The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Under the Weather

I’ve been having this bad dream for a week now, but it must be one of the lucid ones, because I’m always able to back out before it turns into a nightmare. Only this time it seems to have followed me, because Ellen and I aren’t alone. There’s something under the bed. I can hear it chewing.

You know how it is when you’re really scared? Sure you do. I mean, it’s pretty universal. Your heart seems to stop, your mouth dries up, your skin goes cold and goosebumps rise all over your body. Instead of meshing, the cogs in your head just spin. I almost scream, I really do. I think, It’s the thing I don’t want to look at. It’s the thing in the window seat.

Then I see the fan overhead, the blades turning at their slowest speed. I see a crack of early-morning light running down the middle of the pulled drapes. I see the graying milkweed fluff of Ellen’s hair on the other side of the bed. I’m here on the Upper East Side, fifth floor, and everything’s okay. The dream was just a dream. As for what’s under the bed—

I toss back the covers and slide down to my knees, like a man who means to pray. But instead of that, I lift the flounce and peer under the bed. I only see a dark shape at first. Then the shape’s head turns and two eyes gleam at me. It’s Lady. She’s not supposed to be under there, and I guess she knows it (hard to tell what a dog knows and what it doesn’t), but I must have left the door open when I came to bed. Or maybe it didn’t quite latch and she pushed it open with her snout. She must have brought one of her toys with her from the basket in the hall. At least it wasn’t the blue bone or the red rat. Those have squeakers in them, and would have wakened Ellen for sure. And Ellen needs her rest. She’s been under the weather.

‘Lady,’ I whisper. ‘Come out of there.’

She only looks at me. She’s getting on in years and not so steady on her pins as she used to be, but she’s not stupid. She’s under Ellen’s side, where I can’t reach her. If I raise my voice she’ll have to come, but she knows (I’m pretty sure she knows) that I won’t do that, because if I raise my voice, it will wake Ellen for sure.

As if to prove this, Lady turns away from me and the chewing recommences.

Well, I can handle that. I’ve been living with Lady for thirteen years, nearly half my married life. There are three things that get her on her feet. One is the rattle of her leash and a call of ‘Elevator!’ Another is the thump of her food dish on the floor. The third—

I get up and walk down the short hall to the kitchen. From the cupboard I take the bag of Snackin’ Slices, making sure to rattle it. I don’t have to wait long for the muted clitter of cocker claws. Five seconds and she’s right there. She doesn’t even bother to bring her toy.

I offer her one of the little carrot-shapes, then toss it into the living room. A little mean, maybe, but the fat old thing can use the exercise. She chases her treat. I linger long enough to start the coffeemaker, then go back into the bedroom. I’m careful to pull the door all the way shut.

Ellen’s still sleeping, and waking up before she does has one benefit: no need for the alarm. I turn it off. Let her sleep a little later. It’s a bronchial infection. I was scared for awhile there, but now she’s on the mend.

I go into the bathroom and officially christen the day by brushing my teeth (I’ve read that in the morning a person’s mouth is as germicidally dead as it ever gets, but the habits we learn as children are hard to break). I turn on the shower, get it good and hot, and step in.

The shower’s where I do my best thinking, and this morning I think about the dream. Five nights in a row I’ve had it. (But who’s counting, right?) Nothing really awful happens in this dream, but in a way that’s the worst part. Because I know – absolutely, positively – that something awful will happen. If I let it.

I’m in an airplane, in business class. I’m in an aisle seat, which is where I prefer to be, so I don’t have to squeeze past anybody if I have to go to the toilet. My tray-table is down. On it are a bag of peanuts and an orange drink that looks like a Vodka Sunrise, a drink I’ve never ordered in real life. The ride is smooth. If there are clouds, we’re above them. The cabin is filled with sunlight. Someone is sitting in the window seat, and I know if I look at him (or her, or possibly it), I’ll see something that will turn my bad dream into a nightmare. If I look into the face of my seatmate, I may lose my mind. It could crack open like an egg and a tide of bloody darkness might pour out.

I give my soapy hair a quick rinse, step out, dry off. My clothes are folded on a chair in the bedroom. I take them and my shoes into the kitchen, which is now filling with the smell of coffee. Nice. Lady’s curled up by the stove, looking at me reproachfully.

