The Broom of the System

14
1990
/a/

At the Frequent and Vigorous/Bombardini Company switchboard at 10 A.M. on Wednesday were Lenore Beadsman, Candy Mandible, Judith Prietht. Under the switchboard counter, with only his boots visible in the cubicle, was Peter Abbott. Just leaving was an anonymous delivery boy, having delivered to Lenore an enormous enclosing wreath of flowers, red-and-white roses arranged in an interlocking Yin and Yang. The wreath sat atop the switchboard wastebasket, being too big to fit inside. Definitely in the wastebasket, though, was the note that had come with the flowers: “Miss Beadsman. Time grows short. One way or the other you will be part of me.”
There was just no way Lenore was going to sit in her chair with Peter Abbott right under her. She and Candy Mandible stood off, by the door to the cubicle, Candy smoking and making rings. Judith Prietht was frantic at the Bombardini Company board, but she did find time to keep darting looks over at Peter Abbott’s boots as they jiggled with his mysterious efforts. Peter was apparently attaching something to the Frequent and Vigorous switchboard console. Something long and intricate, and expensive, Candy had said. He had had to shut off the F and V console temporarily, which was just fine by Lenore.
Candy was smoking a clove cigarette, which are particularly good for rings, and she also from time to time dropped ashes into the opened bloom of one of the Yin-blossoms. “He is rich, you know,” she said to Lenore.
“That’s not nearly funny,” Lenore said, eyeing the flowers. “I’m thinking of maybe having Dr. Jay call the net people about him for me. At least he’s too big to get down in here anymore. I think. I hope.”
“Rich is not to be dismissed lightly, kiddo,” said Candy. “You may not want to be Stonecipheco-rich, but you can still not mind richness per se.”
“Is that why you’re with Mr. Allied now? Is he going to take you away from all this?” Lenore laughed and gestured.
“Well, we haven’t gotten past the just plain taking stage, yet.” Candy gave a smoky laugh. “This is a real man, Lenore.” She looked at her. “The world is turning out to be full of real, real men.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Candy lowered her voice, and Lenore could see her pupils spread. “I don’t know where you found that Lang guy, but good God.”
“Don’t want to hear about it.” Lenore looked away, at the back of Judith’s head, with a phone attached. “And anyway I’m possibly rich per se now, anyway, thanks to Vlad-royalties. We still need to talk at length about that, Candy. You’re supposed to be my friend. Vlad the Impaler’s friend.”
“Vlad’s probably got a cage entirely lined with full-length mirrors now. Vlad’s probably in a state of constant bird-orgasm.”
“Shit!” came Peter Abbott’s voice from under the console counter.
“Gesundheit,” Judith Prietht said among console-beeps.
“If things don’t work out in a month, Rick and I are going to get him back legally,” Lenore said. “Rick says he’ll hire a lawyer. It turns out Vlad the Impaler is legally his, because he’s got the receipt. He was being weird about Vlad last night.”
Judith Prietht swiveled in her chair; she had hit her Position Busy button. “Listen, Lenore honey ...” She blinked and smiled. “Can I call you Lenore?”
“I’m not too sure about Lenore honey, Judith,” said Candy.
Lenore turned to Candy. “How come she’s being so nice today?”
“She wants you to get her Hart Lee Sykes’s autograph,” Candy said, tapping ashes. “She’s a God-Partner, apparently. Big time.”
“If you wouldn’t mind ...” Judith started to croon.
“I’m hopefully not going to see Sykes again, Judith,” said Lenore.
“But you could write him,” Judith Prietht said. “You could call him, right from here, and I’d even pay for it if you wanted.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t have to—”
“And could you also ask him to ... maybe to ... ?” Judith looked imploringly at Candy Mandible.
Candy rolled her eyes. “She wants you to get him to say a blessing over a picture of her cat.” Judith came out with a Polaroid and waved it at Lenore, as if Lenore were very far away.
“Judith, how about if I say I’ll do what I can. Maybe I can get Rick to talk to him; he’s going to deal with CBN people, he said.” Lenore stared absently at the soles of Peter Abbott’s boots.
Judith’s Position Release button started flashing that flash that means there are just too many calls piling up. She Accessed and Started In and waded back, blowing a kiss to Lenore.
“We’ve found the way to her heart, at least,” said Candy, making a fist to look at her nails.
