The Broom of the System

3
1990
/a/

A nurse’s aide threw the contents of a patient’s water glass out a window, the mass of water hitting the ground dislodging a pebble, which rolled across the angled pavement and fell with a click on a stone culvert in the ditch below, startling a squirrel having at some sort of nut right there on the concrete pipe, causing the squirrel to run up the nearest tree, in doing which it disturbed a slender brittle branch and surprised a few nervous morning birds, one of which, preparatory to flight, released a black-and-white glob of droppings, which glob fell neatly on the windshield of the tiny car of one Lenore Beadsman, just as she pulled into a parking space. Lenore got out of the car while the birds flew away, making sounds.
Flowerbeds of pretend marble, the plastic sagging and pouty-lipped in places from the heat of the last month, flanked the smooth concrete ramp that ran up from the edge of the parking lot to the Home’s front doors, the late-summer flowers dry and grizzled in the deep beds of dry dirt and soft plastic, a few brown vines running weakly up the supports of the handrails that went along the ramp above the flowerbeds, the paint of the handrails bright yellow and looking soft and sticky even this early in the day. Dew glittered low in the crunchy August grass; light from the sun moved in the lawn as Lenore went up the ramp. Outside the doors an old black woman stood motionless with her walker, her mouth open to the sun. Above the doors, along a narrow tympanum of sun-punched plastic again pretending to be igneous marble, ran the letters SHAKER HEIGHTS NURSING HOME. On either side of the doors, impressed into stone walls that reached curving away out of sight to become the building’s face, were entombed the likenesses of Tafts. Inside the doors, in the glass tank between outer and inner entries, languished three people in wheelchairs, blanket-lapped even in the greenhouse heat of the mid-moming glass, one with a neck drooping so badly to the side that her ear rested on her shoulder.
“Hi,” Lenore Beadsman said as she hurried through an inner glass door frosted in the sunlight with old fingerprints. Lenore knew the prints were from the wheelchair patients, for whom the metal bar with the PUSH sign on it was too high and too hard. Lenore had been here before.
The Shaker Heights Home had just one story to it. This level was broken into many sections and covered a lot of territory. Lenore came out of the hot tank and down the somewhat cooler hall toward this particular section’s receiving desk, with the tropical overhead fan rotating slowly over it. Inside the doughnut reception desk was a nurse Lenore hadn’t seen before, a dark-blue sweater caped over her shoulders and held with a metal clasp on which was embossed a profile of Lawrence Welk. People in wheelchairs were everywhere, lining all the walls. The noise was loud and incomprehensible, rising and falling, notched by nodes of laughter at nothing and cries of rage over who knew what.
The nurse looked up as Lenore got close.
“Hi, I’m Lenore Beadsman,” Lenore said, a little out of breath.
The nurse stared at her for a second. “Well that’s not terribly amusing, is it,” she said.
“Pardon me?” Lenore asked. The nurse gave her the fish-eye. “Oh,” Lenore said, “I think the thing is we’ve never met. Madge is usually here, where you are. I’m Lenore Beadsman, but I guess I’m here to see Lenore Beadsman, too. She’s my great-grandmother, and I—”
“Well, you just,” the nurse looked at something on the big desk, “you just let me ring Mr. Bloemker, hold on.”
“Is Gramma all right?” Lenore asked. “See I was just in—”
“Well I’ll just let you speak to Mr. Bloemker, hello Mr. Bloemker? A Lenore Beadsman here to see you in B? He’ll be right out to see you. Please hang on.”
“I guess I’d rather just go ahead and see Lenore. Is she OK?”
The nurse looked at her. “Your hair is wet.”
“I know.”
“And uncombed.”
“Yes, thank you, I know. See I was just in the shower when my landlady called up the stairs that I had a phone call from Mr. Bloemker.”
“How did your landlady know?”
“Pardon?”
“That you had a phone call from Mr. Bloemker.”
“Well it’s a neighbor’s phone, that I use, but she didn‘t—”
“You don’t have a phone?”
“What is this? No I don’t have a phone. Listen, I’m very sorry to keep asking, but is my Gramma all right or not? I mean Mr. Bloemker said to come right over. Should I call my family? Where’s Lenore?”
The nurse was staring at a point over Lenore’s left shoulder; her face had resolved into some kind of hard material. “I’m afraid I’m in no position to say anything about ... ,” looking down, “... Lenore Beadsman, area F. But now, if you’ll just be so kind as to wait a moment, we can—”
“Where’s the morning nurse who’s supposed to be here? Where’s Madge? Where’s Mr. Bloemker?”
Mr. Bloemker appeared in the dim recesses of a corridor, beyond the reach of light from the reception area.
“Ms. Beadsman!”
“Mr. Bloemker!”
“Shush,” said the nurse; Lenore’s shout had produced a ground-swell of sighs and moans and objectless shouts from the wheelchaired forms lining the perimeter of the circular reception station. A television went on in a lounge off the hall, and Lenore caught a glimpse of a brightly colored game show as she hurried down toward Mr. Bloemker.
“Mr. Bloemker.”
“Hello Ms. Beadsman, thank you so much for coming so quickly and so early. Were you to be at work soon?”
“Is my great-grandmother all right? Why did you call?”
“Why don’t we just nip over to my office.”
“Well but I don’t understand why I can’t just ...” Lenore stopped. “Oh my Lord. She didn’t ... ?”
“Oh dear me no, please come with me. I-careful, watch the ... good morning, Mrs. Feltner.” A woman careened past in a wheelchair.
