

### The Guy in 3-C and Other Tales, Satires and Fables

by

R.P. Burnham

SMASHWORDS EDITION

******

PUBLISHED BY:

The Wessex Collective on Smashwords

The Guy in 3-C and Other Tales, Satires and Fables

this edition copyright 2014 by R.P. Burnham

originally published as a chapbook in 2000

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Acknowledgements

"The Guy in 3-C" first appeared in Satire, "A Breach of Decorum" in Infinity Limited, "Harold and Elroy" in Wyoming, the Hub of the Wheel, "The Mystery of Democracy Inn" in Satire, and "Litbiz Magazine Interview with William Shakespeare and Fyoder Dostoyevsky" first appeared in The Long Story, and has subsequently been reprinted in Northeast and The Least Shadow of Public Thought.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Mystery of Democracy Inn

The Guy in 3-C

Harold and Elroy

One Day Griswold

A Breach of decorum

The Reminder

Two Bird Fables

Dick and Jane Remember the Simple Sentences

Litbiz Magazine Interview

a note about the writer

### ###

The Mystery of Democracy Inn

### or

### Jonesie, The Modern Prometheus

Miss Isabella Flutterhart, her bosom heaving in agitation, tried one final time to start the car. The engine grinded and sputtered but would not catch. "Alas!" cried Isabella. "Alas!" For she was alone and frightened on a desolate stretch of the Maine coast far, far away from civilization. Around her the lightning bolts burst to the ground with the savagery of a dagger plunged into the breast, the thunder and wind roared louder than the moans of the damned, and the chill rain fell in sheets of solid water like blood pouring from a severed artery. No wonder she was scared.

A bolt of lightning cracked across the sky and revealed a large gothic structure at the end of the peninsula half a mile ahead. There was only one thing to do — she must flee for refuge to that large mansion and hope they could accommodate her. She grabbed her overnight bag and fastened her meager summer coat as tightly as possible and fled through the rain, getting frightfully wet before reaching the building which bore in front a weatherbeaten sign that read: DEMOCRACY INN. Inside the lobby illuminated with candles because of the power outage, Isabella, shivering and drenched to the skin, paused a moment to catch her breath before noticing a corpulent gray haired lady with a gray complexion and wearing a gray dress regarding her sternly from behind the counter.

"What do you want?"

Isabella, remembering her breeding, chose to ignore the patent incivility of the remark. "Pray, whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?"

The woman frowned darkly but answered, "I am Madame Veneer, proprietess of Democracy Inn. Who are you ?"

"My name is Miss Isabella Flutterhart. I'm a governess. I was on my way to assuming a new station at a gentleman's house when first I got lost in the fog and then this dreadful storm came up and put my car out of commission."

Madame Veneer frowned and folded her arms across her ample bosom. "Well?" she demanded harshly and with another frown. "Well?"

"Well, I was hoping there might be accommodations for me tonight."

"Madame Veneer looked behind her to where two score sets of keys hung idly waiting for use, then back to Isabella.

"I can pay, of course," explained Isabella. She reached for her purse.

Madame Veneer waved her hand disdainfully. "Time enough for that later," she said. "Wait here. I shall find the hired man to bring your bag upstairs."

As she was speaking to Madame Veneer Isabella couldn't help but notice a tall, dark and handsome stranger regarding her with a stern countenance from the other end of the lobby. Now alone, Isabella took occasion to steal glances now and then toward the gentleman, noting his black hair and flashing, fierce black eyes that somehow radiated an aura of melancholy and mystery. "Oh, my" murmured Isabella to herself. "Oh, my." She was certain something evil lurked in this inn. She could feel in the heavy, damp atmosphere of the ancient edifice the repressed panting of strong desires and unbridled passion, and somehow associating them with the flashing black eyes of the stranger, it made her feel warm in a secret place not fit to be mentioned in polite society.

"Oh, my," murmured Isabella again as the gentleman, after casting a melancholy look in her direction, turned upstairs, favoring ever-so-slightly his left leg. At long last Madame Veneer returned wearing an even deeper scowl than when she left, possibly because she had been unable to find the hired man. "Follow me," she said archly, peering at Isabella from above her gray spectacles and disdainfully picking up Isabella's bag with an aura that communicated just how unworthy of her station such an action was. Her other hand held the candle.

Halfway up the stairs the tall, dark stranger passed them on his way back down. When their eyes met, the stranger nodded curtly to Madame Veneer and gave an almost imperceptible bow to Isabella. Seeing Madame Veneer's eyes narrow, Isabella was sure there was some secret between them. "Pray, Madame Veneer, who is that gentleman?"

Gaining the landing, Madame Veneer turned and proceeded down the hall. Only at the door of Room 8 did she turn and regard Isabella archly. "Mr. Heathmarsh is staying at the inn. Beyond that I am not at liberty to divulge the private affairs of our guests. Here is your room." She opened the door to a small comfortably furnished room containing a brass bed covered with a pink bedspread, a desk and chair, a dresser with a mirror, a large closet, and best of all for Isabella's present condition, a bathtub and sink in the corner. Seeing it, Isabella said, "I am most particularly anxious to remove my wet things and take a hot bath. I do hope the storm has not affected the water as well."

Madame Veneer frowned and shook her head, a gesture Isabella took to mean that hot water was available. "And I do hope a tray can be sent up."

Madame Veneer dropped the overnight bag on the bed in the same disdainful manner she had picked it up. Taking her candle, she lit several more in the room. "I will send the maid up," she said. "Miss Flutterhart, I feel it my duty to warn you that you must stay in your room. If you hear noises in the night, pay them no heed. Stay in your room. Is that understood?"

Isabella nodded, not at all pleased with her hostess's imperious manner. "I understand," she said, and looked toward the door with a dismissive nod.

As soon as she was alone Isabella drew the bath water and removed her wet clothes. The hot water restored her spirits, more dampened by Madame Veneer than the rain, and soon she was humming happily to herself. By the time she stepped out of the tub she was singing aloud, a fatal mistake for one of her maidenly virtue, for before she even had a chance to reach for a towel she was mortified to see before her a large man with a blondish crewcut whose coarse eyes were staring at her nakedness.

"Eek!" cried Isabella, covering her rubies with one hand and her golden triangle with the other. "What is the meaning of this outrage?"

"Sorry, ma'am. I knocked and thought your singing was an invitation to enter. I brought the tray."

With his coarse eyes still roving over her loveliness, Isabella thought it high time to educate the common people in basic civility. "A gentleman would turn his head," she said sharply. "Have the goodness to leave me in privacy."

With an embarrassed grin, the man hung his head and left, after which Isabella dressed and ate her sandwich and tea and then retired, all the time thinking in shocked outrage of what the coarseness of the hired man's eyes communicated until she grew quite warm in that secret place.

At about two o'clock Isabella was awakened by a loud noise. For a moment she lay confused while gradually recovering her self-awareness. She had been dreaming that the mysterious stranger had come up to her bed, ripped open her bodice and was drinking in the loveliness of her twin beauties whilst Isabella, heaving in agitation, was murmuring, "Please, Mr. Heathmarsh, have some decency." And while that dream was certainly distressing, particularly to a person of such maidenly virtue as Isabella, she knew instictively that was not the cause of her sudden awakening. She listened intently, holding her breath, and before long heard the sounds of muffled voices and the sharp retort of something banging against something else. Remembering Madame Veneer's injunction, Isabella was momentarily hesitant, but it occurred to her that this remote peninsula would be a perfect place for enemies of the republic to land spies from submarines. At the same time she remembered the look Madame Veneer and Mr. Heathmarsh had exchanged on the stairs. Very likely he was right now in the act of some monstrous betrayal of his country and only she could save him from himself. Of course she realized that without a robe to cover her flimsy bodice she was in some danger of being ravished if she came upon that brooding, melancholy man, but weighing that possibility, she decided her patriotic duty compelled her to take the personal risk, and bravely she set forth down the stairs. Seeing a light in the kitchen, she tiptoed toward it very, very slowly so as not to give herself away. At the corner she slowly, very slowly, peeped her head around to behold ... what? Did her eyes deceive her? Did she see what she saw? "Oh, my," she murmured, feeling herself tremble. Then all her bravery deserted her and with a cry of fear she beat a hasty retreat to her chamber, dived into the bed, and covered her head with the blankets.

After her fright Isabella was late arising in the morning. Downstairs no one was present except Maidsie the maid, who while getting her tea and roll informed her that though the storm had passed the road was still washed out so that she was trapped at the inn. Isabella asked if a man might take a look at her car and was directed to Jonesie in the workshop. There she found herself, much to her mortification, in the presence of the man who had stared at her nakedness the night before. When she came in he was tending to a wounded sandpiper. "Morning ma'am," he said, touching his cap. "You see this poor wee thing was injured in the storm." As he spoke Isabella was conscious of his coarse eyes roving over her twin lovelies, but she always had a soft heart for people who loved and helped weaker creatures, so she could not help exclaiming, "Why, what a good and gentle common man you are, Jonesie. I wonder if you could take pity on another victim of the storm and fix my car." Here she batted her big blue eyes at him, which made Jonesie only too happy to comply. With tool box in hand he sauntered down the road whistling and soon returned saying the problem was merely water in the distributor. Within an hour her car was fixed and parked in front of the sign for Democracy Inn. Isabella offered to reimburse him for his trouble, but he touched his cap awkwardly and said, "My pleasure, ma'am."

"Why," said Isabella, blushing at the thought that he was once again eying her twin lovelies bursting forth from her low cut gown, "I must exclaim, what a good and charitable man you are!"

After that Isabella whiled away the rest of the morning reading a romance she had brought with her. At twelve she went down to the restaurant hoping to find another guest with whom she could share her dark forebodings about the inn. As it happened, a middle-aged couple, he dressed in tweeds and a bow tie and wearing thick glasses, she elegant in a gown even lower cut than Isabella's, saw her glancing indecisively from them to the mysterious stranger and invited her to join them. They introduced themselves as Professor and Mrs. Tenuretrack.

"What brings you to the seacoast?" Isabella asked, glancing at the mysterious Mr. Heathmarsh and trying not to be disappointed.

"Research," answered the professor crytically. "I investigate surreal phenomena as part of my scholarly research."

"Oh, my," Isabella said, much relieved. "Then perhaps I should tell you what I saw last night. I hardly know whom to trust, but if you say you investigate strange phenomena, then perhaps you'll understand. I think," added Isabella in hushed tones, "that some foul fiend stalks this inn and that we are all in mortal danger."

It is impossible to describe the effect this statement had on the professor. He appeared startled, intrigued, ecstatically happy, and dubious all at once. Regaining his composure after a sip of tea and a glance down his wife's dress, he said, "Miss Flutterhart, kindly explain what you mean."

"I mean, professor, that I saw something here last night, something ... something ... not human and yet ... and yet ..."

The professor eyed her steadily in his most professorial manner. "Did it have" ... he paused dramatically ... "five lines and an oval?"

Isabella let out a shriek. "Why, professor, how on earth did you know?"

In the corner the dark stranger looked up from his three day old newspaper, while the professor beamed confidently. "I suspect, Miss Flutterhart, you have indeed seen the creature."

"Pray explain," Isabella said breathlessly.

The professor favored Isabella with a wan smile. "The creature that holds enthralled an entire nation, and who goes by the name of Jonesie."

"Jonesie!" exclaimed Isabella.

"Jonesie," nodded the professor.

"But surely ... I've met Jonesie. He's a very kind man, though coarse," she added, remembering his roving eyes. "He not only fixed my car for me today. He takes care of sick animals. Jonesie? No," Isabella concluded, lowering her voice and glancing toward the mysterious stranger. "Mr. Heathmarsh seems more likely. But, pray tell, professor," said the virtuous Isabella, her voice rising and growing excited and despite herself feeling warm in that unmentionable area, "what does Jonesie do, ravish fair maidens?"

The professor leaned forward conspiritorially. "Miss Flutterhart, I must trust you to keep the information I am about to impart in the strictest confidence. An undue word, a casually dropped phrase, could ruin my research just as it verges on triumph. May I trust you to be discreet?"

"You have my word of honor as a gentlewoman," Isabella replied.

"Very well, then. Let me share with you the fruits of my research thus far. To begin with, Jonesie is a stick figure kind of guy — no personality, no face worth remembering, no recognizably unique beliefs. His body, legs and arms are mere thin lines and his face a blank oval. Some believe a child invented him while doodling in front of the tv on Saturday morning. Others conjecture he came from the mind of an adult with no imagination who didn't see anything in the world but a few worn clichés and warmed over slogans. Some maintain Jonesie is mass man in all his purity. It is known that he does what he's told to do and keeps his nose clean. He likes sports and situation comedies on tv—especially violent sports and comedies where there is a lot of, er — shall we say a lot of prodigious and pulchritudinous female adipose proto-plasm —"

"—He means these," Mrs. Tenuretrack interrupted, putting her hands a foot in front of her chest and gesturing like the pope while Isabella modestly blushed.

"Though he learned to read in school," continued the professor, with an appreciative glance down his wife's dress, "it is also known that he never reads a book, magazine or serious newspaper. If it weren't for traffic signs and tv titles he'd have long ago forgotten how to read. Now my research has verified this point abundantly: since he doesn't read, he doesn't think. As a result he is a perfect candidate for the boys who run the government and the boys on Madison Avenue so that every latest fad is tried out on him, every shift of opinion registered in his mind. It's a matter of public record, in fact, that Jonesie always numbers himself in the majority in every public opinion poll ever taken except once when he was asked a hard question requiring thought and he found himself among the 22% who went for "not sure" on the poll. However, even in this case two weeks later opinion shifted and "not sure" swung into the majority position again. So in effect his record is perfect.

