, have you seen old Gabby lately.” A polite lie.

She nodded her head, politely believing him. Then, cautiously, she started homing in on what was, for her, the issue. “And Leda, how is she, poor thing?”

“Leda is fine, Viola.”

“She’s getting out of the house, then?”

“Well no, not often. Sometimes we take her up to the roof for a bit of air. It’s closer than the street.”

“Ah, the pain!” Mrs. Galban murmured with swift, professional sympathy that the years had not been able to blunt. Indeed, it was probably better exercised now than when she’d been an aide at Bellevue. “You don’t have to explain—I know it can be so awful, can’t it, pain like that, and there’s so little any of us can do. But…” she added, before Ab could turn aside the final thrust, “… we must do that little if we can.”

“It’s not as bad as it used to be,” Ab insisted.

Mrs. Galban’s look was meant to be understood as reproachful in a sad, helpless way, but even Ab could sense the calculations going on behind the brown, cataracted eyes. Was this, she asked herself, worth pursuing? Would Ab bite?

In the first years of Leda’s invalidism Ab had picked up extra Dilaudin suppositories from Mrs. Galban, who specialized in analgesics. Most of her clients were other old women whom she met in the out-patient waiting room at the hospital. Ab had bought the Dilaudin more as a favor to the old pusher than from any real need, since he got all the morphine that Leda needed from the interns for next to nothing.

“It’s a terrible thing,” Mrs. Galban lamented quietly, staring into her seventy-eight-year-old lap. “A terrible thing.”

What the hell, Ab thought. It wasn’t as if he were broke.

“Hey, Gabby, you wouldn’t have any of those things I used to get for Leda, would you? Those what-you-call-ums?”

“Well, Ab, since you ask … ”

Ab got a package of five suppositories for nine dollars, which was twice the going price, even here on the playground. Mrs. Galban evidently thought Ab a fool.

As soon as he’d given her the money, he felt comfortably unobligated. Walking off he could curse her with buoyant resentment. The old bitch would have to live a damned long time before he ever bought any more plugs off her.

Usually Ab never made the connection between the two worlds he inhabited, this one out here and the Bellevue morgue, but now, having actively wished Viola Galban dead, it struck him that the odds were strong that he’d be the one who’d shove her in the oven. The death of anyone (anyone, that is, whom Ab had known alive) was a depressing idea, and he shrugged it away. At the far edge of his shrug, for the barest instant, he saw the young, pretty face of Bobbi Newman.

The need to buy something was suddenly a physical necessity, as though his wad of bills had become that cock and had to be jerked off after a week-long abstinence.

He bought a lemon ice, his first ice of the year, and strolled among the stalls, touching the goods with thick, sticky fingers, asking prices, making jokes. Everywhere the vendors hailed him by his name when they saw him approach. There was nothing, so rumor would have it, that Ab Holt couldn’t be talked into buying.

2

Ab looked at his two hundred and fourteen pounds of wife from the doorway. Wrinkled blue sheets were wound round her legs and stomach, but her breasts hung loose. “They’re prizewinners to this day,” Ab thought affectionately. Any feelings he still had for Leda were focused there, just as any pleasure she got when he was on top of her came from the squeezing of his hands, the biting of his teeth. Where the sheets were wrapped round her, however, she could feel nothing—except, sometimes, pain.

After a while Ab’s attention woke Leda up, the way a magnifying glass, focusing on a dry leaf, will start it smoldering.

He threw the package of suppositories onto the bed. “That’s for you.”

“Oh.” Leda opened the package, sniffed at one of the wax cylinders suspiciously. “Oh?”

“It’s Dilaudin. I ran into that Mrs. Galban at the market, and she wouldn’t get off my back till I’d bought something.”

“I was afraid for a moment you might have got it on my account. Thanks. What’s in the other bag, an enema bottle for our anniversary?”

Ab showed her the wig he’d bought for Beth. It was a silly, four-times-removed imitation of the Egyptian style made popular by a now-defunct TV series. To Leda it looked like something you’d find at the bottom of a box of Xmas wrapping, and she was certain it would look the same way to her daughter.

“My God,” she said.

“Well, it’s what the kids are wearing now” Ab said doubtfully. It no longer looked the same to him. He brought it over to the wedge of sunlight by the bedroom’s open window and tried to shake a bit more glitter into it. The metallic strings, rubbed against each other, made soft squeaking sounds.

“My God,” she said again. Her annoyance had almost betrayed her into asking him what he’d paid for it. Since the epochal argument beneath the plane tree she never discussed money matters with Ab. She didn’t want to hear how he spent his money or how he earned it. She especially didn’t want to know how he earned it, since she had, anyhow, a fair idea.

She contented herself with an insult. “You’ve got the discrimination of a garbage truck, and if you think Beth will let herself be seen in that ridiculous, obscene piece of junk, well… !” She pushed at the mattress until she was sitting almost upright. Both Leda and the bed breathed heavily.

“How would you know what people are wearing outside this apartment? There were hundreds of these fucking things all over the playground. It’s what the kids are wearing now. What the fuck.”

“It’s ugly. You bought your daughter an ugly wig. You have every right to, I suppose.”

“Ugly—isn’t that what you used to say about everything Milly wore? All those things with buttons. And the hats! It’s a stage they go through. You were probably just the same, if you could remember that long ago.”

“Oh, Milly! You’re always holding Milly up as though she were some kind of example! Milly never had any idea how—” Leda gave a gasp. Her pain. She pressed her hand flat against the roll of flesh to the side of her right breast, where she thought her liver might be. She closed her eyes trying to locate the pain, which had vanished.

Ab waited till Leda was paying attention to him again. Then, very deliberately, he threw the tinselly wig out the open window. Thirty dollars, he thought, just like that.

The manufacturer’s tag fluttered to the floor. A pink oval with italic letters: Nephertiti Creations.

With an inarticulate cry Leda swiveled sideways in bed till she’d made both feet touch the floor. She stood up. She took two steps and reached out for the window frame to steady herself.

The wig lay in the middle of the street eighteen floors below. Against the gray concrete it looked dazzlingly bright. A Tastee Bread truck backed up over it.

Since there was no reproach she might have made that didn’t boil down to a charge of his throwing away money, she said nothing. The unspoken words whirled round inside her, a plague-bearing wind that ruffled the wasted muscles of her legs and back like so many tattered flags. The wind died and the flags went limp.

Ab was ready behind her. He caught her as she fell and laid her back on the bed, wasting not a motion, smooth as a tango dip. It seemed almost accidental that his hands should be under her breasts. Her mouth opened and he put his own mouth across it, sucking the breath from her lungs.