“Who’s that nurse at the desk?”
“Just through this door, here.”
“This isn’t the way to Gramma’s room.”
“This way.”
/b/

Well, now, just imagine how you’d feel if your great-grandmother-great it could really probably be argued in more than one sense of the word, which is to say the supplier of your name, the person under whose aegis you’d first experienced chocolate, books, swing sets, antinomies, pencil games, contract bridge, the Desert, the person in whose presence you’d first bled into your underwear (at sixteen, now, late sixteen, grotesquely late as we seem to remember, in the east wing, during the closing theme of “My Three Sons,” when the animated loafers were tapping, with you and Lenore watching, the slipping, sick relief, laughter and scolding at once, Gramma used her left arm and there was her old hand in Lenore’s new oldness), the person through whose personal generosity and persuasiveness vis à vis certain fathers you’d been overseas, twice, albeit briefly, but still, your great-grandmother, who lived right near you—were just all of a sudden missing, altogether, and was for all you knew lying flat as a wet Saltine on some highway with a tire track in her forehead and her walker now a sort of large trivet, and you’ll have an idea of how Lenore Beadsman felt when she was informed that her great-grandmother, with whom all the above clauses did take place, was missing from the Shaker Heights Nursing Home, in Shaker Heights, right near Cleveland, Ohio, near which Lenore lived, in East Corinth.
/c/

Combination Embryonic Journal and Draft Space for Fieldbinder Collection
Richard Vigorous
62 Bombardini Building
Erieview Plaza
Cleveland, Ohio
Reasonable reward for proper and discreet return.

25 August

Lenore, come to work, where I am, remove yourself from the shower immediately and come to work now, I’ll not come down for my paper until you are here, Mandible is getting suspicious when I call.
/d/

The outside of a door, which like all the doors here looked like solid wood but was really hollow and light and rattled in its latch when the office window was open and the wind blew, said DAVID BLOEMKER, ADMINISTRATOR OF FACILITY. The office, like the rest of the Home, smelled faintly of urine.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I understand what you’re saying,” Lenore said.
Mr. Bloemker had sad wet brown eyes and blinked behind round glasses as he pulled and scratched at his beard, in the heat. “What I am saying, Ms. Beadsman, is that with all possible apologies and every assurance that we are doing everything within our power to resolve the situation, I must report to you that area F’s Lenore Beadsman is at this point in time missing.”
“I don’t think I understand what ‘missing’ means.”
“I am afraid that it means that we are unable to determine her present whereabouts.”
“You don’t know where she is.”
“That is unfortunately right.”
“What,” said Lenore, “you mean you don’t know where she is in the Home?”
“Oh my no, if she were on the grounds, there would be no situation of any significance. No, we have—those of us on hand at the moment have covered the entire facility.”
“So, what, she’s somewhere off the grounds?”
“That would seem to be so, to our extreme distress.” Mr. Bloemker’s fingers, with their long nails, sank into his beard.
“Well how may I ask did that happen?” said Lenore.
“This is not entirely clear to anyone,” looking off, out the win . dow, at the sun through the trees on a car right by the window. It was Lenore’s car, with the spot on the windshield.
“Well was she here last night?”
“We are at this time unable to determine that.”
“There must have been a nurse who looked in on her last night—what does she say?”
Mr. Bloemker looked at her sadly. “I’m afraid we are at present unable to contact the relevant nurse.”
“And why is that.”
“I am afraid we don’t know where she is.”
“Either?”
A sad smile. “Either.”
“Gee.”
Mr. Bloemker’s telephone buzzed. Lenore eyed it as he went to answer it. Not a Centrex, no crossbar. Something primitive, single-line unretrievable transfers, no hunters. “Yes,” Mr. Bloemker was saying. “Yes. Please.”
He hung up gently and went back to blinking moistly at Lenore. Lenore had a thought. “All right, but what about Mrs. Yingst, in the next room?” she said. “She and Lenore are like this. Mrs. Yingst is sure to know when she was last around. Have you talked to Mrs. Yingst?”
Mr. Bloemker looked at this thumb.
“Mrs. Yingst is ... around, isn’t she?”
“Not at this time, unfortunately, no.”
“Meaning she’s missing too.”
“I am afraid I must say yes.” Mr. Bloemker’s eyes shone with regret. Lenore thought she saw a bit of egg in his beard.
“Well, listen, what exactly’s going on here, then? Is everybody gone and you have no idea where they are? I think I just don’t understand the situation, yet, completely.”
“Oh Ms. Beadsman, nor in truth do I, to my profound grief,” a, movement in one side of his face. “What I have been able to determine is that at some point in the last, shall we say, sixteen hours some number of residents and staff here at the facility have become ... unavailable to access.”
“Meaning missing.”
“Yes.”
“Well how many is ‘some number’?”
“At this time it looks to be twenty-four.”
“Twenty-four. ”
“Yes.”
“How many of them are patients?”
“Twenty residents are at this time unavailable.”
“Meaning twenty patients.”