"A lot of people are under the impression Jonesie doesn't exist. They say they've never met him and therefore he cannot possibly be real. Their argument is compelling. I'd be the first one to admit he is nearly impossible to examine closely and that even when seen there's not much you can conclude from five lines and an oval. But I have devised a scientific experiment rather like Einstein's thought experiments (it's my gift to the methodology of the social sciences," he proudly added parenthetically) "to prove Jonesie exists. We all know that no one has ever seen electricity, but we can all see it indirectly through its effects. Proving Jonesie's existence must be done similarly. Just as with electricity we must pay attention to the effects which are easily seen — just turn on the tv or ring a doorbell or depress a toaster and you see them. So it is with Jonesie. We know he exists because we can see his effects in the calibre of men and women who lead this country. Such sorry, miserable scraps of humanity, we have to remind ourselves, were elected into office, and it would clearly be impossible to elect such mediocrities unless Jonesie controlled the ballot box. Similarly we know Jonesie exists from the fare served up on network television. No human being could possibly be watching that stuff. Not if we accept the definition of human being as he or she who looks before and after, as having such large discourse. Not if we exclaim with Hamlet, 'What a piece of work is a man!' So you see, Jonesie exists. American culture proves he exists. He's real, not an abstraction. The problem has always been this: how can a normal human being with all the attributes of his species, who suffers pain and responds to the pain of others, who loves his children and fears death, how ...?"

"Yes, professor, how does this foul fiend manifest itself?"

"That is exactly the reason I am here, my dear Miss Flutterhart. As you know, the full moon brings forth the werewolf and in the night stalks the dreaded vampire. Some such mechanism, I am sure, brings forth Jonesie. Tonight I plan the experiment of a lifetime. Your help will insure my success. I will have proof of the creature's metamor-phosis—"

Suddenly a loud, blood-curdling scream erupted from the kitchen, and Smithie, the cook, ran by with his eyes wide with horror. "My God!" exclaimed Isabella. "The creature has struck!"

Amidst the general flurry of excitement, with the four guests all standing and eying one another, Madame Veneer appeared to calm everyone. "A slight misunderstanding," she frowned. "Please be seated."

The professor, with a shrug and a look toward his wife that communicated he was interested in pursuing some private research in their room, quickly whispered to Isabella his plan and they retired. Since the plan required Jonesie's presence in Isabella's room, as soon as she had finished her lunch she went in search of him. "Jonesie, my good man," said our golden haired heroine, "I wonder if you would be so kind as to come to my room tonight promptly at eight. Could you do that?" She batted her big blue eyes at him, and as expected Jonesie indicated that he would be only too happy to oblige.

As soon as it was dark the professor and his wife entered Isabella's room and set up their equipment. Before hiding in the closet the professor reminded Isabella that she would be perfectly safe as long as she followed his plan. At eight Jonesie arrived, wearing a grin and carrying a six pack of beer.

Isabella's instructions were to first get Jonesie off guard by polite chitchat, a skill which a young lady of her accomplishments was most adept at. "How is that poor sandpiper, Jonesie?" she began.

"Fine, ma'am. He's got a broken wing but I've splintered it."

"And do you expect the good weather to hold?"

"Reckon so, ma'am."

"And, pray tell me, Jonesie, just how do you spend your leisure time?"

Jonesie sat down and cracked a cool one. He offered a can to his lady but she politely declined. "Well, ma'am. I like to drink beer. That's fun. And sports and comedies on tv are fun to watch." (Isabella heard the professor's "hmmm" in the closet.) "But today I was doing something special. I was practicing for the county fair games."

"How delightful. And what sporting events have you entered?" blushed Isabella, conscious that now and again Jonesie's coarse eyes were boldly roving over her twin lovelies.

"The spitting contest and hog chasing. The spitting contest is my best event, though. I always expect to rate quite highly in the spitting contest."

"Tell me, Jonesie, were you up late last night?"

"Last night? Lemme see." He chewed his tongue and gave the question a hard think before brightening. "Yeah, me and Smithie were playing cards in the kitchen."

"And did you," asked Isabella, feeling her heart palpitate as she moved into the critical part of the experiment, "talk about anything out of the ordinary?"

Jonesie tugged at his collar and looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Ayuh. Smithie talked about Japan where he was stationed in the army."

"Did he tell you about the strange life he saw there?"

To Isabella's horror Jonesie's eyes went blank as ovals as he began to speak. Her courage almost failing her, she struggled to get out the professor's next question. "What do you think of the poor people starving in Africa, Jonesie?"

"People ... starving ... in ... Africa?" Jonesie repeated. Now his nose and mouth were fading.

"Throw weight!" Isabella shouted, moving into the third phase of the experiment. "Balance of power! Gross national product of Thailand! Deficit spending to stimulate the economy!" She couldn't go on, the horror was too great. Before her a man was crumbling away and a thing was emerging. Putting her hands to her cheeks, she screamed. The professor, however, was more firm in his resolve. He leaped from the closet yelling philosophical verities with the rapidity of slugs jetting forth from an Uzi. "Existence precedes essence! Act only according to a maxim by which you can at the same time will that it shall become a universal law! The transcendent can only be manifest in the immanent! Esse est percipi!"

Before them, perfectly formed and unmistakable, were five lines and an oval. With a cry of triumph and a blinding series of flashes, the professor shot off a roll of film. When it was over Jonesie was standing in the middle of the room in his normal body looking dazed and perplexed. "Sure was bright," he said dully. "I can see stars." He reached out and tried to touch them.

"The mystery is solved!" cried the professor's wife, coming from the closet and straightening the décolletage of her dress, which for some reason was mightily disarrayed. Turning to her husband she gushed forth with this apostrophe: "You have prevailed. Jonesie is your normal, decent, honest guy until faced with things that cannot be seen. The moment he is confronted with problems over the horizon or abstractions, he turns into the foul fiend. You, hero of democracy, have been proved right!"

"Yes, my love," crowed the professor. "My work is vindicated! My future secure! Let them laugh at me now!"

"But, professor," Isabella said, tugging at his arm and trying to bring him back to the business at hand. "The creature. How shall we destroy the creature? Silver bullets and stakes through the heart seem too difficult with a stick figure, to say nothing of the cruelty of it. What shall we do?"

"Posh!" cried that learned man, already assuming the arrogance and self-importance of a full professor at a prestigious university, "we educate the bugger."

Just then another blood-curdling scream pierced the air and shattered windows on three floors. Maidsie, however, quickly rushed up to explain the phenomenon. It seemed Mr. Heathmarsh, who was in fact a traveling salesman selling a line of paper napkins for the cocktail lounges of his circuit and who had been in a funk at the prospect of losing sales due to the storm, had refused Madame Veneer's advances and had been crowned over the head with a frying pan for his trouble. Earlier today Smithie had been the victim of the same hostile coronation when he told Madame Veneer that she was so fat and there was so much woman there that if he married her he'd instantly be liable to be brought up on charges of bigamy.

With that other and secondary mystery solved, the professor turned to Isabella to offer her grant money to undertake Jonesie's and democracy's redemption. Isabella looked over at Jonesie sitting dazed and cracking a brewski. Just at that moment the stars cleared from his eyes so that he was able to catch sight of her twin lovelies bursting forth from her low cut gown. Naturally he grinned coarsely. "Yes, professor, I will undertake the charge," cried Isabella, resolving to work extra hard at educating Jonesie. A great deal, she knew, depended on her success, most particularly whether the sequel to "Jonesie, the Modern Prometheus" would be "Bride of Jonesie" or "The Return of Jonesie," and that unmentionable warm spot was pretty clearly telling her which sequel it preferred.

The Guy in 3-C

First of all I should say we live in a quiet, peaceful building and it's only Percy Thistlethwaite who doesn't fit in. He's the guy in 3-C. He's been living in the building longer than anyone else and is set in his ways. To give the guy his due, I have to admit that most of the time he minds his own business. But sometimes he snaps. I remember the last time it happened to me. I'm the building super and general handyman and was trying to fix one of the four washing machines we have in our basement laundry, though as usual I wasn't having much luck. I know some guys get frustrated when they can't get something fixed, but that never bothered me—actually I didn't have a clue what I was doing and was only banging around inside the machine so that I could tell my boss Maury Steinberg that I tried to fix it but that it needed a pro. That's our usual game, and Maury's quite sensible about the arrangement. So anyways, I was in a pretty good mood thinking about the new deal down at McDonald's I was going to have for lunch when Mr. Thistlethwaite comes in with his laundry whistling a tune I recognized, and feeling friendly as I say, I poked my head out from under the broken machine and said, "Howdy, Mr. Thistlethwaite, I do that too when I'm doing laundry."

I don't know if I startled him or what, but for a long time he just kept loading his laundry and whistling as if he hadn't even heard me. But finally after throwing in the last shirt, he looked up and said, in a non-too friendly tone, "Do what?"

"Whistle the jingle to Stain Away! It's my brand too." I pointed to the familiar red, white and blue box—"Colors you can trust" was their slogan. "You know—'You keep the blues at bay/When you use Stain Away!'"

He stared at me as if dumbfounded for so long I started to get embarrassed. Then he said, "And all the time I thought it was a theme from Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings. Thank you, sir. Thank you for enlightening me."

Now I should say right here we're getting into one of the reasons Mr. Thistlethwaite doesn't fit in at 87 Pleasant Street. Everyone in the building loves rock music. Sadie Finklestein, whose arthritis is so bad she's often been confined to a wheelchair since her eightieth birthday, has told me many times that her only regret is that she can't boogie when she's in the steel wheels. Tony Tortillini was just telling me the other day when we were walking over to Burger King on State Street to try the new chicken sandwich they were advertising that he loves the part where John screams in "Day in the Life." At Howie Cavallaro's sixtieth birthday last month we must have listened to Neil Young's "Rust Never Dies" album ten times (Howie, having worn out the record years ago, had got the CD version so that he just kept hitting the repeat button). And of course all the young people in our building never go for their jogs or power walks without their Sony Walkmans bringing them the latest sounds. But Percy Thistlethwaite? He actually likes classical music!

Well, I could see his remark was sarcastic and I should have been on my guard, but I was in too good a mood to let it bother me (that deal at McDonald's included a Big Mac, large fries and a coke for just $2.99, so who wouldn't be happy?) and I ignored the sarcasm and said, "Tell me, Mr. Thistlethwaite, where's the place you call home?" and repeated when he just looked puzzled, "Where are your people from? The old country and all that?"

He looked at me as if I'd asked him the size of his you-know-what. "I don't have 'people' like that, if you must know."

"What do you mean?" I was really perplexed and thought he didn't understand. "You know, what language did your people speak before they spoke English? That's what I meant by 'home.' I'm just asking because the neighborhood Ethnic Pride Day is coming up."

That's when he went ballistic on me. Standing his full 6-2, skinny beanpole, shiny chrome-domed, faded blue eyed, pants up-to-the-chest height, he said drily, "Some of us approximate the condition known poetically as a stranger on the earth. Some of us" (his voice began rising until it thundered across the walls) "were born into misery and misfortune. Some of us, Mr. Hmtchs, have, in fine, no scene of domestic bliss and childhood sweetness to refresh our minds in the dry desert of quotidian existence."

"Oh, I see," said I, mustering all the sympathy possible when a guy you hardly know is yelling at you, "then you're an orphan. I'm sorry."

Mr. Thistlethwaite turned sharply and glared at me. "You, sir," he roared, "may assume no such thing. It's very presumptuous of you."

You'd better believe I made myself scarce after that display. And you'd also better believe I'm not the only one who's been the victim of a Thistlethwaitish outburst. Recently Tiffany Hernandez, who just married Chuckie Yamashita and moved into the building, just about got her head snapped off and was called an impertinent puppy for calling him "Percy" instead of Mr. Thistlethwaite. Mostly, though, it's sarcasm that the guy in 3-C uses. Make no mistake about it, Mr. Thistlethwaite can be a sarcastic guy. Sometimes I get the impression he thinks he's the only sane guy in a building filled with idiots. Take Jose, for example. The poor guy's real name is U Suk Toe. A lot of people razzed him about that name, though with a name like Bob Hmtchs I never did. I must have heard the joke about the Czech guy who's asked to read the eye chart at the optometrist's a million times—"Read it? Hell, I know the guy!" I tell people my name is pronounced "him-chess" and the matter is settled, but the trouble with U Suk Toe is that it's pronounced exactly as it's spelled. So finally he americanized his name to Jose, as in "No way, Jose." But Mr. Thistlethwaite, he always pronounced the "J" and made his name rime with "hose." And the thing is, Jose's a good guy—he's really into punk rock and on weekends dresses like a Deadhead with tie-dyed shirts, headband and the works.