Anger was their aphrodisiac. Over the years the interval between fighting and fucking had grown shorter and shorter. They scarcely bothered any longer to differentiate the two processes. Already his cock was stiff. Already she’d begun to moan her rhythmic protest against the pleasure or the pain, whichever it was. As his left hand kneaded the warm dough of her breasts, his right hand pulled off his shoes and pants. The years of invalidism had given her lax flesh a peculiar virginal quality, as though each time he went into her he was awakening her from an enchanted, innocent sleep. There was a kind of sourness about her too, a smell that seeped from her pores only at these times, the way maples yield sap only at the depth of the winter. Eventually he’d learned to like it.

A good sweat built up on the interface of their bodies, and his movements produced a steady salvo of smacking and slapping and farting sounds. This, to Leda, was the worst part of their sexual assaults, especially when she knew the children were at home. She imagined Beno, her youngest, her favorite, standing on the other side of the door, unable to keep from thinking of what was happening to her despite the horror it must have caused him. Sometimes it was only by concentrating on the thought of Beno that she could keep from crying out.

Ab’s body began to move faster. Leda’s, crossing the threshold between self-control and automatism, struggled upward away from the thrusts of his cock. His hands grabbed her hips, forcing her to take him. Tears burst from her eyes, and Ab came.

He rolled off, and the mattress gave one last exhausted whoosh.

“Dad?”

It was Beno, who certainly should have been in school. The bed-room door was halfway open. Never, Leda thought, in an ecstasy of humiliation, never had she known a moment to match this. Bright new pains leapt through her viscera like tribes of antelope.

“Dad,” Beno insisted. “Are you asleep?”

“I would be if you’d shut up and let me.”

“There’s someone on the phone downstairs, from the hospital. That Juan. He said it’s urgent, and to wake you if we had to.”

“Tell Martinez to fuck himself.”

“He said” Beno went on, in a tone of martyred patience that was a good replica of his mother’s, “it didn’t make any difference what you said and that once he explained it to you you’d thank him. That’s what he said.”

“Did he say what it was about?”

“Some guy they’re looking for. Bob Someone.”

“I don’t know who they want, and in any case…” Then it began to dawn: the possibility; the awful, impossible lightning bolt he’d known he would never escape. “Bobbi Newman, was that the name of the guy they’re looking for?”

“Yeah. Can I come in?”

“Yes, yes.” Ab swept the damp sheet over Leda’s body, which hadn’t stirred since he’d got off. He pulled his pants on. “Who took the call, Beno?”

“Williken did.” Beno stepped into the bedroom. He had sensed the importance of the message he’d been given and he was determined to milk it for a maximum of suspense. It was as though he knew what was at stake.

“Listen, run downstairs and tell Williken to hold Juan on the line until… ” One of his shoes was missing.

“He left, Dad. I told him you couldn’t be interrupted. He seemed sort of angry and he said he wished you wouldn’t give people his number anymore.”

“Shit on Williken then.”

His shoe was way the hell under the bed. How had he …?

“What was the message he gave you exactly? Did they say who’s looking for this Newman fellow?”

“Williken wrote it down, but I can’t read his writing. Margy it looks like.”

That was it then, the end of the world. Somehow Admissions had made a mistake in slotting Bobbi Newman for a routine cremation. She had a policy with Macy’s.

And if Ab didn’t get back the body he’d sold to White … “Oh Jesus,” he whispered to the dust under the bed.

“Anyhow you’re supposed to call them right back. But Williken says not from his phone ‘cause he’s gone out.”

There might be time, barely and with the best luck. White hadn’t left the morgue till after 3 a.m. It was still short of noon. He’d buy the body back, even if it meant paying White something extra for his disappointment. After all, in the long run White needed him as much as he needed White.

“Bye, Dad,” Beno said, without raising his voice, though by then Ab was already out in the hall and down one landing.

Beno walked over to the foot of the bed. His mother still hadn’t moved a muscle. He’d been watching her the whole time and it was as though she were dead. She was always like that after his father had fucked her, but usually not for such a long time. At school they said that fucking was supposed to be very healthful but somehow it never seemed to do her much good. He touched the sole of her right foot. It was soft and pink, like the foot of a baby, because she never walked anywhere.

Leda pulled her foot away. She opened her eyes.

White’s establishment was way the hell downtown, around the corner from the Democratic National Convention (formerly, Pier 19) which was to the world of contemporary pleasure what Radio City Music Hall had been to the world of entertainment—the largest, the mildest, and the most amazing. Ab, being a born New Yorker, had never stepped through the glowing neon vulva (seventy feet high and forty feet wide, a landmark) of the entrance. For those like Ab who refused to be grossed out by the conscious too-muchness of the major piers, the same basic styles were available on the side streets (“Boston” they called this area) in a variety of cooler colors, and here, in the midst of all that was allowed, some five or six illegal businesses eked out their unnatural and anachronistic lives.

After much knocking a young girl came to the door, the same probably who had answered the phone, though now she pretended to be mute. She could not have been much older than Beno, twelve at most, but she moved with the listless, enforced manner of a despairing housewife.

Ab stepped into the dim foyer and closed the door against the girl’s scarcely perceptible resistance. He’d never been inside White’s place before and he would not even have known what address to come to if he hadn’t once had to take over the delivery van for White, who’d arrived at the morgue too zonked out to function. So this was the market to which he’d been exporting his goods. It was less than elegant.

“I want to see Mr. White,” Ab told the girl. He wondered if she were another sideline.

She lifted one small, unhappy hand toward her mouth.

There was a clattering and banging above their heads, and a single flimsy facs-sheet drifted down through the half-light of the stairwell. White’s voice drifted down after it: “Is that you, Holt?”

“Damn right!” Ab started up the stairs but White, light in his head and heavy on his feet, was already crashing down to meet him.

White placed a hand on Ab’s shoulder, establishing the fact of the other man’s presence and at the same time holding himself erect. He had said yes to Yes once too often, or twice, and was not at this moment altogether corporeal.

“I’ve got to take it back,” Ab said. “I told the kid on the phone. I don’t care how much you stand to lose, I’ve got to have it.”

White removed his hand carefully and placed it on the banister. “Yes. Well. It can’t be done. No.”

“I’ve got to.”

“Melissa,” White said. “It would be … If you would please … And I’ll see you later, darling.”

