19

DEATH OF A SALESMAN – 1ST PERSON (IDENTITY)

He once told me about the day he purchased me…

The door-to-door salesman was a replica of Willy Loman as portrayed by the actor Dustin Hoffman in the 1985 film version of Arthur Miller’s play. When he opened the door he wondered if the disguise was intentional or coincidental. Did the salesman know he was a plaquedemic? Did he know he was a plaquedemic of a particular brand? Did he know he was a plaquedemic of a particular brand who would recognize a replica of Willy Loman as portrayed by the actor Dustin Hoffman in the film version of Arthur Miller’s play when he saw one? What were the chances? Was somebody he knew lurking beneath the disguise? Was it even a disguise? Perhaps this was Dustin Hoffman’s great-great-great-etc.-grandson. But what were the chances of the grandson looking exactly like his great-great-great-etc.-grandfather? And what were the chances of him dressing up like a character that his great-great-great-etc.-grandfather played in a film? And what were the chances that his real life profession was the same profession owned by the character in his fictional life?

“Can I help you?” the plaquedemic asked.

“No,” said the Loman. He smiled. “But I can help you, sir.” He looked down at the guitar case in his grasp. It was bigger than him. “Do you want my help?”

“Not really.”

“Okay. Bye.” He made no effort to leave.

They stared at each other for half a minute. “Wait. Come in.”

“Thank you.” The salesman stepped inside.

The plaquedemic looked the salesman up and down. “I didn’t know door-to-door salesmen still existed.”

“How do you know I’m a door-to-door salesman?”

“There’s a sign on your hat that says so.” He pointed at it.

“Oh.”

“So you still exist, I guess.”

“I do. But it’s a secret. Don’t tell anybody.”

The plaquedemic gnawed introspectively on a pinky finger. “Do I know you?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe. Certainly. But maybe not. I’m certain the answer is maybe not.”

“What are you, Willy Loman?”

“Willy Loman?”

“What’s going on out there?” yelled the plaquedemic’s wife-thing from the kitchenette.

“Nothing!”

He told the salesman they would have to forgo trivialities. “Sell me something. Try anyway. I’m broke.” He disliked salesmen. He disliked the very idea of salesmen and probably wouldn’t buy anything on that condition alone. But confrontation wasn’t his specialty. And he had an overactive sense of empathy. He knew the salesman’s pain. He would have felt too guilty if he sent him away without giving him a chance. Yet he deeply resented the salesman for invading his life and tampering with his emotional spectrum. He wanted to hug him. He wanted to strangle him.

The salesman bowed. “I understand. Trivialities, however, are the game’s name. I’m sorry.” He pushed his way passed the plaquedemic and glided into the kitchenette where the wife-thing was petting and doting over a Bundt cake. She shrieked at the sight of the stranger and dropped the cake on the floor. She accused him of frightening her. But she was quickly won over by his humorous dialogue. The salesman took her hand and stroked it. He asked her name and said it was very pretty. She blushed. He eased her onto the dining table, removed her apron, slipped off her panties and unzipped his trousers.

He stuck his cock in her hole…

The plaquedemic waited patiently for them to finish in the doorway of the kitchenette. A few times he asked, “Are you finished yet?” The wife-thing ignored him. The salesman dutifully replied, “One moment, please.”

Afterwards the men retired to the living cube loveseat. The salesman cleared off a coffee table and set his guitar case atop it. He patted the case. “Inside is the answer.”

“The answer?”

“That’s correct.”

“What answer?”

“The answer?”

“To what?”

“It.”

Their voices were dim. But I could hear them talking…

The salesman explained that he could piece me together in several minutes. Then it was simply a matter of filling out a questionnaire and jacking the plaquedemic’s psyche into mine for programming. The process was psychosomatic. My mind would be formatted according to the technology of his desireggggand then so would my body. “You can create anything,” the salesman assured him, “as long as you understand that, whatever it is, its actions will belong to you by signed contract.” He asked the salesman if that was really true. The salesman said, “No. Not really. The fact is you can’t create anything. There are certain existential rules and regulations that must be taken into consideration. And it has to look exactly like you. If you want it to look differently, you have to alter your own image first. The rest of what I said is true, though. Mostly.”

The plaquedemic expressed some concern about price. The salesman squeezed his knee and assured him I was perfectly affordable. Even if I wasn’t affordable it would be a tragedy not to buy me.

“Tragedy?” he said.

“When the feeling’s gone and you can’t go on,” said the salesman.

“I’m broke.”

“Nobody’s broke.”

“Everybody’s broke.”

“Are you sure? Can you prove it in a court of Law?”

“Nobody can prove anything in a court of Law.”

“Indeed.”

The plaquedemic couldn’t say no. The salesman lifted a finger. Implanted into the tip of it was a small yellow smiley face wearing mirrorshades. He told his customer to grimace for the camera.

Five seconds later the plaquedemic’s debt transcended comprehension. But there was a chance the debt would be paid off in only two generations if his children and his children’s children worked hard enough. A third generation might be necessary. He had been reticent to have kids despite the wife-thing’s constant pleading and crying about being childless. This afternoon they would have a talk about making her a young mother-thing.

The salesman opened the guitar case and removed me. In my protolithic form I resembled something like a giant walking stick or deathly anorexic marionette puppet. I couldn’t feel anything. But I was aware of my body. My mind was schizofunctional.

The plaquedemic filled out the questionnaire. The salesman liquefied his responses and blended them in a Petri dish with a sample of his blood and two special ingredients called Badass and the McGuyver Factor. He sprinkled a bit of table salt on top. He sucked up the resultant mixture with an antique-looking syringe and injected the mixture into one of my extremities. Finally he put a straw into a hole in my shriveled head.

