THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror Read online

  Table of Contents

  EPIGRAPH

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE BUSINESSMAN

  A Tale of Terror

  Thomas M. Disch

  The issue always and at bottom is spiritual.

  —Dwight D. Eisenhower

  CHAPTER 1

  When she awoke she did not realize for some time where she was. Then it sank in—she was dead and buried in a grave. How she knew this, by what sense informed, she could not tell. Not by the sight of her eyes, or by any spiritual analog of sight, for how can there be sight where no light enters? Nor was there any tingle of fleshy consciousness in limbs or loins, in heart or mouth. Her body was here in the coffin with her, and in some way she was still linked to its disintegrating proteins, but it wasn’t through her body’s senses she knew these things. There was only this suspended sphere of self-awareness beyond which she could discern certain dim essentials of the earth immuring her—a dense, moist, intricated mass pierced with constellations of forward-inching hungers, nodules of intensity against a milky radiance of calm bacterial transformation.

  The worms crawl in—she remembered the rhyme from childhood. The worms crawl out. The worms play pinochle on your snout.

  How long would this go on? The question framed itself coolly, without triggering alarms. Ghosts—such ghosts as she had ever heard of—were supposed to be free to range where they would. Were said to flit. Whereas she remained attached, by some sort of psychic gravity, to this inert carcass, in which even the process of decay was impeded by the chemicals that had been pumped into it.

  Almost as the question was formed, the answer existed within her sphere of sentience. Her thinking self would go on thinking… indefinitely. Not “forever.” Forever remained as unfathomable and foggy an idea as it had been when she was alive. She knew, too, that she would not always be confined to her corpse’s coffin, that a time would come when she’d be able to slip loose from the clinging raiment of flesh to flit at liberty like other ghosts.

  But that time was not now. Now she was dead, and she had that to think about.

  CHAPTER 2

  On Tuesdays on his lunch hour Glandier drove to The Bicentennial Sauna on Lake Street and got his ashes hauled by whoever was available. He wasn’t choosy. The important thing was to get back to his desk by two o’clock. Not that anyone would have cared if he’d been half an hour late. But he cared. He liked to parcel his time into neat whole-hour bundles, a habit he’d carried over from school, where the bells demarcating the hours also signaled a shift of mental gears.

  He did, naturally, have his favorites. For a blow job he liked Libby, who was the youngest girl at the sauna and sort of thin and frail. She never got down on her knees in front of him without a little wince of disgust. This had such an immediate positive effect on Glandier that he’d scarcely got his cock down her throat before he’d shot his load. In some ways that seemed a waste of $25, but while it lasted it was great, and for the next ten or fifteen minutes too. Also, it left more time for lunch.

  His other favorite must have been the oldest of the lot. Sacajawea she was known as among the clientele of the Bicentennial. A real squaw with a fat ass and big sagging tits and lots of makeup around her eyes. She had a way of drooping her eyelashes down and lifting them up that was sexy as hell though probably just as phony as the lashes. He liked the idea of her having to act like she thought his performance was really hot shit, the way when he was screwing her she’d croon encouraging obscenities, or gasp them if he’d reached that rate of delivery; the way he knew she was grateful for his regular patronage and $5 tips, she being nothing to look at; the way, after he’d got his breath back, she’d start sucking him off again, gratis. Not to much purpose, usually. He could get it up again; that wasn’t the problem. But usually he couldn’t shoot his load a second time in the forty-five minutes he allotted himself.

  The weekly visit to the Bicentennial was a substitute for his former weekly visit to the downtown St. Paul office of Dr. Helbron, a psychiatrist who specialized in combating the depressions and anxieties of upper-echelon executives at 3-M, Honeywell, and other Twin Cities–based multinational corporations. Dr. Helbron had suggested the Bicentennial himself, claiming that all Glandier needed to start feeling like his old self was a little pussy on a regular basis. How could he refuse the experiment with his own doctor promoting the idea?

  And it had worked. While he was not precisely his old self again, he couldn’t complain any longer of disabling depressions or sudden insane bursts of anger. Those had been the symptoms that had sent him to the doctor’s office originally, on the advice of the company’s personnel director, Jerry Petersen. Back at that time—the summer of ‘79—Glandier had done all he could to act like his old self-confident self, smiling a lot and cracking jokes, but while he might disguise his depressions, the anger, when it came, was not so controllable. Before he could think about it, he would flip out and find himself making a scene in a restaurant or berating one of the girls in the office for something probably not her fault. There was a kind of demon of righteousness in him that leapt out like a rattlesnake and with no more warning. After a few such scenes had come to be witnessed by his associates, it had been suggested to him by Jerry Petersen (who was not only the personnel director but a close friend as well) that he should seek professional advice.