Lenore was looking at Candy. “Listen,” she said. “What did you mean good God about Lang? You guys didn’t ... ?”
Candy watched herself make and unmake a fist. “Yes and no,” she said. “I mean I’m afraid yes we did, and did, and very definitely yes good God.” She saw Lenore’s look. “What can I tell you? I was bored, and Nick was meeting with supermarket chains, and he’ll never know. But no we won‘t, probably, ever again, I don’t think. First because Nick and I are really serious, and I think I’ve got a shot at richness per se, not to mention that Nick is almost a Lang, himself. Did Andy tell you his old college nickname, by the way?”
Lenore dug a bit of stone out of the tread of her sneaker.
“I died laughing,” said Candy.
“Lang is rich per se himself, you might want to know,” Lenore said. “His father owns a mammoth company in Texas. His father is supposedly more or less responsible for the G.O.D.” She looked up at Candy. “And then what about Clint Roxbee-Cox? Clint must be insane with jealously, over you and Mr. Allied.”
“Clint is admittedly not a happy man right now,” Candy said, arranging things in her purse on the switchboard counter. “But he’s a company man. And Nickie is the company. Clint told him he wishes us all the best, although Nick did say he didn’t much care for the way Clint was looking at his throat when he said it.”
“If you want to call Mr. Vigorous now, you can use my phone,” Judith shot over.
“Well Judith I’m supposed to go up and see him after lunch, anyway,” said Lenore. “He’s getting Vern to come in for me this afternoon, for some unclear reason. ”
Candy looked over at the back of Judith’s head, then at Lenore. “The thing is—” She put a hand on Lenore’s arm and guided her into the line of Erieview shadow that creased the edge of the white cubicle. “The other reason why the Lang thing was just one night I think is that it was pretty dam clear he has his eye on somebody else, in a big way.” She looked at Lenore.
Lenore looked at her own wrist, pretended to study it. “Listen, how did you snag Mr. Allied, anyway? You were in despair last week. I want to hear.”
“He wants you, Lenore, really, is who he wants,” Candy said, making sure that Judith couldn’t be listening and then forcing Lenore to look her in the eye. “It was far too clear.”
“Really don’t want to go into it,” Lenore muttered, looking out into the lobby.
“It was just incredibly obvious,” said Candy. “He kept asking all about you, when we could talk. Talked about having met you once, how sorry he was about that, although I never got clear on just what he was sorry for and you’re going to have to fill me in sometime, I’m dying to know. Kept talking about you and Rick, and laughing. Saying stuff about strategic misrepresentation, whatever that is. And even weirder stuff about how he noticed on the plane coming back that your leg wasn’t at all like his leg, wasn’t really even like a regular leg, at all, he said.”
“That was a really leggy trip,” Lenore laughed, edging for the cubicle door. “Listen, maybe I’ll just go up and see Rick right now.”
“Sweetie, it was just too obvious he thought he was using me,” said Candy. “Not that we didn’t have big fun. Not that Schwartz’s room will ever be the same. But I could see how he thought he was trying to get at you through me. And he could do it, Lenore. You get me? He could literally get at you through me. You get me?”
“Ummm ... ”
“Rick just better be something entirely else, in his own right, is all I can say,” said Candy.
Lenore looked at her. “Except I thought you said Mr. Allied was unattainable, hence part of the charm. I thought you said he was engaged to some Australian lady.”
Candy laughed and drew on her cigarette, made an oval in the air and speared it. “I sense a sudden shift in the conversation. Well I just saw my big chance, is all. At a company party three days ago. Was it three? When you were in the Heights? I used Clint mercilessly to get to the executive side of the room. The violet dress came through. It got Nick, over hors d‘oeuvres. The dress did it. He was helpless. The dress was awesome.”
“You’re awesome, is who’s awesome.”
“Vidi, vici, veni, is all I can say,” said Candy. “Which is what you could say, too, with a really spectacular specimen, if you wanted. I’d think about it.”
“Rick and I are supposed to be in love, you forget,” Lenore said quietly, back at her wrist.
“What would Vlad the Impaler have to say to that, I wonder,” said Candy. She put out her cigarette in the middle of Yang.
“What a bitch,” Peter Abbott said, emerging stiffly from beneath the console.
“I beg your pardon?” said Candy.