‘Don’t go giving me the stink-eye,’ I tell her, and nod toward the closed bedroom door. ‘You know the rules.’

She puts her snout down between her paws and pretends to sleep, but I know she’s still looking at me.

I choose cranberry juice while I wait for the coffee. There’s OJ, which is my usual morning drink, but I don’t want it. Too much like the drink in the dream, I suppose. I have my coffee in the living room with CNN on mute, just reading the crawl at the bottom, which is all a person really needs. Then I turn it off and have a bowl of All-Bran. Quarter to eight. I decide that if the day is nice when I take Lady out, I’ll skip the cab and walk to work.

It’s nice, all right, spring edging into summer and a shine on everything. Carlo, the doorman, is under the awning, talking on his cell phone. ‘Yuh,’ he says. ‘Yuh, I finally got hold of her. She says go ahead, no problem as long as I’m there. She don’t trust nobody, for which I don’t blame her. She got a lot of nice things up there. You come when? Three? You can’t make it earlier?’ He tips me a wave with one white-gloved hand as I walk Lady down to the corner.

We’ve got this down to a science, Lady and I. She does it at pretty much the same place every day, and I’m fast with the poop bag. When I come back, Carlo stoops to give her a pat. Lady waves her tail back and forth most fetchingly, but no treat is forthcoming from Carlo. He knows she’s on a diet. Or supposed to be.

‘I finally got hold of Mrs Warshawski,’ Carlo tells me. Mrs Warshawski is in Five-C, but only technically. She’s been gone for a couple of months now. ‘She was in Vienna.’

‘Vienna, is that so,’ I say.

‘She told me to go ahead with the exterminators. She was horrified when I told her. You’re the only one on Four, Five, or Six who hasn’t complained. The rest of them …’ He shakes his head and makes a whoo sound.

‘I grew up in a Connecticut mill town. It pretty well wrecked my sinuses. I can smell coffee, and Ellie’s perfume if she puts it on thick, but that’s about all.’

‘In this case, that’s probably a blessing. How is Mrs Franklin? Still under the weather?’

‘It’ll be a few more days before she’s ready to go back to work, but she’s a hell of a lot better. She gave me a scare for a while.’

‘Me too. She was going out one day – in the rain, naturally—’

‘That’s El,’ I say. ‘Nothing stops her. If she feels like she has to go somewhere, she goes.’

‘—and I thought to myself, “That’s a real graveyard cough.”’ He raises one gloved hand in a stop gesture. ‘Not that I really thought—’

‘I get it,’ I said. ‘It was on the way to being a stay-in-the-hospital cough, for sure. But I finally got her to see the doctor, and now … road to recovery.’

‘Good. Good.’ Then, returning to what’s really on his mind: ‘Mrs Warshawski was pretty grossed out when I told her. I said we’d probably just find some spoiled food in the fridge, but I know it’s worse than that. So does anybody else on those floors with an intact smeller.’ He gives a grim little nod. ‘They’re going to find a dead rat in there, you mark my words. Food stinks, but not like that. Only dead things stink like that. It’s a rat, all right, maybe a couple of them. Mrs W. probably put down poison and don’t want to admit it.’ He bends down to give Lady another pat. ‘You smell it, don’t you, girl? You bet you do.’

There’s a litter of purple notes around the coffeemaker. I take the purple pad they came from to the kitchen table and write another.

Ellen: Lady all walked. Coffee ready. If you feel well enough to go out to the park, go! Just not too far. Don’t want you to overdo now that you’re finally on the mend. Carlo told me again that he ‘smells a rat.’ I guess so does everyone else in the neighborhood of 5-C. Lucky for us that you’re plugged up and I’m ‘nasally challenged.’ Haha! If you hear people down the hall, it’s the exterminators. Carlo will be with them, so don’t worry. I’m going to walk to work. Need to think some more about the latest male wonder drug. Wish they’d consulted us before they hung that name on it. Remember, DON’T OVERDO. Love you-love you.

I jot half a dozen xs just to underline the point, and sign it with a B in a heart. Then I add it to the other notes around the coffeemaker. I refill Lady’s water dish before I leave.