Another time he turned his sarcastic tongue on Sadie. She was sitting in her wheel chair in the shade in front of our building grooving to a Pearl Jam song, and at the same time Mr. Thistlethwaite was waiting for the bus and sitting on one of the benches. He was trying to read something and kept giving Sadie dirty looks until finally he asked her to turn the radio down a bit. But Sadie didn't particularly like his tone of voice, so instead of doing what he asked she told him Pearl Jam wasn't a group you listened to as background music, and she quoted Stanley Chen, the world-famous rock critic, who had written that the soul of America throbbed in every note that sublime group played. Then, Sadie said, a maniacal look came into Mr. Thistlethwaite's eyes so that she actually began to be afraid, but instead of physical violence his chosen weapon was sarcasm. "You know," he said with a grimace horrible to behold, "if ever I'm on the verge of suicide I'm going to remember this moment." "Why's that?" Sadie asked. She found the remark really interesting, and what with the song being over and the news on she turned off the radio to listen. "Because of the healing power of humor is what is needed to fight despair," he said. "To think that grown men and women actually make their living pompously criticizing music designed for pimply-faced adolescents and talking about it in terms of high art—why, it's guaranteed to save one from despair." And with that he slapped his knee and roared with laughter. But Sadie can't stand to hear a word against Pearl Jam or Stanley Chen, and on that day I'm afraid Mr. Thistlethwaite made a bitter enemy.

Having made a lot of them through the years, Mr. Thistlethwaite hadn't exactly built up a backlog of good will. Probably it wouldn't have mattered, and we would have all gone tolerating him, except at this time the fateful idea of a mural of Walt Disney characters in our lobby came up. Bette Ceckowski's daughter Cary offered to paint it for us, and Maury said it was okay with him as long as all the tenants agreed. "All the tenants?" I asked him. Already I could smell the skunk, but Maury said all twelve tenants had to agree.

Naturally the guy in 3-C made for a hung jury. His exact objection was something along the lines of hell freezing over before he'd see such drivel in the building he lived in. For two weeks people argued with him (not me—I knew it was useless), trying to convince him that the mural would make our building unique, that Cary was the best artist in her high school and would do a marvelous job, that it wouldn't even cost us a cent since she was doing it for artistic expression, not money, all of which pleading Mr. Thistlethwaite greeted with snorts of contempt.

After that murderlust grew in our hearts. In the lobby in the morning, at McDonald's or Burger King or Pizza Hut at lunch, out on the benches on nice nights, we'd meet and talk about him. Sandy Abu Saed (she was my pal Binky's wife, but I have to admit in my imagination she and I have done some naughty things together— she's a real black-eyed beauty, let me tell ya), Sandy, anyways, cut right to the chase at Burger King (new fish sandwich this week). "He's doing something fishy in there, I can tell you. Why else would he sliver in and out of his door like a snake? We've been living on the third floor for five years now and have never seen inside his place."

To which Buzz Singha countered, after washing down a huge bite of his Whopper with chocolate milkshake, which was half price if you bought the fish sandwich but Buzz just felt like a whopper so he paid full price, "If you ask me he's murdered someone and is getting rid of the evidence in a vat of acid. Either that or he's chopping the body up just like that guy in Milwaukee did."

At McDonald's (free soft drinks with orders over $3) Bette Ceckowski thought he looked like a fellow on America's Most Wanted, one of her favorite TV shows. The guy had swindled widows and old folks out of their life savings in eleven different states. "He was tall and skinny," Bette concluded, "with blue eyes and fair hair just like our guy."

Everyone was pretty impressed with this reasoning (Bette, you see, had gone to college) but later that night when a bunch of us were talking it over during half time on Monday Night Football Jose offered a different perspective on our problem. "How do we know his name is Thistlethwaite?" he asked as he passed around the pepperoni and double cheese pizza we had had delivered—the first at full price, the other two at half price.

Everyone looked dumbfounded, though as I thought about it you could see why Jose would reason along these lines. Finally after everyone chewed thoughtfully on their pizza for a while, Andy Xanthopoulis said, "Well, it's the name on his mailbox. Besides, who'd think up a name like that?" He shook his head. "No, we want to know the real story, look for his picture at the Post Office. That's what I'm going to do." Andy was part of the Beta testing that proved Pepsi was better than Coke. He never drank Coke, only Pepsi, and you have to understand he spoke as emphatically as if he was on his usual spiel about how awful Coke was. He was so emphatic, in fact, for a while there I think we were all planning a trip to the Post Office first thing in the morning.

Then Binky Abu Saed chimed in with the fruits of his big think. "Who would make up a name like Thistlethwaite? I'll tell you who—a guy who reads books and listens to classical music, that's who. For me, I look forward to the day his trial's on the Court Channel."

"After we finger him at the Post Office," Andy added.

"Or when we grab him and make him confess," Jose chimed in.

I thought everyone was getting carried away. I understood their anger and frustration—with our building already thirty-five years old it would only take something special like the Disney mural to get us designated as a National Historical Site—but I think we were forgetting our uniquely American sense of fair play. When I brought this up, though, it was not at first well received.

Buzz said, "It's one thing to be fair to a guy because we Americans are the fairest people in the world. But it's quite another thing to be fair to a guy who's not normal—who's not even American."

Well, that got us thinking again. I know my head was beginning to ache, and it looked like the boys were feeling the pain too. But for our building no sacrifice is too much! What Buzz said was true. Like my Martha used to say (I still call her my Martha even though it's going on fifteen years we've been divorced), we all like to watch a bit of TV each night, have lunch at McDonald's once or twice a week, go shopping at the mall and see the people, talk about last night's ballgame or what the Hollywood stars are doing in bed to each other, and generally participate in the culture of our great country. But Mr. Thistlethwaite? He didn't even own a TV as far as I could tell. He didn't like baseball, the mall, or fastfood.

And as Buzz pointed out, he didn't know a thing about the OJ trial!

We talked about this for a while, and then Jose more or less seconded Buzz's observation when he said, "He doesn't seem to have a past. You never hear him speaking of the old country or of when his parents or grandparents came to America. I find it very suspicious. He ain't like any American I know."

He high-fived Buzz and Binky, then did an end zone dance like the running back who just scored a big TD for our side to remind us of his American credentials. In fact all the guys got quite excited since that TD put us ahead. Andy went out for a pass and Jose threw him a perfect spiral with the pizza box. Andy caught it, then knocked himself silly against the wall as he headed up field. All this time, though, I was still thinking. I'd seen enough detective shows to know we had to start from the facts if we were to solve the mystery. When I was a kid I wanted to be a cop, so naturally it was me (I say this in all modesty) who brought this to the group's attention during the ad for the new chicken-bacon sandwich at Wendy's. I counted off on my fingers the facts as we knew them. Mr. Thistlethwaite was in his mid-fifties. He was a widower and had two kids living in the Midwest (though no one could recall ever seeing these kids). He used to be a librarian but lost his job when the college he worked at folded. Now he lived on savings or some kind of an annuity.

Andy, who was just coming around from the hard tackle the wall had made, said these facts weren't much to go on, so we all tried to think of someone he liked besides those old fart poets and composers. No one could ever remember him mentioning actors, rock stars, presidents, athletes or famous criminals in favorable terms. Buzz recalled that one time Mr. Thistlethwaite told Sonny Rodriguez he admired Martin Luther, but we all knew Doctor King has a holiday now and gives us the day off, so it went without saying that everyone admired him. The only suspicious thing was that he said Martin Luther. It just wasn't like him to call a guy by his first name. I called Leroy MacIntyre to ask him if he knew anything about Mr. Thistlethwaite being involved with the Black Muslims. Leroy was the only black guy in our building and therefore our expert on black folks. But Leroy doubted it. "The guy's as pale as a moon calf," he opined. "He ain't likely to be messing with them brothers."

Well, so much for that theory. The guys started talking wild again, so I had to remind them that we needed facts before we could get the cops to arrest him, and that meant we had to get inside his apartment and nose around. Since I was the super, I had the best chance of getting in.

But another week went by while we tried various schemes without any luck. I tried to talk Mr. Thistlethwaite into letting me inspect his air conditioner by telling him that Maury wanted all the units checked since they hadn't been serviced in years. Mr. Thistlethwaite, however, pointed out that he had never used his AC because he hated the noise it made. Next I suggested he needed his apartment painted and that I was just the man to do it, but he said as a matter of fact he was planning to get it wall papered and was only waiting because he was torn between Goofy and Tinkerbell as the motif. Three days later I told him I'd have to inspect his thermostat now that winter was approaching, and this time too he was ready for me. He took his contract from his pocket and showed me the paragraph where it said no entry could be made without his permission.

I now realized the guy in 3-C was fiendishly clever and that he was on to us. I reported this back to the others, who all became rather discouraged. Just then, though, our luck changed, and I'm proud to say it was owing to my cleverness, if I do say so myself. Perhaps Mr. Thistlethwaite underestimated just exactly who I was, but I didn't. Bob Hmtchs is the name, clever dude is the game! What I did was find out where he spent three or four mornings a week by tailing him. I disguised myself as a street mime, painting half my face black and the other half white, and wearing a sailor outfit with a jersey of white and red horizontal stripes and white pants. I don't think even Martha would recognize me if she passed me on the street. As a matter of fact she did pass by, but she took one look and hurriedly rushed away. And I know Mr. Thistlethwaite didn't. Every time he happened to look back at me I simply pretended I was in an invisible box. It was in this way that I discovered he went to the public library on these mornings.

My successful sleuthing emboldened me to try to break into his apartment with the master key the next morning he was gone, but once again he was one step ahead of us—he'd changed the locks. Sandy, Bette, and Sadie, who kept watch for me by the elevator and stairs, regarded this as proof of his guilt and were for calling the cops instantly. I had to remind them that Columbo and other experienced detectives (I was thinking especially of myself) always waited for proof before making arrests. Didn't Bette's face cloud over when she heard me say that! She reminded us that she had been to college and said that in college, unlike TV, proof was proof.

Then, the very next day, just like on TV, and not like in college, something occurred that unexpectedly allowed us to get inside the apartment. We owed our good luck to Sandy and Binky's cat Snowball. That darn cat was forever getting into mischief like knocking grocery bags over, chewing through slippers, and so forth, up to more serious things like eating Sadie's parakeet, whose name was Mick Jagger. This time Snowball was hanging around the door to Mr. Thistlethwaite's apartment, and when he left it ajar as he went to the utility closet to get a mop before you could say Jumping Jack Flash, Snowball had slipped into the apartment and deposited a hairball on a valuable book. Mr. Thistlethwaite, coming back and discovering this outrage, began chasing the cat around the apartment and swinging at her with the mop. I could hear all this commotion down in the lobby and went up to investigate. I got up there to discover through the open door Mr. Thistlethwaite, his eyes wild with bloodlust, screaming that his book was ruined while Snowball was dodging his blows and howling in outrage that she wasn't free to do what she wanted. Sadie had wheeled out into the hall and in her excitement apparently confusing Snowball and Mr. Thistlethwaite, she was screaming, "Good Lord! Stop him before he kills again!" Sandy (who was wearing a foxy tank top and tight shorts) was yelling at her neighbor to leave her cat alone. In the confusion I don't think Mr. Thistlethwaite even noticed I slipped into his apartment under the pretense of trying to help out while actually my trained eyes were casing the place out.

There were books everywhere, in shelves, in piles on the floor, on tables, even on the window sills. By his easy chair was the one he must have been reading at the time and on which Snowball had deposited her love token—The Works of Shelley, a poet, I think. The walls had a lot of pictures of landscapes and such, and also a lot of what looked like old family portraits of dudes dressed up in old-fashioned clothes. It made me think he came from a family of actors. There was a certificate from the American Library Association and another for some club he must have belonged to (though I never remember seeing him going off to any meetings)—Sons of the American Revolution, it said. Tony later told me it was something like the Knights of Columbus. I didn't see a TV anywhere, so we were right about that. He did have a great sound system with speakers as big as tanks, but of course all his stuff was classical, so I didn't waste my time looking at it too closely. With Mr. Thistlethwaite chasing Snowball, Sandy chasing both of them, and Sadie in the hall yelling from her steel wheels, "Murder! Stop the fiend before he kills again!" it took great powers of concentration just to notice the things I was seeing. Luckily, just then Snowball made a break for the door, and all of them ran out into the hall. Quickly I checked his freezer to see if it was like that guy's in Milwaukee, but it wasn't. He was clean. In fact I saw once in a movie the apartment of a character who was a librarian that the detective had to interview, and I have to admit Mr. Thistlethwaite's place reminded me of that set in the movie. I was going to have to tell the others that we couldn't easily nail him on a mass murderer charge.

At this point, just when the guy in 3-C probably thought he had us on the ropes, I came up with a plan that got us the victory. Maury's a softy, so I told Bette to let fly with some tears when we went to talk with him, and it worked. Maury let us have the mural on an eleven to one vote. Mr. Thistlethwaite, seeing that he'd lost this battle of wits (notice I don't say I won, but you can draw your own conclusions), began moving his stuff out of his unit. But just when we calculated almost all his stuff was gone and we were looking forward to living in a Thistlethwaiteless building, something truly fishy began happening in 3-C. Three mysterious and large boxes were delivered, and Mr. Thistlethwaite stayed on. Strange young men and women came with backpacks and suitcases and spent the days inside, often not leaving until late at night. Sometimes, even though it was from that swanky emporium over on Cross Street, pizza was delivered! We asked Maury if Mr. Thistlethwaite was planning to sell his condominium, but Maury hadn't heard a word. We tried asking the guy in 3-C what his plans were, but he'd just give us a goofy grin and say, "In the fullness of time, my dear people, in the fullness of time."