“I’m gonna have some words for those tunnel drips when they get back, is all I can say,” said Peter. He bent and with a grunt dragged an enormous box of exotic tools and cables and wires out from under the white counter. Began arranging items on the box’s shelves.
“I hardly even dare to hope that you just fixed our lines,” said Lenore. The console began to beep the minute Peter plugged it back in; Candy took the call.
Peter was hooking some things onto his belt. “What I’ve done here is to take the first step in Interactive Cable’s plan to restore service and get you some satisfaction.”
“He didn’t fix anything,” Candy shot over. “He just attached something weird and deeply Freudian to the underside of the console, so they can do a tunnel-test or something. In case you’re in any doubt about the phones, I just talked to a Bambi’s Den of Discipline customer wanting to know about inflatable dolls.”
“Inflatable dolls?”
“The first step in a really expensive but ingenious plan Mr. Sludgeman came up with,” Peter Abbott was continuing, bent over his box on the counter. “We’re gonna do tunnel-tests. We’re gonna test your tunnel like nobody’s business.”
“Big whiff,” said Candy Mandible.
“Hey, lady, it is a big whiff,” Peter said. “A really big and nasty whiff, if you’re the one that’s gotta do it. Try to imagine having to test a whole nervous system by trying to stick all sorts of shit in the nerves.”
“You are really the master of the yummy image,” said Lenore.
“Just tell your supervisor, that hen lady, so I don’t have to tell her, ‘cause she scares the stuffing right out of this guy,” said Peter Abbott, jingling his belt nervously, “that what we’re doin’ is hooking all the consoles that utilize lines in your tunnel, the one under this building, hooking all the consoles into this network of testing cable, this cable that we’re gonna feed into the tunnel, to test it. If it’s one of the consoles that’s infecting all the others, we’re gonna know. If it’s something in the tunnel infecting all you guys, we’ll know. We’re gonna like feel the tunnel’s pulse.”
“Feel the pulse of a nerve?”
“Testing’s gonna hopefully start in a few days,” Peter said, picking up the last of his things and hooking them onto his belt. Lenore bent and saw a brightly colored spaghetti of new wires leading down from the base of the console to a plug in the cubicle’s floor. The wires pulsed with a strange sort of violet light.
“That stuff looks really hard to put in,” she said to Peter.
Peter turned and stared into her eyes. Lenore looked back innocently. Peter sighed. “Yeah, it’s a bitch. The tests can’t start till I get all you guys hooked into the test circuit. It’s a son of a bitch. I can only work so fast, and it’s just me, and I’m only gettin’ scale for it.”
“Well, we certainly don’t want to keep you,” Candy said without looking up, handling a request for a wheel of Stilton.
“I’ll see ya. I gotta go insert the exact same stuff over at Bambi’s Den of Discipline now,” Peter said, moving toward the door of the cubicle. “You take it easy.”
“Happy inserting,” said Candy. The jingle of Peter’s belt receded.
“Peter, goodbye!” called Judith Prietht, sitting up a bit to get her head over the top of the cubicle. Peter was gone. The shadow in the huge lobby had almost seemed to move toward him to take him, Lenore saw.
“I’m going to talk to Rick about getting some smaller windows in this lobby,” she said to Candy. “This shadow stuff is starting to really give me the creeps. I don’t like the way the shadow is handling people’s exits.”
“You know who you have to talk to about the Building.” Candy smiled, winked at Lenore, gestured at the flowered wreath on the wastebasket. “The big fromage. El Grandé Yango.”
“Not even potentially funny. Humor not even possible in that.”
Candy laughed and bent to the console.
/b/

“So is all clear, here?”
“No problem I can see, R.V.”
“Can’t possibly take more than two or three months.”
“Less, if we haul ass.”
“If this is ready for distribution by Thanksgiving we’re supposedly in line for a mammoth bonus.”
“Kick-ass.”
“So then, no questions?”
“None I can see, except maybe who that skeleton guy is, out front.”
“Who?”
“That skeleton guy, out front, in the sidewalk, under that mesh?”
“Oh. Well that’s Moses Cleaveland, Andrew.”
“Who?”
“General Moses Cleaveland, the founder of the city of Cleveland.”
“The founder of the city?”
“Yes.”
“With a ‘Reserved Parking’ sign sticking out of his eye?”