It’s twenty blocks or so, and I don’t think about the latest male wonder drug. I think about the exterminators, who will be coming at three. Earlier, if they can make it.

The dreams have interrupted my sleep cycle, I guess, because I almost fall asleep during the morning meeting in the conference room. But I come around in a hurry when Pete Wendell shows a mock-up poster for the new Petrov Excellent campaign. I’ve seen it already, on his office computer while he was fooling with it last week, and looking at it again I know where at least one element of my dream came from.

‘Petrov Excellent Vodka,’ Aura McLean says. Her wonderful breasts rise and fall in a theatrical sigh. ‘If that name’s an example of the new Russian capitalism, it’s dead on arrival.’ The heartiest laughter at this comes from the younger men, who’d like to see Aura’s long blond hair spread on a pillow next to them. ‘No offense to you intended, Pete. Petrov Excellent aside, it’s a great leader.’

‘None taken,’ Pete says with a game smile. ‘We do what we can.’

The poster shows a couple toasting each other on a balcony while the sun sinks over a harbor filled with expensive pleasure boats. The cutline beneath reads SUNSET. THE PERFECT TIME FOR A VODKA SUNRISE.

There’s some discussion about the placement of the Petrov bottle – right? left? center? below? – and Frank Bernstein suggests that actually adding the recipe might prolong the page-view, especially for webvertising and in mags like Playboy and Esquire. I tune out, thinking about the drink sitting on the tray in my airplane dream, until I realize George Slattery is calling on me. I’m able to replay the question, and that’s a good thing. You don’t ask George to chew his cabbage twice.

‘I’m actually in the same boat as Pete,’ I say. ‘The client picked the name, I’m just doing what I can.’

There’s some good-natured laughter. There have been many jokes about Vonnell Pharmaceutical’s newest drug product.

‘I may have something to show you by Monday,’ I tell them. I’m not exactly looking at George, but he knows where I’m aiming. ‘By the middle of next week for sure. I want to give Billy a chance to see what he can do.’ Billy Ederle is our newest hire, and doing his break-in time as my assistant. He doesn’t get an invite to the morning meetings yet, but I like him. Everybody at Andrews-Slattery likes him. He’s bright, he’s eager, and I bet he’ll start shaving in a year or two.

George considers this. ‘I was really hoping to see a treatment today. Even rough copy.’

Silence. People study their nails. It’s as close to a public rebuke as George ever gets, and maybe I deserve it. This hasn’t been my best week, and laying it off on the kid doesn’t look so good. It doesn’t feel so good, either.

‘Okay,’ George says at last, and you can feel the relief in the room. It’s like a light cool breath of breeze, there and then gone. No one wants to witness a conference-room caning on a sunny Friday morning, and I sure don’t want to get one. Too much other stuff on my mind.

George smells a rat, I think.

‘How’s Ellen doing?’ he asks.

‘Better,’ I tell him. ‘Thanks for asking.’

There are a few more presentations. Then it’s over. Thank God.

I’m almost dozing when Billy comes into my office twenty minutes later. Check that: I am dozing. I sit up fast, hoping the kid thinks he caught me deep in thought. He’s probably too excited to have noticed either way. In one hand he’s holding a piece of poster board. I think he’d look right at home in Podunk High School, putting up a big notice about the Friday-night dance.

‘How was the meeting?’ he asks.

‘It was okay.’

‘Did they bring us up?’

‘You know they did. What have you got for me, Billy?’

He takes a deep breath and turns his poster board around so I can see it. On the left is a prescription bottle of Viagra, either actual size or close enough not to matter. On the right – the power side of the ad, as anyone in advertising will tell you – is a prescription bottle of our stuff, but much bigger. Beneath is the cutline: PO-TENS, TEN TIMES MORE EFFECTIVE THAN VIAGRA!

As Billy looks at me looking at it, his hopeful smile starts to fade. ‘You don’t like it.’

‘It’s not a question of like or don’t like. In this business it never is. It’s a question of what works and what doesn’t. This doesn’t.’

Now he’s looking sulky. If George Slattery saw that look, he’d unload. I won’t, although it might feel that way to him because it’s my job to teach him. In spite of everything else on my mind, I’ll try to do that. Because I love this business. It gets very little respect, but I love it anyway. Also, I can hear Ellen say, you don’t let go, babe. Once you get your teeth in something, they stay there. Determination like that can be a little scary.