The girl mounted the steps reluctantly, as though her certain future were waiting for her at the top. “My daughter,” White explained with a sad smile as she came alongside. He reached out to rumple her hair but missed by a few inches.

“We’ll discuss this, shall we, in my office?”

Ab helped him to the bottom. White went to the door at the far end of the foyer. “Is it locked?” he wondered aloud.

Ab tried it. It was not locked.

“I was meditating,” White said meditatively, still standing before the unlocked door, in Ab’s way, “when you called before. In all the uproar and whirl, a man has to take a moment aside to … ”

White’s office looked like a lawyer’s that Ab had broken into at the tag-end of a riot, years and years before. He’d been taken aback to find that the ordinary processes of indigence and desuetude had accomplished much more than any amount of his own adolescent smashing about might have.

“Here’s the story,” Ab said, standing close to White and speaking in a loud voice so there could be no misunderstanding. “It turns out that the one you came for last night was actually insured by her parents, out in Arizona, without her knowing. The hospital records didn’t say anything about it, but what happened is the various clinics have a computer that cross-checks against the obits. They caught it this morning and called the morgue around noon.”

White tugged sullenly on a strand of his sparse, mousy hair. “Well, tell them, you know, tell them it went in the oven.”

“I can’t. Officially we’ve got to hold them for twenty-four hours, just in case something like this should happen. Only it never does. Who would have thought, I mean it’s so unlikely, isn’t it? Anyhow the point is, I’ve got to take the body back. Now.”

“It can’t be done.”

“Has somebody already… ?”

White nodded.

“But could we fix it up again somehow? I mean, how, uh, badly … ”

“No. No, I don’t think so. Out of the question.”

“Listen, White, if I get busted over this, I won’t let myself be the only one to get hurt. You understand. There are going to be questions.”

White nodded vaguely. He seemed to go away and return. “Well then, take a look yourself.” He handed Ab an old-fashioned brass key. There was a plastic Yin and Yang symbol on the keychain. He pointed to a four-tier metal file on the far side of the office. “Through there.”

The file wouldn’t roll aside from the doorway until, having thought about it, Ab bent down and found the release for the wheels. There was no knob on the door, just a tarnished disc of lock with a word “Chicago” on it. The key fit loosely and the locks had to be coaxed.

The body was scattered all over the patchy linoleum. A heavy rose-like scent masked the stench of the decaying organs. No, it was not something you could have passed off as the result of surgery, and in any case the head seemed to be missing.

He’d wasted an hour to see this.

White stood in the doorway, ignoring, in sympathy to Ab’s feelings, the existence of the dismembered and disemboweled corpse. “He was waiting here, you see, when I went to the hospital. An out-of-towner, and one of my very … I always let them take away whatever they want. Sorry.”

As White was locking up the room again, Ab recollected the one thing he would need irrespective of the body. He hoped it hadn’t gone off with the head.

They found her left arm in the coffin of simulated pine with the Identi-Band still on it. He tried to persuade himself that as long as he had this name there was still half a chance that he’d find something to hang it on.

White sensed Ab’s renascent optimism, and, without sharing it, encouraged him: “Things could be worse.”

Ab frowned. His hope was still too fragile to bear expression.

But White began to float away in his own mild breeze. “Say, Ab, have you ever studied Yoga?”

Ab laughed. “Shit no.”

“You should. You’d be amazed what it can do for you. I don’t stick with it like I should, it’s my own fault, I suppose, but it puts you in touch with… Well, it’s hard to explain.”

White discovered that he was alone in the office. “Where are you going?” he asked.

420 East 65th came into the world as a “luxury” coop, but like most such it had been subdivided by the turn of the century into a number of little hotels, two or three to a floor. These hotels rented rooms or portions of rooms on a weekly basis to singles who either preferred hotel life or who, as aliens, didn’t qualify for a MODICUM dorm. Chapel shared his room at the Colton (named after the actress reputed to have owned the entire twelve rooms of the hotel in the ’80’s and ’90’s) with another ex-convict, but since Lucey left for his job at a retrieval center early in the morning and spent his afterhours cruising for free meat around the piers the two men rarely encountered each other, which was how they liked it. It wasn’t cheap, but where else could they have found accommodations so reassuringly like those they’d known at Sing-Sing: so small, so spare, so dark?

The room had a false floor in the reductionist style of the ’90’s. Lucey never went out without first scrupulously tucking everything away and rolling the floor into place. When Chapel got home from the hospital he would be greeted by a splendid absence: the walls, one window covered by a paper screen, the ceiling with its single recessed light, the waxed wood of the floor. the single decoration was a strip of molding tacked to the walls at what was now, due to the raised floor, eye-level.

He was home, and here, beside the door, bolted to the wall, quietly, wonderfully waiting for him, was his twenty-eight-inch Yamaha of America, none better at any price, nor any cheaper. (Chapel paid all the rental and cable charges himself, since Lucey didn’t like TV)

Chapel did not watch just anything. He saved himself for the programs he felt really strongly about. As the first of these did not come on till 10:30, he spent the intervening hour or two dusting, sanding, waxing, polishing, and generally being good to the floor, just as for nineteen years he had scoured the concrete of his cell every morning and evening. He worked with the mindless and blessed dutifulness of a priest reading his office. Afterwards, calmed, he would roll back the gleaming floorboards from his bed and lie back with conscious worthiness, ready to receive. His body seemed to disappear. Once the box was on, Chapel became another person. At 10:30 he became Eric Laver, the idealistic young lawyer, with his idealistic young notions of right and wrong, which no amount of painful experience, including two disastrous marriages (and the possibility now of a third) ever seemed to dispel. Though lately, since he’d taken on the Forrest case … This was The Whole Truth.

At 11:30 Chapel would have his bowel movement during an intermission of news, sports, and weather.

Then: As The World Turns, which, being more epic in scope, offered its audience different identities on different days. Today, as Bill Harper, Chapel was worried about Moira, his fourteen-year-old problem stepdaughter, who only last Wednesday during a stormy encounter at breakfast had announced to him that she was a lesbian. As if this wasn’t enough, his wife, when he told her what Moira had told him, insisted that many years ago she had loved another woman. Who that other woman might have been he feared he already knew.

It was not the stories that engaged him so, it was the faces of the actors, their voices, their gestures, the smooth, wide-open, whole-bodied way they moved. So long as they themselves seemed stirred by their imaginary problems, Chapel was satisfied. What he needed was the spectacle of authentic emotion—eyes that cried, chests that heaved, lips that kissed or frowned or tightened with anxiety, voices tremulous with concern.