“We prefer to call them residents, Ms. Beadsman, since as you know we try to offer an environment in which—”
“Fine, well, but don’t a lot of the missing ‘residents’ need IV’s to get fed and stuff? And little things like insulin, and antibiotics, and heart medicine, and help dressing and taking showers? Lenore can hardly even move her left arm this summer, and plus it’s pretty cold for her, outside, for very long, so I just don’t see how they could—”
“Ms. Beadsman, please rest assured that you and I are in more than complete agreement on this. That I am as confused and distraught as are you. As disoriented.” Mr. Bloemker’s cheeks yielded to the force of his beard-abuse, began to move around, so it looked like he was making faces at Lenore. “I find myself facing a situation I, believe me, never dreamt of possibly encountering, monstrous and disorienting.” He licked his lips. “As well, just allow me to say, one for which my training as facility administrator prepared me not at all, not at all.”
Lenore looked at her shoe. Mr. Bloemker’s phone buzzed and flashed again. He reached and listened. “Please,” he said into the phone. “Thank you.”
He hung up and then for some reason came around the desk, as if to take Lenore’s hand, to comfort. Lenore stared at him, and he stopped. “So have you called my father over at Stonecipheco?” she asked. “Should I call him? Clarice is just over in the city, my sister. Is she in on this news?”
Mr. Bloemker shook his head, his hand trailing. “We’ve contacted no one else at this time. Since you are Lenore’s only really regular visitor from among her family, I thought of you first.”
“What about the other patients’ families? If there’s like twenty gone, this place should be a madhouse.”
“There are very few visitors here as a rule, you would be surprised. In any event we have contacted no one else as yet.”
“And why haven’t you.”
Mr. Bloemker looked at the ceiling for a second. There was a really unattractive brown stain soaked into the soft white tile. Light from the sun was coming through the east windows and falling across the room, a good bit of it on Bloemker, making one of his eyes glow gold. He leveled it at Lenore. “The fact is that I have been instructed not to.”
“Instructed? By whom?”
“By the owners of the facility.”
Lenore looked up at him sharply. “Last I knew, the owner of the facility was Stonecipheco.”
“Correct.”
“Meaning basically my father.”
“Yes.”
“But I thought you said my father didn’t know anything about this.”
“No, I said I had not contacted anyone else as of yet, is what I said. As a matter of fact, it was I who was contacted early this morning at home and informed of the state of affairs by a ... ,” sifting through papers on his desk, “... a Mr. Rummage, who apparently serves Stonecipheco in some legal capacity. How he knew of the ... situation is utterly beyond me.”
“Karl Rummage. He’s with the law firm my father uses for personal business. ”
“Yes.” He twisted some beard around a finger. “Well apparently it is ... not wished to have the situation of cognizance to those other than the owners at this moment by the owners.”
“You want to run that by me again?”
“They don’t want anyone to know just yet.”
“Ah.”
“....”
“So then why did you call me? I mean thank you very much for doing so, obviously, but ...”
Another sad smile. “Your thanks are without warrant, I’m afraid. I was instructed to do what 1 did.”
“Oh.”
“The obvious inference to draw here is that the fact that you are after all a Beadsman ... and enjoy some connection to the ownership of the facility through Stonecipheco ...”
“That’s just not true.”
“Oh really? In any event it’s clear that you can be relied on for a measure of discretion beyond that of the average relative-on-the-street.”
“I see.”
Bloemker took a deep breath and rubbed a gold eye with a white finger. In the air around him a whirlpool of dust motes was created. It whirled. “There is in addition the fact that the resident whose temporary unavailability is relevant to you, that is to say Lenore, enjoyed a status here—with the facility administration, the staff, and, through the force of her personality and her evident gifts, especially with the other residents—that leads one to believe that, were the mislocation a result of anything other than outright coercion on the part of some outside person or persons, which seems unlikely, it would not be improper to posit the location and retrieval of Lenore as near assurance of retrieving the other misplaced parties.”
“I didn’t understand any of that.”
“Your great-grandmother was more or less the ringleader around here.”
“Oh.”
“Surely you knew that.”
“Not really, no.”
“But you were here,” looking at a sheet on his desk, “often several times a week, sometimes for long periods. Of time.”
“We talked about other stuff. We sure never talked about any rings being led. And usually there wasn’t anybody else around, what with the heat of the room.” Lenore looked at her sneaker. “And also you know my just plain grandmother’s a ... resident here, too, in area J. Lenore’s daughter-in-law.”
“Concamadine.”
“Yes. She ... uh, she is here, isn’t she?”
“Oh yes,” said Bloemker. He looked at a sheet, then at Lenore. “As ... far as I am aware. Perhaps you’ll excuse me for a moment.” He went to his phone. Lenore watched him dial in-house. A three-digit relay means no crossbar. Bloemker was asking someone something in an administrative undertone Lenore couldn’t hear. “Thank you,” she heard him say. “Yes.”
He smiled. “We’ll simply check to be sure.”
Lenore had had a thought. “Maybe it would be good if I had a look at Lenore’s room, took a look around, maybe see if I could notice something.”
“That’s just what I was going to suggest.”
“Is your beard OK?”
“I’m sorry? Oh, yes, nervous habit, I’m afraid, the state of affairs at the ...” Mr. Bloemker pulled both hands out of his beard.
“So shall we go?”
“Certainly.”
“Or should I call my father from. here?”
“I cannot get an outside line on this phone, I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“After you.”
“Thank you.”