“What shall we say? Shall we say that reserved parking respects no man?”
“Say whatever you want. Just seems a tinch disrespectful, is all.”
“Fits with the whole concept, then.” “....”
/c/

8 September

Vance.

Is there any skin, any substance at all, softer than the cheek of a young child as it yields under a late-afternoon caress at the swimming pool? When the child is caped in a towel, thin calves emerging whitely and trailing away into feet with their temporary stains. The skin is so soft, all defenses, all color washed away, white as shell, loose, lips bright red tinged with blue, trembling; the child shivers, in the summer, at the pool, as the sun hints at becoming only implicit, and the hard-haired mothers stare without pity. And the trembling skin is almost translucent, new.
The pool gives birth to clean new red-eyed children, trembling in cotton capes, and then the slightest wetting of any part of the renewed white skin sends up into space a rebirth of the fragrance of rebirth, a clean that survives until the next bath. The new children are to kiss. And the red sun lowers to melt into the blue bath of clean chlorine, and the red-eyed children are lifted out and leave themselves in prints on the paved deck, shrinking. And suntan oil yields to the sterile scent of a new start, at the end of the day, always a new start. And, as with every newness, ears that pain, and eyes that sting and water.

“Lenore, where are you?” Fieldbinder wrote in his journal, a Batman notebook lifted from the toychest of his absent son. “Evelyn, where are you? Bring my Plain Dealer when you come. ”

I’ve had a look at the little bastard who apparently has Lenore’s picture in his wallet. He is in the Stonecipheco staff directory sent me by the phenomenally thorough Mr. Rummage. This Obstat person, this person who went to high school with Lenore, and whose father was a force behind our absurd Desert and is now in Washington aspiring to some greater sillinesses; this young Obstat who is himself an improbable force behind this whole increasingly troubling Corfu-food project. I’ve had a look at him, here in the directory, and I feel ever so much better. Looks to be almost as short as I, and thin, eminently breakable, with watery colorless hair retreating from a head positively dominated and defined by the shape of the skull underneath. The skin stretched tight over that skull. A skull that seems to me perhaps even to threaten to burst through and end the whole charade. Yecch.
So a head the shape of a skull. And tiny little lifeless brown eyes, eyes like little anuses.
I have nothing to fear from an anus-eyed skull-head.
He and Lang are apparently lunching. He and Lang enjoy some sort of connection through Industrial Desert Design. Lang came close to insinuating that he had had congress with Mandible last night, this morning. I must approach him carefully on the subject of the reversal. My ears still hurt me, from the flight, and there are sounds when I swallow.
For once Fieldbinder was actually looking forward to seeing his pathetic psychologist, Dr. J____, with his ridiculous moving chairs, the next day. Fieldbinder had been having a dream that was troubling him a lot. that was troubling him no end.
My father was a large, soft estate attorney who dressed exclusively in flannel in his off-hours. Broad and pale. With boots. And a small boy’s persistent love for throwing stones into deep, empty places, and listening. He spanked. He was one of those parents who spanked. I never once laid an angry hand to Vance Vigorous’s bottom. Maybe that is part of the trouble.
It is a windy day. Clouds scud. The wind whips at Lake Erie, the shaggy lake. My office window is sliced neatly in black. Half. In the lit half, the wind makes Lake Erie shaggy. In the shadow-half it all looks like rotten mayonnaise, there in the distance, squelching brown and white between the pudgy fingers of the wind. What a hideous view.
And where on earth does Norman Bombardini get off putting a sign through the eye of the founder of Cleveland?
Ten minutes, at the outside. I’ll simply keep time on the wall of my office. When the shadow reaches the diploma, she will be here.
/d/

“Is this place great or what?” Neil Obstat, Jr. was saying to Wang-Dang Lang. “Just wait. The bartender sticks his thumb in his eye once an hour. It’s in his contract.”
“And look at the gazongas on that Ginger,” Lang said, tilting his beer bottle. “Never seen any shit like this.”
“We can come back here tonight,” said Obstat. “They’ve got even wilder shit at night. Cleveland at night can get pretty wild.” He sucked at his Twizzler. “Cleveland gets underrated. You guys in the East forget that significant cultural stuff goes on in the Midwest.”
“Nothing insignificant about those gazongas, I’ll tell you that right now.”