  A polite way of saying he was crazy. But then he was crazy, it could not be denied. Only a crazy man would murder his wife, and that was what Glandier had done.

  CHAPTER 3

  At the age of only forty-eight, Joy-Ann Anker was dying of cancer. She’d become violently ill in the second week of a diet that had been, up to that point, a great success. At the hospital they’d done an exploratory operation and discovered a large malignant tumor in her lower colon. It had already spread through her body beyond the point where surgery could hold out any hope. The hospital put her on a course of chemotherapy, which made her almost constantly nauseated, and sent her home. Ironically, the cancer, the operation, and the chemotherapy combined had had the effect of a completely successful diet. For only the se
cond time in her life she was down to her supposedly ideal weight of 114 pounds and could fit into clothes she hadn’t worn for fourteen years. Most of her old clothes, however, she’d given to her daughter three years ago, at a time when she’d lost faith in diets. Joy-Ann had cried, after Giselle had gone off with the boxes of clothes, at her vision of the life that lay ahead of her, a life of boredom, booze, and loneliness. She cried now at the thought that even that life wasn’t to be allowed her. Sometimes she could even laugh about the whole thing. God, obviously, was playing a practical joke.

  Officially, she wasn’t supposed to know she was dying. The doctor and the priest had both told her that though the odds were against her there was still hope. They didn’t say hope for how long, not to her. But during one of Bob’s visits to the hospital, she’d pretended to be asleep, so as not to have to talk to him (if there was anything worse than visiting someone in a hospital, it was being visited), and Dr. Wandke had painted a very different picture for her son-in-law. Six months. At most. That had been toward the end of January, which gave her to the end of July if she was lucky.

  There was some comfort in being able to pretend she didn’t know. When Father Rommel visited she could just be her usual self and wasn’t under pressure to go to confession. Whereas if her prognosis were out in the open, she’d have had to go through the motions of making a confession, and it would have been a bad confession, since she was still, in her heart of hearts, holding onto one sin she couldn’t or wouldn’t repent of. From a strictly Catholic point of view it might not be a sin at all—just the opposite, in fact—but it wasn’t something she wanted to discuss with a priest. It had been bad enough all those years she’d had to confess once a year to using birth control, but this… In any case, she’d stopped believing in a lot of things since the children had left home and she didn’t have to be responsible for their religious beliefs.

  It occurred to Joy-Ann that she might be able to get back the clothes she’d given Giselle. Even better, she might ask for Giselle’s own clothes, if Bob hadn’t given them away to Goodwill Industries as he’d said he meant to. She called Bob at work and his secretary said he was at a meeting, which naturally she didn’t believe. Bob was a good enough son-in-law, especially considering what had happened, but his weekly visits sprang from a sense of duty, not because they enjoyed each other’s company. Giselle was all they had in common, and the less said about that the better.

  Dutifully he returned her call that evening, and she only had to hint at what she wanted before he volunteered to bring over Giselle’s whole wardrobe tomorrow on his way to the office. There were eight cardboard boxes, which seemed a lot at first, but considering how many boxes would be needed to pack up all her clothes when she passed on, it wasn’t an especially large wardrobe. She wondered whether he’d brought back Giselle’s clothes from Las Vegas. At the time, with the tragedy still uppermost in everyone’s mind, she’d known better than to ask, but now, unpacking the eight boxes, she couldn’t help but be curious.

  There were several casual outfits she couldn’t remember Giselle ever wearing, jeans and cotton shirts and such, but only one that provably, by its label, originated in Las Vegas: an orange pants suit made out of a slinky polyester. It fit to perfection and looked, to Mrs. Anker’s orthodox eye, just a little obscene. It might be possible to have the pants suit dyed, but she doubted it. What sort of life had Giselle been leading out there? She would never understand what had possessed her daughter to run off like that. It couldn’t have been gambling. Giselle was the only one of them immune to that. It must have been madness, pure and simple.

  In the end the only items she kept, besides the pants suit, were the things she’d outgrown and given Giselle: the belted suit from Dayton’s, the black dress she’d worn to her own mother’s funeral and scarcely ever again, and several flowery prints too lightweight for winter. She put them on and took them off in front of the big bedroom mirror, weeping sometimes at the thought that she might never live to wear any of them out on the street, but sometimes smiling too, because she had undeniably never looked sexier in her life.

  CHAPTER 4

  There was another world off at an angle from the world she’d known till now, that world six feet above her full of its cars and its houses. Sometimes this other world seemed to be inside her, but when she would reverse her attention inward and try to approach the threshold to that dimly sensed world within, it would go out of focus or fade, though never did it disappear entirely. It was always there, as real as the furniture one stumbles over in a dark room.