He would sit on the mattress, propped on cushions, four feet back from the screen, breathing quick, shallow breaths, wholly given over to the flickerings and noises of the machine, which were, more than any of his own actions, his life, the central fact of his consciousness, the single source of any happiness Chapel knew or could remember.

A TV had taught Chapel to read. It had taught him to laugh. It had instructed the very muscles of his face how to express pain, fear, anger, and joy. From it he had learned the words to use in all the confusing circumstances of his other, external life. And though he never read, or laughed, or frowned, or spoke, or walked, or did anything as well as his avatars on the screen, yet they’d seen him through well enough, after all, or he would not have been here now, renewing himself at the source.

What he sought here, and what he found, was much more than art. Which he had sampled during prime evening hours and for which he had little use. It was the experience of returning, after the exertions of the day, to a face he could recognize and love, his own or someone else’s. Or if not love, then some feeling as strong. To know, with certainty, that he would feel these same feelings tomorrow, and the next day. In other ages religion had performed this service, telling people the story of their lives, and after a certain lapse of time telling it to them again.

Once a show that Chapel followed on CBS had pulled down such disastrous ratings for six months running that it had been canceled. A pagan forcibly converted to a new religion would have felt the same loss and longing (until the new god has been taught to inhabit the forms abandoned by the god who died) that Chapel felt then, looking at the strange faces inhabiting the screen of his Yamaha for an hour every afternoon. It was as though he’d looked into a mirror and failed to find his reflection. For the first month the pain in his shoulder had become so magnificently more awful that he had almost been unable to do his work at Bellevue. Then, slowly, in the person of young Dr. Landry, he began to rediscover the elements of his own identity.

It was at 2:45, during a commercial for Carnation Eggies, that Ab came pounding and hollering at Chapel’s door. Maud had just come to visit her sister-in-law’s child at the observation center to which the court had committed him. She didn’t know yet that Dr. Landry was in charge of the boy’s case.

“Chapel,” Ab screamed, “I know you’re in there, so open up, goddammit. I’ll knock this door down.”

The next scene opened in Landry’s office. He was trying to make Mrs. Hanson, from last week, understand how a large part of her daughter’s problem sprang from her own selfish attitudes. But Mrs. Hanson was black, and Chapel’s sympathy was qualified for blacks, whose special dramatic function was to remind the audience of the other world, the one that they inhabited and were unhappy in.

Maud knocked on Landry’s door: a closeup of gloved ringers thrumming on the paper panel.

Chapel got up and let Ab in. By three o’clock Chapel had agreed, albeit sullenly, to help Ab find a replacement for the body he had lost.

3

Martinez had been at the desk when the call came from Macy’s saying to hold the Newman body till their driver got there. Though he knew that the vaults contained nothing but three male geriatric numbers, he made mild yes-sounds and started filling out both forms. He left a message for Ab at his emergency number, then (on the principle that if there was going to be shit it should be Ab who either cleaned it up or ate it, as God willed) got word to his cousin to call in sick for the second (two to ten) shift. When Ab phoned back, Martinez was brief and ominous: “Get here and bring you know what. Or you know what.”

Macy’s driver arrived before Ab. Martinez was feeling almost off-balance enough to tell him there was nothing in storage by the name of Newman, Bobbi.

But it was not like Martinez to be honest when a lie might serve, especially in a case like this, where his own livelihood, and his cousin’s, were jeopardized. So, making a mental sign of the cross, he’d wheeled one of the geriatric numbers out from the faults, and the driver, with a healthy indifference to bureaucratic good form, carted it out to his van without looking under the sheet or checking the name on the file: NORRIS, THOMAS.

It was an inspired improvisation. Since their driver had been as culpable as the morgue, Macy’s wasn’t likely to make a stink about the resulting delay. Fast post mortem freezing was the rule in the cryonic industry and it didn’t pay to advertise the exceptions.

Ab arrived a bit before four. First off he checked out the log book. The page for April 14 was blank. A miracle of bad luck, but he wasn’t surprised.

“Anything waiting?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s incredible,” Ab said, wishing it were.

The phone rang. “That’ll be Macy’s,” Martinez said equably, stripping down to street clothes.

“Aren’t you going to answer it?”

“It’s your baby now.” Martinez flashed a big winner’s smile. They’d both gambled but Ab had lost. He explained, as the phone rang on, the stopgap by which he’d saved Ab’s life.

When Ab picked it up, it was the director, no less, of Macy’s Clinic, and so high in the sky of his just wrath it would have been impossible for Ab to have made out what he was screaming if he hadn’t already known. Ab was suitably abject and incredulous, explaining that the attendant who had made the mistake (and how it could have happened he still did not understand) was gone for the day. He assured the director that the man would not get off lightly, would probably be canned or worse. On the other hand, he saw no reason to call the matter to the attention of Administration, who might try to shift some of the blame onto Macy’s and their driver. The director agreed that that was uncalled for.

“And the minute your driver gets here Miss Newman will be waiting. I’ll be personally responsible. And we can forget that the whole thing happened. Yes?” Yes.

Leaving the office, Ab drew in a deep breath and squared his shoulders. he tried to get himself into the I-can-do-it spirit of a Sousa march. He had a problem. There’s only one way to solve a problem: by coping with it. By whatever means were available.

For Ab, at this point, there was only one means left. Chapel was waiting where Ab had left him on the ramp spanning 29th Street.

“It has to be done,” Ab said.

Chapel, reluctant as he was to risk Ab’s anger again (he’d nearly been strangled to death once), felt obliged to enter a last symbolic protest. “I’ll do it,” he whispered, “but it’s murder.”

“Oh no,” Ab replied confidently, for he felt quite at ease on this score. “Burking isn’t murder.”

On April 2, 1956, Bellevue Hospital did not record a single death, a statistic so rare it was thought worthy of remark in all the city’s newspapers, and there were then quite a few. In the sixty-six years since, there had not been such another deathless day, though twice it had seemed a near thing.

At five o’clock on the afternoon of April 14, 2022, the city desk computer at the Times issued a stand-by slip noting that as of that moment their Bellevue tie-line had not dispatched a single obit to the central board. A print-off of the old story accompanied the slip.

Joel Beck laid down her copy of Tender Buttons, which was no longer making sense, and considered the human-interest possibilities of this nonevent. She’d been on stand-by for hours and this was the first thing to come up. By midnight, very likely, someone would have died and spoiled any story she might have written. Still, in a choice between Gertrude Stein (illusion) and the Bellevue morgue (reality) Joel opted for the latter.

