Thomas M. Disch - The Businessman.pdf - Thomas M. Disch - widez2

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.

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