‘Sit down, Billy.’

He sits.

‘And wipe that pout off your puss. You look like a kid who just dropped his binky in the toilet.’

He does his best. Which I like about him. Kid’s a trier, and if he’s going to work in the Andrews-Slattery shop, he’d better be. Of course, he also has to be a doer.

‘Good news is I’m not taking it away from you, mostly because it’s not your fault Vonnell Pharmaceutical saddled us with a name that sounds like a multivitamin. But we’re going to make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear. In advertising, that’s the main job seven times out of every ten. Maybe eight. So pay attention.’

He gets a little grin. ‘Should I take notes?’

‘Don’t be a smartikins. First, when you’re shouting a drug, you never show a prescription bottle. The logo, sure. The pill itself, sometimes. It depends. You know why Pfizer shows the Viagra pill? Because it’s blue. Consumers like blue. The shape helps, too. Consumers have a very positive response to the shape of the Viagra tab. But people never like to see the prescription bottle their stuff comes in. Prescription bottles make them think of sickness. Got that?’

‘So maybe a little Viagra pill and a big Po-TENS pill? Instead of the bottles?’ He raises his hands, framing an invisible cutline. ‘“Po-TENS, ten times bigger, ten times better.” Get it?’

‘Yes, Billy, I get it. The FDA will get it, too, and they won’t like it. In fact, they could make us take ads with a cutline like that out of circulation, which would cost a bundle. Not to mention a very good client.’

‘Why?’ It’s almost a bleat.

‘Because it isn’t ten times bigger, and it isn’t ten times better. Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, Po-TENS, they all have about the same effectiveness when it comes to penis elevation. Do your research, kiddo. And a little refresher course in advertising law wouldn’t hurt. Want to say Blowhard’s Bran Muffins are ten times tastier than Bigmouth’s Bran Muffins? Have at it, taste is a subjective judgment. What gets your prick hard, though, and for how long …’

‘Okay,’ he says in a small voice.

‘Here’s the other half. “Ten times more” anything is – speaking in erectile dysfunction terms – pretty limp. It went out of vogue around the same time as Two Cs in a K.’

He looks blank.

‘It’s how advertising guys used to refer to their TV ads on the soaps back in the fifties. Stands for two cunts in a kitchen.’

‘You’re joking!’

‘Nope. Now here’s something I’ve been playing with.’ I jot on a pad, and for a moment I think of all those notes scattered around the coffeemaker back in good old 5-B – why are they still there?

‘Can’t you just tell me?’ the kid asks from a thousand miles away.

‘No, because advertising isn’t an oral medium. Never trust an ad that’s spoken out loud. Write it down and show it to someone. Show it to your best friend. Or your … you know, your wife.’

‘Are you okay, Brad?’

‘Fine. Why?’

‘I don’t know, you just looked funny for a minute.’

‘Just as long as I don’t look funny when I present on Monday. Now – what does this say to you?’ I turn the pad around and show him what I’ve printed there: PO-TENS … FOR MEN WHO WANT TO DO IT THE HARD WAY.

‘It’s like a dirty joke!’ he objects.

‘You’ve got a point, but I’ve printed it in block caps. Imagine it in a soft italic type. Or maybe small, in parentheses. Like a secret.’ I add the parens, although they don’t work with the caps. But they will. It’s a thing I just know, because I can see it. ‘Now, playing off that, think of a photo showing a big burly guy. In low-slung jeans that show the top of his underwear. And a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, let’s say. See him with some grease and dirt on his guns.’

‘Guns?’

‘His biceps. And he’s standing beside a muscle car with the hood up. Now, is it still a dirty joke?’

‘I … I don’t know.’

‘Neither do I, not for sure, but my gut tells me it’ll pull the plow. But not yet. The cutline still doesn’t work, you’re right about that, and it’s got to, because it’ll be the basis of the TV and ’Net ads. So play with it. Make it work. Just remember the key word …’

Suddenly, just like that, I know where the rest of that damn dream came from. It snaps into place.

‘Brad?’

‘The key word is hard,’ I say. ‘Because a man … when something’s not working – his prick, his plan, his life – he takes it hard. He doesn’t want to give up. He remembers how it was, and he wants it that way again.’