She notified Darling where she’d be. He thought it was a sleeping idea and told her to enjoy it.

By the first decade of the 21st Century systematic lupus erythematosis (SLE ) had displaced cancer as the principal cause of death among women aged twenty to fifty-five. This disease attacks every major system of the body, sequentially or in combination. Pathologically it is a virtual anthology of what can go wrong with the human body. Until the Morgan-Imamura test was perfected in 2007, cases of lupus had been diagnosed as meningitis, as epilepsy, as brucellosis, as nephritis, as syphilis, as colitis … The list goes on.

The etiology of lupus is infinitely complex and has been endlessly debated, but all students agree with the contention of Muller and Imamura in the study for which they won their first Nobel prize, SLE— the Ecological Disease: lupus represents the auto-intoxication of the human race in an environment ever more hostile to the existence of life. A minority of specialists went on to say that the chief cause of the disease’s proliferation had been the collateral growth of modern pharmacology. Lupus, by this theory, was the price mankind was paying for the cure of its other ills.

Among the leading proponents of the so-called “doomsday” theory was Dr. E. Kitaj, director of Bellevue Hospital’s Metabolic Research unit, who now (while Chapel bided his time in the television room) was pointing out to the resident and interns of heaven certain unique features of the case of the patient in Unit 7. While all clinical tests confirmed a diagnosis of SLE, the degeneration of liver functions had progressed in a fashion more typical of lupoid hepatitis.

Because of the unique properties of her case, Dr. Kitaj had ordered a liver machine upstairs for Miss Schaap, though ordinarily this was a temporary expedient before transplantation. Her life was now as much a mechanical as a biologic process. In Alabama, New Mexico, and Utah, Frances Schaap would have been considered dead in any court of law.

Chapel was falling asleep. The afternoon art movie, a drama of circus life, was no help in keeping awake, since he could never concentrate on a program unless he knew the characters. Only by thinking of Ab, the threats he’d made, the blood glowing in his angry face, was he able to keep from nodding off.

In the ward the doctors had moved on to Unit 6 and were listening with tolerant smiles to Mrs. Harrison’s jokes about her colostomy.

The new Ford commercial came on, like an old friend calling Chapel by name. A girl in an Empire coupe drove through endless fields of grain. Ab had said, who said so many things just for their shock value, that the commercials were often better than the programs.

At last they trooped off together to the men’s ward, leaving the curtains drawn around Unit 7. Frances Schaap was asleep. The little red light on the machine winked on and off, on and off, like a jet flying over the city at night.

Using the diagram Ab had scrawled on the back of a transfer form, Chapel found the pressure adjustment for the portal vein. He turned it left till it stopped. The arrow on the scale below, marked P P, moved slowly from 35, to 40, to 50. To 60.

To 65.

He turned the dial back to where it had been. The arrow shivered: the portal vein had hemorrhaged.

Frances Schaap woke up. She lifted one thin, astonished hand toward her lips: they were smiling! “Doctor,” she said pleasantly. “Oh, I feel…” The hand fell back to the sheet.

Chapel looked away from her eyes. He readjusted the dial, which was no different, essentially, from the controls of his own Yamaha. The arrow moved right, along the scale: 50. 55.

“… so much better now.”

60. 65.

“Thanks.”

70.

“I hope, Mr. Holt, that you won’t let me keep you from your work,” Joel Beck said, with candid insincerity. “I fear I have already.”

Ab thought twice before agreeing to this. At first he’d been convinced she was actually an investigator Macy’s had hired to nail him, but her story about the computer checking out the obits and sending her here was not the sort of thing anyone could have made up. It was bad enough, her being from the Times, and worse perhaps.

“Am I?” she insisted.

If he said yes, he had work to do, she’d ask to tag along and watch. If he said no, then she’d go on with her damned questions. If it hadn’t been that she’d have reported him (he could recognize the type), he’d have told her to fuck off.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered carefully. “Isn’t it me who’s keeping you from your work?”

“How so?”

“Like I explained, there’s a woman up on 18 who’s sure to terminate any minute now. I’m just waiting for them to call.”

“Half an hour ago you said it wouldn’t take fifteen minutes, and you’re still waiting. Possibly the doctors have pulled her through. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

“Someone is bound to die by twelve o’clock.”

“By the same logic someone was bound to have died by now—and they haven’t.”

Ab could not support the strain of diplomacy any longer. “Look, lady, you’re wasting your time—it’s as simple as that.”

“It won’t be the first time,” Joel Beck replied complacently. “You might almost say that that’s what I’m paid to do.” She unslung her recorder. “If you’d just answer one or two more questions, give me a few more details of what you actually do, possibly we’ll come up with a handle for a more general story. Then even if that call does come I could go up with you and look over your shoulder.”

“Who would be interested?” With growing astonishment Ab realized that she did not so much resist his arguments as simply ignore them.

While Joel Beck was explaining the intrinsic fascination of death to the readers of the Times (not a morbid fascination but the universal human response to a universal human fact), the call came from Chapel.

He had done what Ab asked him to.

“Yeah, and?”

It had gone off okay.

“Is it official yet?”

It wasn’t. There was no one in the ward.

“Couldn’t you, uh, mention the matter to someone who can make it official?”

The Times woman was poking about the morgue, fingering things, pretending not to eavesdrop. Ab felt she could decipher his generalities. His first confession had been the same kind of nightmare, with Ab certain all his classmates lined up outside the confessional had overheard the sins the priest had pried out of him. If she hadn’t been listening he could have tried to bully Chapel into…

He’d hung up. It was just as well.

“Was that the call?” she asked.

“No. Something else, a private matter.”

So she kept at him with more questions about the ovens, and whether relatives ever came in to watch, and how long it took, until the desk called to say there was a driver from Macy’s trying to bring a body into the hospital and should they let him?

“Hold him right there. I’m on my way.”

“That was the call,” Joel Beck said, genuinely disappointed.

“Mm. I’ll be right back.”

The driver, flustered, started in with some story why he was late.

“It’s skin off your ass, not mine. Never mind that anyhow. There’s a reporter in my office from the Times— ”

“I knew,” the driver said. “It’s not enough I’m going to be fired, now you’ve found a way—”

“Listen to me, asshole. This isn’t about the Newman fuckup. And if you don’t panic she never has to know.” He explained about the city desk computer. “So we just won’t let her get any strange ideas, right? Like she might if she saw you hauling one corpse into the morgue and going off with another.”