  Her first clear view of it came in a flash. She saw, across the threshold, a field of pure geometry and color, like a painting that was simultaneously flat on the ground and covering every wall. It bore a general resemblance to a red gingham tablecloth, except that it wavered and the bands of red were just as bright, in their way, as the patches of white, which in fact weren’t really white but some other, indefinable color. It seemed incredibly beautiful and important, but before she could grasp why, it was gone.

  Afterward she speculated a great deal as to what it was that she had seen, but always, though she could recall quite clearly the look of it, its sense eluded her. Patience: that was the first lesson of the afterlife. Patience unmeasured by calendar or clock, or even by the cadences of articulated thought. Most of her subjective time went by in flows of low-level sentience, such as one slips into, in life, only at the edge of sleep. No telling how long these periods of spiritual sleep had lasted. They might be ten-minute dozes; just as likely she might have slept away an entire winter like a seed in frozen ground. Sometimes the constellations of hungers creeping in the soil above her would have completely altered when she awakened, or the liquefying tissues of her dead body would have entered upon some new and more drastic stage of disintegration.

  Impossible, even as a spirit divorced from flesh, not to regard these transformations without aversion. Impossible not to strain against that still unbroken linkage that kept her here, sealed in this coffin like a genie in a jug. Not, however, with any sense of dread; rather, she regarded her corpse as she would, in the world above, have reacted to some derelict on Hennepin Avenue, who smells and whose clothes are in rags and whom no one can help even if help had been asked for.

  Once it seemed that she had actually won free. A tendon of the corpse’s flesh, drying, had tugged a bone out of its socket: it was that sudden popping out she’d thought to be the breaking of the lock. And perhaps it did signal, in a small way, the beginning of her liberation, for afterward the horizon of her awareness seemed greatly enlarged. She came to have an almost panoramic sense of the cemetery grounds—not just the sphere of earth immediately about her but beyond that, to where the other corpses lay and decayed. All of them dead, all inert and without consciousness. She alone, in all that cemetery, lived in the afterlife.

  No, that wasn’t so. She alone had failed to cross that inner threshold into the realm of the endless gingham cloth. It wasn’t just her body she was trapped in, it was the whole world.

  CHAPTER 5

  The source of grace has its favorite bloodlines, for which there is no accounting. Grace runs in families; it has no relation to merit. Entire generations of sons-of-bitches may enjoy the most infamous good luck, while the wise, the virtuous, and the deserving suffer and sink beneath insupportable burdens. It is perfectly unfair, yet there is nothing religiously inclined people so long for as the assurance that they and theirs belong to a chosen people.

  The Ankers were such a family. Joy-Ann, who was doubly an Anker, having been born an Anker and married an Anker cousin, would have denied this emphatically, but those who are so chosen seldom suspect it till quite late in life. She was still too young, at forty-eight, to recognize the marks of grace in what she considered a string of tragic misfortunes. For the source of grace—let us be honest and call it God—is also an ironist and a dweller in paradoxes; He produces good from evil as a matter of course.

  The Ankers were not notabl
y wicked as a family. They were, admittedly, layabouts and drifters, by and large (even, in a few instances, bums and drunks), but not evil in large, oppressive ways; victims, not victimizers; the sort of people, mournful, meek, and poor in spirit, to whom the Beatitudes have promised, not without irony, heaven and earth. Joy-Ann, for instance, in the fifteen years since her husband’s death, had been exempted from the common curse of having to work for a living by an insurance policy her husband had purchased for a quarter at the airport in Las Vegas. He had left Vegas ruined and was buried two weeks later in the Minnesota Veterans’ Cemetery by a widow with enough money not only to rescue the mortgage from foreclosure but to purchase an annuity that paid out $8,000 a year! That, together with Dewey’s Social Security survivor benefits, had seen the surviving Ankers through the rest of the ‘60s in comfortable indigence. Bing had gone to Cretin, Giselle to Our Lady of Mercy. Joy-Ann had stayed home and cooked quick, starchy meals from recipes in Family Circle. Each year she became a little fatter, a little more querulous, but in her soul she was as happy as a pig in mud. She was getting exactly what she wanted out of life, a free ride.

  Now the ride was coming to an end just as inflation had whittled her annuity and benefits down to the point where grocery shopping was once again a source of anxiety. She had been faced with the necessity of having to sell the house. Two real estate agents, independently of each other, had valued it at $80,000, maybe more: four times what she and Dewey could have got for it in 1954 when it had passed to them on the death of her father-in-law, the senior Mr. Anker. A gold mine! All these years she’d lived in it she’d put it in the category of water, air, and sunlight—something necessary but omnipresent. With its shabby back yard and ancient wallpaper, who’d have supposed it wasn’t the residential equivalent of the secondhand clothes at the Salvation Army? Eighty thousand dollars for a corner lot on Calumet Avenue? Money was becoming meaningless!