/e/

The Home was broken into ten sections, areas they were called, each roughly pentagonal in shape, housing who knows how many patients, the ten areas arranged in a circle, each area accessible by two and only two others, or via the center of the circle, a courtyard filled with chalky white gravel and heavy dark plants and a pool of concentric circles of colored water distributed and separated and kept unadulterated by a system of plastic sheeting and tubing, the tubing leading in toward the pool in the center from a perimeter of ten smooth, heavy wooden sculptures of jungle animals and Tafts and Stonecipher Beadsmans I, II, and III, with a translucent plastic roof high overhead that let in light for the plants but kept rain or falling dew from diluting the colors of the pool, the interior planes of each of the ten sections walled in glass and accessing into the courtyard, the yard itself off-limits to residents because the gravel was treacherous to walk in, swallowed canes and the legs of walkers, mired wheelchairs, and made people fall over—people with hips like spun glass, Lenore had once told Lenore.
Down a corridor, through a door, around the perimeter of one area, past a gauntlet of reaching wheelchaired figures, out a glass panel, through the steamy crunch of the courtyard gravel, through another panel and halfway around the perimeter of area F, Mr. Bloemker led Lenore to her great-grandmother’s room, put his key in the lock of another light, pretend-wood door. The room was round, looked with big windows into the east parking lots with a view at the comer of which glittered, spangled with light through the trees in the wind, Lenore’s little red car again. The room was unbelievably hot.
“You didn’t turn the heat down?” Lenore said.
Mr. Bloemker stayed in the doorway. “The owners had installed an automatic duct complex to this room that is as difficult to dismantle as it is resistant to malfunction. We are also of course expecting that Lenore will be back with us very soon.”
Steam hung in the air of the room, you could feel each breath on your lips, the windows sweated broadly, the movement of the sun through the trees made a dark green flutter on the white walls.
Lenore Beadsman, who was ninety-two, suffered no real physical disability save a certain lack of capacity on her left side, and the complete absence of any kind of body thermometer. She now depended for her body’s temperature on the temperature of the air around her. She had in effect become sort of cold-blooded. This had come to the attention of her family in 1986, after the death of her husband, Stonecipher Beadsman, when she began to take on a noticeable blue hue. The temperature in Lenore’s room here at the Home was 98.6 degrees. This simultaneously kept Gramma alive and comfortable and kept her visitors down to Lenore and a brief bare minimum of other patients and staff and very occasionally Lenore’s sister, Clarice.
The room contained a bed that was made, a desk and bedside table sheened with humidity, a water glass on the bedside table whose contents had almost evaporated, a bureau on which were ranged some jars of Stonecipheco baby food, some vaguely malevolent black cords snaking out from a wall, the remnants of a cable hookup to a television Gramma had caused to be removed, a chair, a closet door, a clotted shaker of salt, and on a black metal TV tray a little clay horse Lenore had gotten Gramma in Spain a long time ago. The walls were bare.
“OK,” Lenore said, looking around, “she pretty obviously took her walker.” She opened the closet door. “She couldn’t have taken very many clothes ... here’s her suitcase ... or taken much underwear,” looking in the bureau drawers. Lenore picked up one of the jars of Stonecipheco baby food, one with a red-ink drawing of a laughing baby on the label. Strained beef flavor. “She eats this stuff?” she asked, looking over at Mr. Bloemker, who stood with a sweat-shiny face in the doorway, massaging his chin.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“I’d bet money she doesn’t.” Lenore went to the desk. There were three light, empty drawers. One locked drawer.
“Did you open this drawer, here?”
“We were unable to locate the key.”
“Ah.” Lenore went to the TV table, took the little clay horse and popped its head off, and out fell a key and fluttered a tiny picture of Lenore, out of a locket. The picture was old and dull. The key made a sound on the metal table. Mr. Bloemker wiped at his forehead with the sleeve of his sportcoat.
Lenore opened the drawer. In it were Gramma’s notebooks, yellow and crispy, old, and her copy of the Investigations, and a small piece of fuzzy white paper, which actually turned out to be a tom-off label from another jar of Stonecipheco food. Creamed peach. On the white back of the label something was doodled. There was nothing else in the drawer. Which is to say there was no green book in the drawer.
“This is just weird,” Lenore was saying. She looked at Mr. Bloemker. “She didn’t take the Investigations, which is like her prize possession because it’s autographed, or her notebooks either. Except I guess she did take a book. She kept a book in here. Have you ever maybe seen a green book, pretty heavy, bound with a sort of greenish leather, with like a little decorative lock and clasp?”
Mr. Bloemker nodded at her. There was a drop of sweat hanging from his nose. “I do think I recall seeing Lenore with such a book. I had rather assumed it was her diary, or a record of her days at Cambridge, which I knew were immensely important to her.”
Lenore shook her head. “No, that’s more or less what these are,” indicating the yellowed notebooks in the open drawer. “No, I don’t know what this thing was, but she had it and the Investigations with her all the time. Remember how when she’d go out of her room here her nightgown would be all sagging down in front? She couldn’t carry the books and use her walker, so she had this big pocket on the front of her nightgown, and she’d put them in there, and it’d sag.” Lenore felt herself beginning to get upset, remembering. “Did she, had she gone out of the room much the last few days?”
There were wet sounds as Mr. Bloemker worked at his face. “I know for a fact that as a matter of established routine Lenore was out in the area F lounge for some period every afternoon. Holding forth. When were you last here, may I ask?”
“I think a week ago today.”
Mr. Bloemker’s eyebrows went up. Drops stopped and started on his forehead.
“The thing is that my brother was getting set to go back to college,” said Lenore. “I’ve been helping him buy stuff and arrange things and work out some things with my father, when I haven’t been working. There was a lot of stuff to arrange.”
“His college must begin terribly early. It’s not yet even September.”
