334 by Thomas M. Disch Page A

done what Ab asked him to.
    “Yeah, and?”
    It had gone off okay.
    “Is it official yet?”
    It wasn’t. There was no one in the ward.
    “Couldn’t you, uh, mention the matter to someone who can make it official?”
    The Times woman was poking about the morgue, fingering things, pretending not to eavesdrop. Ab felt she could decipher his generalities. His first confession had been the same kind of nightmare, with Ab certain all his classmates lined up outside the confessional had overheard the sins the priest had pried out of him. If she hadn’t been listening he could have tried to bully Chapel into…
    He’d hung up. It was just as well.
    “Was that the call?” she asked.
    “No. Something else, a private matter.”
    So she kept at him with more questions about the ovens, and whether relatives ever came in to watch, and how long it took, until the desk called to say there was a driver from Macy’s trying to bring a body into the hospital and should they let him?
    “Hold him right there. I’m on my way.”
    “That was the call,” Joel Beck said, genuinely disappointed.
    “Mm. I’ll be right back.”

    The driver, flustered, started in with some story why he was late.
    “It’s skin off your ass, not mine. Never mind that anyhow. There’s a reporter in my office from the Times— ”
    “I knew,” the driver said. “It’s not enough I’m going to be fired, now you’ve found a way—”
    “Listen to me, asshole. This isn’t about the Newman fuckup. And if you don’t panic she never has to know.” He explained about the city desk computer. “So we just won’t let her get any strange ideas, right? Like she might if she saw you hauling one corpse into the morgue and going off with another.”
    “Yeah, but…” The driver clutched for his purpose as for a hat that a great wind were lifting from his head. “But they’ll crucify me at Macy’s if I don’t come back with the Newman body! I’m so late already because of the damned—”
    “You’ll get the body. You’ll take back both. You can return with the other one later, but the important thing now—”
    He felt her hand on his shoulder, bland as a smile.
    “I thought you couldn’t have gone too far away. There’s a call for you and I’m afraid you were right: Miss Schaap has died. That is whom you were speaking of?”
    Whom! Ab thought with a sudden passion of hatred for the Times and its band of pseudo-intellectuals. Whom!
    The Macy’s driver was disappearing toward his cart.
    It came to Ab then, the plan of his salvation, whole and entire, the way a masterpiece must come to a great artist, its edges glowing.
    “Bob!” Ab called out. “Wait a minute.”
    The driver turned halfway round, head bent sideways, an eyebrow raised: who, me?
    “Bob, I want you to meet, uh … ”
    “Joel Beck.”
    “Right. Joel, this is Bob, uh, Bob Newman.” It was, in fact, Samuel Blake. Ab was bad at remembering names.
    Samuel Blake and Joel Beck shook hands.
    “Bob drives for Macy’s Clinic, the Steven Jay Mandell Memorial Clinic.” he laid one hand on Blake’s shoulder, the other hand on Beck’s. She seemed to become aware of his stump for the first time and flinched. “Do you know anything about cryonics, Miss uh?”
    “Beck. No, very little.”
    “Mandell was the very first New Yorker to go to the freezers. Bob could tell you all about him, a fantastic story.” He steered them back down the corridor toward the morgue.
    “Bob is here right now because of the body they just… Uh.” He remembered too late that you didn’t call them bodies in front of outsiders. “Because of Miss Schaap, that is. Whom,” he added with malicious emphasis, “was insured with Bob’s clinic.” Ab squeezed the driver’s shoulder in lieu of winking.
    “Whenever possible, you see, we notify the clinic people, so that they can be here the minute one of their clients terminates. That way there’s not a minute lost. Right, Bob?”
    The driver nodded,