What he sought here, and what he found, was much more than art. Which he had sampled during prime evening hours and for which he had little use. It was the experience of returning, after the exertions of the day, to a face he could recognize and love, his own or someone else’s. Or if not love, then some feeling as strong. To know, with certainty, that he would feel these same feelings tomorrow, and the next day. In other ages religion had performed this service, telling people the story of their lives, and after a certain lapse of time telling it to them again.
Once a show that Chapel followed on CBS had pulled down such disastrous ratings for six months running that it had been canceled. A pagan forcibly converted to a new religion would have felt the same loss and longing (until the new god has been taught to inhabit the forms abandoned by the god who died) that Chapel felt then, looking at the strange faces inhabiting the screen of his Yamaha for an hour every afternoon. It was as though he’d looked into a mirror and failed to find his reflection. For the first month the pain in his shoulder had become so magnificently more awful that he had almost been unable to do his work at Bellevue. Then, slowly, in the person of young Dr. Landry, he began to rediscover the elements of his own identity.
It was at 2:45, during a commercial for Carnation Eggies, that Ab came pounding and hollering at Chapel’s door. Maud had just come to visit her sister-in-law’s child at the observation center to which the court had committed him. She didn’t know yet that Dr. Landry was in charge of the boy’s case.
“Chapel,” Ab screamed, “I know you’re in there, so open up, goddammit. I’ll knock this door down.”
The next scene opened in Landry’s office. He was trying to make Mrs. Hanson, from last week, understand how a large part of her daughter’s problem sprang from her own selfish attitudes. But Mrs. Hanson was black, and Chapel’s sympathy was qualified for blacks, whose special dramatic function was to remind the audience of the other world, the one that they inhabited and were unhappy in.
Maud knocked on Landry’s door: a closeup of gloved ringers thrumming on the paper panel.
Chapel got up and let Ab in. By three o’clock Chapel had agreed, albeit sullenly, to help Ab find a replacement for the body he had lost.
3
Martinez had been at the desk when the call came from Macy’s saying to hold the Newman body till their driver got there. Though he knew that the vaults contained nothing but three male geriatric numbers, he made mild yes-sounds and started filling out both forms. He left a message for Ab at his emergency number, then (on the principle that if there was going to be shit it should be Ab who either cleaned it up or ate it, as God willed) got word to his cousin to call in sick for the second (two to ten) shift. When Ab phoned back, Martinez was brief and ominous: “Get here and bring you know what. Or you know what.”
Macy’s driver arrived before Ab. Martinez was feeling almost off-balance enough to tell him there was nothing in storage by the name of Newman, Bobbi.
But it was not like Martinez to be honest when a lie might serve, especially in a case like this, where his own livelihood, and his cousin’s, were jeopardized. So, making a mental sign of the cross, he’d wheeled one of the geriatric numbers out from the faults, and the driver, with a healthy indifference to bureaucratic good form, carted it out to his van without looking under the sheet or checking the name on the file: NORRIS, THOMAS.
It was an inspired improvisation. Since their driver had been as culpable as the morgue, Macy’s wasn’t likely to make a stink about the resulting delay. Fast post mortem freezing was the rule in the cryonic industry and it didn’t pay to advertise the exceptions.
Ab arrived a bit before four. First off he checked out the log book. The page for April 14 was blank. A miracle of bad luck, but he wasn’t surprised.
“Anything waiting?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s incredible,” Ab said, wishing it were.
The phone rang. “That’ll be Macy’s,” Martinez said equably, stripping down to street clothes.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?”
“It’s your baby now.” Martinez flashed a big winner’s smile. They’d both gambled but Ab had lost. He explained, as the phone rang on, the stopgap by which he’d saved Ab’s life.
When Ab picked it up, it was the director, no less, of Macy’s Clinic, and so high in the sky of his just wrath it would have been impossible for Ab to have made out what he was screaming if he hadn’t already known. Ab was suitably abject and incredulous, explaining that the attendant who had made the mistake (and how it could have happened he still did not understand) was gone for the day. He assured the director that the man would not get off lightly, would probably be canned or worse. On the other hand, he saw no reason to call the matter to the attention of Administration, who might try to shift some of the blame onto Macy’s and their driver. The director agreed that that was uncalled for.
“And the minute your driver gets here Miss Newman will be waiting. I’ll be personally responsible. And we can forget that the whole thing happened. Yes?” Yes.
Leaving the office, Ab drew in a deep breath and squared his shoulders. he tried to get himself into the I-can-do-it spirit of a Sousa march. He had a problem. There’s only one way to solve a problem: by coping with it. By whatever means were available.
For Ab, at this point, there was only one means left. Chapel was waiting where Ab had left him on the ramp spanning 29th Street.
“It has to be done,” Ab said.
Chapel, reluctant as he was to risk Ab’s anger again (he’d nearly been strangled to death once), felt obliged to enter a last symbolic protest. “I’ll do it,” he whispered, “but it’s murder.”
“Oh no,” Ab replied confidently, for he felt quite at ease on this score. “Burking isn’t murder.”
On April 2, 1956, Bellevue Hospital did not record a single death, a statistic so rare it was thought worthy of remark in all the city’s newspapers, and there were then quite a few. In the sixty-six years since, there had not been such another deathless day, though twice it had seemed a near thing.
At five o’clock on the afternoon of April 14, 2022, the city desk computer at the Times issued a stand-by slip noting that as of that moment their Bellevue tie-line had not dispatched a single obit to the central board. A print-off of the old story accompanied the slip.
Joel Beck laid down her copy of Tender Buttons, which was no longer making sense, and considered the human-interest possibilities of this nonevent. She’d been on stand-by for hours and this was the first thing to come up. By midnight, very likely, someone would have died and spoiled any story she might have written. Still, in a choice between Gertrude Stein (illusion) and the Bellevue morgue (reality) Joel opted for the latter.
She notified Darling where she’d be. He thought it was a sleeping idea and told her to enjoy it.
By the first decade of the 21st Century systematic lupus erythematosis (SLE ) had displaced cancer as the principal cause of death among women aged twenty to fifty-five. This disease attacks every major system of the body, sequentially or in combination. Pathologically it is a virtual anthology of what can go wrong with the human body. Until the Morgan-Imamura test was perfected in 2007, cases of lupus had been diagnosed as meningitis, as epilepsy, as brucellosis, as nephritis, as syphilis, as colitis … The list goes on.