“No, the place he goes—which is this place called Amherst College? In Massachusetts?—it doesn’t start for a couple weeks yet, but he wanted to go visit our mother before the year started and everything. ”
“Visit your mother?”
“She’s sort of resting, in Wisconsin.”
“Ah.”
“Listen, should I call her and tell her what’s going on? She’s Lenore’s relative too. I really think we better call the police.”
Mr. Bloemker’s glasses had slipped almost all the way down his nose. He pushed them up, and they immediately slid down again. “What I can do at this point is pass along to you the information and requests relayed to me very early by Mr. Rummage.” He tugged at his cuffs. “The police are not going to be contacted at this point in time. The owners are of the opinion, for reasons which I must in all honesty confess remain at this moment hazy to me, that this is an internal nursing-care-facility matter which can be brought to some quick resolution without resort to outside aid. If of course it be so, the advantages accruing in terms of minimal embarrassment and impediment to the facility are obvious. You are requested to inform no one of any details of the situation until you have spoken to your father. You are requested to contact your father at your very earliest opportunity.”
“Dad is really hard to contact, usually.”
“Nevertheless.”
Lenore looked back at the open desk drawer. “This is making very little sense to me. And what about the relatives of the staff who are ... unavailable right now? Won’t their families find their unavailability a little out of the ordinary? They’re going to be apt to want to call the police, don’t you think? I don’t blame them. I’d like to call the police, too.”
Mr. Bloemker’s glasses suddenly fell off his nose and he caught them, barely, and wiped the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “It is at this point unclear whether the families of the unavailable staff are themselves unavailable because of normal extra-Home commitments, or whether they too have become unavailable in a manner similar to that of the staff, but the in a way fortuitous though of course also quite disquieting fact remains ...”
“What was all that?” Lenore said from back at Gramma’s drawer.
“The families aren’t around, either.”
“Gosh.”
“What are you doing?” Bloemker asked. Lenore was looking at the ink drawing on the back of the Stonecipheco label that lay on top of the notebooks in the desk drawer. It featured a person, apparently in a smock. In one hand was a razor, in the other a can of shaving cream. Lenore could even see the word “Noxzema” on the can. The person’s head was an explosion of squiggles of ink.
“Looking at this thing,” she said.
Mr. Bloemker moved closer. He smelled like a wet diaper. “What is it,” he asked, looking over Lenore’s shoulder.
“If it’s what I think it is,” said Lenore, “it’s a sort of joke. A what do you call it. An antinomy.”
“An antinomy?”
Lenore nodded. “Gramma really likes antinomies. I think this guy here,” looking down at the drawing on the back of the label, “is the barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves. ”
Mr. Bloemker looked at her. “A barber?”
“The big killer question,” Lenore said to the sheet of paper, “is supposed to be whether the barber shaves himself. I think that’s why his head’s exploded, here.”
“Beg pardon?”
“If he does, he doesri t, and if he doesn‘t, he does.”
Mr. Bloemker stared down at the drawing. Smoothed his beard.
“Look, can we leave?” Lenore asked. “It’s really hot. I want to leave.”
“By all means.”
Lenore put the Stonecipheco label in her purse and shut the drawer. “I’ll put the key here on the desk, but I don’t think anybody other than the police ought to go looking through Gramma’s stuff, assuming the police get called, which I really think they ought to.”
“I quite agree. You are taking the ... ?”
“Antinomy.”
“Yes.”
“Is that OK?”
“The person on the telephone said nothing indicating otherwise.”
“Thanks.”
There was a knock at the door. A staff member handed a note to Mr. Bloemker. Bloemker read the note. The staff member looked at Lenore’s dress and shoes for a moment and left.
“Well of course as I fully expected Concamadine Beadsman is still with us, over in J,” Mr. Bloemker said. “Would you perhaps care to see her before you—?”
“No thanks, really,” Lenore cut him off. “I really have to get to work. What time is it, by the way?”
“Almost noon.”
“God, I’m going to be really late. I’m going to get killed. I hope Candy isn’t mad about covering. Look, is there a phone where I can dial out to call and say I’ll be late? I really need to call.”
“There are dial-out phones at every reception station. I’ll show you.”
“I remember, come to think of it.”
“Of course.”
“Look, I’m going to be in touch, soon, obviously. I’m going to get hold of my father from work, and I’ll tell him he should call you.”
“That would be enormously helpful, thank you.” Mr. Bloemker’s shirt had soaked the outline of a thin V through his sportcoat.
“And of course please call me if anything happens, if you find anything out. Either at work or over at the Tissaws’ house.”
“Rest assured that I will. You are still employed at Frequent and Vigorous?” ,
“Yes. Have you got the number?”
“Somewhere, I’m sure.”
“Really, let me give it to you to be sure. We get an incredible amount of wrong numbers.” Lenore wrote the number on a card from her purse and handed it to Mr. Bloemker. Mr. Bloemker looked at the front of the card.
“ ‘Rick Vigorous: Editor, Reader, Administrator, All-Around Literary Presence, Frequent and Vigorous Publishing, Inc.’?”
“Never mind, just there’s the number. Can we please go to the dial-out phone? I’m hideously late, and being here longer isn’t going to help get Lenore back, I can see.”
“Of course. Let me get the door.”
“Thank you.”
“Not at all.”