“Blow. Hard.”

The wife-thing peeked into the living cube. “Can I interest either of you gentlemen in a piece of cake? I picked it up from the floor. I dusted it off. I put it on the table. It’s sitting there now. Good as new!”

“Woman!” the salesman snarled. “Goddamn your cake and bring us thirsty bulls a couple of scotches!”

“But, but.”

“Do as I say!”

The wife-thing hurried back into the kitchenette. She tried to hide in the refrigerator. Not enough room. She wrapped herself in the tablecloth. She locked her knees. She tipped over into the wall and froze there pretending to be a patio umbrella.

The salesman touched the plaquedemic’s thigh. “I’m sorry about that. It’s awkward when customers have to see their wife-things reprimanded. But we’ve all got jobs to do, isn’t that so? Blow now.”

My head flopped closer to the plaquedemic. “The fragrance is the color of a scream,” I said.

“It spoke!”

“Yes. Sometimes it speaks. That’s what happens. You better get moving. Without the user’s Breath of Life, the machine may acquire down syndrome, or hermaphroditism, or cerebral palsy, or webbed toes, or an allergic reaction to aardvarks, or some such birth defect. I’ve seen neglected ’gängers come to life that were anthropomorphous globs of noses. Granted, some of the noses were extremely good-looking and went on to become supermodels for clip-on mustaches and pince-nez, but as a whole the ’gänger they comprised was reliably malcontent and couldn’t function without its medication.”

“I get the picture.” The plaquedemic filled his lungs with air. He wrapped his lips around the straw and blew until his cheeks turned purple…

He gasped for air as I sprung across the living cube and crashed into a clock face. Ticks and tocks rained onto my shoulders in slowtime…

My withered limbs swelled and erupted in spasms. An electric current shattered my frail skeleton. My shrunken head melted and a new head crawled out of the residual hole.

I screamed. I screamed.

I heard somebody else scream. I still couldn’t see…A bolt of television static struck my visual screen. I grabbed the bolt. My hand caught on fire. My flesh melted. My bones melted…and burned and burned into chrome…My blood sizzled…I screamed. I screamed…Then I could see.

In the beginning was the Image…Later was the Word. Suddenly I possessed a fully loaded WCOED (Wang Chung Oxford English Dictionary) lexicon including unconscious how-to instructions. I discharged a creative magazine of curse words as my body continued the agonizing hustle and flow of inflating and deflating and constructing and reconstructing…

“I’m naked,” I said when it was over. I sat by myself on the loveseat. Ectoplasm seeped from my pores and dripped down my skin in large brown chunks. “I shit myself.” It was true. I was mired in a pool of feces. I glanced across the room at my original. He was plastered against a wall. “May I have a shower?”

The plaquedemic pinched his nose with his fingers and gawked at the salesman. The salesman stood at attention on the other side of the living cube. He had applied a giant clothespin to his nose.

“I forgot to mention this bit of unpleasantness,” he said. “It’s worth it, though, don’t you think? Sir, meet your match. Literally. Well, not quite literally. Literally in terms of the generally understood connotation of the phrase ‘meet your match,’ I mean. Does that make sense?”

My original and I looked at each other. I stood up and bowed deeply. He said, “I…”

“Woman!” blurted the salesman. “Get your canned ham out here and clean up this mess! Jesus!” The salesman crossed his arms over his chest. The wife-thing scampered out of the kitchenette at top speed and smashed into a china cabinet. She was still tangled in the tablecloth. She wriggled out of it and got to her feet. She saluted the salesman and began to pick up the broken cups and saucers and dishes.

The salesman yelled, “Leave the china! Tend to the android!”

“Oh!” exclaimed the wife-thing. She broke into tears.

The plaquedemic stepped forward. “Mr. Loman!”

“Loman?” said the salesman. He furrowed his brow.

The plaquedemic picked up a book and threw it at him. The salesman ducked…and climbed onto the plaquedemic’s back. He wrapped his legs around his waist and massaged his shoulders and spine. “Calm down now,” he said. “It’s going to be all right. Sometimes a man has to take control of a situation. You understand. Yes. There you are. My my, you’re a bundle of knots. My my. I’ll take care of you. How does that feel?”

The plaquedemic closed his eyes and moaned in pleasure.

The wife-thing sprayed me down with a bottle of Windex. Bit by bit she squeaked my body clean. Afterwards she tried to strap me into a diaper. I asked if I could have a pair of Dudley Horrorshow boxer briefs instead. She told me my original couldn’t afford that brand of underwear.

“Alas,” I said.

The massage felt so good that the plaquedemic fell asleep standing up.

The salesman quietly climbed off of him. He picked up the wife-thing and packed her into the guitar case. He nodded at me. “Good luck then.” As he was about to leave the plaquedemic snorted awake and asked where he was going.

The salesman frowned. “Going? Ah yes, going. I’m going home, I suppose. It’s almost dinnertime.”

“Ahem,” said the plaquedemic.

“Oh yes. I almost forgot.” He unsnapped the guitar case. The wife-thing rolled out of it. She hit the floor and shrieked. “Well then,” the salesman said. “I guess that’s it. I’d like to take this opportunity to say that I appreciate your business. Have a nice day then. Bye.” He slammed the door shut behind him.

My original placed his fists on his hips and frowned at me…

Later that night the salesman died in his sleep. The obituary said he was 54 years old. Forensic schizoanalysts determined that at the time of death he had been dreaming about butlers. The butlers were jetpacking across the troposphere in a great V-shape. Each carried a plate of hors d’oeuvres and wore astronaut bubbles on their heads in case they slipped out of formation and fell into space.

According to the coroner the cause of death was the fear of dying alone.