“Yeah, but…” The driver clutched for his purpose as for a hat that a great wind were lifting from his head. “But they’ll crucify me at Macy’s if I don’t come back with the Newman body! I’m so late already because of the damned—”

“You’ll get the body. You’ll take back both. You can return with the other one later, but the important thing now—”

He felt her hand on his shoulder, bland as a smile.

“I thought you couldn’t have gone too far away. There’s a call for you and I’m afraid you were right: Miss Schaap has died. That is whom you were speaking of?”

Whom! Ab thought with a sudden passion of hatred for the Times and its band of pseudo-intellectuals. Whom!

The Macy’s driver was disappearing toward his cart.

It came to Ab then, the plan of his salvation, whole and entire, the way a masterpiece must come to a great artist, its edges glowing.

“Bob!” Ab called out. “Wait a minute.”

The driver turned halfway round, head bent sideways, an eyebrow raised: who, me?

“Bob, I want you to meet, uh … ”

“Joel Beck.”

“Right. Joel, this is Bob, uh, Bob Newman.” It was, in fact, Samuel Blake. Ab was bad at remembering names.

Samuel Blake and Joel Beck shook hands.

“Bob drives for Macy’s Clinic, the Steven Jay Mandell Memorial Clinic.” he laid one hand on Blake’s shoulder, the other hand on Beck’s. She seemed to become aware of his stump for the first time and flinched. “Do you know anything about cryonics, Miss uh?”

“Beck. No, very little.”

“Mandell was the very first New Yorker to go to the freezers. Bob could tell you all about him, a fantastic story.” He steered them back down the corridor toward the morgue.

“Bob is here right now because of the body they just… Uh.” He remembered too late that you didn’t call them bodies in front of outsiders. “Because of Miss Schaap, that is. Whom,” he added with malicious emphasis, “was insured with Bob’s clinic.” Ab squeezed the driver’s shoulder in lieu of winking.

“Whenever possible, you see, we notify the clinic people, so that they can be here the minute one of their clients terminates. That way there’s not a minute lost. Right, Bob?”

The driver nodded, thinking his way slowly toward the idea Ab had prepared for him. He opened the door to his office, waited for them to go in. “So while I’m upstairs why don’t you and Bob have a talk, Miss Peck. Bob has dozens of incredible stories he can tell you, but you’ll have to be quick. Cause once I’ve got his body down here …” Ab gave the driver a significant look. “… Bob will have to leave.”

It was done as neatly as that. The two people whose curiosity or impatience might still have spoiled the substitution were now clamped to each other like a pair of steel traps, jaw to jaw to jaw to jaw.

He hadn’t considered the elevator situation. During his own shift there were seldom logjams. When there were, carts routed for the morgue were last in line. At 6:15, when the Schaap was finally signed over to him, every elevator arriving on 18 was full of people who’d ridden to the top in order to get a ride to the bottom. It might be an hour before Ab and his cart could find space and the Macy’s driver would certainly not sit still that much longer.

He waited till the hallway was empty, then scooped up the body from the cart. It weighed no more than his own Beno, but even so by the time he’d reached the landing of 12, he was breathing heavy. Halfway down from 5 his knees gave out. (They’d given fair warning but he’d refused to believe he could have gone so soft.) He collapsed with the body still cradled in his arms.

He was helped to his feet by a blond young man in a striped bathrobe many sizes too small. Once Ab was sitting up. the young man tried to assist Frances Schaap to her feet. Ab, gathering his wits, explained that it was just a body. “Hoo-wee, for a minute there, I thought…” He laughed uncertainly at what he’d thought.

Ab felt the body here and there and moved its limbs this way and that, trying to estimate what damage had been done. Without undressing it, this was difficult.

“How about you?” the young man asked, retrieving the cigarette he’d left smoking on a lower step.

“I’m fine.” He rearranged the sheet, lifted the body and started off again. On the third-floor landing he remembered to shout up a thank-you at the young man who’d helped him.

Later, during visiting hours in the ward, Ray said to his friend Charlie, who’d brought in new cassettes from the shop where he worked: “It’s incredible some of the things you see in this hospital.”

“Such as?”

“Well, if I told you you wouldn’t believe.” Then he spoiled his whole build-up by twisting round sideways in bed. He’d forgotten he couldn’t do that.

“How are you feeling?” Charlie asked, after Ray had stopped groaning and making a display. “I mean, in general.”

“Better, the doctors say, but I still can’t piss by myself.” He described the operation of the catheter, and his self-pity made him forget Ab Holt, but later, alone and unable to sleep (for the man in the next bed made bubbling sounds) he couldn’t stop thinking of the dead girl, of how he’d picked her up off the steps, her ruined face and frail, limp hands, and how the fat attendant from the morgue had tested, one by one, her arms and legs, to see what he’d broken.

There was nothing for her in the morgue, Joel had decided, now that the day had yielded its one obit to nullify the nonevent. She phoned back to the desk but neither Darling nor the computer had any suggestions.

She wondered how long it would be before they fired her. Perhaps they thought she would become so demoralized if they kept her on stand-by that she’d leave without a confrontation scene.

Human interest: surely somewhere among the tiers of this labyrinth there was a story for her to bear witness to. Yet wherever she looked she came up against flat, intractable surfaces: Six identical wheelchairs all in a row. A doctor’s name penciled on a door. The shoddiness, the smells. At the better sort of hospitals, where her family would have gone, the raw fact of human frangibility was prettied over with a veneer of cash. Whenever she was confronted, like this, with the undisguised bleeding thing, her first impulse was to avert her eyes, never—like a true journalist—to bend a little closer and even stick a finger in it. Really, they had every reason to give her the sack.

Along one stretch of the labyrinth iron curlicues projected from the walls at intervals. Gas brackets? Yes, for their tips, obscured by layer upon layer of white paint, were nozzle-shaped. They must have dated back to the nineteenth century. She felt the slightest mental tingle.

But no, this was too slim a thread to hang a story from. It was the sort of precious detail one notices when one’s eyes are averted.

She came to a door with the stenciled letters: “Volunteers.” As this had a rather hopeful ring to it, human-interest-wise, she knocked. There was no answer and the door was unlocked. She entered a small unhappy room whose only furniture was a metal filing cabinet. In it was a rag-tag of yellowing mimeographed forms and equipment for making Koffee.

She pulled the cord of the blinds. The dusty louvres opened unwillingly. A dozen yards away cars sped past on the upper level of the East Side Highway. Immediately the whooshing noise of their passage detached itself from the indiscriminate, perpetual humming in her ears. Below the highway a slice of oily river darkened with the darkening of the spring sky, and below this a second stream of traffic moved south.