/f/

25 August

I have a truly horrible dream which invariably occurs on the nights I am Lenoreless in my bed. I am attempting to stimulate the *oris of Queen Victoria with the back of a tortoise-shell hairbrush. Her voluminous skirts swirl around her waist and my head. Her enormous cottage-cheese thighs rest heavy on my shoulders, spill out in front of my sweating face. The clanking of pounds of jewelry is heard as she shifts to offer herself at best advantage. There are odors. The Queen’s impatient breathing is thunder above me as I kneel at the throne. Time passes. Finally her voice is heard, overhead, metalled with disgust and frustration: “We are not aroused.” I am punched in the arm by a guard and flung into a pit at the bottom of which boil the figures of countless mice. I awake with a mouth full of fur. Begging for more time. A ribbed brush.
/g/

One big problem with owning one of those new Mattel ultra rompact cars, which was what Lenore owned, was that the plastic car had a plastic choke which had to be engaged while the car warmed up for not fewer than five minutes, which was particularly irritating in‘the summer, because Lenore had to sit in the small oven that was the car for these five minutes, while the engine raced like mad and made a lot of unpleasant noise, before she could get going and have some cooler air blow on her. While she made the choke-wait in the Home’s parking lot, Lenore watched an ant nibble at something in the wad of bird droppings that lay near the top of her windshield.
The ant was torn off the windshield by the wind when Lenore hit the Inner Belt of I-271 and started going seriously fast. The offices of the publishing firm of Frequent and Vigorous were in that part of downtown Cleveland called Erieview Plaza, right near Lake Erie. Lenore took the Inner Belt south and west from Shaker Heights, preparatory to her being flung by I-271 northward into the city itself, which meant that she was for a while with her car tracing the outline of the city of East Corinth, Ohio, which was where she had her apartment, and which determined the luxuriant and not unpopular shape of the Inner Belt Section of I-271.
East Corinth had been founded and built in the 1960’s by Stonecipher Beadsman II, son of Lenore Beadsman, Lenore Beadsman’s grandfather, who was unfortunately killed at age sixty-five in 1975 in a vat accident during a brief and disastrous attempt on the part of Stonecipheco Baby Food Products to develop and market something that would compete with Jell-O. Stonecipher Beadsman II had been a man of many talents and even more interests. He had been a really fanatical moviegoer, as well as an amateur urban planner, and he had been particularly rabid in his attachment to a film star named Jayne Mansfield. East Corinth lay in the shape of a profile of Jayne Mansfield: leading down from Shaker Heights in a nimbus of winding road-networks, through delicate features of homes and small businesses, a button nose of a park and a full half-smiling section of rotary, through a sinuous swan-like curve of a highway extension and tract housing, before jutting precipitously westward in a huge, swollen development of factories and industrial parks, mammoth and bustling, the Belt curving back no less immoderately a couple miles south into a trim lower border of homes and stores and apartment buildings and some boarding houses, including that in which Lenore Beadsman herself lived and from which she had driven up over Jayne Mansfield to the Shaker Heights Home this morning. Families and firms owning property along the critical western boundary of the suburb were required by zoning code to paint their facilities in the most realistic colors possible, a condition to which property owners in the far westward section near Garfield Heights (where the industrial swelling was most pronounced) particularly objected, and as one can imagine the whole East Corinth area was immensely popular with airline pilots, who all tended to demand landing patterns into Cleveland-Hopkins Airport over East Corinth, and who made a constant racket, flying low and blinking their lights on and off and waggling their wings. The people of East Corinth, many of them unaware of the shape their town really lay in, a knowledge not exactly public, crawled and drove and walked over the form of Jayne Mansfield, shaking their fists at the bellies of planes. Lenore had lived in East Corinth only two years, ever since she had gotten out of college and decided she did not want to live at home or enter Stonecipheco, all at once. To the south, 271 gave way to 77, and 77 led down through Bedford, Tallmadge, Akron, and Canton before stretching into the Great Ohio Desert, with its miles of ash-fine black sand, and cacti and scorpions, and crowds of fishermen, and concession stands at the rim.
There were two reliable ways to identify the Bombardini Building, which was where the firm of Frequent and Vigorous made its home. A look from the south at Erieview Tower, high and rectangular not far from the Terminal section of Cleveland’s downtown, reveals that the sun, always at either a right or a left tangent to the placement of the Tower, casts a huge, dark shadow of the Building over the surrounding area—a deep, severely angled shadow that joins the bottom of the Tower in black union but then bends precipitously off to the side, as if the Erieview Plaza section of Cleveland were a still pool of water, into which the Tower had been dipped, the shadow its refracted submergence. In the morning, when the shadow casts from east to west, the Bombardini Building stands sliced by light, white and black, on the Tower’s northern side. As ‘the day swells and the shadow compacts and moves ponderously in and east, and as clouds begin to complicate the shapes of darknesses, the Bombardini Building is slowly eaten by black, the steady suck of the dark broken only by epileptic flashes of light caused by clouds with pollutant bases bending rays of sun as the Bombardini Building flirts ever more seriously with the border of the shadow. By mid-afternoon the Bombardini Building is in complete darkness, the windows glow yellow, cars go by with headlights. The Bombardini Building, then, is easy to find, occurring nowhere other than on the perimeter of the sweeping scythe of the Midwest’s very most spectacular shadow.
