Thomas M. Disch - The Businessman

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Thomas Disch

THE BUSINESSMAN

Flyleaf:

Murdering your wife might not sound all that difficult, and in the case of Bob Glandier it was dead

simple. Agenda: fly to Las Vegas, enter the Lady Luck Motor Lodge, strangle, get back on the plane to

Minnesota, and resume life as an upper-echelon executive. What came afterward was not so simple.

Still in the grave when the novel opens, and none too pleased, Bob's wife Giselle can foresee that she

will be obliged to haunt him. There isn't much else to think about in her situation. Quite inadventently Giselle's

mother, Joy-Ann, releases her daughter's spirit one day, the only casualty being that she loses her own life in

the process.

While Giselle is out discovering how unpleasant it is to haunt her husband, Joy-Ann arrives in

Paradise (not to be confused with "Heaven," which is the next stage along and designed along less mortal,

more "Looking-into-the-face-of-God" lines). Joy-Ann meets Paradise's coordinator, the famous

nineteenth-century actress Adah Menken, who explains the use of "Home Box Office," where events of your

own and your relatives' lives can be played in any order. Adah and Joy-Ann can see that they have a lot of

intervening to do to sort out the evil that began at the Lady Luck Motor Lodge.

The ghost of poet John Berryman plays a major - often heroic - role in this drama, which is just as

well because at the time he meets Giselle he has become thoroughly bored with suburban seances (his

dislexia making him particularly hopless at Ouija boards). Elaborate hauntings lie ahead for Berryman and

Giselle, transmogrifications and, above all, a battle agains the force which will turn a white Scottish terrier and

a heron into killers - not to mention a rather engaging little boy who will soon be known as "Charlie Manson

writ small."

How a novel can at once be so lighthearted and so utterly terrifying is something only Thomas M.

Disch can answer. _The Businessman_ is like _The Exorcist_ in a playful mood. The living, the dead and the

indeterminate form a cast of characters who interact in a fashion that is disarmingly logical. "Who would have

thought that the afterlife had so many rules?" asks Berryman. Many murders and unspeakable horrors later,

it seems oddly clear that terms could never have been struck with the businessman any other way.

Thomas Michael Disch became a freelance writer in 1964 after working in advertising. He was born in

Iowa in 1940 and educated at New York University. He now has a long list of books to his credit - poetry,

children's books, short story collections, and such notable novels as _334_, _Camp Concentration_, _Clara

Reeve_, _On Wings of Song_, and _Neighboring Lives_, which he coauthored with Charles Naylor. He lives in

New York City.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint:

Excerpt from "The Assault on Immortality Begins" from _Henry's Fate_ by John Berryman.

permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.

United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner

whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in

critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East

53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside

Limited, Toronto.

The issue always and at bottom is spiritual.

- DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

CHAPTER

When she awoke she did not realize for some time where she was. Then it sank in -

she was dead and buried in a grave. How she knew this, by what sense informed, she could

not tell. Not by the sight of her eyes, or by any spiritual analog of sight, for how can there

be sight where no light enters? Nor was there any tingle of fleshy consciousness in limbs or

loins, in heart or mouth. Her body was here in the coffin _with_ her, and in some way she was

still linked to its disintegrating proteins, but it wasn't through her body's senses she knew

these things. There was only this suspended sphere of self-awareness beyond which she

could discern certain dim essentials of the earth immuring her - a dense, moist, intricated

mass pierced with constellations of forward-inching hungers, nodules of intensity against a

milky radiance of calm bacterial transformation.

_The worms crawl in_ - she remembered the rhyme from childhood. _The worms crawl

out. The worms play pinochle on your snout_.

How long would this go on? The question framed itself coolly, without triggering alarms.

Ghosts - such ghosts as she had ever heard of - were supposed to be free to range where

they would. Were said to flit. Whereas she remained attached, by some sort of psychic

gravity, to this inert carcass, in which even the process of decay was impeded by the

chemicals that had been pumped into it.

Almost as the question was formed, the answer existed within her sphere of sentience.