She got the blinds up and tried the window. It opened smoothly. A breeze touched the ends of the scarf knotted into her braids as she leaned forward.

There, not twenty feet below, was her story, the absolutely right thing: in a triangle formed by a feeder ramp to the highway and the building she was in and a newer building in the bony style of the ’70’s was the loveliest vacant lot she’d ever seen, a perfect little garden of knee-high weeds. It was a symbol: of Life struggling up out of the wasteland of the modern world, of Hope…

No, that was too easy. But some meaning, a whisper, did gleam up to her from this patch of weeds (she wondered what their names were; at the library there would probably be a book …), as sometimes in Tender Buttons the odd pairing of two ordinary words would generate similar flickerings poised at the very threshold of the intelligible. Like:

An elegant use of foliage and grace and a little piece of white cloth and oil.

Or, more forcibly: A blind agitation is manly and uttermost.

4

The usual cirrus at the horizon of pain had thickened to a thunder-head. Sleepless inside a broken unit in the annex to Emergency, he stared at the red bulb above the door, trying to think the pain away. It persisted and grew, not only in his shoulder but in his fingers sometimes, or his knees, less a pain than an awareness that pain were possible, a far-off insistent jingling like phone calls traveling up to his head from some incredible lost continent, a South America full of dreadful news.

It was the lack of sleep, he decided, since having an explanation helped. Even this wakefulness would have been tolerable if he could have filled his head with something besides his own thoughts—a program, checkers, talk, the job….

The job? It was almost time to clock in. With a goal established he had only to whip himself toward it. Stand: he could do that. Walk to the door: and this was possible though he distrusted his arrhythmic legs. Open it: he did.

The glare of Emergency edged every common place with a sudden, awful crispness, as though he were seeing it all raw and naked with the skin peeled back to show the veins and muscles. He wanted to return to the darkness and come out through the door again into the average everydayness he remembered.

Halfway across the distance to the next door he had to detour about a pair of DOA’s, anonymous and neuter beneath their sheets. Emergency, of course, received more bodies than actual patients, all the great city’s gore. Memories of the dead lasted about as long as a good shirt, the kind he’d brought back before prison.

A pain formed at the base of his back, rode up the elevator of his spine, and stepped off. Braced in the doorframe (sweat collected into drops on his shaved scalp and zigzagged down to his neck), he waited for the pain to return but there was nothing left but the faraway jingle jingle jingle that he would not answer.

He hurried to the duty room before anything else could happen. Once he was clocked in he felt protected. He even swung his left arm round in its socket as a kind of invocation to the demon of his usual pain.

Steinberg looked up from her crossword puzzle. “You all right?”

Chapel froze. Beyond the daily rudenesses that a position of authority demands, Steinberg never talked to those under her. Her shyness, she called it. “You don’t look well.”

Chapel studied the wordless crossword of the tiled floor, repeated, though not aloud, his explanation: that he had not slept. Inside him a tiny gnat of anger hatched and buzzed against this woman staring at him, though she had no right to, she was not actually his boss. Was she still staring? He would not look up.

His feet sat side by side on the tiles, cramped and prisoned in six-dollar shoes, deformed, inert. He’d gone to the beach with a woman once and walked shoeless in the heated, glittering dust. Her feet had been as ugly as his, but…

He clamped his knees together and covered them with his hands, trying to blot out the memory of…

But it seeped back from places inside in tiny premonitory droplets of pain. Steinberg gave him a slip. Someone from ‘M’ was routed to a Surgery on 5. “And move,” she called out after him.

Behind his cart he had no sense of his speed, whether fast or slow. It distressed him how this muscle, then that muscle, jerked and yanked, the way the right thigh heaved up and then the left thigh, the way the feet, in their heavy shoes, came down against the hard floors with no more flexion than the blades of skates.

He’d wanted to chop her head off. He’d often seen this done, on programs. he would lie beside her night after night, both of them insomniac but never talking, and think of the giant steel blade swooping down from its superb height and separating head and body, until the sound of this incessantly imagined flight blended into the repeated zoom zim zoom of the cars passing on the expressway below, and he slept.

The boy in “M” ward didn’t need help sliding over onto the cart. He was the dunnest shade of black, all muscles and bounce and nervous, talky terror.

Chapel had standard routines worked out for his type.

“You’re a tall one,” it began.

“No, you got it backwards—it’s your wagon that’s too short.”

“How tall are you anyhow? Six two?”

“Six four.”

Reaching his punch line, Chapel made a laugh. “Ha, ha, I could use those four inches for myself!” (Chapel stood 5′ 7″ in his shoes.)

Usually they laughed with him, but this one had a comeback. “Well, you tell them that upstairs and maybe they’ll accommodate you.”

“What?”

“The surgeons—they’re the boys that can do it.” The boy laughed at what was now his joke, while Chapel sank back into a wounded silence.

“Arnold Chapel,” a voice over the PA said. “Please return along ‘K’ corridor to ‘K’ elevator bank. Arnold Chapel, please return along ‘K’ corridor to ‘K ‘ elevator bank.”

Obediently he reversed the cart and returned to “K” elevator bank. His identification badge had cued the traffic control system. It had been years since the computer had had to correct him out loud.

He rolled the cart into the elevator. Inside, the boy repeated his joke about the four inches to a student nurse.

The elevator said, “Five.”

Chapel rolled the cart out. Now, right or left? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t breathe.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” the boy said.

“I need …” He lifted his left hand towards his lips. Everything he looked at seemed to be at right angles to everything else, like the inside of a gigantic machine. He backed away from the cart.

“Are you all right?” He was swinging his legs down over the side.

Chapel ran down the corridor. Since he was going in the direction of the Surgery to which the cart had been routed the traffic control system did not correct him. Each time he inhaled he felt hundreds of tiny hypodermic darts penetrate his chest and puncture his lungs.

“Hey!” a doctor yelled. “Hey!”

Into another corridor, and there, as providentially as if he’d been programmed right to its door, was a staff toilet. The room was flooded with a calm blue light.

He entered one of the stalls and pulled the door, an old door made of dark wood, shut behind him. He knelt down beside the white basin, in which a skin of water quivered with eager, electric designs. He dipped his cupped fingers into the bowl and dabbled his forehead with cool water. Everything fell away—anger, pain, pity, every possible feeling he’d ever heard of or seen enacted. He’d always expected, and then braced against, some eventual retribution, a shotgun blast at the end of the long, white corridor of being alive. It was such a relief to know he had been wrong.

