And when he left the shower stall — he had no need for the traction of bathmats, his balance, which had been slipping away now for months, had returned — he dived into the thick motel bath towels no longer rough to his skin as sandpaper or ground glass or cat-o’-nine-tails. He rubbed himself down, however, with a pulled-punch vigor, making the stinging noises of hygiene — bahrruh, prrrt, shashashashasha — but holding back at last, fearful lest he accidentally press some raw nerve which would, like a linchpin tumbler falling into place in a lock, cause his brain to renege on his remission and return his body to its zipper condition. So he dried his scalp gently, even as he made his curious warpath movements, and ventriloquized the whoops and yaps of a remembered zealousness. And combed his hair wet.
And froze, alarmed and despairing because there was suddenly a queer, faintly burning, salt-in-wound sensation in the outside corners of his eyes. Oh, Christ, he thought. “Oh, God,” he said, “time’s up. I have counted my chickens. Death is not mocked.” And touched the tender spots where the gates of his disease were still open, where his M.S. had stood stupidly in the draft. And the tips of his forefingers came away wet. “Why, they’re tears,” he said in the profoundest wonder he had ever known. They’re tears and I felt them, my skin as honed as that! Feel them, feel them, delicate and baroque as the tracings of snails or the feathery strands of spiders. “Thank you,” he said. “Thanks. Thank you.” And lay naked on the bed, his skin taking the full force of the impression of the spread, imagining he could feel the warm reds and cool blues and neutral browns of its pattern beneath him, while the tears — he would not touch them, would not stanch them — flowed and flowed and finally stopped. And he could feel, enjoy, their evaporative lift. And even the molecular heft of the salt they left behind.
Then he touched with the fingers of both hands every square inch of his body. And the insides of his ears. And explored his nostrils. And poked about in his mouth to feel his teeth on his fingers, his cavities, to touch his tongue and dip it into the well behind his jaw. And reached into his asshole, going deep as a doctor.
His body was still there.
He called the front desk and asked that a bellman be sent to his room.
“Listen,” he told the man, “I’m going to give you ten dollars. I want you to send a woman. Cheap, expensive, I don’t care. I don’t care what color she is or what she looks like or anything about her age. I just want—”
“You want to be chucked out of here, that’s what you want.”
“No, no, you don’t understand—”
“Mister, it’s eleven-thirty in the morning. Oklahoma City isn’t New York.”
“Oh, I see,” Ben said, “the call girls haven’t started yet. I misunderstood. Oh, I see. Oh, that’s different.” He was addressing the bellman like a pimp but in his heart he felt as rehabilitated as Scrooge on Christmas morning. In another minute he would give him money to fetch a goose.
“Put your clothes on,” the bellman said.
“What? Oh.” He was still naked. Christ, had he traded his sanity for his remission? He couldn’t hope to explain. “Will you take the money anyway? I’m not — I didn’t know — look, I know what you’re thinking, what you’d have to be thinking, but it isn’t — It’s — Where’s my Bible?” he asked desperately.
The bellman sneered and Ben, when the man had gone, laughed his ass off, the same one he could touch again with his fingers and feel when he wiped himself.
Which didn’t butter any parsnips. He should have been at his Cinema I and Cinema II in the Draper Lake Shopping Mall, but he wasn’t leaving the motel till he got laid. He called his manager and said he was still in Wichita but was about to leave and would make it down by that evening.
He dressed and went into the dining room and had his lunch. The waitress was a young and pretty girl, and under the napkin on his lap he had an immense hard-on. He chewed his food nervously and stammered when he asked the girl for water. He made her stand by while he added up his check and his brain raced with schemes to engage her personally. He ordered desserts he did not want, commented on the weather, what people did before there was air conditioning, how interesting it must be to work in a motel, meet all those people, American people, who lived — he recalled his rider’s phrase — in the middle of the middle class. “You learn,” he said wildly, “about their different tastes. I mean, coming from all over as they do, they bring, they, uh, bring their customs with them, their peculiar, well, er, folk dishes. That would be, uh, be a, a fair statement, wouldn’t it?”
“Very fair,” she said. “In the morning the kids want Sugar Frosted Flakes and the grownups eat bacon and eggs.”
“Yes. Well…”
“Was there anything else? One of the girls is out today and I have her station, too.”
“Anything else? No no. It was, er, delicious. My compliments to the chef.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“Yes. Well…Good luck, good luck to you. Only you can prevent forest fires,” he added lamely. He felt like an idiot and tipped her two dollars for a three-dollar lunch. His salvation now, his only hope not to seem like a fool in her eyes, was to seem insane. Madness had a certain integrity which stupidity lacked.
He started back to his room. It was absolutely necessary that he have a woman, yet, in a strange way, his desire had little to do with lust. Even his hard-on had been more a fact of his remission than of lasciviousness. He had told his brain what to do and it, in its new health, flexing all its recovered muscles, had done it. “See,” his brain said, “watch this. It’s like riding a bicycle.”
A maid was making up the room across from his. He let himself in with his key and cleared the motel soap off the bathroom shelves and hid it in his suitcase. He scooped up the towels he had used and shoved them into the shower stall.
“Miss,” he said, standing in the doorway of his room, “oh, miss?”
“Yes yeah?” She looked to be a woman in her late forties or early fifties, but it was difficult to tell. She may have been an Indian. She was extremely short, very fat.
“I don’t seem to have been left any soap.”
“No yeah? Take from cart what you need.”
“Oh.” He had had the idea she would bring it to him. He made a great to-do about selecting the soaps, strolling about the big canvas wagon as if it were a sweet table or a notions counter, looking into the cartons of matchbooks and the sheaves of treated shoe-shine cloths like bundles of fresh dollars in a teller’s drawer. He examined the cutlery of ballpoint pens and poked about among the waxy motel postcards and stationery. “Well,” he said, when the Indian woman came out with a roll of dirty bed linen, “there’s certainly a lot of things you have to remember to give out. All these pens and cloths and”—he looked directly into the woman’s face—“sanitary napkin disposal bags.”
“Mnh.”
“Oh hey,” he said, “look at that, will you? The sheets.” From where he was standing he could not see the sheets. “All crumpled and soiled…A lot goes on in a motel room, I bet.”