Her thinking self would go on thinking . . . indefinitely. Not "forever." Forever remained as

unfathomable and foggy an idea as it had been when she was alive. She knew, too, that she

would not always be confined to her corpse's coffin, that a time would come when she'd be

able to slip loose from the clinging raiment of flesh to flit at liberty like other ghosts.

But that time was not now. Now she was dead, and she had that to think about.

CHAPTER

On Tuesdays on his lunch hour Glandier drove to The Bicentennial Sauna on Lake

Street and got his ashes hauled by whoever was available. He wasn't choosy. The important

thing was to get back to his desk by two o'clock. Not that anyone would have cared if he'd

been half an hour late. But _he_ cared. He liked to parcel his time into neat whole-hour

bundles, a habit he'd carried over from school, where the bells demarcating the hours also

signaled a shift of mental gears.

He did, naturally, have his favorites. For a blow job he liked Libby, who was the

youngest girl at the sauna and sort of thin and frail. She never got down on her knees in front

of him without a little wince of disgust. This had such an immediate positive effect on Glandier

that he'd scarcely got his cock down her throat before he'd shot his load. In some ways that

seemed a waste of $25, but while it lasted it was great, and for the next ten or fifteen

minutes too. Also, it left more time for lunch.

His other favorite must have been the oldest of the lot. Sacajawea she was known as

among the clientele of the Bicentennial. A real squaw with a fat ass and big sagging tits and

lots of makeup around her eyes. She had a way of drooping her eyelashes down and lifting

them up that was sexy as hell though probably just as phony as the lashes. He liked the idea

of her having to act like she thought his performance was really hot shit, the way when he

was screwing her she'd croon encouraging obscenities, or gasp them if he'd reached that rate

of delivery; the way he knew she was grateful for his regular patronage and $5 tips, she being

nothing to look at; the way, after he'd got his breath back, she'd start sucking him off again,

gratis. Not to much purpose, usually. He could get it up again; that wasn't the problem. But

usually he couldn't shoot his load a second time in the forty-five minutes he allotted himself.

The weekly visit to the Bicentennial was a substitute for his former weekly visit to the

downtown St. Paul office of Dr. Helbron, a psychiatrist who specialized in combating the

depressions and anxieties of upper-echelon executives at 3-M, Honeywell, and other Twin

Cities - based multinational corporations. Dr. Heibron had suggested the Bicentennial himself,

claiming that all Glandier needed to start feeling like his old self was a little pussy on a regular

basis. How could he refuse the experiment with his own doctor promoting the idea?

And it had worked. While he was not precisely his old self again, he couldn't complain

any longer of disabling depressions or sudden insane bursts of anger. Those had been the

symptoms that had sent him to the doctor's office originally, on the advice of the company's

personnel director, Jerry Petersen. Back at that time - the summer of '79 - Glandier had done

all he could to act like his old self-confident self, smiling a lot and cracking jokes, but while he

might disguise his depressions, the anger, when it came, was not so controllable. Before he

could think about it, he would flip out and find himself making a scene in a restaurant or

berating one of the girls in the office for something probably not her fault. There was a kind of

demon of righteousness in him that leapt out like a rattlesnake and with no more warning.

After a few such scenes had come to be witnessed by his associates, it had been suggested

to him by Jerry Petersen (who was not only the personnel director but a close friend as well)

that he should seek professional advice.

A polite way of saying he was crazy. But then he was crazy, it could not be denied.

Only a crazy man would murder his wife, and that was what Glandier had done.

CHAPTER

At the age of only forty-eight, Joy-Ann Anker was dying of cancer. She'd become

violently ill in the second week of a diet that had been, up to that point, a great success. At

the hospital they'd done an exploratory operation and discovered a large malignant tumor in

her lower colon. It had already spread through her body beyond the point where surgery could

hold out any hope. The hospital put her on a course of chemotherapy, which made her almost

constantly nauseated, and sent her home. Ironically, the cancer, the operation, and the

chemotherapy combined had had the effect of a completely successful diet. For only the

second time in her life she was down to her supposedly ideal weight of 114 pounds and could

fit into clothes she hadn't worn for fourteen years. Most of her old clothes, however, she'd

given to her daughter three years ago, at a time when she'd lost faith in diets. Joy-Ann had

cried, after Giselle had gone off with the boxes of clothes, at her vision of the life that lay

ahead of her, a life of boredom, booze, and loneliness. She cried now at the thought that

even that life wasn't to be allowed her. Sometimes she could even laugh about the whole

thing. God, obviously, was playing a practical joke.