Yes, I think. He sure does.

Billy smirks. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

I manage a smile. It feels godawful heavy, as if there are weights hanging from the corners of my mouth. All at once it’s like being in the bad dream again. Because there’s something close to me I don’t want to look at. Only this isn’t a lucid dream I can back out of.

This is lucid reality.

After Billy leaves, I go to the can. It’s ten o’clock, most of the guys in the shop have offloaded their morning coffee and are taking on more in our little break room, so I have the shithouse to myself. I drop my pants so if someone wanders in and happens to look under the door he won’t think I’m weird, but the only business I’ve come in here to do is thinking.

Four years after coming on board at Andrews-Slattery, the Fasprin Pain Reliever account landed on my desk. I’ve had some special ones over the years, some breakouts, and that was the first. It happened fast. I opened the sample box, took out the bottle, and the basis of the campaign – what admen sometimes call the heartwood – came to me in an instant. I ditzed around a little, of course – you don’t want to make it look too easy – then did some comps. Ellen helped. This was just after we found out she couldn’t have babies. It was something to do with a drug she’d been given when she had rheumatic fever as a kid. She was pretty depressed. Helping with the Fasprin comps took her mind off it, and she really threw herself into the thing.

Al Peterson was still running things back then, and he was the one I took the comps to. I remember sitting in front of his desk in the sweat seat with my heart in my mouth as he shuffled slowly through the comps we’d worked up. When he finally put them down and raised his shaggy old head to look at me, the pause seemed to go on for at least an hour. Then he said, ‘These are good, Bradley. More than good, terrific. We’ll meet with the client tomorrow afternoon. You do the prez.’

I did the prez, and when the Dugan Drug VP saw the picture of the young working woman with the bottle of Fasprin poking out of her rolled-up sleeve, he flipped for it. The campaign brought Fasprin right up there with the big boys – Bayer, Anacin, Bufferin – and by the end of the year we were handling the whole Dugan account. Billing? Seven figures. Not a low seven, either.

I used the bonus to take Ellen to Nassau for ten days. We left from Kennedy, on a morning that was pelting down rain, and I still remember how she laughed and cried ‘Kiss me, beautiful’ when the plane broke through the clouds and the cabin filled with sunlight. I did kiss her, and the couple on the other side of the aisle – we were flying in business class – applauded.

That was the best. The worst came half an hour later, when I turned to her and for a moment thought she was dead. It was the way she was sleeping, with her head cocked over on her shoulder and her mouth open and her hair kind of sticking to the window. She was young, we both were, but the idea of sudden death had a hideous possibility in Ellen’s case.

‘They used to call your condition “barren,” Mrs Franklin,’ the doctor said when he gave us the bad news, ‘but in this case, your inability to conceive could be a blessing. Pregnancy puts a strain on the heart, and thanks to a disease that was badly treated when you were a child, yours isn’t strong. If you did happen to conceive, you’d be in bed for the last four months of the pregnancy, and even then the outcome would be dicey.’

She wasn’t pregnant when we left on that trip, and her last checkup had been fine, but the climb up to cruising altitude had been plenty rough … and she didn’t look like she was breathing.

Then she opened her eyes. I settled back into my aisle seat, letting out a long and shaky breath.

She looked at me, puzzled. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. The way you were sleeping, that’s all.’

She wiped at her chin. ‘Oh God, did I drool?’

‘No.’ I laughed. ‘But for a minute there you looked … well, dead.’

She laughed too. ‘And if I was, you’d ship the body back to New York, I suppose, and take up with some Bahama Mama.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’d take you, anyway.’

‘What?’

‘Because I wouldn’t accept it. No way would I.’

‘You’d have to after a few days. I’d get all smelly.’

She was smiling. She thought it was still a game, because she hadn’t really understood what the doctor was telling her that day. She hadn’t – as the saying goes – taken it all the way to the heartwood. And she didn’t know how she’d looked, with the sun shining on her winter-pale cheeks and smudged eyelids and slack mouth. But I’d seen, and I’d taken it to the heartwood. She was my heart, and I guard what’s there. Nobody takes it away from me.

‘You wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘I’d keep you alive.’

‘Really? How? Necromancy?’

