Free 334 by Thomas M. Disch Page B

the blame onto Macy’s and their driver. The director agreed that that was uncalled for.
    “And the minute your driver gets here Miss Newman will be waiting. I’ll be personally responsible. And we can forget that the whole thing happened. Yes?” Yes.
    Leaving the office, Ab drew in a deep breath and squared his shoulders. he tried to get himself into the I-can-do-it spirit of a Sousa march. He had a problem. There’s only one way to solve a problem: by coping with it. By whatever means were available.
    For Ab, at this point, there was only one means left. Chapel was waiting where Ab had left him on the ramp spanning 29th Street.
    “It has to be done,” Ab said.
    Chapel, reluctant as he was to risk Ab’s anger again (he’d nearly been strangled to death once), felt obliged to enter a last symbolic protest. “I’ll do it,” he whispered, “but it’s murder.”
    “Oh no,” Ab replied confidently, for he felt quite at ease on this score. “Burking isn’t murder.”
    On April 2, 1956, Bellevue Hospital did not record a single death, a statistic so rare it was thought worthy of remark in all the city’s newspapers, and there were then quite a few. In the sixty-six years since, there had not been such another deathless day, though twice it had seemed a near thing.
    At five o’clock on the afternoon of April 14, 2022, the city desk computer at the Times issued a stand-by slip noting that as of that moment their Bellevue tie-line had not dispatched a single obit to the central board. A print-off of the old story accompanied the slip.
    Joel Beck laid down her copy of Tender Buttons, which was no longer making sense, and considered the human-interest possibilities of this nonevent. She’d been on stand-by for hours and this was the first thing to come up. By midnight, very likely, someone would have died and spoiled any story she might have written. Still, in a choice between Gertrude Stein (illusion) and the Bellevue morgue (reality) Joel opted for the latter.
    She notified Darling where she’d be. He thought it was a sleeping idea and told her to enjoy it.
    By the first decade of the 21st Century systematic lupus erythematosis (SLE ) had displaced cancer as the principal cause of death among women aged twenty to fifty-five. This disease attacks every major system of the body, sequentially or in combination. Pathologically it is a virtual anthology of what can go wrong with the human body. Until the Morgan-Imamura test was perfected in 2007, cases of lupus had been diagnosed as meningitis, as epilepsy, as brucellosis, as nephritis, as syphilis, as colitis … The list goes on.
    The etiology of lupus is infinitely complex and has been endlessly debated, but all students agree with the contention of Muller and Imamura in the study for which they won their first Nobel prize, SLE— the Ecological Disease: lupus represents the auto-intoxication of the human race in an environment ever more hostile to the existence of life. A minority of specialists went on to say that the chief cause of the disease’s proliferation had been the collateral growth of modern pharmacology. Lupus, by this theory, was the price mankind was paying for the cure of its other ills.
    Among the leading proponents of the so-called “doomsday” theory was Dr. E. Kitaj, director of Bellevue Hospital’s Metabolic Research unit, who now (while Chapel bided his time in the television room) was pointing out to the resident and interns of heaven certain unique features of the case of the patient in Unit 7. While all clinical tests confirmed a diagnosis of SLE, the degeneration of liver functions had progressed in a fashion more typical of lupoid hepatitis.
    Because of the unique properties of her case, Dr. Kitaj had ordered a liver machine upstairs for Miss Schaap, though ordinarily this was a temporary expedient before transplantation. Her life was now as much a mechanical as a biologic process. In Alabama, New Mexico, and Utah, Frances Schaap