334/Bodies

"Bodies" is the second section of 334. It first appeared separately in Quark #4, 1971.

Summary

The year is 2022. Ab Holt and his flunky Arnold Chapel operate a black-market corpse-dealing scheme out of Bellevue Hospital, supplying a necrophiliac brothel. When Ab finds that he's sold a body that will be missed—it was meant to be frozen at a cryonics facility—he browbeats Chapel into killing a patient and substituting her for the missing cadaver.

Related characters

Ab's daughter Milly is a central character in "Emancipation". His victim Frances Schaap was last seen in "The Death of Socrates". Juan Martinez appears in the 334 novella.

Notes

the steroid tablets he had to take now

Chapel probably doesn't mean anabolic steroids, but the kind that are used for rheumatoid arthritis or for inflammatory diseases like lupus.

his initiation into the K of C

The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal lodge. Amputating a finger joint is not one of their traditions, as far as I know, but seems to have become one in the future of 334 (Ab joined 25 years earlier, in 1997). This kind of amputation has sometimes been a feature of male initiation rites.

WANDTKE, JWRZY

Probably a misprint by the hospital for the Polish name Jerzy (George), pronounced "Yezhie."

the castration of any Republican

See "Democratic National Convention" below. In the parlance of 334, "Republican" and "Democrat" have acquired new meanings which will become clear from context. At this point, the only clue is that they are not political terms, because Ab also lists "political extremists" as another category of people he hates.

Before revaluation

It's not clear how much Ab's $115 is worth in today's terms, but at some point in the novel's future history there has been a period of drastic inflation followed by currency adjustment.

Where else could you buy something

The black market in 334 doesn't only provide things that are hard to find; it's also the only place to make cash transactions outside of the computerized credit and tax system.

She had a policy with Macy's

It's not clear whether, in the future, the Macy's department store chain has branched out into the cryonics business or this is an unrelated Macy.

the Democratic National Convention (formerly, Pier 19)

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Pier 19 is an area next to South Street Seaport below the Brooklyn Bridge; the actual pier was demolished in the mid-20th century.

The reason that a sex district adorned with a "glowing neon vulva" is named the Democratic National Convention is that in 334, "Republican" means "homosexual" and "Democratic" means "heterosexual." 21st-century readers might assume that Disch meant this as an ironic reversal, given the Republican Party's history of opposition to LGBT rights; however, in 1971 the two major parties were not strikingly different from each other in that regard. A more likely explanation is that this is New York City, which has a long history of Democratic Party dominance, so the sexual majority is identified with the political majority. The fact that there is virtually no mention of government in the novel, except as a distant bureaucracy, suggests that most residents are so politically uninvolved that the words have lost their original meaning.

He had said yes to Yes once too often

Yes was previously described as "some new pill ... that made you feel better"; apparently that was an understatement.

Martinez had been at the desk

This is Juan Martinez, Lottie Hanson's husband, who will appear throughout the 334 novella.

Burking isn't murder

Burke and Hare were infamous 19th-century murderers who killed lodgers in order to sell the bodies to medical researchers; "Burking" became a slang term for their favored murder technique, smothering. Ab's proposed crime has a different motivation: he needs to replace a body that's already been sold.

Tender Buttons

Tender buttons: objects, food, rooms (1914), a long experimental poem by Gertrude Stein.

systematic lupus erythematosis

Lupus, an autoimmune disease whose cause is still unclear, affects primarily women. Its incidence has been increasing since the mid-20th century—not as dramatically as Disch describes (between 2010 and 2016, the average number of lupus-related deaths in the U.S. per year was 1,176), although he also suggests that many deaths attributed to other diseases might turn out to be lupus.

It could certainly be a coincidence that "Ab", besides being Ab Holt's first name, is also the medical abbreviation for antibody—the kind of defensive protein that, when wrongly targeted to the body's own tissues, directs the damage of autoimmune diseases like lupus. Or it could not.

as much a mechanical as a biologic process

A possible reason Ab finds it so easy to rationalize killing Frances: because she is alive only due to technological support. There's arguably a similar theme in the way other characters in the novel seem to almost welcome the idea of civilization (or at least New York) coming to an end, focusing on its un-alive and mechanical aspects and not valuing the life it still sustains.

the afternoon art movie, a drama of circus life

As shown in "Emancipation", "art movie" means porn.

the Steven Jay Mandell Memorial Clinic

Steven Jay Mandell was the first member of the Cryonics Society of New York to be frozen, in the hope of eventual revival, after his death in 1968. At the time 334 was written, Mandell was, as far as the public knew, still frozen and likely to remain so. It was later revealed that due to a lack of funds, he had actually been transferred to a cheaply run facility that allowed bodies to thaw and decompose.

the real moon was there ... A population of how many now? Seventy-five?

A later reference to "the last astronaut" suggests that humanity has lost all ambition for space travel, but here it seems that there is at least a small foothold on the moon, even though none of the characters care about this.