‘By refusing to give up. And by using an adman’s most valuable asset.’

‘Which is what, Mr Fasprin?’

‘Imagination. Now can we talk about something more pleasant?’

The call I’ve been expecting comes around three thirty. It’s not Carlo. It’s Berk Ostrow, the building super. He wants to know what time I’m going to be home, because the rat everybody’s been smelling isn’t in 5-C, it’s in our apartment. Ostrow says the exterminators have to leave by four to get to another job, but that isn’t the important thing. What’s important is fixing what’s wrong in there and by the way, Carlo says no one’s seen your wife in over a week. Just you and the dog.

I explain about my deficient sense of smell, and Ellen’s bronchitis. In her current condition, I say, she wouldn’t know the drapes were on fire until the smoke detector went off. I’m sure Lady smells it, I tell him, but to a dog, the stench of a decaying rat probably smells like Chanel No. 5.

‘I get all that, Mr Franklin, but I still need to get in there to see what’s what. And the exterminators will have to be called back. I think you’re probably going to be on the hook for their bill, which is apt to be quite high. I could let myself in with the passkey, but I’d really be more comfortable if you were—’

‘Yes, I’d be more comfortable, too. Not to mention my wife.’

‘I tried calling her, but she didn’t answer the phone.’ I can hear suspicion in his voice now. I’ve explained everything, advertising men are good at that, but the convincing effect only lasts for sixty seconds or so. That’s why you keep hearing the same ads and slogans over and over again: A little dab’ll do ya. Save time, save money. Pepsi, for those who think young. I’m lovin’ it. Breakfast of champions. It’s like driving a nail. Driving it right into the heartwood.

‘She’s probably got the phone on mute. Plus, the medication the doctor gave her makes her sleep quite heavily.’

‘What time will you be home, Mr Franklin? I can stay until seven; after that there’s only Alfredo.’ The disparaging note in his voice suggests I’d be better off dealing with a street weirdo.

Never, I think. I’ll never be home. In fact, I was never there in the first place. Ellen and I enjoyed the Bahamas so much we moved to Cable Beach, and I took a job with a little firm in Nassau. I shout Cruise Ship Specials (‘The Ride is the Destination!’), Stereo Blowout Sales (‘Don’t Just Hear It Better, Hear It Cheaper!’), and supermarket openings (‘Save Under the Palms!’). All this New York stuff has just been a lucid dream, one I can escape at any time.

‘Mr Franklin? Are you there?’

‘Sure. Just thinking. I’ve got one meeting I absolutely can’t miss, but why don’t you meet me in the apartment around six?’

‘How about in the lobby, Mr Franklin? We can go up together.’ In other words, I’m not giving you a head start, Mr Advertising Genius who maybe killed his wife.

I think of asking him how he believes I’d beat him to the apartment and get rid of El’s body – because that is what he’s thinking. Maybe murder is not at the very front of his mind, but it’s not all the way in back, either. Husband-murders-wife is very big on the Lifetime Channel. Maybe he thinks I’d use the service elevator, and stash her body in the box room. Or maybe dump it down the incinerator chute? DIY cremation.

‘The lobby is absolutely okey-fine,’ I say. ‘Six. Quarter of, if I can possibly make it.’

I hang up and head for the elevators. I have to pass the break room to get there. Billy Ederle’s leaning in the doorway, drinking a Nozzy. It’s a remarkably lousy soda, but it’s all we vend. The company’s a client.

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Home. Ellen called. She’s not feeling well.’

‘Don’t you want your briefcase?’

‘No.’ I don’t expect to be needing my briefcase for awhile. In fact, I may never need it again.

‘I’m working on the new Po-TENS direction. I think it’s going to be a winner.’

‘I’m sure,’ I say, and I am. Billy Ederle will soon be movin’ on up, and good for him. ‘I’ve got to get a wiggle on.’

‘Sure, I understand.’ He’s twenty-four and understands nothing. ‘Give her my best.’