The other aforementioned identifying feature was the white skeleton of General Moses Cleaveland, which found itself in shallow repose in the cement of the sidewalk in front of the Bombardini Building, its outline clearly visible, of no little interest to passing pedestrians and the occasional foraging dog, the latter’s advances discouraged by a thin bit of electrified grillwork, the General’s rest thus largely untroubled save by the pole of a sign which jutted disrespectfully out of Cleaveland’s left eye socket, the sign itself referring to a hugely outlined parking space in front of the Building and reading: THIS SPACE RESERVED FOR NORMAN BOMBARDINI, WITH WHOM YOU DO NOT WANT TO MESS.
Frequent and Vigorous Publishing shared the Bombardini Building with the administrative facilities of the Bombardini Company, a firm involved in some vague genetic engineering enterprises about which Lenore in all honesty cared to know as little as possible. The Bombardini Company occupied most of the lower three floors and a single vertical line of offices up the six-story height of the Bombardini Building’s east side. Frequent and Vigorous took a vertical line of narrow space on the western side of the Building for three floors, then swelled out to take almost all the top three. The Frequent and Vigorous telephone switchboard, where Lenore worked, was in the western corner of the cavernous Bombardini Building lobby, across the huge back wall of which, cast through the giant windows in the front wall of the lobby, the Erieview shadow steadily and even measurably moved, eating the wall. Time could with reasonable accuracy be measured by the position of the shadow against the back wall, except when the black-and-white window-light flickered like a silent movie during the fickle shadow-period of mid-day.
Which it now was. Lenore was hideously late. She hadn’t been able to get through to Candy Mandible on the phone, either. The Shaker Heights Home’s phones were apparently on the fritz: F and V’s number had put Lenore in touch with Cleveland Towing.
“Frequent and Vigorous,” Candy Mandible was saying into the switchboard console phone. “Frequent and Vigorous,” she said. “No this is not Enrique’s House of Cheese. Shall I give you that number, even though it might not work? You’re welcome.”
“Candy God I’m so sorry, it was unavoidable, I couldn’t get through.” Lenore came back behind the counter and into the switchboard cubicle. The window high overhead flashed a cathedral spear of sun, then was dark.
“Lenore, you’re like three hours late. That’s just a little much.”
“My supervisor wouldn’t take it. I’d get fired if I pulled anything like what you guys pull,” Judith Prietht shot off between calls beeping at the Bombardini Company switchboard console a few feet away in the tiny cubicle.
Lenore put her purse by the Security phones. She came close to Candy Mandible. “I tried to call you. Mrs. Tissaw called me out of the shower at like nine-thirty because Schwartz had answered this call for me. I had to go to the nursing home right away.”
“Something’s wrong.”
“Yes.” Lenore saw that Judith Prietht’s ears were aprick. “Can I just talk to you later? Will you be home later on?”
“I’ll be off over at Allied at six,” Candy said. “I was supposed to be over there at freaking twelve—but it’s OK,” seeing Lenore’s expression. “Clint said he’d get somebody to cover for me as long as I wanted. Are you all right? Which one is it?”
“Lenore. ”
“She didn’t ... ?”
“It’s unclear.”
“Unclear?”
“My supervisor, you gotta have reasons for being late, and submit ‘em in advance, and they have to get signed by Mr. Bombardini,” Judith said amid beepings and rings. “But then we have a real business, we get real calls. Bombardini Company. Bombardini Company. One moment.”
“She’s being particularly pleasant today,” said Lenore. Candy made a strangle-motion at Judith, then started to get her stuff together.
Their console sounded. Lenore got it. “Frequent and Vigorous,” she said. She listened and looked up at Candy. “Bambi’s Den of Discipline?” she said. “No, this is most definitely not Bambi’s Den of Discipline ... Candy, do you have the number of a Bambi’s Den of Discipline?” Candy gave her the number but said it probably wouldn’t make any difference. Lenore recited the number and released.
“Bambi’s Den of Discipline?” she said. “That’s a new one. What do you mean there’s probably no difference?”
“I can’t figure it out, I don’t see nothing wrong,” a voice came from under the console counter, under Lenore’s chair, by her legs. Lenore looked down. There were big boots protruding from under the counter. They began to jiggle; a figure struggled to emerge. Lenore shot her chair back.
“Lenore, there’s line trouble that I guess started last night, Vem said,” Candy said. “This is Peter Abbott. He’s with Interactive Cable. They’re trying to fix the problem. ”
“Interactive Cable?”
“Like the phone company, but not the phone company.”
“Oh.” Lenore looked listlessly at Peter Abbott. “Hi.”
“Well hello hello,” said Peter, winking furiously at Lenore and pulling up his collar. Lenore looked up at Candy as Peter played with something hanging from his tool belt.
“Peter is very friendly, it seems,” said Candy Mandible.
“Hmm.”
“Well I can’t see nothing wrong in there, I’m stumped,” Peter said.
“What’s the problem?” Lenore asked.
“It’s not good,” said Candy. “We I guess more or less don’t have a number anymore. Is that right?” She looked at Peter Abbott.
“Well, you got line trouble,” said Peter.
“Right, which apparently in this case means we don’t have a number anymore, or rather we do, but so does like the whole rest of Cleveland, in that we now all of a sudden share a single number with all these other places. All these places that share our line tunnel. You know all those numbers we were just one off of, and we’d just get the wrong numbers all the time—Steve’s Sub, Cleveland Towing, Big B.M. Cafe, Fuss ‘n’ Feathers Pets, Dial-a-Darling? Well now they’re like all the same number. You dial their numbers, and the F and V number rings. Plus a whole lot of new ones: a cheese shop, some Goodyear service office, that Bambi’s Den of Discipline, which by the way gets a disturbing number of calls. We’ve all got the same number now. It’s nuts. Is that right what I said?” she asked Peter Abbott. She got her stuff and got ready to leave, looking at her watch.