Officially, she wasn't supposed to know she was dying. The doctor and the priest had

both told her that though the odds were against her there was still hope. They didn't say

hope for how long, not to her. But during one of Bob's visits to the hospital, she'd pretended

to be asleep, so as not to have to talk to him (if there was anything worse than visiting

someone in a hospital, it was being visited), and Dr. Wandke had painted a very different

picture for her son-in-law. Six months. At most. That had been toward the end of January,

which gave her to the end of July if she was lucky.

There was some comfort in being able to pretend she didn't know. When Father

Rommel visited she could just be her usual self and wasn't under pressure to go to confession.

Whereas if her prognosis were out in the open, she'd have had to go through the motions of

making a confession, and it would have been a bad confession, since she was still, in her

heart of hearts, holding onto one sin she couldn't or wouldn't repent of. From a strictly

Catholic point of view it might not be a sin at all - just the opposite, in fact - but it wasn't

something she wanted to discuss with a priest. It had been bad enough all those years she'd

had to confess once a year to using birth control, but this. . . . In any case, she'd stopped

believing in a lot of things since the children had left home and she didn't have to be

responsible for _their_ religious beliefs.

It occurred to Joy-Ann that she might be able to get back the clothes she'd given

Giselle. Even better, she might ask for Giselle's own clothes, if Bob hadn't given them away to

Goodwill Industries as he'd said he meant to. She called Bob at work and his secretary said he

was at a meeting, which naturally she didn't believe. Bob was a good enough son-inlaw,

especially considering what had happened, but his weekly visits sprang from a sense of duty,

not because they enjoyed each other's company. Giselle was all they had in common, and the

less said about that the better.

Dutifully he returned her call that evening, and she only had to hint at what she

wanted before he volunteered to bring over Giselle's whole wardrobe tomorrow on his way to

the office. There were eight cardboard boxes, which seemed a lot at first, but considering

how many boxes would be needed to pack up all her clothes when she passed on, it wasn't an

especially large wardrobe. She wondered whether he'd brought back Giselle's clothes from Las

Vegas. At the time, with the tragedy still uppermost in everyone's mind, she'd known better

than to ask, but now, unpacking the eight boxes, she couldn't help but be curious.

There were several casual outfits she couldn't remember Giselle ever wearing, jeans

and cotton shirts and such, but only one that provably, by its label, originated in Las Vegas:

an orange pants suit made out of a slinky polyester. It fit to perfection and looked, to Mrs.

Anker's orthodox eye, just a little obscene. It might be possible to have the pants suit dyed,

but she doubted it. What sort of life had Giselle been leading out there? She would never

understand what had possessed her daughter to run off like that. It couldn't have been

gambling. Giselle was the only one of them immune to that. It must have been madness, pure

and simple.

In the end the only items she kept, besides the pants suit, were the things she'd

outgrown and given Giselle: the belted suit from Dayton's, the black dress she'd worn to her

own mother's funeral and scarcely ever again, and several flowery prints too lightweight for

winter. She put them on and took them off in front of the big bedroom mirror, weeping

sometimes at the thought that she might never live to wear any of them out on the street,

but sometimes smiling too, because she had undeniably never looked sexier in her life.

CHAPTER

There was another world off at an angle from the world she'd known till now, that

world six feet above her full of its cars and its houses. Sometimes this other world seemed to

be inside her, but when she would reverse her attention inward and try to approach the

threshold to that dimly sensed world within, it would go out of focus or fade, though never did

it disappear entirely. It was always there, as real as the furniture one stumbles over in a dark

room.