By now Cary had finished her mural and the government officials came to check out our building. Unfortunately they rejected our request to become an historical site. True, they said, our place was 35 years old and therefore historical; but, they reminded us, it still needed something special to set it apart and they had already registered 143 buildings with Walt Disney murals. Everyone was of course very disappointed. For several weeks as we ate our Whoppers and Big Macs all we had to talk about (especially now that the OJ trial was over) was what was happening in 3-C. Sadie was quite sure he was building a nuclear device with smuggled Russian uranium. She read in one of the tabloids that a woman grew an extra breast after handling some of that illicit stuff and rather hoped something extra would grow on Mr. Thistlethwaite. Before that happened, though, she said we had to have the cops in to arrest him. Somewhat impatiently I had to remind her that we needed proof before we could get a warrant and that I rather doubted Snowball would volunteer for another assignment.

Mr. Thistlethwaite had been present on the day the government officials came to our building and was even seen talking to them as he waited for his mysterious young friends in the lobby. Sadie and some of the others suspected he had prejudiced the officials against us. For sure he watched them examine the Disney mural with a wry, self-satisfied smile on his face. Because of that I was doubly surprised about a month later when he came down to the lobby to give me the key to 3-C. "Of late I have had occasion to study the contract for my condo very closely. One article states that a key must be available in case of emergencies. Perhaps you did not know"—here he gave me a look fraught with significance—"that I recently changed the lock. Here is the key."

"You'll be selling your place I expect, Mr. Thistlethwaite," I said as I took the key.

He rubbed his bald pate and peered at me through his thick glasses. "On the contrary, my stuff is being moved back today now that the renovations are done."

He started walking away, then turned just like Columbo always does to deliver the zinger. "Oh, by the way, I've also called the government people in for a look. Not only that, but I'm afraid I must ask you for a favor. I'm called out of town to my son's house and will not be available for the scheduled visit. I wonder if you'll have the kindness to show them around 3-C."

After he left you could have knocked me over with a feather. My hand was positively trembling as I got on the phone to tell everyone the news. The next morning, a half hour after Mr. Thistlethwaite left for the airport, Jose, Binky, Andy and I rushed upstairs to where Sadie was waiting impatiently in her steel wheels and into 3-C we went. You're not going to believe it, but what we found was the walls and ceilings of every room painted with at least a thousand wasps. Some were against blue backgrounds, some were on flowers, some were stinging other insects, some were in swarms, some were alone, some were huge six-foot paintings, some tiny and life size, but everywhere there were yellow and black wasps. Each room had been painted by a different artist so that there were many different styles. Most were realistic but some were stylized, almost abstract. Leaning against the kitchen counter we found a sign that said THE HOUSE OF THISTLETHWAITISH WASPDOM. TOURS AVAILABLE. It looked like he intended to have that on the door. The most interesting place was the spare bedroom. There the artist had painted human faces on the wasps—there were dozens of them, but the only ones we recognized were Washington and Lincoln because of the car ads on Presidents' Day and Shakespeare, who does a lot of ad work too. The rest of them, of both men and women, showed a lot of old-fashioned people like in movies.

We were impressed and more importantly so were the government people when I proudly showed them around. Three months after their second visit to our building we were designated a National Historical Site, and Jose, Bette, Sadie and I started making some dough selling T-shirts that Cary designed—we didn't make a lot from the visitors that came but enough to pay for our lunches at Burger King, McDonald's and Pizza Hut, so just try to tell me we're not ahead of the game. Really, you should also try to get your place designated an historical site—I strongly recommend it. We Americans love history, so you're bound to make some money.

Oh, yeah, I should also say something about the people who visited. The ones who came to see the Walt Disney mural were regular people. They wore T-shirts and sneakers and had Sony Walkmans soldered to their ears just like regular people always do. But the ones who came to see the guy in 3-C's apartment were different. The men all wore their pants up to their chests and the women almost always had on dresses. There was a lot of blue hair among them too. If you bumped into them, they would all say, "Oh, I do beg your pardon." But you know what? Cary designed a special wasp T-shirt of yellow and black horizontal stripes, and I'll be darned if some of them didn't buy them.

Percy Thistlethwaite is now a popular guy at our building. He's changed too. The biggest thing is that he's not sarcastic anymore. But you can see for yourself how he's changed when I tell you about what happened when I saw him awhile ago. I thanked him for making our building the hot spot in our nation's tourist industry that it's become and said, "Everyone's real thankful to you, Mr. Thistlethwaite."

"My pleasure, Bob," he answered with a modestly dismissive wave of the arm. "Glad to help." His arm continued waving in the air and for a second there I thought he was actually going to high-five me, but really that would be too much. Instead he put his arm out to shake my hand and said, "Hey, call me Percy."

I'll tell you, that guy in 3-C is some guy. Hell, you could even say he's one heck of a guy! He even bought one of the yellow and black T-shirts, and this morning he was wearing it. He seemed proud as a peacock and pleased as punch to be wearing the wasp colors. Go figure. Who'd want to be associated with an insect unless he was a really cool guy!

### Harold and Elroy

### A Dialectical Dance

I.

Elroy (The Thesis)

Elroy's long death began the day he, along with hundreds of others, was turned out of the mental institution in an effort by politicians to save taxpayers the evil grief of bankrolling freeloaders. Elroy, confined to a wheelchair because a stroke had left him partially paralyzed, was given twenty dollars and released onto the streets of the city. "Here's your stop, Elroy," the fat driver said as he wheeled Elroy out of the truck. Giving him a friendly little shove, the driver, who was partial to the sweet cadences of Spenser, murmured this parting benediction: "Sweet Tom, roll softly till I end my route." So just like that Elroy found himself free to pursue the American dream with a twenty dollar headstart. And this pleased him very much, for in addition to having an ulcer, cirrhosis of the liver, poor circulation, and the interesting condition up in the file cabinet that experts called schizophrenia (all this at the tender age of 46), Elroy was a bone fide alcoholic, and it had been months upon months since last he'd gone on a good toot.

Now Elroy was no vulgarian, so first he looked around to make sure he wasn't standing up the welcome wagon. Seeing only a mangy mut pawing through a garbage can, he concluded that there would be no danger of impropriety if he sallied forth directly in search of a liquor store.

Such beacons of welcome for weary wayfarers on life's long and lonely journey are fortunately never far away. Elroy found one after wheeling only two blocks. It even had an automatic door, making it easy for him to enter, but nevertheless he had to stop to collect his breath and still his beating heart (the presence of so much booze in one space always made Elroy giddy with happiness -- his idea of heaven would be to have the run of such a place forever). "Let's see," he said to himself as he eyed the rows of bottles. "Hmmm." In the past he would buy rotgut, but with the twenty dollar bill crumpled tightly in his sweaty palm he felt it would be sinful to settle for anything short of the finest scotch. Just to prove to himself that he hadn't lost the common touch of a man of the people, he added to that a bottle of cheap wine. The next step was to find a private place where the gallant men in blue would not interrupt his libations with friendly little reminders of his exalted place in the scheme of things. This alley, thought he, as he espied a narrow thoroughfare between two warehouses, will do just fine. He wheeled in and set up shop behind a dempster, and there he found, like Satan, a heaven in what unimaginative people might denominate a hell. Glug, glug, glug. Sweetly it burned. Pang in the belly. Then warmth flowing through the half of his body that could still feel. And most of all the condition of wellbeing up there in the file cabinet. Glug, glug, glug. Ditto the sequence of physical sensations and spiritual joy. Glug, glug, glug. Ditto. And so forth through the whisky and wine.

It was fun while it lasted, but the trouble was a twenty spot doesn't go that far what with today's prices. Take rent, for example. When Elroy woke up in the morning he perceived that two rather unsavory looking gentlemen who were evidently sharing accommodations with him in the alley were going through his personal effects. One of them, a rough looking customer indeed, had Elroy's last six dollars in his hand.

"Hey," Elroy said indignantly. "That's my money."

"Oh yeah? Sez who?" the fellow growled. "This 'ere's our alley. And this"—he waved the six dollars in Elroy's face— "is your rent. Ain't that so, Bart?"

"It's so, Burt," the other agreed.

Before Elroy could so much as ask to see his lease, Bart, who was a tall skinny fellow and obviously the intellectual in their private corporation, suggested that Elroy's wheelchair had dollar signs written all over it. By which observation he did not mean that they should sell the wheelchair—rather that it would be handy in soliciting funds from philanthropic individuals with liquid assets on their persons.

Thus Elroy's diurnal routine was settled on his first morning back in the land of opportunity. He would panhandle until he got enough money for rent and a bottle (usually the same thing). Then he'd get loaded with Burt and Bart, his landlords. When he felt hungry (which wasn't often), he'd go to a soup kitchen nearby. On those occasions when the booze would make him vibrate like a bowstring, somehow someone would see that he got to detox. A couple of times when his ulcer acted up someone from the soup kitchen would take him to the hospital.

And so the times between Phoebus's gentle kiss of yonder hill and Diana's chaste reign was filled, and so he lived. One thing about such a life, Elroy was as contemptuous as Plato about mere temporality, as scornfully indifferent to his physical surroundings as the Buddha. Yes, he scorned to be a vulgar creature of the earth. His spirit lived not in the alley he called home, his wheelchair touched not the gross substantiality of the sidewalk concrete or the unclean dirt of the gutter. Trailing clouds of forgetfulness that the booze and his own private chaotic filing system afforded him, his soul found nirvana with such regularity that sometimes weeks would go by without Elroy having a single recollection of the hours and how he'd filled them.

By this time he was so skinny that if he wore striped pajamas they'd only need one stripe, but he didn't eat much because his ulcer was killing him. Of course the booze would give it a stab too, but that was offset by the sweet burning of the whisky in his throat and by the warm tingling sensation that would suffuse the half of his body still capable of a tingle. And by the feeling of wellbeing up there where the self was misfiled.

And yet there was no danger of Elroy being happy. Deep down he knew it was a living death he was enduring and he knew where it all was leading. In the moments, rarer and rarer though they be, when he'd come to full consciousness, he'd steadfastly refuse to think of the future or the forgotten past. True, sometimes he'd take from his paper bag of personal effects a worn teddy bear and consider it with a far-off look in his eyes, but then he'd forget and busy his mind with the best way to raise funds so to reach again that blessed state of nirvana where his consciousness, such as it was, could merge into the cosmic whole. It was all he cared about, poor lad, and the world, or at least that part of the world where he was enduring his earthly trek, didn't care one way or the other about what was going on in that chaotic filing system that was captain of his wheeled vessel as it sailed through dark and turbulent water -- or, if you prefer, as it rolled over concrete and dirt.

II.

Harold (The Antithesis)

Harold's long life of rebirth began after he died. It happened like this: he was swimming in the cold Atlantic on a steamy August day when a boat driven by a drunken teenager came too close to shore and struck him in the head. The blow caused him to lose consciousness and sink below the waves where he drowned. Nobody noticed him because for several minutes the beach was in chaos. People scattered, mothers gathered their children together, another man who was slightly injured by the boat was attended to, the teenager got into a yelling match with a man whose child had almost been hit. It was only after things settled down a bit that Harold's absence was noticed. The lifeguard, who had been in the process of bandaging the wounded man, stopped what he was doing, screamed at the woman who had informed him of Harold's absence, and dove into the water. The waves had already washed Harold's body in toward shore, so the lifeguard found him quickly. Frantically he hauled him up unto the beach and began trying to restart the heart with blows to the chest and administering mouth to mouth resuscitation. Twice the heart fluttered then died before a pulse, at first weak and then stronger, began. The crowd of hundreds of people, gathered round in a tight circle to watch, cheered the lifeguard when Harold began breathing on his own.

All during this time, from the point where the boat had struck him until the point where his eyes flickered open, Harold was absent, having gone on the most extraordinary journey of his life. After a moment of confusion he experienced a strangely liberating floating sensation, and yet he could feel that he was going immensely fast, speeding as if in a tunnel of billowy and many-colored clouds through billions of miles of time and space. During this time, which was not time in any earthly sense, he relived and recollected every single experience of his life. He remembered every kind deed he had done, every happy event in his life, and equally every act where he found himself wanting, where he knew he could have done better, and on the whole he felt his life was incomplete and unsatisfactory. Before he could feel any regret for the wine spilled in the lost times, he found himself in the presence of a stupendously bright light, brighter than ten million suns, and yet it did not hurt to look at it. On the contrary, the light radiated the most wondrously warm and energetic love. Never had Harold felt so much at peace and so abundantly drenched in overpowering security. He felt he had come home to his ultimate home, for no love and no warmth and no peace on earth could be anything but a remote shadow of this love, this warmth, this peace. Harold knew he was in the presence of Love itself, the mighty creator of the universe, and though in life he had never been a religious man at all, this knowledge did not surprise him. Of course, he thought to himself. Of course it should be so. More slowly he became aware of other beings in the periphery of Love, and slower still he recognized some of them as people he had known who were on earth dead and gone. Nobody spoke and yet communication was perfect and unfettered. His father told him he was not ready yet, that his work was incomplete. Harold resisted this message even though he felt it to be true, but looking for permission from the Being of Light to stay forever, he learned that here the truth could not be hidden. Before he could even struggle to remain, he felt weight sinking him down, he felt pain and began coughing and gagging, he opened his eyes to see the lifeguard crouching by his side with an intense look of relief on his face, he knew he was back in the land of the living and he felt sad.