Lang and Obstat were in Gilligan’s Isle. It was almost lunchtime. This was lunch. Lang had spent the morning with Rick Vigorous, determining that he would be able to do all his translation work in a week, if he worked at all hard. Lang was looking forward to the next three months. He’d been given the rest of the day off. He’d called Neil Obstat the minute he’d happened to see Rick Vigorous staring at Obstat’s picture in some of the material from Stonecipheco.
“I can’t get over seeing you again, and here in Cleveland,” Obstat was saying. They were at the Professor’s thumb. “And you say you’re not in deserts anymore.”
“Temporarily.”
“Temporarily. You’ve been doing accounting? Just can’t see you as an accountant, big guy.”
“The story behind that has to do with this girl who was just such hot shit that I let her run the show, for a bit of time,” Lang said, crossing and uncrossing his legs on the plastic bench.
“Not Lenore Beadsman.”
“No, course not Lenore Beadsman.” Lang signalled for another beer, and the bartender over there in his white hat gave him a thumbs-up. “My wife,” Lang said to Obstat. “The girl who’s my wife.”
“Really hot, huh?”
“Don’t want to talk about it.”
“Sure.” Obstat sipped his Twizzler. “But you mentioned something about Lenore Beadsman, when you called.”
“Did I?”
“Positive.”
“Huh. Well she works at the place I’m workin’ at, translating your wild shit for you.”
“Stuff is wild, isn’t it?” Obstat squirmed on his seat. “Boy I’m excited, is all I can say. This is the sort of thing a corporate chemist just dreams of. I thought I’d be spending all my time testing pH levels in creamed fruit.”
“I just can’t believe the shit works. Does it really work at all like y‘all are havin’ us say in this ad?”
“Really looks like it does, guy. The Chief has been ga-ga for months. Kids are talking months, maybe years before they would have, in limited tests. We’re talking not only eventual market domination, but a potentially really significant insight into the relation between nutrition and mental development, between what the body needs and the mind can do.”
The bartender, coming over with Lang’s fourth beer, slipped on a strategically placed maraschino cherry and pitched headlong into Ginger’s chest. He missed his eye with his thumb, but did manage to crack his head nastily on the plastic table. Beer flew everywhere.
Obstat laughed and clapped with everyone else, “Aww, Gilligan.” He bent and quickly tied the bartender’s shoelaces together.
“What about my beer?” Lang was saying.
“Coming right up,” the bartender murmured. He was on his feet and moving when the shoelaces got him. He somersaulted into and off of Mrs. Howell’s hair, ending up draped over her pince-nez.
Obstat giggled.
“Immature f*cker,” Lang grinned.
“Got to get into the spirit of the place.”
Lang sucked off the last bit of beer in his bottle. “But you say you do know this Beadsman girl, then,” he said to Obstat.
Obstat got serious. “Do I ever,” he said. “I went to high school with her, when we were kids. I’ve had a crush since I was this high. She’s maybe even a reason why I went to work for Stonecipheco. Unconscious or something. Except I had no idea she didn’t like her Dad and didn’t want to go into the Company. I’m pissed. I only got to see her in person again the other day, when we were all in the Chief’s office. The Chief is her Dad. And one of their relatives got us going on the whole pineal project, and now she’s trying to rip us off. But I can still pull it off. Except I think Lenore’s frigid. I made a bit of a dick of myself over her in school, and I was going for heavy eye contact, in the Chiefs office. But she always just looked right through me. I think she’s frigid.”
Lang accepted another beer without looking up. “But hot, though, too.”
Obstat fingered his tie. “Don’t know what it is about her, Wanger. The girl’s just always slayed me. The way she dresses, the not incidental gazonga factor. And her legs. The single most out-of-this. world pair of legs I’ve ever laid eyes on.”
“I was noticin’ those legs,” Lang said, nodding.
“I’ve had this wild fantasy, for who knows how long, about doing her out in the G.O.D.,” Obstat said, looking faraway. He looked back at Lang and blushed a bit. “You been back out there, lately, at all? I’ve been dying to go. I still remember when we planted cacti.”
“We can go any time you want,” said Lang. “I’m gonna buy some sort of car for out here tomorrow, I decided. Lenore’s little boyfriend’s paying me like the money hurt his hand.”
“Boyfriend?”