Her first clear view of it came in a flash. She saw, across the threshold, a field of pure

geometry and color, like a painting that was simultaneously flat on the ground and covering

every wall. It bore a general resemblance to a red gingham tablecloth, except that it wavered

and the bands of red were just as bright, in their way, as the patches of white, which in fact

weren't really white but some other, indefinable color. It seemed incredibly beautiful and

important, but before she could grasp why, it was gone.

Afterward she speculated a great deal as to what it was that she had seen, but

always, though she could recall quite clearly the look of it, its _sense_ eluded her. Patience:

that was the first lesson of the afterlife. Patience unmeasured by calendar or clock, or even

by the cadences of articulated thought. Most of her subjective time went by in flows of

low-level sentience, such as one slips into, in life, only at the edge of sleep. No telling how

long these periods of spiritual sleep had lasted. They might be ten-minute dozes; just as likely

she might have slept away an entire winter like a seed in frozen ground. Sometimes the

constellations of hungers creeping in the soil above her would have completely altered when

she awakened, or the liquifying tissues of her dead body would have entered upon some new

and more drastic stage of disintegration.

Impossible, even as a spirit divorced from flesh, not to regard these transformations

without aversion. Impossible not to strain against that still unbroken linkage that kept her

here, sealed in this coffin like a genie in a jug. Not, however, with any sense of dread; rather,

she regarded her corpse as she would, in the world above, have reacted to some derelict on

Hennepin Avenue, who smells and whose clothes are in rags and whom no one can help even

if help had been asked for.

Once it seemed that she had actually won free. A tendon of the corpse's flesh, drying,

had tugged a bone out of its socket: it was that sudden popping out she'd thought to be the

breaking of the lock. And perhaps it did signal, in a small way, the beginning of her liberation,

for afterward the horizon of her awareness seemed greatly enlarged. She came to have an

almost panoramic sense of the cemetery grounds - not just the sphere of earth immediately

about her but beyond that, to where the other corpses lay and decayed. All of them dead, all

inert and without consciousness. She alone, in all that cemetery, lived in the afterlife.

No, that wasn't so. She alone had failed to cross that inner threshold into the realm of

the endless gingham cloth. It wasn't just her body she was trapped in, it was the whole world.

CHAPTER

The source of grace has its favorite bloodlines, for which there is no accounting. Grace

runs in families; it has no relation to merit. Entire generations of sons-of-bitches may enjoy

the most infamous good luck, while the wise, the virtuous, and the deserving suffer and sink

beneath insupportable burdens. It is perfectly unfair, yet there is nothing religiously inclined

people so long for as the assurance that they and theirs belong to a chosen people.

The Ankers were such a family. Joy-Ann, who was doubly an Anker, having been born

an Anker and married an Anker Cousin, would have denied this emphatically, but those who

are so chosen seldom suspect it till quite late in life. She was still too young, at forty-eight,

to recognize the marks of grace in what she considered a string of tragic misfortunes. For the

source of grace - let us be honest and call it God - is also an ironist and a dweller in

paradoxes; He produces good from evil as a matter of course.

The Ankers were not notably wicked as a family. They were, admittedly, layabouts and

drifters, by and large (even, in a few instances, bums and drunks), but not evil in large,

oppressive ways; victims, not victimizers; the sort of people, mournful, meek, and poor in

spirit, to whom the Beatitudes have promised, not without irony, heaven and earth. Joy-Ann,

for instance, in the fifteen years since her husband's death, had been exempted from the

common curse of having to work for a living by an insurance policy her husband had purchased

for a quarter at the airport in Las Vegas. He had left Vegas ruined and was buried two weeks

later in the Minnesota Veterans' Cemetery by a widow with enough money not only to rescue

the mortgage from foreclosure but to purchase an annuity that paid out $8,000 a year! That,

together with Dewey's Social Security survivor benefits, had seen the surviving Ankers

through the rest of the '60s in comfortable indigence. Bing had gone to Cretin, Giselle to Our

Lady of Mercy. Joy-Ann had stayed home and cooked quick, starchy meals from recipes in

_Family Circle_. Each year she became a little fatter, a little more querulous, but in her soul

she was as happy as a pig in mud. She was getting exactly what she wanted out of life, a

free ride.