This happened during a company picnic which Harold's wife and children had been unable to attend. So intensely private was the experience, so vivid and overwhelming, that Harold chose not to share it with any of his workmates, but as soon as he saw his wife after his hospital examination he told her everything. She was a religious person and had often tried to get Harold to go to church with her. "It was Jesus," she said confidently."The light was Jesus."

Harold thought not. He felt that while Jesus may have come from the Being of Light, something told him the light and love was universal and God of all religions. He didn't have to go to church, he knew, to be reborn. He already was reborn. If the most telling immediate effect of the experience was the certain knowledge that never again would he fear death, still it was inaccurate to say any particular thing changed more than another in Harold's life, for in truth everything had changed and changed completely. No longer existed the old tentative Harold groping after belief and wondering, when he could rise above his problems enough to wonder, what the point of his life was. He became a Gott betrunkener Mensch, searching for God everywhere. The leaves would rustle, revealing their pale olive green undersides, and Harold would look there for God. The sunlight would catch his child's brown hair and make it radiate gold, and for a moment Harold would see again the light of Love. He would listen to his favorite music and in the sonorities of a sweet violin or the soaring voice of a soprano he would catch the sound of God. But why enumerate examples when everything he did and everywhere he went reminded him of God? During the year that followed his death Harold read everything he could get his hands on on after-death experience. He found that in every important detail his experience fit the universal one of all who had traveled to the land of death and returned. And though he did not need such confirmation, this knowledge pleased him very much.

If there was any dark underside to his continual joy, it was a vague, unarticulated dissatisfaction with the imperfect earth. His work, for example, now seemed trivial and unimportant to him, and yet before his death and return he had channeled all his energy into ambition. Now a job was simply the means of procuring daily bread. And there was something else. He loved his wife and children just as much as before, perhaps even more, but the love he bore them and the love they returned was such a pale shadow of the love he'd felt in the presence of the cosmos that he couldn't hide from himself a detachment and indifference to the earth. Perhaps he even forgot what his father had told him while he was enthralled by the light of Love-- that his work on earth was incomplete.

And so he lived, and so all his thoughts abided deep in the faraway cosmos, and so the world where people strove to live a human life and struggled to find joy seemed unreal to him.

III.

Harold and Elroy (The Synthesis)

One time when Harold was walking to his car in the city Elroy accosted him. "Hey man. Got any spare change?" As he spoke these ancient words he glanced mournfully at his rusty wheelchair and assumed a woebegone expression guaranteed to melt a miser's heart. Harold, lost in a haze of golden light, looked up startled and embarrassed. "No," he shook his head, and he walked on.

He hardly noticed the woebegone expression, the skin stretched thin over the bone, the tremor of Elroy's hand which he had affectingly extended in supplication, or the rusty chariot from which Elroy led the army of Burt and Bart. How could he when he was lost in the warm glow of God's love? How could he when love is blind?

So he walked on to his car and drove home. Elroy, meanwhile, accosted the next man and the next. About one in ten gave, so he didn't think twice about Harold. Why should he when all he was intent on doing was getting loaded?

But since Harold's place of business was close to the area where Elroy was gainfully employed, as the months went by they met one another frequently. Sometimes Harold absentmindedly threw Elroy a quarter, sometimes he didn't. Once when Elroy fell out of his wheelchair dead drunk, Harold and another man helped him back into it, an heroic mercy indeed, considering that Elroy hadn't bathed for several months and was riper than a dead pumpkin. When Harold asked if they should see that he got home, the other man shook his head. "The poor bastard is home," he said. "He lives in that alley."

"But what about when it gets cold?" Harold asked in a shocked voice.

The man shrugged. "The man's an alcoholic. Maybe he doesn't feel."

That didn't seem to Harold to be a satisfactory answer. But what was the answer? He looked down at the man slumped in the wheelchair with his tongue hanging out of his mouth and with his chin covered with slobber. For the first time it occurred to him that Elroy was one slice short of a loaf in addition to being a drunk. He'd already noticed the limpness of the left arm when he'd picked him up and concluded that paralysis was the reason for the wheelchair. What kind of a life was this? The question opened up such a dark chamber that Harold dared not look within.

And so he waited for the cops to arrive; then he walked on and tried to forget because he did not know what else to do. But he could not forget. It had been a year since he'd died and returned, and for the first time in that year his obsessive thoughts of the bright light were shadowed by the haunting face of Elroy. Each day he looked for Elroy in his accustomed place in front of the alley, simultaneously hoping and dreading to see him. A week later he was there, still in the wheelchair, still begging, but having had a session up in the file cabinet where things had gotten very much misfiled indeed, he had developed a new Tom-O-Bedlam technique. "Poor Elroy's a-cold," Elroy said. "Poor Elroy's a-hungry. Elroy could use a quarter." (You'll note nirvana was that much closer for our Buddhist mystic -- now even his name was an estranged objective thing external to himself.)

It was in this way that Harold learned Elroy's name. Now the amazing thing about a name, particularly when you can hang a face and a few experiences on it, is that it individualizes and personalizes. Harold had been in the habit of thinking of Elroy as the beggar. Sometimes he was the beggar in the wheelchair, other times the poor bastard, the mad bugger, the empty bagger, but always a nice vague phrase that helped Elroy stay in nirvana as far as Harold was concerned. Now here he was saying poor Elroy this and poor Elroy that -- making it awfully hard to keep a fellow tucked away in nirvana under such circumstances. "What is it you want me to do for you?" Harold asked.

"Do?" Elroy repeated sarcastically. "Elroy wants a quarter. Poor Elroy's a-cold and a-hungry."

"Is there someplace you want to go?" Harold asked in his kindest voice.

"To each according to his need, from each according to his ability," answered the wise Elroy. "Elroy wants you to ante up. Poor Elroy wants you to listen to his song. Poor Elroy wants you to be a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal while he sings. Elroy wants you to stay on key. Elroy wants you to remember charity suffereth long and is kind. Poor Elroy wants more than a quarter. Elroy wants to sing."

And there on the street, in front of the alley, in his untutored Heldentenor, Elroy sang this song:

Sky blue, true blue, eye blue, you blue,

What in the world am I supposed to do?

Sky blue, true blue, eye blue, you blue,

To live like this with life to rue.

Sky blue, true blue, eye blue, you blue,

There's nothing, nothing I can do.

Harold was about to compliment Elroy when he was stopped by a wave of the hand that indicated an encore was forthcoming. And sure enough, Elroy rose from the wheelchair and on trembling legs sang,

Sky blue, true blue, eye blue, you blue,

There's something, something I can do.

Then his face turned purple and, seized with convulsions, he collapsed onto the gross uncleanliness of the sidewalk.

Now here finally, you think, here is Harold's chance. Elroy's booked for a flight to the other world and Harold having been there can offer him tips for tourists and so comfort him. Be of good cheer, brother, you're going to a far far better place, etc. etc. -- that sort of thing. Wrong. Elroy was beyond the comfort of speech. His emaciated, alcohol-ravaged face, unnaturally florid because he had been gagging blood, was already assuming the dignified and unreachable expression of death, so there was nothing for Harold to do. Even though he did do things -- like tell a passerby to call an ambulance -- Harold's main job right now was to think. And what was he thinking? He was thinking of life and he was thinking of death. He was thinking of the Light of Love and the darkness of hate, of transcendence and immanence, of promise and failure, of dream and reality. He saw that neither he nor the world lived up to its promise and he was ashamed. He saw that he had to love Elroy, freely and as a gift. He saw that nothing was easy, least of all being human and escaping from the terrible prison of the self. He saw that there was only work to do, work that would take him all the rest of his days and even then, when he followed Elroy permanently to the light, would still be undone. He saw that the world was a strange, strange place and would never easily yield up its contradictions.

And two more things:

He saw that Elroy had died.

He saw that the sidewalk was real.

ONE DAY GRISWOLD

One day Griswold was taking his ease in an alley just as twilight approached, and when he opened his eyes he couldn't help noticing a woman across the way. That's because she was prancing naked back and forth in the window and shrieking along to the sounds of an Italian opera as she did her exercises. Griswold didn't care for opera, but as he watched the well endowed woman with growing interest, he decided it was high time he got into culture. "Hey, lady," he said, leaning into the window and ogling, "We should get to know one another. What's your name?"

The lady was doing a series of cartwheels so that various anatomical delicacies flashed by Griswold's bedazzled eyes. She glanced Griswold's way every now and again, but it was only when she finally came to a stop several minutes later that she said, "My friends call me Felicitie. What's your handle?"

"Call me Griswold. And hey," he said with a series of eyebrow elevations just like Groucho, "I sure like your birthday suit."

"Is that so? Well, it's your birthday too. Put on your birthday suit and get your butt in here."

That was the kind of offer that was music to Griswold's ears. In his haste to get in the window and into his birthday suit at the same time, though, he got stuck in the window and had to be yanked into the room by the athletic lady. "You ready for some jumping jacks, sport?" she asked as she helped him into his birthday suit.

Griswold gave her a knowing look and followed it with a wink. "I can think of better exercise than that."

"Humph!" sniffed the lady. "Let's get one thing straight, buster. You gotta be in shape to play in my league." So saying, she started doing jumping jacks and shrieking away to the music.

For a moment Griswold was deflated, but he was too shrewd to let any little obstacle deter him. He started jump jacking to beat the band all the while bellowing away to the bass parts of the opera as best he could. After a while, though, he ran out of wind. Huffing and puffing, he yelled above the music, "What say we take a break?"

The lady stopped for a moment and appeared to be cogitating. Then she jump-jacked over to the tape deck and flipped it off. "My tune-up's over, sport. Let's start the engine."

Just then, however, the white clad keepers busted in and took the lady away. "Shame on you, Griswold," one of them said. "Cheer up, Griswold," added another one. "This is your lucky day. The big boys have decided you're not right for this place. You've got your walking papers."

So Griswold, and not for the first time either, was forced to absent himself from felicity.

One day when Griswold heard that the police were searching for the perpetrator of a particularly gruesome murder that occurred over the Easter holidays, he hastened himself down to the station to confess. "I used a meat cleaver," he explained. "There was no stopping my lust for blood. I hacked away until the pieces were suitable for stir frying in a wok. That's the kind of monster I am. Come on," he finished, puttting his hands out to be cuffed, "put me in jail and throw the key away."

"Why'd you do it?" asked the big, burly and bored desk sergeant, ignoring the proffered hands and instead slurping at his mug of coffee.

Griswold frowned, not at all pleased with the cop's attitude. Griswold preferred to live in a moral society where standards existed and people could be shocked, but you'd have to look real close to see even a tiny speck of revulsion or horror on this cop's beefy face. Besides, the guy was bald, and Griswold never trusted bald guys. "Why?" he repeated. "Because I'm a monster who doesn't deserve to live. I'm a menace to society. No decent person should be allowed to come within fifteen feet of me."

The sergeant put down his coffee mug and wiped his mouth with his hairy wrist. "You've got one thing right, pal. Except I'd revise it to a hundred feet. Get lost."

Griswold didn't have to hear the guy twice. He made himself scarce.

One day Griswold wondered why the universe started. He was at the shelter watching a show on tv about the big bang, and the scientist with the glasses was explaining about the cosmic atom and was really being interesting about how all the matter in the universe was compressed to the size of a pinhead. Another guy came on and explained what happened in the next few seconds. He was a bald guy so much less interesting. It seems, though, that an explosion occurred and stuff started going all over the place and getting bigger all the time. Griswold listened carefully but kept asking the tv to answer the question why. Why did it happen? How come?

These guys didn't seem to think the question was very important, so Griswold went out on the street. Perhaps there, he thought, people wouldn't ignore his question. A tall skinny guy with plenty of hair on his head came by. He looked smart so Griswold asked him. At first the guy tried to ignore him, but Griswold walked by his side and repeated the question until the guy finally said, "I don't know. Maybe it was because God was lonely."

That seemed like a pretty good answer. Griswold could relate to that, having been lonely once or twice in his day (actually quite often, but Griswold was trying not to think about sad things what with cosmic atoms making such stuff seem pretty trivial). So he left the guy and changed his question to, "Do you think God was lonely and that's why he started the universe?"

Most people ignored him or brushed him off with a "sure, buddy, whatever you say." Finally, though, he came upon a bald guy who looked like he'd been waiting for years for someone to pop this very question. His eyes lit up like firecrackers and he said, "Good question, pal. It just so happens I am God and I can tell you exactly why I made the universe. I just felt like it, that's why. Just like I feel like telling you to get lost."

Griswold knew you didn't fool around with God. He took His advice and got lost.

One day Griswold met up with his friend Binkley. They hadn't seen each other in a long time and decided to reminisce about old times at the funny farm over dinner, but unfortunately they started arguing about which restaurant to go to. Griswold felt like Chinese food, but Binkley wanted Italian. He conceded that Chinese food was tasty but maintained the atmosphere was lousy. The Italian place offered privacy, while the dumpster for the Chinese place was right under a streetlight. Griswold said he didn't care — you could get in and out of there in a minute. Well, they argued like this for a long time and parted friends no more. Griswold was so sad he changed his mind back to his original plan and went dumpster diving at McDonald's.

One day Griswold had an idea. There were too many sour pusses around, he decided. People trudging along keeping their eyes to the ground and their mouths set determinedly wasn't exactly his idea of a fun society. Is this what that Nathan Hale guy regretted he only had one life to give for? Is this what that Jefferson guy meant by the pursuit of happiness? Griswold figured America had to be just about the most unhappy place on earth. Everyone pretended to be happy when you asked them, but the way they were on the street told the real story, and since that's where Griswold lived, he saw the real thing.