“This guy named Vigorous, owns the firm we’re at, or at least part of it.” Lang looked off over Obstat’s shoulder, at the Skipper.
“I remember the Chief saying something to her about a Vigorous, in his office,” Obstat said, narrowing his little brown eyes. He dug at his Twizzler’s plastic pineapple jug with a straw.
“He’s a interesting little dung beetle. Doublest chin I ever did see on a human being.” Lang drank deeply. “How’d he get hold of Lenore, I wonder, if she’s so all-fired hot as you say.”
“There is no God in the universe, Wang-Dang,” Obstat said, shaking his big head.
“So I keep getting told. Even though the girl herself owns this wild-ass bird that’s gonna be on religious TV, with padre Sykes, who’s my own personal Daddy’s favorite.” Lang held up a bandaged finger. “Little F*cker damn near took my digit off, yesterday.”
“You were at Lenore’s house, with her bird?”
Lang stared silently at Obstat.
“Well, we know all about the bird thing,” Obstat said, looking away and shaking his head. “We’re shitting all kinds of different bricks over that one. We think what happened was this relative who got us going on the project slipped the thing a pineal mickey. Which means maybe they’re going around slipping it all over the place. Which means other companies could get hold of it. Which has the Chief shitting bricks, believe you me—that along with the fact that the retards in Jars have made something like three times as many jars as we need, or have lids for, even, so the Chief has to try to sell some jars to this chain of medical laboratories, and he‘s—”
“This crap can make animals talk?” Lang interrupted.
“Well, our understanding is the bird doesn’t talk, so much as just repeat.”
“... remember Candy did say something about that.”
“Who?”
“They got peanuts in this bar, at all?”, Lang said. They both looked around. “What kind of self-respectin’ bar doesn’t have peanuts?”
“Coconut I know they’ve got. It’s a mood place.”
“Shit on fire.”
“But anyway we don’t really know what it can do. You ought to hear some of these kids. They can sing like birds.”
“Some joke.”
“No pun intended.”
Lang stared absently into Ginger’s décolletage. “So she’s hot, then, and things with her Daddy aren’t too good.”
“My impression is they aren’t close at all.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Listen, you want to see a picture of her?” Obstat dug for his wallet in the back pocket of his Chinos.
“I know what she looks like,” Lang said. Then he looked up at Obstat in surprise. “You carry her picture?”
“The little lady has smitten me from afar, since way back who knows when,” Obstat said, shaking his head and flipping through his credit cards. “I admit it’s a pitiful situation.”
“This an old picture you got?”
“High school yearbook.”
“Give it here, then.”
Obstat handed over the little wallet photo. In the picture Lenore was sixteen. Her hair was very long. She was smiling broadly, looking off into the nothing reserved especially for yearbook photos.
Lang stared down at the picture. He brushed away a bit of beer foam from the border with a thumb. Lenore smiled at him, through him.
“Looks to be her, all right.”
Obstat was bouncing up and down in his seat. “Listen, stay a few more minutes. It’ll be time for another gag in a while. And have a look at that one over there, at Mary-Ann, with the little guy in the beard and steamed glasses. Looks a little spacey, but talk about your basic gazongas.”
Lang kept looking at the photo. He seemed to be about to say something.
/e/

“Maybe even inclined to say big mistake here, Rick.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s an absolute inspiration. I was positively writhing with excitement at the prospect of telling you, last night. And then of course you conked out. Again.”
“But I like the switchboard. You know that. And it even looks like the lines are going to get fixed soon. They’re going to do tests.”
“Lenore, you are in a position to do me a favor. Actually to help both of us, I think. This will be deeply interesting, I promise. I’ve seen that you’re chafing, at the switchboard, deep down.”
“Beg pardon?”
“You can save me valuable weeding-time.”
“How can Norslan translations take so much time? That’s not a long thing.”
“....”
“And what’s with the light in here right now? This is creepy.”
“Frigging shadow ...”
“We need to have a serious talk about the windows in the lobby, too, mister. I’m starting not to care one bit for the way the—”
“Come here a moment. See the way the lake looks like rotten mayonnaise in the shadow-half of the window? Doesn’t that look like rotten mayonnaise?”
“Oh, that’s just sick.”
“But doesn’t it?”
“It really does.”
“I thought so.”