“Yeah, line trouble,” Peter Abbott said.
“At least now you’ll have calls. At least now you’ll have something to do for a change,” said Judith Prietht. “Bombardini Company. Bombardini Company.”
“How come she’s not messed up?” Lenore gestured at Judith.
“Different line tunnels,” Peter Abbott said. “Bombardini Inc.’s lines are actually it turns out in this tunnel pretty far away, a few blocks west of Erieview. The calls just get into here via a matrix sharing-thread transfer, which is a real complicated plus ancient thing. Your lines are in a tunnel right under this building, under the lobby, out under that guy’s skeleton.” Peter Abbott pointed at the floor.
“So then why are you up here instead of down with the lines?” Candy Mandible wanted to know.
“I’m not a tunnel man. I’m a console man. I don’t do tunnels. They sent some guy from Tunnels down there early this morning. It’s gotta be his problem. I can’t find nothing up here with what you girls got. This’s a twenty-eight, right? I haven’t lost my mind?”
“Right, Centrex twenty-eight.”
“I know it’s a Centrex, that’s all I do, I’m bored as shit with Centrexes, excuse my French.”
“Well what did the guy from the tunnel say?” Lenore asked. Candy was answering a phone.
“Dunno, ‘cause I haven’t talked to him. I sure can’t call him, am I right?”
“What, we can’t dial out on this, either?”
“I was just makin’ a joke. You can call out OK. Just try again if you get an automatic loop into one of the other in-tunnel points. No, I just hafta talk to the tunnel guy in person, back at the office. We hafta write up reports.” Peter looked at Lenore. “You married?”
“Oh, brother.”
“This one’s not married either, right?” Peter Abbott asked Candy, nodding over at Lenore. His hair wasn’t blond so much as just yellow, like a crayon. His face had the color of a kind of dark nut. Not the sort of tan that comes from the sun. Lenore sensed CabanaTan. The guy looked like a photographic negative, she decided.
He sighed. “Two unmarried girls, in distress, working in this tiny little office ...”
“Women,” Candy Mandible corrected.
“I’m not married either,” Judith Prietht called over. Judith Prietht was about fifty.
“Groovy,” said Peter Abbott.
“So can Bambi and Big Bob and all the others even get any calls, now?” Lenore asked. “Do their phones ring at all?”
“Sometimes, sometimes not,” Peter Abbott said, jingling his belt. “The point is they can’t be sure where it’ll ring, and neither can you, which is obviously subpar service. Your number’s not picking you out of the network like it should, it’s as we say picking out a target set and not a target.”
“Lovely. ”
“At least now you’ll have some calls to answer,” said Judith Prietht. “All you ever get is wrong numbers anyway. You guys are going to go bankrupt. Who ever heard of a publishing house in Cleveland?”
“I like your shoes,” Peter Abbott said to Lenore. “I got some shoes just like that.”
“Does Rick know about all this?” Lenore asked Candy.
Candy stopped. “Rick. Lenore, call him right away.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Who knows what’s ever the matter. All I know is first he just had a complete spasm about your not being here. This was at like ten-o-one. And then now he keeps calling down all the time, to see if you’re here yet. He keeps pretending it’s different people asking for you, holding his nose, putting a hankie over the phone, trying this totally pitiful English accent, pretending it’s outside calls for you, which he should know I can tell it isn’t because he knows the way the console light flashes all fast when they’re in-house calls. God knows he spends enough time down here. And now he hasn’t come down for his paper, even, he’s just sitting up there brooding, playing with his hat.”
“What else does he have to do?” said Judith Prietht, who was unwrapping wax paper from a sandwich and blinking coquettishly at Peter Abbott, who was in turn trying to stare down over the counter into Lenore’s cleavage.
“God, well I really need to talk to him, too,” said Lenore.
“Sweetie, I forgot for a second. How just totally horrible. You must be out of your head. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I think so. Vern’ll be in at six. I’ll call Rick as soon as I can. I have to call my father, too. And his lawyer.”
“I sense something in the wind,” said Peter Abbott.
“You hush,” said Candy Mandible. She squeezed Lenore’s arm as she passed. “I’m late. I have to go. You come home tonight, hear?”
“I’ll call and let you know,” Lenore said.
“What, you guys are roommates?” Peter Abbott asked.
“Partners in crime,” Judith Prietht snorted.
“Lucky room, is all I can say.”
“Let’s just have a universal dropping dead, except for Lenore,” said Candy. She walked off across the marble lobby floor into the moving blackness.
“She’s got another job?” Peter Abbott asked.
“Yes.” The console beeped. “Frequent and Vigorous.”
“Where at?”
Lenore held up a finger for him to wait while she dealt with somebody wanting to price a set of radials. “Over at Allied Sausage Casings, in East Corinth?” she said when she’d released.
“What a gnarly place to work. What does she do?”
“Product testing. Tasting Department.”
“What a disgusting job.”
“Somebody has to do it.”
“Glad it’s not me, boy.”
“But I do assume you have some kind of job to do? Like fixing our lines?”
“I’m off. I’ll be in touch—if possible.” Peter Abbott laughed and left, jingling. He walked into a moving patch of light in the middle of the lobby and the light disappeared, taking him with it.
The console began to beep.
“Frequent and Vigorous,” Lenore said. “Frequent and Vigorous.”