The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin Read Free Book Online Page B

It’s two thirty-five. The temperature is fifty-three degrees. It’s fifty-three degrees.”
    He had never been to England and so had never heard the BBC, but he had an impression that this was what it must sound like. He had a sense, too, of service, a special nonprofit feel of a government- managed, tax-based, public utility, as if the story he told the music librarian at the radio station in Lincoln somehow had come true. Giving the time and temperature, he imagined his voice coming out of loudspeakers in the dining halls of prisons or the card rooms of veterans’ hospitals. He liked this. In a way—though it had come about in a manner entirely different from the one he had counted on when he had approached the brothers—he felt exactly the responsibility he had hoped to feel.
    His nervousness began to relax its hold on him, though he did not tamper with its effects. Now his constraint was designed, a technique, and he acquired still another sense of his professionalism, a wicked inside knowledge of his own manner, the same knowledgeable sensation available, he supposed, to workers on newspapers who see the headlines before they hit the streets—a split-second edge that was all one needed to maintain a notion of his uniqueness and to confirm his closeness to the source of things.
    “I had never had it before. But what did I have? What did I have exactly? A knowledge of what time it was and what time it was getting to be? Access to the weather report? The sequence in which the records would be played that afternoon? What I had was inside information about myself, what I was going to do, what particular shape my dignity would take next, how much shyness or reserve would be there in the next time signal, what unmood would be provoked by the next unmusic I played.”
    But that only got him through the afternoons. The music, however transatlantic and anonymous, was the point. He merely served it, bringing it to the turntable like a waiter, his presence hidden in his deference, his shyness only the giver’s decent effacement. If it weren’t for the music, however, and the time and temperature, he would have been lost, so though the fright did not actually return, it waited for him like that portion of a sick man’s day when the temperature climbs and the pain begins.
    Doing the news that followed his afternoon record show, for example, and recalling the brothers’ insistence that he make more palatable the inevitable reports of accident and sudden death with a deflective cheer—they meant, he supposed, no more than that he lift the pitch of his voice—he felt enormous pressure to oblige, pressure that existed even as he read those stories that had nothing to do with disaster: neutral items about the sale of farms in adjoining counties, or the paving of the dirt road that led to the new dam. He knew what was coming up, and like some unsure singer who knows of a difficult passage later in his song that he has negotiated hit and miss in rehearsal, he could anticipate only those bad places in the road where the car turned over and the children died, and felt his throat begin to constrict, his mouth to dry, his teeth to dry too, like hard foreign objects suddenly in his mouth. So, even as he continued to read the report of the new engine purchased for the volunteer fire department and what the governor said in his address to the Building and Loan convention, he would sound a little hysterical, and once or twice when the time came for him actually to give the damaging bulletin, he lost control entirely. Aiming for the C above high C that was the perfect pitch the Credenzas wanted, the exact and only comforting tone of catastrophe for them, his voice broke, he overshot and gave them not perfect pitch nor even imperfect pitch, but wild pitch, shattering the decorous modulations of radio with falsetto, with something close to a real shriek or scream. Someone hearing him might have thought it was his child who had burned to a