Luckily he'd read in a book that smiles were infectious. The guy in the book said they were the one gift that when you gave it, it was given back to you double. Griswold was a serious and concerned citizen, so he decided to give this advice a go. He built and wore a sandwich board that had HAVE A NICE DAY printed in big red letters fore and aft, and he walked up and down the streets smiling at people. But you can probably guess the results. "Get lost, pal" and "piss off" were among the nicer things his fellow Americans said to him, so finally Griswold gave up on his idea. He figured if everyone was going to live in his own little world then America would have to remain an unhappy place. He burnt his sign one cold night and smiled at the fire, which was at least twice as warm as he was.

One day Griswold thought about the life he knew until his head was so filled with it that he wanted to share his vision with others. He wrote it up as a story and sent it off to a literary magazine, using the shelter as his return address. Six months later the story came back with a printed rejection slip. Griswold read the slip and wondered why it took six months to find out his story was not suitable. Never daunted, however, he tried another magazine. Eight months later the same slip came back. These people must live strange lives, Griswold thought. I'm writing about human beings but that's not suitable for them. Never daunted, he brought some bottles back to the store to get money for postage, and, after nipping a couple envelopes from the shelter, sent his story off again, all to the same effect. He did this six more times until, daunted, he decided he'd try a place that claimed they specialized in personal replies. Off the story went, and after waiting the usual six months, one night the bald guy who had the night shift at the shelter said with a smirk, "Hey, Griswold, you musta died and gone to heaven, 'cause there's a letter here for ya." With trembling hands Griswold opened up the envelope to read the personal reply. It was short, sweet and to the point: it said, "Get lost, pal."

One day after Griswold had given up sending his story out for biannual visits, he chanced to catch a glimpse of himself in a store window and couldn't help noticing that there was a bald guy staring back at him. He thought to himself, "If there's one thing in life you have to be leery of, Griswold ole buddy, it's bald guys." So he decided to take the world's advice. He got lost. ˚

A BREACH OF DECORUM

L. Dudley Fitzgibbon believed in proper dress, proper behavior, and proper respect for station and class. He was no democrat, God forbid, though part of his code of genteelness incorporated the ancient notion of noblesse oblige toward what he would call the unlettered masses. L. Dudley Fitzgibbon also was a stickler for proper grammar and diction, a person who never descended to the vulgarity of even colloquial familiarity, to say nothing about slang and sundry neologisms. The horrid leveling tendency of the modern world, he maintained, came about when the first man in medieval England was so negligent of the mother tongue, so inimical to good breeding, that he began using can't instead of cannot, you're instead of you are, and there's instead of there is . Imagine his surprise one morning, then, when his wife of thirty five years rose from the breakfast table with her face expressing a mixture of surprise and delight, and going to the window, exclaimed, "Why, Dudley, there's a peregrine falcon in the pear tree!"

"There are," corrected L. Dudley Fitzgibbon, doubly shocked at what he perceived to be an error of grammatical number in addition to the breach of proper diction in the contraction. "There are a pair of green falcons in the pear tree, my dear."

"But honeybunch," cried she of thirty five years duration, now with her nose pressed to the glass and her eyes riveted on the falcon, and so excited as to be positively in danger of appearing vulgar, "a peregrine falcon is a kind of bird — a rare and magnificent one. There is a peregrine falcon in the pear tree."

His error pointed out to him, L. Dudley Fitzgibbon bowed deeply to his wife and apologized. "How delightful, my dear," he said in an effort to gracefully share her enthusiasm as a sign of respect (though you may be sure he would not split an infinitive in describing his behavior).

This incident is just one small example of L. Dudley Fitzgibbon doing the gentlemanly thing. In a world of uncertainty and flux, one thing alone could be depended on, and that was that never could it be said that L. Dudley Fitzgibbon was not always unerringly gracious and excruciatingly correct. Among his friends and acquaintances he was the final arbiter on any question of propriety. If a friend's daughter wanted to bring her black lesbian roommate home for the holidays, the friend would call L. Dudley Fitzgibbon to inquire about the proper sleeping arrangements. If a neighbor needed to know what kind of sympathy card would be appropriate to send a Christian Scientist whose child had died from his refusal to allow a blood transfusion, he asked L. Dudley Fitzgibbon. The same was true for questions concerning everything from the proper placement of silverware at a formal dinner party to what to do if you came home early to find the wife in bed with the UPS man making an unauthorized delivery. So proficient and so excruciatingly correct was L. Dudley Fitzgibbon, that the bookstore in the suburb in which he was domiciled stopped carrying etiquette books. It had been fifteen years since last it had sold one.

On those rare occasions when someone would treat his dedication to proper behavior with levity, saying for instance that such enslavement to mere forms was inane and pointless, L. Dudley Fitzgibbon would peer over his black rimmed glasses perched on his aquiline Anglo-Norman nose and smile good-humoredly (for that too was the mark of a gentleman) while explaining that in his considered judgment the rules of etiquette and proper behavior, far from being useless and inane, were what separated us from the beasts. "It is what allows us to live together in harmony. It is the glue that cements society together. Without courtesy life would indeed be short, nasty and brutish. No, no," he would end with a dramatic and dismissive wave of the hand, "as for me, I would rather be imprisoned for life than for one moment to be thought incorrect."

Now every day at precisely one o'clock L. Dudley Fitzgibbon took a constitutional. So regular was its appointed rounds and so precise their chronology, that the people of his town found themselves in the enviable position of the good burghers of Königsberg back in the days when Immanuel Kant would cogitate a-foot with such Teutonic precision that they would set their watches to his itinerary. Similarly, L. Dudley Fitzgibbon would pass the Episcopal church at 1:14, the historical society at 1:21, the north corner of the town common at 1:30, and arrive at Mac's Newsstand to buy his afternoon paper at 1:35. On the same day as the little misunderstanding concerning the peregrine falcon, L. Dudley Fitzgibbon was sallying forth in his usual fashion and was just approaching the north end of the common when he espied a woman resting in an automobile. In itself there was nothing extraordinary about this. Gentlemen and ladies alike often parked by the commons at the lunch hour and some of them would even rest their eyes for a few moments -- a practice L. Dudley Fitzgibbon had never entirely condoned, but which had become widespread enough that one could hardly be singled out for a breach of propriety for indulging it.

But something did not look right about this woman. It wasn't her appearance — she wore a silk blouse and her necklace of genuine pearls marked her as a lady of distinction — but for one thing, her head was not in a position of repose; rather it appeared to be slumped over the steering wheel. Moreover, her left hand, which was resting on the bottom of the open window, appeared to clench and unclench spasmodically. L. Dudley Fitzgibbon, regarding the woman while not breaking stride, was confronted with a dilemma: her behavior suggested that she might be in the throes of a seizure and in need of help, while on the other hand it was a fundamental tenet of his code that it was impolite to stare, and it went without saying that one simply did not meddle in the affairs of another person. Even with the car now, and with these two conflicting ideas bouncing like ping pong balls from one end of his mind to the other, L. Dudley Fitzgibbon panicked. For an infinitesimal fraction of a second all hung in the balance, but during that moment of moral abeyance, L. Dudley Fitzgibbon looked ahead of him to perceive a hundred or so paces ahead another gentleman (he wore a bowtie, a sure sign) strolling toward him, and this piece of intelligence determined his course of action: L. Dudley Fitzgibbon walked on. Etiquette and breeding are only operative, being correct or incorrect can only occur, in the presence of another; society is the presence of a witness, and so L. Dudley Fitzgibbon, ever the quintessential social creature, concentrated all his attention into how he would greet this oncoming gentleman. His reading of the countenance told him a curt but polite "good day" together with a slight nod would be the appropriate greeting. This maneuver he effected at five paces after making eye contact (the proper distance, the proper procedure, should you wish to know). As for the other gentleman, had he closely been regarding our hero (a doubtful proposition) he would have noticed at most the merest hesitancy in L. Dudley Fitzgibbon's gait as he passed the car — rather as if one had varied his stride to avoid stepping on some unmentionable substance in one's path. But judging from the quick and careful perusal of his watch, that gentleman's main concern was checking the accuracy of his timepiece. Appearing satisfied, he crossed the street and went on his way as L. Dudley Fitzgibbon proceeded to Mac's Newsstand. There L. Dudley Fitzgibbon momentarily debated retracing his steps instead of returning home via his usual route of Ashberry Street and past the public library, but he had never done that before and couldn't bring himself to break new ground now. Besides, he reasoned, it was only his imagination, overwrought from being found to be in error about the peregrine falcon earlier this morning, that caused his dark moment of doubt and confusion. He was sure now that the lady was merely resting.

That night he and his wife gave a dinner party for the man who succeeded L. Dudley Fitzgibbon as president of the bank when he opted for early retirement and the gentlemanly life of leisure, and in being perfectly correct for four hours (a skill which, you may be sure, even in long practitioners of the art took total concentration), the matter of the woman in the parked automobile slipped his mind. He was a little bothered in bidding his guests good-night that one of them, a neighbor and a widow, addressed him by his first name even though they had only known one another for ten years, and in turning over the possible impropriety in his mind before drifting off to the shores of Lethe, he had no further occasion to remember the moment of awkward uncertainty during his constitutional.

At breakfast next morning, however, the world treated L. Dudley Fitzgibbon most rudely. He was just finishing his poached egg and about to ask his better half to pass the coffee when he turned to the Metro/Region section of the morning paper, and there, with particulars that were unmistakable, was the story of a woman who had died of a cerebral seizure while parked in her car yesterday afternoon. If it is true that horses sweat, men perspire, but ladies only glow, then L. Dudley Fitzgibbon became three creatures in one in that instant, sweating, perspiring, and glowing up a storm on the outside while a damp, clammy fog gripped the cockles of his heart on the inside. His mind, like a car with the clutch disengaged, raced with no where to go, and his heart thumped at such a prodigious rate that L. Dudley Fitzgibbon thought that only a primal scream of anguish would release him. But you must never underestimate the power of proper breeding. We shall get no primal screams from L. Dudley Fitzgibbon. Like a gentleman, he sat there and said nothing then and nothing for the remainder of his life about this incident. Its only effect on his wife was to puzzle her for ever after as to why on earth L. Dudley Fitzgibbon arose from the breakfast table without saying "excuse me." In their thirty-five years of perfectly correct life together, that was the first and only time she had ever witnessed such a breach of decorum. If anything, however, she was secretly pleased to see that her man was not perfect. It made him seem more human to her, more capable of being loved. Perhaps that is why they lived happily ever after.

The Reminder

A Modern Fable

Once, upon a time when that the world was unfair and evil (which is to say, any time thou lik'st), there lived a businessman who spent his whole life making money. Nary another thing else pleased him, and until the night came that he dreamed a dread dream he worked so hard and for swich long hours every day that he did not have time to look around him to witness the warp and woof of the world. Until he dreamed his dream the fowles of the welkin were apparitions to the businessman, the flowers of the field were specters, the trees phantoms, the rains of heaven ghosts, the stars above were will-o'-the-wisps, even the vast panoramic firmament itself was a shimmering chimera, and most of all the people who passed him each day were walking shadows. Until he dreamed his dream.

For always and anon he walked straight ahead as if that he be in a narrow tunnel and he looked only toward his goal. As he walked he would count his money and scheme to make more, murmuring a prayer to the power and glory. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of darkness, money maketh me to lie down in rich green pastures and restoreth my soul. Yea, to thee, Mammon, I bend my knee and pray that thou encreasest my store." For Mammon was the only thing external to him that he engaged in dialogue, the which reason be why he saw not thilke mighty powre that knitteth all bonds of things.

Even his lady, who had given him three children, and the children themselves, touched not his heart of hearts. For once he possessed something he ceased to be interested in it. His lady understood that he would fain be working to increase his store of worldly goods, and she accepted it. She tried to be a good woman by filling her days in deeds of good charitee to the wretched, hoping thereby that the tainted money her husband made could do some good in the world and return good for evil. But certes dared she say aught against him, for in truth she was sore afraid. She was useful to the businessman because she had good taste and could pick out exquisite antiques and fine paintings which said full plain to the world, lo! here be a wealthy man, but otherwise he hearkened to her feelings and concerns not the least. Busy as he was making money, he could see no place in the scheme of things for love.

Ywis, the lusts of the body were another matter. Certes there was a place for them. He kept lodgings downtown and forced many of his comely and fair female employees, including his secretaries, to partake in the sinful pleasures of the flesh. Those who refused he discharged from his employ, but not many refused, for he was rich and mighty and wot full well how to hent his way.

Now thilke businessman had a partner with whom he had to share the profits. The partner had invented the product they sold and held the patent on it, but the businessman had put up all the money and it grieved him to his very soul to have to share his riches with this partner. O it offended his sense of right and wrong, to say nothing of his sense of propriety, to have to share with this unseemly knave. For his partner, he trowed, was a weak man and foolishly honest. He cared not a straw for profits. Instead he cared only to make as good a product as possible, the which reason, certes, the businessman deemed him swyche an uncunning fellow.

For a long time the businessman brooded over what to do until came an evil day he was visited with an inspiration. First he hastened him to a lawyer, then he came back with a contract. "Prithee, sign this," quoth he to the partner.