Now the ride was coming to an end just as inflation had whittled her annuity and

benefits down to the point where grocery shopping was once again a source of anxiety. She

had been faced with the necessity of having to sell the house. Two real estate agents,

independently of each other, had valued it at $80,000, maybe more: four times what she and

Dewey could have got for it in 1954 when it had passed to them on the death of her

father-in-law, the senior Mr. Anker. A gold mine! All these years she'd lived in it she'd put it in

the category of water, air, and sunlight - something necessary but omnipresent. With its

shabby back yard and ancient wallpaper, who'd have supposed it wasn't the residential

equivalent of the secondhand clothes at the Salvation Army? Eighty thousand dollars for a

corner lot on Calumet Avenue? Money was becoming meaningless!

The neighborhood around Calumet had been one of Joy-Ann's longest-standing

grievances. First it had got decrepit, then blacks moved in. Then, without her ever noticing,

that process had gone into reverse. Houses were painted (except her own) and lawns tidied.

Children reappeared on the sidewalks. Though some of them were black, they did set a

general tone of prosperity as they pedaled their tricycles and pulled their wagonloads of

symbolic sand, since one knew that not even automobiles require as large and constant a

cash outlay as children. The Roman matron who said that her children were her jewels was

not exaggerating.

Eighty thousand dollars: to be sitting on top of a pile of money like that and to know

that it would all go to waste - that was no happy thought. Not literally to waste, of course.

Literally it would go to her son-in-law, Robert Glandier. Joy-Ann didn't like him, but he'd always

been a dutiful rememberer of Christmases and birthdays. After the tragedy of Giselle, and even

more after her own spell in the hospital, he'd been as thoughtful as anyone who was basically

inconsiderate could be expected to be. He phoned a couple of times a week and came around

on Sunday mornings to take her to church if she felt up to it. Or, more usually, to join her in a

Sunday brunch of waffles and bacon. Joy-Ann loved waffles. It didn't make any difference

that a few minutes after she ate them she'd have to go into the bathroom to throw up;

waffles remained a major satisfaction.

"Are you sure," he had asked her one such Sunday morning, "you don't want to go to

eleven o'clock mass? It wouldn't be any trouble."

"No, really. Do you want another waffle?"

"Mmf," he said, nodding his head.

She poured batter onto the two grills and covered them. "The thing is, it doesn't seem

so important to me any more. I mean, I don't see any reason why God should be there in

church any more than somewhere else. Do you?"

"No. But then I don't believe in God."

Joy-Ann pursed her lips and shook her head, as though to say, _Naughty, naughty_.

She was of the widely held opinion that at bottom everyone believed what she believed, if

only they'd be honest with themselves.

"I still go to bingo on Tuesday nights," she continued thoughtfully. "Alice Hoffman

drives me over. Would you believe I am actually _lucky_ at bingo? That's weird, isn't it? I'm

consistently lucky at bingo, though sometimes it's a little ironic. I mean, last week I won a

turkey. What am I going to do with a turkey?"

"What did you do with it?"

"Well, I could see Alice definitely had her eye on it, but I didn't see any point giving it

to _her_. I mean, she isn't exactly starving to death, is she. So I gave it to the sisters. And I

got the nicest letter from Sister Rita thanking me. I wish they'd wear habits though, like they

used to. And do the mass in Latin again. It just isn't the same."

Joy-Ann started quietly to cry. Latin made her think of requiem masses, and that

reminded her that she was dying at the age of only forty-eight. Through her tears she

watched the steam rising from the waffle iron.

Glandier watched the waffle iron too, so as not to have to look at his mother-in-law.

He resented displays of emotion. He knew, from watching such moments on TV, that he was

expected to say something comforting, or else to hug her. But all he could think to say was,

"That's all right," which didn't seem much of a comfort, while the idea of physical contact with

Joy-Ann was slightly repellant. Not because she didn't still have her looks. Now that she'd

slimmed down, she looked all right, especially for a gal of forty-eight. But she was dying, and

Glandier had never given any thought before to the inevitability of death, to cancer and what

it must do to stomachs, livers, lungs, and all the other spaghetti a person has got wrapped up

inside his skin. He wished, fervently, that Joy-Ann would hurry up with her dying.

