334 by Thomas M. Disch

would have been considered dead in any court of law.
    Chapel was falling asleep. The afternoon art movie, a drama of circus life, was no help in keeping awake, since he could never concentrate on a program unless he knew the characters. Only by thinking of Ab, the threats he’d made, the blood glowing in his angry face, was he able to keep from nodding off.
    In the ward the doctors had moved on to Unit 6 and were listening with tolerant smiles to Mrs. Harrison’s jokes about her colostomy.
    The new Ford commercial came on, like an old friend calling Chapel by name. A girl in an Empire coupe drove through endless fields of grain. Ab had said, who said so many things just for their shock value, that the commercials were often better than the programs.
    At last they trooped off together to the men’s ward, leaving the curtains drawn around Unit 7. Frances Schaap was asleep. The little red light on the machine winked on and off, on and off, like a jet flying over the city at night.
    Using the diagram Ab had scrawled on the back of a transfer form, Chapel found the pressure adjustment for the portal vein. He turned it left till it stopped. The arrow on the scale below, marked P P, moved slowly from 35, to 40, to 50. To 60.
    To 65.
    He turned the dial back to where it had been. The arrow shivered: the portal vein had hemorrhaged.
    Frances Schaap woke up. She lifted one thin, astonished hand toward her lips: they were smiling! “Doctor,” she said pleasantly. “Oh, I feel…” The hand fell back to the sheet.
    Chapel looked away from her eyes. He readjusted the dial, which was no different, essentially, from the controls of his own Yamaha. The arrow moved right, along the scale: 50. 55.
    “… so much better now.”
    60. 65.
    “Thanks.”
    70.

    “I hope, Mr. Holt, that you won’t let me keep you from your work,” Joel Beck said, with candid insincerity. “I fear I have already.”
    Ab thought twice before agreeing to this. At first he’d been convinced she was actually an investigator Macy’s had hired to nail him, but her story about the computer checking out the obits and sending her here was not the sort of thing anyone could have made up. It was bad enough, her being from the Times, and worse perhaps.
    “Am I?” she insisted.
    If he said yes, he had work to do, she’d ask to tag along and watch. If he said no, then she’d go on with her damned questions. If it hadn’t been that she’d have reported him (he could recognize the type), he’d have told her to fuck off.
    “Oh, I don’t know,” he answered carefully. “Isn’t it me who’s keeping you from your work?”
    “How so?”
    “Like I explained, there’s a woman up on 18 who’s sure to terminate any minute now. I’m just waiting for them to call.”
    “Half an hour ago you said it wouldn’t take fifteen minutes, and you’re still waiting. Possibly the doctors have pulled her through. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
    “Someone is bound to die by twelve o’clock.”
    “By the same logic someone was bound to have died by now—and they haven’t.”
    Ab could not support the strain of diplomacy any longer. “Look, lady, you’re wasting your time—it’s as simple as that.”
    “It won’t be the first time,” Joel Beck replied complacently. “You might almost say that that’s what I’m paid to do.” She unslung her recorder. “If you’d just answer one or two more questions, give me a few more details of what you actually do, possibly we’ll come up with a handle for a more general story. Then even if that call does come I could go up with you and look over your shoulder.”
    “Who would be interested?” With growing astonishment Ab realized that she did not so much resist his arguments as simply ignore them.
    While Joel Beck was explaining the intrinsic fascination of death to the readers of the Times (not a morbid fascination but the universal human response to a universal human fact), the call came from Chapel.
    He had