"What is it?" quoth the partner, a guileless man and true.

"T'is nothing — merely a new contract to cover our business dealings."

The partner wanted to know what was wrong with the old contract. He was in the middle of an engineering problem and scarcely hearkened to the words of the businessman.

"Too limited. It doth not cover the business in expanding markets. Prithee, sign right here and I'll take care of the rest."

So it came to pass that the partner signed away his half of the business. In the meantime the lawyer was engaged to search the patent office for an invention of right plenteous similitude to the one the partner had and to buy it. Once all this was done the businessman doubled his profits. Then turned he his mind to his other ventures, for thou must understand that he owned divers sundry businesses, although the one he cheated his partner out of was the most profitable. He owned stores and factories, and paid his workers as little as possible. He owned a very profitable illegal dumping service whereby chemical companies could have their foul poisons dumped on agricultural land late at night for a handful of silver. Eek owned he lodging houses which he rented to workers and other lewd folk who paid him promptly (and well wot every wight that eviction abided him who failed to make payment). Though whilom the businessman had grown up in poverty himself, thou canst see that it had only taught him to be cruel and ruthless and to trust nobody, all without the slightest pang of inwit. What was right was what he had the power to get away with. Rude mechanicals were therefore to be used, for first of all they were but lewd men and weak, and secondly the less ye paid these shadows the more ye had for ye owen treasure.

So evicting tenants and cheating partners and dumping poisons were the measured deeds of a day for the businessman. As long as he kept busy, ywis, he trowed he fulfilled the moral imperative in the definition of a busy-ness man. Some there be who might balk and deem him a villain, but they were even greater knaves than the deposed partner, for certes they were principled people along with being foolishly honest. For them he had the greatest contempt, though he kept it hidden.

In his day it was not fashionable to look like a villain, so the businessman did not wear a black cape or sport a long drooping black mustache. Nay, he had blue eyen and a friendly smile and he knew how to look like a responsible citizen and an honest businessman on television, the which skill being all that was important. For the lowly born of that time had never been told that looks deceive, so they niste not that the businessman cheated his partner and paid not taxes and engaged in crooked deals and abused the poor feeble folk who were too weak to fight back. The businessman was putting one over on them, all right, and when that no one was looking eftsoons would he secretly smile to himself and think that sith it was so easy to deceive the fond and gullible masses he ought to run for public office. All he would have to do is keep smiling and promise no taxes, and then power, peradventure the only thing that was better than money, would eek be his owen treasure. The more he thought about it the more his palms started itching.

For what, prithee, would stoppeth him?

For when that he counted his successes, he saw full well naught had ever gainsaid him beforn. What he wanted he got. He set a goal, worked hard, and lo! it waxeth without measure. Now the only impediment touching his political aspirations was the partner. He was suing to hent back his share of the business, but just when that it appeared costly court fees and eek bad publicity touching his unleveful likings would delay the businessman's political career, it learned him that his partner was at death's door smarting full keen from a dread disease. "How marvelous," quoth the businessman, "methinks now there be naught can stop me." Then he bethought him for a moment and decided he would have to rid him of his wife. She was plain and middle-aged, not glamorous, and would be no help in a political campaign. But here he would have to be careful, for the lewd folk still frowned on divorce by their leaders. If that only she too could be infected with a dread disease, he thought, and then it decided him that would be his next undertaking. After that his march to the fount of pure power would be unfettered.

Thou must not think that these obstacles disturbed the businessman. Nay, they were what made the journey to his goal pleasing and the goal when reached sweet. (Glosa. For after all, why doth a wealthy man deserve plenteous riches and power while millions go without? Every wight, lewd or learned, knoweth it is because of the keenness of his wit and his craft and cunning in solving divers difficulties.) Textus. So the businessman, poised within striking distance of his ultimate victory, enjoyed full well having to solve the problems of his wife's murder, the hushing up of his foolish partner's lawsuit, and the more mundane problems of getting a campaign organization to hoodwink the lewd folk into voting him into power.

"And a slogan" he thought beforn he drifted off to sleep on a night. "I'll need a slogan to give a distinctive touch to my campaign — something to really daze the people into believing I'll save the country." With eyen heavy with sleep, he could only come up with a couple second-rate ones — "Democracy, Decency, and Decentralization" and "Stand Tall and Proud." "But," quoth he, just as sleep caught him in her embrace, "I can hire some hack wordsmith for the slogan, so no need to worry about it now. I'll see about it anon." But never did he see about hiring a hack wordsmith, for it so happeneth that on thilke same night he had his dread dream, which went like this:

He is in a fog shrouded park and he is being followed by a foul fiend. He cannot see his stalker, except now and then as a vague form emerging out of the fog, but always he heareth the footsteps. Even on grass they echoeth like the feet of a madman on cobblestone, step by step, slow and unhurried and unyielding. The businessman walketh faster, but no matter how fast he walketh the footsteps echoing on cobblestone are always right behind him. A throng of folk pass him with blank faces and he can tell they heareth not the footsteps. It is only he whom the foul fiend doggeth. Panicking, he begineth to run through the park and down the street, into a drugstore and through the back into an alley. He runneth until he droppeth from weariness, panting and gasping. But it doth no good. Still step by step the shadowy form moveth avaunt thilke space the fog alloweth his eyen to see.

Just when that he can stand no more and is about to scream with dark dread, as swythe as the blink of an eye the scene shifteth and he findeth him back in the small town he grew up in. The day is bright and warm with gentle cheer, and he is standing on a pleasant, though impoverished, street. Across from him is the house of the lady for whom he did chores and earned his first dollars. But looks are deceiving, for he recognizeth the great dread and insecurity he felt as a boy buried by poverty to be the same dread he felt when that he was followed in the park, and he trembleth, not knowing what to do. Faces float by, his mother, his friend who played games with him, the first teacher to have caught him cheating, a neighbor who worked with his father — all people from the past whom he had left behind when that he achieved worldly success. It confuseth him to see them here with him, but beforn he can think of what it means he recognizeth further off, in the parking lot beside a kirk, a man who is bent down on his hands and knees staring intently at something. "Look at the intricate pattern on that leaf," his partner saith and pointeth. "How exquisite! How lovely!" Forsooth, here be a thing passing strange: the businessman in his dream somehow knoweth full well what the partner is doing. He is trying to live intently and fully, drinking up the sweetness of the earth beforn his time is up. But the businessman is filled with more horror than when the shadowy tormentor dogged him step by step. How can he appreciate beauty when that he will die? He will be swallowed by darkness, he will sink into the damp clammy ground without air or sunlight, he will molder and the worms will ransack his body. "Oh how," quoth he to the partner, "how canst thou be drinking in beauty when thou knowst thou art a dead man?" "Because beforn I die I want to live," the partner answereth. Even as he speaketh the fog droppeth down again and the partner, half lost in mist, turneth and beginneth to walk toward the businessman step by step, echoing as if on cobblestone. Now the businessman seeth he is the one who must die, and the cold sweat and dread and smarting in his lungs from running and the echoing of the footsteps do not go away even after he waketh up with a scream.

He saw that the dream was verily not a dream and he knew — Gramercy! — that he could not escape death. And deep in the night, all alone, with his sleeping wife by his side, the businessman felt small and vulnerable and powerless and for the first time sith reaching man's estate he was sore afraid.

When that he arose in the morning the businessman was still wood affright out of measure. He was obsessed with the thought that the shadow of death hung over him like an invisible sword and that unless he did right by his partner he would die soon. He cancelled an important meeting and hastened him over to his partner's lodgings, only to find out from the partner's wife that he was too late — the partner had died in the night. Instead of relieving him, this news afrighted the businessman even more, for the pangs of inwit gave birth to the fantastic conceit that it was his partner's ghost that had visited him in his dream. Too distraught to attend to business, he rushed back home in hopes that his lady would talk him into a calmer and more rational state. But when that he told her the whole tale of his cheating the partner, the partner's death and his dream, her face went stony. "It's the final straw," quoth the lady. "Full plain I see thou art a wicked man and I will bide with thee no more."

Whereupon there passed a weary time of wanhope and terror. Weeks went by the which he forsook the right swift course of his prosperitee and descended to the level of the meanest and lewdest of men when that he wandered the streets with wild eyen, but he saw nothing, recalled nothing. Only wherever he went footsteps on cobblestones dogged him. Finally the weeks of sore affliction caused stomach cramps so severe that the businessman thought he was dying of a heart attack. He was taken to a sickhouse screaming in great terror, and there, after several weeks of rest, he one day made a discovery. He looked at his hands. He felt his face. He wiggled his toes. He was alive. "What nonsense," quoth he, "to think I was going to die soon." And just like that he checked him out of the sickhouse and got back to business.

But after the businessman returned to the business world did any effect from the dream linger? Forsooth, the answer is yea. It remembered him his roots and he was a little kinder. It remembered him the dark dread he felt and how there was no escape from death and he was a little more humble. It remembered him that death was one thing he could fool not and he was a little less hypocritical. He ran not for public office because he was a little less confident. And now he lost money on some of his schemes because he was a little less crafty. By himself, and without any corresponding change in the society he lived in, these little changes were all thou couldst expect.

And so he lived on for many years.

But a question doth remain. After his dream did the businessman see that the fowles of the welkin, the flowers in the park, the rains of heaven, the stars of the firmament, and most of all the throngs of people in the streets were real? He saw that they were passing, changing every day. He saw that everything was hurrying off to death and negation. The stars would burn out, the fowles and flowers would fall, the rain would sink into the earth, all folk, lewd or learned, busy with their million separate dreams and plans would one day all be still. But strange enough to say, what he saw did not afflict him nigh as sore as the original dread that he felt in his dream. This was because the tunnel walls had disappeared and in realizing that he was no different from the world he lived in he was a little more human. While he lived he was a little more human. So it was that when that at last the day came for him to be gathered into eternity, in his death throes he called out, not for Mammon, but for the God who sided with the small and humble folk of the earth, and then he died a little easier.

here endeth the tale of the businessman who dreamed a bad dream

Two Bird Fables

### The Flock That Flew Away

One time during a drought a flock of sparrows was having a difficult timegetting by on the meager food available. The three bully-boy leaders of the flock were the only ones who ever ate their fill. Some of their lieutenants also got enough (just barely), but most of the flock were on the verge of starvation. Growing desperate, the starving birds talked it over amongst themselves and elected a spokesbird to represent them. She flew over to where the three honchos were and waited politely for them to notice her. After several minutes during which they hardly deigned to favor her with a glance, she got the picture and said impatiently, "Say listen, you guys, in case you haven't noticed you three are as plump as Thanksgiving turkeys while we're all starving. Wouldn't it be more fair if we shared everything equally? What d'ya say?"

The three leaders looked at each other in amazement and then back to the elected spokesbird. Their eyes narrowed in displeasure. "No," said they in unison, "the poor will always be with us. It's the natural order that some get more, and we deserve it because we're smarter and stronger than all of you. So a word to the wise, my friend. Clam up and stop trying to make trouble or we'll be forced to go hard on you." Just to make sure she got the message, one of them gave her a sharp peck on top of her head.

Just then a scout came back and announced he'd found a field full of seeds. "Okay," yelled the three bully-boys, "everyone get into pecking order and follow us." They did what they were told and soon arrived at the field where the three honchos ate their fill, then the lieutenants, and finally, the others got to scratch around for the few seeds left. The bottom fifteen percent got nothing.

While the three bully-boys and their lieutenants dozed off the effects of their pig-out, the other birds held a pow-wow. "Believe me, we'll get nothing from those three. Leave them behind," advised the spokesbird. "Let's fly away and promise to share equally." The others were at first hesitant, but their growling bellies finally convinced them. After that every member of the flock got the same amount, no matter how meager the food supply, and collectively they managed to get through the drought and all eat well when the good times returned.

Moral: the poor will always be with us until the social structure is changed.

### Birds of a Feather

One day an eagle chanced to meet a starling. Puffing itself up so that its white crown glowed in the sun, he said, "If you're not a disgusting, vulgar thing, I don't know what is. I live in the largest house of any bird. I have a magnificent view for miles around. I send my chicks to private school and before they're a year old they can already soar above the clouds. But you have no tail worth speaking of. Your plumage is drab. You live by eating garbage and hustling a meal wherever you can. You steal the homes of nobler creatures like the blue bird and flicker. You came into this country an illegal alien and have multiplied like jack rabbits.

"Why," sniffed the eagle with a regal turn of his beak, "I've seen you huddling on chimney tops getting covered with disgusting soot just so you can keep warm in winter, whereas I have this magnificent coat to keep me warm, and besides, I can soar south to my winter condominium anytime I please."

While the eagle was thus expatiating, the starling stood hunched up and silent, looking shame-faced. "One of the glories of nature, I ain't," he thought to himself, but even so the eagle's words grated.

As soon as the eagle flew away on majestic wings as wide as twenty starlings, a crow came along. "Brother," said he, "don't let that pompous windbag get to you. Follow me and I'll show you how Mr. High-and-Mighty makes his living." Together they flew to a tall pine tree and watched the eagle first steal a fish from an osprey and then, after he'd greedily devoured it, fly down and squabble with some vultures over the rotten carcass of a dead deer.

"Seen enough, Brother?" the crow asked with a wink.

"Yes," said the starling, already feeling better, "I see that birds of a feather come in all sizes, shapes and colors, and the only thing that really distinguishes them is the size of their beaks."