The doctor, or was it the boy routed to surgery, had come into the toilet and was knocking on the wooden door. Neatly and as though on cue, he vomited. Long strings of blood came out with the pulped food.

He stood up, zipped, and pushed open the door. It was the boy, not the doctor.

“I’m better now,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m feeling fine.”

The boy climbed back onto the cart, which he’d wheeled himself all this way, and Chapel pushed him around the corner and down the hall to Surgery.

Ab had felt it in his arms and his hands, a power of luck, as though when he leaned forward to flip over each card his fingers could read through the plastic to know whether it was, whether it wasn’t the diamond he needed to make his flush.

It wasn’t.

It wasn’t.

It wasn’t.

As it turned out, he needn’t have bothered. Martinez got the pot with a full house.

He had lost as much blood as he comfortably could, so he sat out the next hands munching Nibblies and gassing with the bar decoration, who was also the croupier. It was said she had a third interest in the club, but so dumb, could she? She was a yesser and yessed everything Ab cared to say. Nice breasts though, always damp and sticking to her blouses.

Martinez folded after only his third card and joined Ab at the bar. “How’d you do it, Lucky?” he jeered.

“Fuck off. I started out lucky enough.”

“A familiar story.”

“What are you worried—I won’t pay you back?”

“I’m not worried, I’m not worried.” He dropped a five on the bar and ordered sangria, one for the big winner, one for the big loser, and one for the most beautiful, the most successful businesswoman on West Houston, and so out into the heat and the stink.

“Some ass?” Martinez asked.

What with, Ab wanted to know.

“Be my guest. If I’d lost what you lost, you’d do as much for me.”

This was doubly irking, one, because Martinez, who played a dull careful game with sudden flashes of insane bluffing, never did worse than break even, and two, because it wasn’t true—Ab would not have done as much for him or anyone. On the other hand, he was hungry for something more than what he’d find at home in the icebox.

“Sure. Okay.”

“Shall we walk there?”

Seven o’clock, the last Wednesday in May. It was Martinez’s day off, while Ab was just sandwiching his excitement in between clock-out and clock-in with the assistance of some kind green pills.

Each time they passed one of the crosstown streets (which were named down here instead of numbered) the round red eye of the sun had sunk a fraction nearer the blur of Jersey. In the subway gallery below Canal they stopped for a beer.

The sting of the day’s losses faded, and the moon of next-time rose in the sky. When they came up again it was the violet before night, and the real moon was there waving at them. A population of how many now? Seventy-five?

A jet went past, coming in low for the Park, winking a jittery rhythm of red, red, green, red, from tail and wing tips. Ab wondered whether Milly might be on it. Was she due in tonight?

“Look at it this way, Ab,” Martinez said. “You’re still paying for last month’s luck.”

He had to think, and then he had to ask, “What luck last month?”

“The switch. Jesus, I didn’t think any of us were going to climb out from under that without getting burnt.”

“Oh, that.” He approached the memory tentatively, not sure the scar tissue was firm yet. “It was tight, all right.” A laugh, which rang half-true. The scar had healed, he went on. “There was one moment though at the end when I thought I’d flushed the whole thing down the toilet. See, I had the Identi-Band from the first body, what’s-her-name’s. It was the only thing I got from that asshole White. … ”

“That fucking White,” Martinez agreed.

“Yeah. But I was so panicked after that spill on the stairs that I forgot, see, to change them, the two bands, so I sent off the Schaap body like it was.”

“Oh Mary Mother, that would have done it!”

“I remembered before the driver got away. So I got out there with the Newman band and made up some story about how we print up different bands when we send them out to the freezers than when one goes to the oven.”

“Did he believe that?”

Ab shrugged. “He didn’t argue.”

“You don’t think he ever figured out what happened that day?”

“That guy? He’s as dim as Chapel.”

“Yeah, what about Chapel?” There if anywhere, Martinez had thought, Ab had laid himself open.

“What about him?”

“You told me you were going to pay him off. Did you?”

Ab tried to find some spit in his mouth. “I paid him off all right” Then, lacking the spit: “Jesus Christ.”

Martinez waited.

“I offered him a hundred dollars. One hundred smackers. You know what that dumb bastard wanted?”

“Five hundred?”

“Nothing! Nothing at all. He even argued about it. Didn’t want to get his hands dirty, I suppose. My money wasn’t good enough for him.”

“So?”

“So we reached a compromise. He took fifty.” He made a comic face.

Martinez laughed. “It was a damned lucky thing, that’s all I’ll say, Ab. Damned lucky.”

They were quiet along the length of the old police station. Despite the green pills Ab felt himself coming down, but ever so gently down. He entered pink cloudbanks of philosophy.

“Hey, Martinez, you ever think about that stuff? The freezing business and all that.”

“I’ve thought about it, sure. I’ve thought it’s a lot of bullshit.”

“You don’t think there’s a chance then that any of them ever will be brought back to life?”

“Of course not. Didn’t you see that documentary they were making all the uproar over, and suing NBC? No, that freezing doesn’t stop anything, it just slows it down. They’ll all just be so many little ice cubes eventually. Might as well try bringing them back from the smoke in the stacks.”

“But if science could find a way to … Oh, I don’t know. It’s complicated by lots of things.”

“Are you thinking of putting money into one of those damned policies, Ab? For Christ’s sake, I would have thought that you had more brains than that. The other day my wife …” He rolled his eyes blackamoor-style. “It’s not in our league, believe me.”

“That’s not what I was thinking at all.”

“So? Then? I’m no mind-reader.”

“I was wondering, if they ever do find a way to bring them back, and if they find a cure for lupus and all that, well, what if they brought her back?”

“The Schaap?”

“Yeah. Wouldn’t that be crazy? What would she think anyhow?”

“Yeah, what a joke.”

“No, seriously.”

“I don’t get the point, seriously.”

Ab tried to explain but he didn’t see the point now himself. He could picture the scene in his mind so clearly: the girl, her skin made smooth again, lying on a table of white stone, breathing, but so faintly that only the doctor standing over her could be sure. His hand would touch her face and her eyes would open and there would be such a look of astonishment.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Martinez said, in a half-angry tone, for he didn’t like to see anyone believing in something he couldn’t believe in, “it’s just a kind of religion.”

Since Ab could recall having said almost the same thing to Leda, he was able to agree. They were only a couple blocks from the baths by then, so there were better uses for the imagination. But before the last of the cloudbank had quite vanished, he got in one last word for philosophy. “One way or another, Martinez, life goes on. Say what you like, it goes on.”