"They're done," she said, drying her eyes with a napkin, then opening both halves of

the waffle iron. The waffles dropped from the upper grills like ripe fruit. She speared her own

with a syrup-sticky fork and began to butter it. Lyrically, the butter melted from a solid yellow

to a liquid, amber gleam, as though the brown grid of the waffle had been encased in Fabulon.

CHAPTER

After he'd got married, in '69 - he was thirty then - Glandier's body had started going

to pot. At regular intervals all through the '70s he would panic and start dieting and lifting

weights in the workshop at the back of the garage. But the diet made him foul-tempered, and

he got bored with the weights, so eventually he would return to his original attitude, which

was, Fuck it. If that was the way it was going to be, there was no point fighting it.

He let his paunch sprawl over his belt. His jaw softened from Dick Tracy to Porky Pig.

Even his arms and shoulders, which used to be beefy if not rock-solid, turned to flab. He didn't

get sloppy about what he wore; that would have been a mistake, since his company was

particular about its executives' dress code. He bought new shirts and suits as his bulk

demanded and, in general, surrendered to the inevitable.

A businessman: that was the image he liked to think he presented. A businessman who

played golf and smoked dollar cigars and spent a lot of money on drab clothes. A big, fat

businessman eating boozy lunches and boozier dinners and leading his peer-group into the

life-styles appropriate to middle age.

Not all his peers were prepared to follow him down this path. As the '70s advanced,

the serious jocks got more serious. You could see them out jogging on the winding lanes of

Willowville, where there'd never been pedestrians before, their styled hair bouncing on their

shoulders, their jogging suits stained dark with sweat, their faces locked into defiant grins.

Not for Glandier. For him it was the back yard, the lawn chair, a daquiri, a magazine. When old

college buddies kidded him about it, he made Falstaff-like jokes at his own expense and filed

away his resentment for later revenge. The older executives at work became friendlier. They

liked to see a young man in such a hurry to join them in their decrepitude.

Once, drunk and soaking complacently in the bathtub, it dawned on Glandier that

_every_ businessman at some point in his life must have come to this same decision - to

_become_ a businessman and leave his youth behind. Now, at forty-one, the transformation

was complete, but the bottom had dropped out of the image. Without a wife to show for

himself, a wife such as Giselle had been - pretty, deferential, and thirteen years younger than

he - there was no longer that important announcement being broadcast to the world

concerning his undiminished vitality in the physical department that mattered most of all, the

department of sex. He had entered upon a new and scarier stage of disintegration. His figure

was ballooning from the slack-muscled grossness allowable in a Brando or an Elvis to the

blimpy, sexless softness of an out-and-out fatso. Even the shape and meaning of his face was

altering.

He knew he looked terrible, that people made remarks about him, even the secretaries

(_especially_ the secretaries), that he was regarded, in some quarters, as a man who was

coming apart at the seams (as his suits were, once again). But he couldn't help himself. He

would get home at night after a hefty dinner at a downtown restaurant and immediately start

swilling Heinekens and Dorito Tortilla Chips in front of the TV. The beer made him put on

weight faster than hard liquor would have, but it moderated his tendency to get stinking drunk

every weekday night. This way at least he could keep his wits about him, and when there

wasn't anything worth watching after the news, which was usually the case, he could beaver

away at the dining-room table, compiling or inventing statistics to stuff in reports. The work

was the thing that kept him going. The work and the idea that somehow things were going to

change, that he was on the verge of something important. Even if that importance was a

negative factor, Glandier needed it in order to maintain a balance between himself and the

universe, one in which the latter did not too much preponderate.

He figured that people supposed he was becoming so fat as a result of the shock of his

wife's death in such unsavory circumstances. Maybe there was even something to be said for

that idea. Maybe he was feeling some kind of buried guilt (it was possible), and that guilt

triggered this terrible craving he felt whenever he resisted the least doughnut. If so, he was

glad that the symptom offered no clue to the crime. There was no M chalked on the back of

his jacket for everyone but himself to see.