“OK, so what does this involve, then?”
“What?”
“This hopefully very temporary Review job.”
“It simply involves screening a portion of the back submissions to the quarterly, for a time, the time I’m to be frantically busy with the herbicide thing. You’ll be weeding out the more obviously pathetic or inappropriate submissions, and putting asterisks on those that strike you as meriting particular attention and consideration on my part.”
“Hmm.”
“We’ll need to make sure your tastes are keened to the proper pitch for our particular publication, of course ...”
“You’re going to keen the pitch of my tastes?”
“Relax. I’m simply going to have you read briefly through a batch I’ve already exposed myself to, and we’ll just see what happens, taste-pitch-wise. You’ll be having a preliminary look at ... these.”
“All those are submissions?”
“I shall say that most are. Some few might for all you know have been sent to me by friends for scrutiny and criticism. But I’ve effaced all names.”
“So it’s not all just troubled-college-student stuff?”
“The bulk of it is, to my ever-increasing irritation and distress. But the average collegiate material you should be able to spot a mile off.”
“How come?”
“Oh, dear, many reasons.”
“....“
“What shall we say? Perhaps that it tends to be hideously self-conscious. Mordantly cynical. Or, if not mordantly cynical, then simperingly naive. Or at any rate consistently, off-puttingly pretentious. Not to mention abysmally typed, of course.”
“....”
“It tries too hard, is really all we can say about most of it. There is simply an overwhelming sense of trying too hard. My, you’re looking particularly lovely in this half of the light.”
“Rick, how am I supposed to know if something’s mordant, or simpering? I don’t know anything about literature.”
“A, the vast majority of the material that passes through here is not even potentially literature, and b, good!”
“What’s good?”
“That you ‘know nothing about literature,’ or at least believe that you don’t. It means you’re perfect: fresh, intuitive, shaking the aesthetic chaff out of your hair ...”
“There’s something in my hair?”
“It’s when people begin to fancy that they actually know something about literature that they cease to be literarily interesting, or even of any use to those who are. You’re perfect, take it from me.”
“I don’t know ...”
“Lenore, what’s with you? Isn’t this the person who sees herself as almost by definition a word person? Who snarls when her literary sensibility is even potentially impugned?”
“I just want to try to keep my personal life and my job as separate as I can. I don’t need Walinda going around saying I got a cushy deal because of you.”
“But here’s your chance to be out of Walinda-range for whole periods of time.”
“And plus, Rick, I just have a bad feeling about the whole thing.”
“Trust me. Help me. Look, let’s take a couple of examples. How about this pathetically typed little item right here? Why don’t you just read the very first bit of it, here, and we’ll ...”
“This one?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s see: ‘Dr. Rudolph Carp, one of the world’s leading proc tologists, was doing a standard exam one warm July morning when he suddenly remembered that he had forgotten to put on an examination glove. He looked down with horror at ...’—oh, gak.”
“Gak indeed. Material like this can simply immediately be put in the rejection pile, on Mavis’s desk, and she will Xerox a terse little rejection slip to go with the returned manuscript.”
“What’s with these titles? ‘Dance of the Insecure’? ‘To the Mall’? ‘Threnody Jones and the Goat from Below’? ‘The Enema Bandit and the Cosmic Buzzer’? ‘Love’? ‘A Metamorphosis for the Eighties’?”
“That last one is actually rather interesting. A Kafka parody, though sensitively done. Self-loathing-in-the-midst-of-adulation piece. Collegiate, but interesting.”
“ ‘As Greg Sampson awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he discovered that he had been transformed into a rock star. He gazed down at his red, as it were leather-clad, chest, the top of which was sprinkled with sequins and covered with a Fender guitar strapped tightly across his leather shoulders. It was no dream.’ Hmmm.”
“Read it over at your leisure. There are some interesting ones. There’s one about a family trying to decide whether to have the grandmother’s gangrenous feet amputated—you should vibrate sympathetically with that one. There’s one about a boy who puts himself through prep school selling copies of the Physicians’ Desk Reference in the halls. One about a woman who hires herself out at exorbitant rates as a professional worrier and griever for the sick and dying ...”
