334 by Thomas M. Disch Page B

thinking his way slowly toward the idea Ab had prepared for him. He opened the door to his office, waited for them to go in. “So while I’m upstairs why don’t you and Bob have a talk, Miss Peck. Bob has dozens of incredible stories he can tell you, but you’ll have to be quick. Cause once I’ve got his body down here …” Ab gave the driver a significant look. “… Bob will have to leave.”
    It was done as neatly as that. The two people whose curiosity or impatience might still have spoiled the substitution were now clamped to each other like a pair of steel traps, jaw to jaw to jaw to jaw.
    He hadn’t considered the elevator situation. During his own shift there were seldom logjams. When there were, carts routed for the morgue were last in line. At 6:15, when the Schaap was finally signed over to him, every elevator arriving on 18 was full of people who’d ridden to the top in order to get a ride to the bottom. It might be an hour before Ab and his cart could find space and the Macy’s driver would certainly not sit still that much longer.
    He waited till the hallway was empty, then scooped up the body from the cart. It weighed no more than his own Beno, but even so by the time he’d reached the landing of 12, he was breathing heavy. Halfway down from 5 his knees gave out. (They’d given fair warning but he’d refused to believe he could have gone so soft.) He collapsed with the body still cradled in his arms.
    He was helped to his feet by a blond young man in a striped bathrobe many sizes too small. Once Ab was sitting up. the young man tried to assist Frances Schaap to her feet. Ab, gathering his wits, explained that it was just a body. “Hoo-wee, for a minute there, I thought…” He laughed uncertainly at what he’d thought.
    Ab felt the body here and there and moved its limbs this way and that, trying to estimate what damage had been done. Without undressing it, this was difficult.
    “How about you?” the young man asked, retrieving the cigarette he’d left smoking on a lower step.
    “I’m fine.” He rearranged the sheet, lifted the body and started off again. On the third-floor landing he remembered to shout up a thank-you at the young man who’d helped him.
    Later, during visiting hours in the ward, Ray said to his friend Charlie, who’d brought in new cassettes from the shop where he worked: “It’s incredible some of the things you see in this hospital.”
    “Such as?”
    “Well, if I told you you wouldn’t believe.” Then he spoiled his whole build-up by twisting round sideways in bed. He’d forgotten he couldn’t do that.
    “How are you feeling?” Charlie asked, after Ray had stopped groaning and making a display. “I mean, in general.”
    “Better, the doctors say, but I still can’t piss by myself.” He described the operation of the catheter, and his self-pity made him forget Ab Holt, but later, alone and unable to sleep (for the man in the next bed made bubbling sounds) he couldn’t stop thinking of the dead girl, of how he’d picked her up off the steps, her ruined face and frail, limp hands, and how the fat attendant from the morgue had tested, one by one, her arms and legs, to see what he’d broken.

    There was nothing for her in the morgue, Joel had decided, now that the day had yielded its one obit to nullify the nonevent. She phoned back to the desk but neither Darling nor the computer had any suggestions.
    She wondered how long it would be before they fired her. Perhaps they thought she would become so demoralized if they kept her on stand-by that she’d leave without a confrontation scene.
    Human interest: surely somewhere among the tiers of this labyrinth there was a story for her to bear witness to. Yet wherever she looked she came up against flat, intractable surfaces: Six identical wheelchairs all in a row. A doctor’s name penciled on a door. The shoddiness, the smells. At the better sort of hospitals, where her family would have gone, the raw fact