“Well. Good luck, Mr. Flesh.”
“Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“What about him?” Flesh jerked his thumb in the direction of Tanner’s screen. The doctor shook his head.
“He’ll be shipped off to Guernsey eventually. The R.A.F. maintains a hospital there for incurables.”
The doctor extended his hand. A shiver of electric plague ran up Flesh’s hand and arm when Gibberd touched him. He felt he could start the hospital’s engines just by touching them, that the energy was in his hands now, in the ruined, demyelinating nerves sputtering like live wires in his fingertips.
Gibberd left and Flesh dressed. He was about his business, heading toward the cashier and the Cadillac. (Probably it wouldn’t start; the battery dead, check. Check the oil.) Then suddenly Ben turned back. He stood for a moment in the center aisle, staring in the direction of Tanner’s screen. “Tanner,” he said, “I don’t want you to say a thing. Don’t interrupt me. Just listen just.
“Gibberd has given me my walking papers. He has given me my dirty bill of health. It’s interesting rather. Here we are, two guys from opposite sides of the world. Yank and Limey. Strangers. Do-be-do-be-doo. Flight Lieutenant Tanner of Eng and Brit Honduras with Nigerian virus in his gut, and me, Ben Flesh, American — don’t interrupt, please just — Ben Flesh, American, ranger in Cadillac of Highway this and Interstate that. Yet somehow the both of us ill met in this hotshot trop med ward in Rap Cit S-dak. You know what? Don’t, don’t answer. You know what? Never mind what, I’ll get to what later.
“Well. Strangers. Sickmates on the edge of the Badlands. Both incurable and generally fatal. Oh, I know a lot about my disease, too. When Dr. Wolfe first diagnosed my case — you remember, I told you about Dr. Wolfe — I boned up on it in the literature, in What to Do till the Doctor Comes. It’s progressive, a neurological disorder of the central nervous system, characterized by muscular dysfunction and the formation of sclerotic, or hardening — be hard, Mister Softee — hardening patches in the brain. One’s myelin — that’s the soft, white fatty substance that encases the axis cylinders of certain nerve fibers: what a piece of work is a man — one’s myelin sheath is unraveling like wool. It snags, you see? Like a run in a stocking. I am panty hose, Lieutenant. Vulnerable as.
“Incurable. Generally fatal. Usually slow and often, in its last stages, characterized by an odd euphoria. I was blind once, I tell you that? No family to speak of. I have heart disease and many businesses. Is this clear? No, don’t answer. The point is, the lines of the drama of my life are beginning to come together, make a pattern. I mean, for God’s sake, Tanner, just consider what I’ve been through, I’ve told you enough about myself. Look what stands behind me. Theatrical costumes! Songs! My history given pizzazz and order and the quality of second- and third-act curtains, coordinated color schemes for the dance numbers, the solos and show-stoppers, what shows up good in the orchestra and the back of the house, and shines like the full moon in the cheap seats. I got rhythm, dig? Pacing, timing, and convention have gone into making me. Oh, Tanner, the prime rate climbs like fever and we ain’t seen nothing yet. Gibberd dooms me. You should have heard him. He makes it official. He dooms me, but very soft sell so I can’t even be angry with him. It’s getting on, the taxis are gathering, the limos, the cops are up on their horses in the street, and I don’t even know my lines — though they’re coming together — or begin to understand the character.
“What do you think? Shh, that was rhetorical. What do you think? You think I should kick my preoccupations? The stuff about my godfather and my godcousins? All the Wandering Jew shit in my late-model Caddy, going farther than the truckers go, hauling my ass like cargo? Aach.
“Me and my trademarks. I’m the guy they build the access roads for, whose signs rise like stiffened peters — Keep America Beautiful — beyond the hundred-yard limit of the Interstates. A finger in every logotype. Ho-Jo’s orange roof and the red star of Texaco. D.Q.’s crimson pout and the Colonel’s bucket spinning, spinning. You name it, I’m in it.
“So. Doomed. Why? Shh. Because I am built to recognize it: a lip reader of big print and the scare headline. Because I’m one of those birds who ain’t satisfied unless he has a destiny, even though he knows that destiny sucks. How did I get this way? I used to be a kid who ate fruit.
“Anyway. As I was saying. You know what? You know what I think? Shh. Hush. I think you’re dead. Don’t bother to correct me if you’re not. That’s what I think. I think you’re dead there behind your screen, that you’ll never see Guernsey. The dramatic lines demand it. Theatricality’s gravitational pull. Who are you to go against something like that? You’re too weak. You have to be strapped to your chair, for God’s sake. So. It’s nice how you can let your hair down with strangers. We were strangers, right? Have we ever met, sir? Do you know me; has there been communication between us in any way, shape, or form; have we gotten together before the show; have promises been made to you? Thank you very much, sir. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
“So it’s agreed. We’re strangers, locked each into his own symptoms, you into Lassa fever and me into my sensory problems. And somehow, as strangers will, somehow we got to talking, and gradually understood each other. I wiped your blood up. You saw my asshole with its spoor of shit. Well, strangers get close in such situations. Now I have my dirty bill of health and I’m told to move on and Dr. Gibberd tells me you’re for Guernsey when your orders come through. And here’s where I’m supposed to go behind them screens and shake hands. Well, I won’t! I won’t do it. That ain’t going to happen. Because you’re dead! Slumped in that queer way death has of disarraying things. So that’s it. The destiny man thinks you’ve been put here on earth to satisfy one more cliché, to be discovered stone cold dead in a Rapid City General wheelchair. For what? So one day I’ll be able to say in my impaired speech—‘There wash thish time in Shouf Dakota, and I wash on the shame woward wi-with thish young chap from the R.A.F. (He called it “Raf.”) — And we got pretty close. The two of us. There was a terrible heat wave and neither of us could sleep. We were kept up half the night by the screams of mental patients who couldn’t be quieted because the power was out, and even though the hospital had its own auxiliary generator, there wasn’t enough power for electric-shock treatments, so we told each other the story of our life, as fellows will in hospital, and got pretty close to each other, and finally I was discharged and I went over to young Tanner’s screen to say goodbye and found him dead.’
“Well, fuck that, Lieutenant! I like you too much to use you around fireplaces. We’ll just skip it because I ain’t going behind no screen to make certain, because if you are dead, by Christ, I don’t think I could take it. I would grab a scissors and cut the lines of my drama. On the other hand, please don’t disabuse me of my sense of the fitness of things. Keep still just. So long, dead guy.”
He turned and started to the exit, but just as he got there he heard a loud, ripping, and unruly fart. Well, how do you like that? he thought. What was it, the critique of pure reason? Or only the guy’s sphincter relaxing in death? Flesh shoved hard against the handle on the fire doors.
He was like a refugee now. A survivor, the last alive perhaps, the heat a plague and waiting for him in his late-model Cadillac baking in the hospital’s open parking lot. He unlocked its doors and opened them wide but did not step in. Whatever was plastic in the car, on the dash, the steering wheel, the push-button knobs on the radio, along the sides of the doors, the wide ledge beneath the rear window, had begun to bubble, boil, the glue melting and the car’s great load of padding rising yeast-like, separating, creating seams he’d been unaware of before, like the perforations on Saltines.