### DICK AND JANE REMEMBER

### THE SIMPLE SENTENCES

The time is somewhere in the future, and Dick and Jane do not live in a simple sentence world anymore, nor do they watch Spot run, for it has been many years since last he wagged his happy little tail. Instead they live in a world of dependent clauses, conditional adverbial modifiers, subjunctive moods, compound-complex sentences, and transformational grammar: it is a world beyond balanced and periodic sentences, a world of spasmodic syntax, a world where even horror cannot be simple. Dick does not say to Jane:

JANE, SEE THE MUSHROOM CLOUD.

SEE IT RISE IN THE AIR.

HEAR IT BOOM, JANE.

FEEL IT FRY YOUR SKIN.

He only sees it in his mind's eye, lying there in waiting, so that instead of receiving direct utterance it gives a certain ambiance to his words and makes the future tense tentative.

Dick and Jane, though older, are just as typical as they were when they helped us all learn to read. Their middle-class upbringing led to a middle-class life when they reached the age of adults, for though you may think of them as living in a timeless world of icecream cones and the sound of baseball bats on hot summer afternoons, of mailmen pulling pennies from little boys' ears and little girls crying because their older brothers tease them, like you and me they had no choice but to grow up and become aware of all the complexities and responsibilities of life. Dick works in the city and commutes by train; Jane sells real estate in the suburbs. They have, to be sure, their good days, but as with you and me not everything worked out the way they dreamed it would. Jane sometimes feels that because she is a woman, nobody in the world appreciates her full humanity, that instead of recognizing her abilities the world pushes and cramps her into the stereotyped role of a woman. Dick has been passed over for promotion more than once, so that sometimes he has a waking nightmare that has him forever working joylessly at a deadend job. Both of them felt a certain war was an abhorent moral perversion, but both of them paid their taxes and thus learned how tight a web the world weaves around the possibility of innocence. Both of them have seen parents, relatives, and friends die; both of them have felt the deep chill of fear in contemplating their own deaths, but both of them cannot struggle into religious faith, for a century of carnage and deathcamps and bleak philosophies mock the believing mind. When the frustrations of their jobs, the impersonality of numbers, the horror of history, the absence of God, and a thousand other things that pull them two ways, three ways and always are added up, Dick and Jane often feel that words can barely express, or at best can only approximate, the swarming vortex of conflicting emotions inside them, and it makes them feel like a child trapped in an abandoned refrigerator whose screams cannot be heard.

But in their heart of hearts Dick and Jane remember the simple sentences. They remember how the first person nominative singular pronoun is such a skinny and lonely but still bold single letter "I," and they recall that the verb must agree with its subject so that there is no suffix "s" on it, making it indistinguishable from the infinitive, and it pleases them to recognize that the present tense of the verb "love" is really a timeless present, and most of all they delight in the grammatical knowledge that it is a transitive verb that takes the direct object "you," so that all three words are bound up into a unity; and so even though simple, "I love you" is still their favorite sentence. Sometimes when they think of those words and say them to each other's eyes, heart, and believing mind, they recapture that simple sentence world which seems to them to be like the pure source of a polluted stream, and then they can sleep well in the night world of tortured syntax.

LITBIZ MAGAZINE INTERVIEW WITH

### William Shakespeare and Fyodor Dostoyevsky

William Shakespeare Fyodor Dostoyevsky

LITBIZ MAGAZINE is proud of its reputation of bringing you the best in literary interviews so that all you unestablished writers out there can garner tips on how to make it. This month we have a double treat for you, an interview with two writers beginning to establish solid reputations. William Shakespeare, of the creative writing department of Sour Cream College, is a poet and playwright known for his mordant wit. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Dept. of Creative Writing, Beandip University, is a short story writer gaining a reputation for the beauty of his language and the complete absence of ideas in his fictions. We caught up with the two at the Meatloaf Writers' Retreat where they were roommates this past summer. We began the interview with Mr. Shakespeare; later Mr. Dostoyevsky joined our discussion.

**Litbiz** I always start off an interview with the most important question that one can ask any writer. Where did you study writing, where are you teaching writing, and what valuable contacts with editors has this led to?

**WS** Good question, and you're absolutely right. My first publication, a long poem called "Venus and Adonis," was printed by a classmate at writing school who'd started a litmag —

**LITBIZ** I've read it. A wondrous piece, ornately poetic to such a degree that to my mind it's the best satire on pompous poetics I've ever seen.

**WS** Thanks. In my work I'm interested in the way language can be used to close off the world and refer only to itself or to other literary works. Reality either bores me or appalls me —

LITBIZ It bores and appalls me too.

**WS** — so "Venus and Adonis" was an attempt to shock the reader into realizing that poetry was language, that that's all it was and ever can be. We can't change the world, but we can write and if successful get a job teaching somewhere. That's what it's all about.

**LITBIZ** Righto. Which leads me back to my original question...

**WS** Cornmeal. Yes, the Workshop at Cornmeal University is where I studied. My first twenty poems were published by classmates who'd started litmags. I started one myself to publish their works.

**LITBIZ** Was that Quid Pro Quo, the litmag dedicated to the daring proposition that poetry was language?

**WS** We carried it one step further and boldly stated that fiction was language too. But if I correctly judge the implication of your question, you're asking me if the notoriety I gained from printing the journal helped my career. It's hard to say. There was a rival school of thought back in those days that maintained that poetry was words, and they viciously attacked me for maintaining that poetry was language. Ultimately I emerged from the controversy unscathed, but I did have a few bad years. For instance, I applied for a teaching job at Sourpickle University, but the dean was a words man and turned me down. I owe all my success to writing school, though, and so I consider the loss of a good position early in my career to be a small price to pay for what I learned about writing at Cornmeal. I arrived on campus with an enormous bundle of juvenilia — plays like Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, which thanks to my instructors' advice will never embarrass me by seeing the light of day.

**LITBIZ** What did they object to about these plays?

**WS** Oh, that they were over-written, pompous, morally earnest, filled with writing that might actually move an audience to consider their common humanity. All good, sound critical objections. To tell the truth, I've only kept them because my instructors did like the touches of bawdy humor I'd thrown in, and there's a scene in one of them, Lear, where a fool, a madman and Lear have a mock trial. Friends tell me it'd make a great absurdist drama and I'm planning on working on it soon.

**LITBIZ** What will be the main idea?

**WS** Well... I suppose that life is absurd and pointless, but... ah...

**LITBIZ** Do you have any specific ideas you try to convey in your work, or do I gather from your hesitancy that you mistrust ideas?

**WS** I suppose there are ideas waiting to be discovered in my work, but when I write I'm strictly thinking only in terms of images and the rhythms of language. If there's one thing I've learned at the Cornmeal Workshop and which I constantly emphasize to my students, it's that ideas bore and appall me —

**LITBIZ** They bore and appall me too.

**WS** The world is there to offer us metaphors, and I suppose when one uses a metaphor it expresses one's deeper self and therefore contains an idea, but...

**LITBI** Z You once said in an earlier interview that all literature is autobiographical and that it's a way of hiding and revealing the self that is every self simultaneously. Could you offer us an example of what you mean?

**WS** Be glad to. Let me quote my poem, "Shall I Compare Ya to a Summer's Day." It's recently been chosen for inclusion in THE BEST LOVED POEMS OF THE CREATIVE WRITING TEACHERS OF AMERICA ANTHOLOGY, and is, I think, an apt example of what I mean.

Baby, you look better than a summer's day to me.

Rough winds shaking, lifting

the skirts of May

the peek I get

as bright as the sun

burning

burning

Now the actual incident that inspired the poem was a female student sitting in the front row of my poetry class, but by the time I actually got the rhythms and images just right, the poem assumed universal significance. That's what I mean when I say that literature is both autobiographical and hides and reveals the self that is every self.

**LITBIZ** Yes, I see. That's perfectly clear.

At this point Shakespeare's roommate at Meatloaf, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, came in from playing mixed doubles to announce he and Emily Dickinson defeated Emile Zola and Charlotte Brontë two sets to love. After congratulating him and hearing him modestly attribute the victory to Emily Dickinson's wicked backhand, we mixed martinis and continued.

**LITBIZ** Your novella, The Brothers Karamazov, has received a lot of praise from critics. They particularly liked the total absence of any ideas and the emphasis on language. Tell me, did the writing present any difficulties?

**FD** Well, the first version of the novella was written before I had any training in the art of writing. You could say, then, that The Brothers had a difficult birth. I can still hear my beloved instructor Bobcat Jones telling me, "Lighten up, Fyodor." He quite rightly found the original ms to be too engagé, too full of moral earnestness. He kept urging me to find the story in my story. Throw out the philosophical crap, he said. Cut the dead wood. It was he who suggested the novella end with the double wedding of Alyosha and Ivan to the twin sculptors. It was Bobcat too who suggested I change the setting from provincial Russia to an artists' retreat in America where writers, artists, dancers, and so forth could meet to share their work. It took several rewrites and much argument, but Bobcat finally convinced me that the only literary response to reality was to be bored or appalled by it —

**LITBIZ** It bores and appalls me too.

**FD** — and to find refuge in language and in the life of a writer, the conferences, the readings, the classes, the writers' retreats, the interviews.

**LITBIZ** Yes, it's what writing's all about. But, you know, every once in a while you still hear some bozo come up with that tired old notion that writing is a private communication between two individual minds. Tell me, what do you think has been gained by the modern view that literature is a social act to be performed in public and with plenty of refreshments?

**WS** I can answer that by reference to this room. The fact that Fyodor and I are doubling up is wonderful. It means that we can get to know each other and share some laughs. I especially like the cocktail hour and the free buffet, but the tennis and swimming are great too. The philosophy of Meatloaf is simple, you see. When you're alone you might start brooding, which can lead to that boring seriousness we're all trying to drive out of literature. When we're together we can puff each other's work and reassure each other that what we're doing in exploring language and metaphor is the way to go, and we can have fun doing it.

**FD** And don't forget the contacts we make, Willy.

**WS** True. I'll tell ya, I've enjoyed meeting that Emily Dickinson, a hot shit if I ever saw one. I'm inviting her to give a reading at my college next semester and she's inviting me out to hers. She's been sunbathing topless every day since we've been here, and I love it.

**LITBIZ** Interesting. We'll have to interview her later on. But tell me, what other advances have you made careerwise here at Meatloaf? Care to share any trade secrets with our readers?

**FD** Well, Willy has just today promised to publish the short story I'm working on in Quid Pro Quo. It's called "Crime and Punishment," the story of a young alienated student at writing school who decides to murder his landlady to gather material for a short story he's been assigned. He's in Murder-Mystery 306 and the instructor is a hard grader.

**WS** I just love the piece. The beauty of the imagery and the rhythm of the language are so choice, so beautiful, that I dare predict it'll be reprinted in Pushcart next year, and will help me get another grant from NEBA [National Endowment for the Bored and Appalled].

**LITBIZ** That's great. I look forward to seeing the piece when it's published. Tell me, how would you assess the state of literature in the U.S. today?

**FD** I think there's more good fiction and poetry being written now than in the whole history of the world. It's really amazing the talent that's out there, the sheer number of people bored and appalled by reality and interested in the literariness of literature. In my creative writing seminar at Beandip University, I alone have seven students who I can confidently predict will go on to garner the Nobel Prize, and the other instructors in the program have about the same number.

**LITBIZ** Willy, how many students do you have as shoo-ins for the Nobel?

**WS** Eleven. These are indeed wondrous times for literature.

**LITBIZ** One final question, or rather a request. Do you have any advice you could give to young writers?

**WS** My advice is simple. You've got to remember that writing is a safe, middle-class profession. That means, go to writing school and learn to write in the one, correct, universally recognized style of writing. I see Fyodor nodding and know he'll agree when I say: you can't become a writer without the accreditation that an MFA gives you, just as you can't become a doctor without a medical degree. We're the proof in the pudding. From our training we automatically can hear the voices of the other students in the seminar critiquing our work, so that after graduating we instinctively know what consensus writing is. God knows what would have happened to us if we'd developed our writing independently. We'd have been two boring and appalling guys, I'll tell ya.

**FD** I would just like to add two things. One: make sure you have an uncle who owns a publishing house. Two: avoid reading the classic writers. They're all a bunch of old farts who wrote before writing was codified into a system. You've got nothing to learn from those dudes.

**LITBIZ** I want to thank both of you for your insightful comments on the writing scene. Have a good time during the remainder of your stay here at Meatloaf, and I'll see you both at the first writing conference in the fall. It'll be in Chicago, and I believe they're serving Indian food this year. See you there, and until then, Bon Appétit!

#######

a note about the writer

R. P. Burnham edits _The Long Story_ literary magazine and is a writer. He has published fiction and essays in many literary magazines. He sets most of his fiction in Maine, where he was born and raised and has deep roots. _The Least Shadow of Public Thought_ , a book of his essays that introduce each issue of _The Long Story_ , was published in 1996 by Juniper Press as part of its Voyages Series. Five other novels, _Envious Shadows, On a Darkling Plain_ , _The Many Change and Pass_ , and _A Robin Redbreast in a Cage_ , have previously been published by The Wessex Collective and are all availabel on online as ebooks along with _Jonathan Willing's travels to Pangea_. Burnham was educated at the University of Southern Maine (undergraduate) and The University of Wisconsin–Madison (graduate). He is married to Kathleen FitzPatrick, an associate professor of Health Science at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts.