We take on half a dozen interns a year at Andrews-Slattery; it’s how Billy Ederle got started. Most are terrific and at first Fred Willits seemed terrific too. I took him under my wing, and so it became my responsibility to fire him – I guess you’d say that, although interns are never actually ‘hired’ in the first place – when it turned out he was a klepto who had decided our supply room was his private game preserve. God knows how much stuff he lifted before Maria Ellington caught him loading reams of paper into his briefcase one afternoon. Turned out he was also a bit of a psycho. He went nuclear when I told him he was through. Pete Wendell called security while the kid was yelling at me in the lobby and had him removed forcibly.

Apparently old Freddy had a lot more to say, because he started hanging around my building and haranguing me when I came home. He kept his distance, though, and the cops claimed he was just exercising his right to free speech. But it wasn’t his mouth I was afraid of. I kept thinking he might have lifted a box-cutter or an X-Acto knife as well as printer cartridges and about fifty reams of copier paper. That was when I got Carlo to give me a key to the service entrance, and I started going in that way. All that was in the fall of the year, September or October. Young Mr Willits gave up and took his issues elsewhere when the days turned cold, but Carlo never asked for the return of the key, and I never gave it back. I guess we both forgot.

That’s why, instead of giving the taxi driver my address, I get him to let me out on the next block. I pay him, adding a generous tip – hey, it’s only money – and then walk down the service alley. I have a bad moment when the key doesn’t work, but when I jigger it a little, it turns. The service elevator has brown quilted movers’ pads hanging from the walls. Previews of the padded cell they’ll put me in, I think, but of course that’s just melodrama. I’ll probably have to take a leave of absence from the shop, and what I’ve done is a lease-breaker for sure, but—

What have I done, exactly?

For that matter, what have I been doing for the last week?

‘Keeping her alive,’ I say as the elevator stops at the fifth floor. ‘Because I couldn’t bear for her to be dead.’

She isn’t dead, I tell myself, just under the weather. It sucks as a cutline, but for the last week it has served me very well, and in the advertising biz the short term is all that counts.

I let myself in. The air is still and warm, but I don’t smell anything. So I tell myself, anyway, and in the advertising biz, imagination is also what counts.

‘Honey, I’m home,’ I call. ‘Are you awake? Feeling any better?’

I guess I forgot to close the bedroom door before I left this morning, because Lady slinks out. She’s licking her chops. She gives me a guilty glance, then waddles into the living room with her tail tucked way down low. She doesn’t look back.

‘Honey? El?’

I go into the bedroom. There’s still nothing to be seen of her but the milkweed fluff of her hair and the shape of her body under the quilt. The quilt is slightly rumpled, so I know she’s been up – if only to have some coffee – and then gone back to bed again. It was last Friday when I came home and she wasn’t breathing and since then she’s been sleeping a lot.

I go around to her side and see her hand hanging down. There’s not much left of it but bones and strips of flesh. I gaze at this and think there’s two ways of seeing it. Look at it one way, and I’ll probably have to have my dog – Ellen’s dog, really, Lady always loved Ellen best – euthanized. Look at it another and you could say Lady got worried and was trying to wake her up. Come on, Ellie, I want to go to the park. Come on, Ellie, let’s play with my toys.

I tuck the reduced hand under the sheets. That way it won’t get cold. Then I wave away some flies. I can’t remember ever seeing flies in our apartment before. They probably smelled that dead rat Carlo was talking about.

‘You know Billy Ederle?’ I say. ‘I gave him a slant on that damn Po-TENS account, and I think he’s going to run with it.’

Nothing from Ellen.

‘You can’t be dead,’ I say. ‘That’s unacceptable.’

Nothing from Ellen.

‘Do you want coffee?’ I glance at my watch. ‘Something to eat? We’ve got chicken soup. Just the kind that comes in the pouches, but it’s not bad when it’s hot.’ Not bad when it’s hot, what a lousy slogan that would be. ‘What do you say, El?’

She says nothing.

‘All right,’ I say. ‘That’s all right. Remember when we went to the Bahamas, hon? When we went snorkeling and you had to quit because you were crying? And when I asked why, you said “Because it’s all so beautiful.”’

Now I’m the one who’s crying.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to get up and walk around a little? I’ll open the windows and let in some fresh air.’

Nothing from Ellen.

I sigh. I stroke that fluff of hair. ‘All right,’ I say, ‘why don’t you just sleep for another couple of hours? I’ll sit here beside you.’

And that’s exactly what I do.

For Joe Hill