“ ‘Elroy’s problem was that he had a tender pimple, on his forehead, right in the spot where his forehead creased when he looked surprised, which was often.’ Gak. Rejection. ‘So it finally happened. Bob Kelly, busy checking out the rear end of his neighbor. Mrs. Ernst as she bent to retrieve a mitten, ran over his son, Miles, with the snowblower.’ Double gak. Double rejection.”
“Like those instincts, kiddo.”
“ ‘Santo Longine, having learned to shift with a cigarette in his hand, now smoked while he drove.’ ‘The morning that Monroe Fieldbinder came next door to the Slotniks’ to discuss Mr. Costigan was a soft warm Sunday morning in May.’ These seem prima facie OK.”
“Why not start with those. Why not go ahead and start with those—start with that last one. Read through about half the stack ... like so. You can use Mavis’s desk until her return from lunch, then you can come in here. I have to run to the typesetter’s this afternoon, and I may be gone for some time. You can have free rein.”
“This one looks sort of interesting, at least potentially. At least
it’s not overtly sick.“
“Which one?”
“....”
“Just see what you think. Go with your feelings, is the vital thing. ”
“Do I get switchboard scale for this?”
“Readers make ten dollars an hour.”
“I’ll just be outside, reading.”
“Have things reversed, Lenore?”
“Hmmm?”
“Nothing. Go. Have fun. Be intuitive.”
“....”
/f/

“Come in. ”
“Good heavens.”
“Come down.”
“Dear me.”
“This way.”
“I’ve got to confess, I thought this was some sort of joke at—”
“It wasn’t. It isn’t.”
“My God, it’s boiling in here. How do you people live? And how am I to walk?”
“Bent over. This way. Hunch your shoulders.”
“Lord.”
“You notice I’m not complaining. We all bend this way naturally. Mrs. Beadsman told me to tell you that as space is bending you now, so time has bent us.”
“....”
“The pain of which you have no idea, God willing. God forbid you should ever be in our state.”
“Rather hope to be in just your state, actually, at some point in the very distant future. Otherwise I ... Ow! Otherwise I expect I’ll be even worse off—specifically dead.”
“Well now that’s a very interesting point, which you can take up with Mrs. Beadsman.”
“Am I perhaps going to have a chance to speak to Mrs. Beadsman, then?”
“No.”
“Mrs. Yingst!”
“Hello, Dr. Jay.”
“Well, I must say it seemed difficult to conceive of, but this is—”
“Cut the guano.”
“... cozy, I must—”
“Here are the sessions’ transcripts back. Here is your money. Lenore instructs me to tell you you’re doing a competent job.”
“Competent?”
“That’s what she said.”
“And how long is this to go on? This is eventually going to kill her. You people and I are killing a person from the inside out.”
“That’s exactly wrong. It’s we who are keeping her alive. Can’t you read? You’re even more of an idiot than Lenore maintains.”
“I refuse to submit to this sort of abuse, madam. I am a distinguished professional, a graduate of Harvard University, a respected member of—”
“You’re a pathetic phobic neurotic whom Lenore used her influence to rescue from institutional commitment by your wife, who if you recall objected to being scrubbed with antiseptic every night before bed. We set you up and keep you in soap and peroxide and deodorant. You’ll do what Lenore tells you to do for precisely as long as you’re needed.”
“But this simply cannot keep on indefinitely. The Vigorous aspect, especially. He’s the real problem. Spoken things anger him beyond belief, and I know he’s eventually—”
“Lenore instructs me to instruct you simply to take care of Mr. Vigorous vis à vis Lenore. He’s getting on everyone’s nerves. Do it. You’ll find some material here on a person who—”
“Listen, though. This will only make it worse. He’s going to want to read something by Blentner. He’s a reader. He’s going to want to lay eyes on Blentner’s actual texts. And he’ll ask me for them, and he’ll find out that there is no Blentner, and then what am I to say?”
“There can be a Blentner if you want there to be, if you need there to be.”
“How’s that?”
“You’ll write something, you ninny. You’ll make something up and attach a name to it. What could be simpler? Are you completely dense?”
“Really, I see no need for this sort of—”
“Take your money and go. Here is the material on Vigorous. Go away.”
“Do you two notice anything smelling the tiniest bit peculiar down here? I—”
“Take your nostrils and go.”
“How am I to turn around? It’s too cramped to turn around.”
“Back up. Go backwards. Mrs. Lindenbaum will help you.”
“This way, dear.”
“Good God.”