CHAPTER

All the bodies were arranged in a pattern that resembled the neatest of suburbs, a

checkerboard, a gigantic crossword puzzle. Above the dead, like clues to the puzzle, their

names would be cut into the stones. The bodies she was aware of, quite as though she were

in a room with them; the names and stones she had to imagine. All that lay above the ground

was denied to her perception as much as that which loomed beyond the red-checked veil -

heaven, she supposed.

As a girl, she'd been troubled by the pictures she'd seen of heaven - the saints and

angels going to church in the clouds - until Sister Rita had explained to her that it would

surely be more exciting than that, that it just wasn't possible from our point of view here

below to imagine the splendor of looking straight at God's face.

She still couldn't imagine it, though she could, almost at will now, approach that

crisscrossed whatever-it-was that separated her from . . .

Then she remembered.

Remembered, in the first instance, only the checked potholder clinging mysteriously to

the white enamel face of the Frigidaire.

Then floods of remembrance. Not the small change the mind yields up by pressing

associative buttons, such as that little homily Sister Rita had delivered in fifth grade; instead,

a _whoosh_ of awareness that she was a complete, unique person with her own identity and

a past life and a name that had always made her uncomfortable: Giselle. After the singer,

Giselle McKenzie. One day in the middle of that life (or what ought to have been the middle of

it) she'd realized, in just such a flash of clarity as this, that perfection existed and she was

part of it. She had been standing in the kitchen and _zing_, it had come to her with sudden,

sweet inevitability, like the punch line of a joke.

Like (which it was) the gift of grace. She hadn't understood then, or for a long while

afterward, that _she_ had been changed, only that the kitchen didn't quite seem itself. It was

breathtaking, a fairy kingdom, lovely, inexplicable, hilarious.

And _mild_.

She could see it all again and hear, here in the stillness of the grave, the Frigidaire and

the clock above the stove humming their old electric song. The clock face, which was

contained, like a large fried egg with numbers on it, in a walnut skillet, gave the time to be

3:06. She had watched (and she watched again now) the thin red hand sweep graciously

around the face. Its motion soothed her quite as though it were a human hand, stroking away

all pain, all memories, every thought. She could have watched it go around all day, forever,

mindless as the moon, but then as though to demonstrate that in fact she could not, that

time and consciousness march on, there was a knock on the door and she had gone to answer

it.

CHAPTER

Joy-Ann was searching, in Monday's puzzle, for the last three flowers beginning with B:

bloodroot, bluet, and bridal wreath. She'd find a B and then trace the upward diagonals

through the grid of scrambled letters. There was a knock on the door, and she put the paper

aside with a little huff of impatience. The puzzle was always the nicest part of the morning,

and anyone calling at this hour was bound to be unwelcome. A salesman, probably, or a bill

collector. Ever since she'd started dying she'd stopped bothering with most of the bills.

Instead, and more dismaying, it was Sister Rita from Our Lady of Mercy.

"Sister!" she exclaimed, and Sister Rita's thick black eyebrows flew up like two alarmed

crows. She was wearing a knitted cap and a dowdy dark-green winter coat. A stranger would

never have known she was a nun.

"Sister, my goodness, I certainly wasn't _expecting_ . . . I mean, the house is a

_mess_. But come in."

"Just for a minute, if I may. I only stopped by to thank you again for that lovely

turkey."

Sister Rita followed Joy-Ann into the littered living room. The couch was covered with

yesterday's papers, the nearer of two easy chairs with unsorted clothes from the drier.

Capacious ashtrays scented the air.

"Actually," said Sister Rita, setting down her two paper shopping bags and removing

her bright striped mittens, "that is a white lie. Thanking you isn't the only reason I dropped by.

Though the turkey has been appreciated. It served as the basis for four meals and a great

deal of nibbling besides."

"Four meals? They must have been small."

"There are only five of us in the convent, now that Sister Terence has departed."

"Rest her soul," said Joy-Ann, without a tremor of her usual dread before the naming of

death. Somehow it seemed appropriate for nuns to die, as it did for them to teach music.

"May I?" With an air of comfortable authority, Sister Rita seated herself in the wooden

rocker.

Joy-Ann cleared space at the end of the couch next the rocker and sat down with the

oddest sense of expectancy, as though she was about to be given a present.

And so she was. Sister Rita reached into one of the shopping bags and took out a

present wrapped in obviously recycled wrappings. "This is -" She handed it to Joy-Ann, whose

spirits sank as soon as she knew, by the heft of it, that it was a book. "- a token of our

appreciation."

"Thank you, Sister, that's very thoughtful. But there's no need -"

"Go ahead, open it, see what it is."

It was a paperback she'd never heard of - some sort of religious book. For the sister's

benefit she read the big cerise title aloud: "_And These Thy Gifts_ by Claire Cullen. Oh, isn't

that nice."

"It doesn't _look_ like much, I realize, Mrs. Anker, but it's provided inspiration for

thousands of individuals in the same situation as you."

Joy-Ann could feel, at the back of her throat, the first premonition of tears, but she

resisted it. Sister Rita had no right to involve her in a serious discussion of her situation, even

indirectly.

"Would you like some coffee?" Joy-Ann suggested defensively.

"No, thank you." She unbuttoned her coat to expose a wooden cross hanging on a

leather thong, clear warning that she meant to stay and talk. But then, as though she could

read Joy-Ann's mind, Sister Rita said she _couldn't_ stay, that anything she might have had to

say was said much better in Claire Cullen's beautiful book.

Joy-Ann promised to start reading it that very morning. A lie - she had no intention of

reading it, ever.

"There is one other matter, but I really don't know how to bring it up, Mrs. Anker. I

understand that you've been receiving . . . chemotherapy?"

Joy-Ann nodded guardedly.

"Sometimes with chemotherapy there can be undesirable side-effects. Nausea,

especially. Sister Terence had weeks, I remember, when she couldn't hold down so much as a

glass of milk. But there is, as Sister Terence learned through one of the nurses at the

hospital, a way to avoid all that. Did anyone at the hospital discuss this with you, Mrs.

Anker?"

Joy-Ann shook her head, not even trying now to hold back the tears. Only an hour

earlier she'd thrown up every bite she'd eaten for breakfast, and now she felt a hunger worse

than the hunger of any diet.

"I thought they might not have. You see, it's . . . a sensitive matter. It _seems_ that

anyone can overcome the nausea associated with chemotherapy by using the drug marijuana.

In fact, it's quite certain. It works. It worked for Sister Terence quite wonderfully. Of course,

she had to learn to inhale the smoke, but once she did she never had any problem keeping

down her food."

"Really? But if that's so" - in a tone of incredulity - "why didn't they tell me at the

hospital?"

"Because marijuana isn't legal. It will probably be made legal one day, at least for

chemotherapy patients, but it isn't yet, not here in Minnesota. That's why I feel a little funny

telling you. You may feel it would be wrong to take the law into your own hands."

"You mean, if I smoked marijuana, I wouldn't lose what I ate? As simple as that?"

Sister Rita's heavy eyebrows lifted in confirmation. "Yes, as simple as that."

"How can I get some?"

"I really can't answer that question, Mrs. Anker. It's been some time now since Sister

Terence passed on. Do you know any young people who might. . . experiment with drugs?"

Joy-Ann tried to think if she knew any young people at all. "There's the delivery boy.

But I haven't paid him for four weeks, and anyhow he's only twelve or thirteen. By young you

mean college age, I suppose. No, I really can't think of anyone."

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ThomasDischTHEBUSINESSMAN Flyleaf:Murderingyourwifemightnotsoundallthatdifficult,andinthecaseofBobGlandieritwasdeadsimple.Agenda:flytoLasVegas,entertheLadyLuckMotorLodge,strangle,getbackontheplanetoMinnesota,andresumelifeasanupper-echelonexecutive.Whatcameafterwardwasnotsosimple.Stillinthegravewhent...

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Thomas M. Disch - The Businessman

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