The Essential Ellison Part 25

"I'd like mine with the mild," Melchior said sweetly." And just a bissel apple sauce on the side, please."

"I want dimsum," Kaspar said. His malachite chopsticks materialized in his left hand, held far up their length indicating he was,)f the highest caste.

"He's only being petulant," Melchior said. "He shouldn't annoy, Balthazar sweetie. Serve them cute and tasty ribs."

"Deliver me," Kaspar murmured.

So they ate dinner, there under the star. The Nubian king, the Scrutable Oriental king, and the Hebrew king. And they watched the roller derby. They also played the spelling game called ghost, but ended the festivity abruptly and on a rancorous note when Balthazar and Melchior ganged up on Kaspar using the word "pringles," which Kaspar contended was not a generic but a specific trade name. Finally they fell asleep, the television set still talking to itself, the light from Melchior reflecting off the picture tube.

In the night the star glowed brightly, calling them on even in their sleep. And in the night early warning reconnaissance troops of the Forces of Chaos flew overhead flapping their leathery bat-wings and leaving in their wake the hideous carbon monoxide stench of British Leyland double-decker buses.

When Melchior awoke in the morning his first words were, "In the night, who made a ka-ka?"

Balthazar pointed. "Look."

The ground was covered with the permanent shadows of the bat-troops that had flown overhead. Dark, sooty shapes of fearsome creatures in full flight.

"I've always thought they looked like the flying monkeys in the 1939 MGM production of The Wizard of Oz, special effects by Arnold Gillespie, character makeup created by Jack Dawn,,, Kaspar said ruminatively.

"Listen, Yellow Peril," Balthazar said, "you can exercise that junkheap memory for trivia later. Unless the point is lost on you, what this means is that they know we're coming and they're going to be ready for us. We've lost the element of surprise."

Melchior sighed and added, "Not to mention that we've been following the star for exactly one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine years, give or take a fast minute, which unless they aren't too clever should have tipped them off we were on the way some time ago."

"Nonetheless," said Kaspar, and fascinated by the word he said it again, "nonetheless."

They waited, but he didn't finish the sentence.

"And on that uplifting note," Balthazar said,, 'let us get in the wind before they catch us out here in the open."

So they gathered their belongings-Melchior's caskets of Krugerrands, his air mattress and inflatable television set, Kaspar's chalice of myrrh, his Judy Garland alb.u.ms and fortune-cookie fortune calligraphy set, Balthazar's wok, his bra.s.s-bound collected works of James Baldwin and hair-conking outfit-and they stowed them neatly in the boot of the Rolls.

Then, with Balthazar driving (but refusing once again to wear the chauffeur's cap on moral grounds), they set out under the auspices of power steering, directly through the perimeter of the dream.

The star continued to s.h.i.+ne overhead. "d.a.m.nedest thing I ever saw," Kaspar remarked, for the ten thousandth time. "Defies all the accepted laws of celestial mechanics."

Balthazar mumbled something.

For the ten thousandth time.

"What's that, I didn't hear?" Melchior said.

"I said: at least if there was a pot of gold at the end of all this..."

It was unworthy of him, as it had been ten thousand times previously, and the others chose to ignore it.

At the outskirts of the dream, a rundown section lined with fast food stands, motels with waterbeds and closed circuit vibrating magic fingers cablevision, bowling alleys, Polish athletic organizations and used rickshaw lots, they encountered the first line of resistance from the Forces of Chaos.

As they stopped for a traffic light, thousands of bat-winged monkey-faced troops leaped out of alleys and doorways with buckets of water and sponges, and began was.h.i.+ng their winds.h.i.+eld.

"Quick, Kaspar!" Balthazar shouted.

The Oriental king threw open the rear door on the right side and bounded out into the street, brandis.h.i.+ng the chalice of myrrh. "Back, back, sc.u.m of the underworld!" he howled.

The troops of Chaos shrieked in horror and pain and began dropping what appeared to be dead allover the place, setting up a wailing and a crying and a screaming that rose over the dream like dark smoke.

"Please, already," Melchior shouted. "Do we need all this noise? All this geshrying! You'll wake the baby!"

Then Balthazar was gunning the motor, Kaspar leaped back into the rear seat, the door slammed and they were off, through the red light-which had, naturally, been rigged to stay red, as are all such red lights, by the Forces of Chaos.

All that day they lay siege to the dream.

The Automobile Club told them they couldn't get there from here. The speed traps were set at nine miles per hour. Sects of religious fanatics threw themselves under the steel-belteds. But finally they came to the Manger, a Hyatt establishment, and they fought their way inside with the gifts, all tasteful.

And there, in a moderately-priced room, they found the Savior, tended by an out-of-work cabinetmaker, a lady who was obviously several bricks shy of a load who kept insisting she had been raped by G.o.d, various shepherds, butchers, pet store operators, boutique salesgirls, certified public accountants, hawkers of T-s.h.i.+rts, investigative journalists, theatrical hangers-on, Sammy Davis, Jr. and a man who owned a whippet that was reputed to be able to catch two Frisbees at the same time.

And the three kings came in, finding it hard to find a place there in the crowd, and they set down their gifts and stared at the sleeping child.

"We'll call him Jomo," said Balthazar, a.s.serting himself.

"Don't be a jerk," Kaspar said. "Merry Jomomas? We'll call him Lao-Tzu. It flows, it sings, it soars."

So they argued about that for quite a while, and finally settled on Christ, because in conjunction with Jesus it was six and five, and that would fit all the marquees.

But still, after two thousand years, they were unsettled. They stared down at the sleeping child, who looked like all babies: like a small, soft W. C. Fields who had grown blotchy drinking wine sold before its time, and Balthazar mumbled, "1' d have been just as happy with a pot of gold," and Kaspar said, "You'd think after two thousand years someone would at least offer me a chair," and Melchior summed up all their hopes and dreams for a better world when he said, "You know, it's funny, but he don't look Jewish."

Dept. Of "What Was The Question?" Dept.

Headline from The Oregonian, Monday, July 1,1974: More Food Said Not AnswerTo Feeding World's Mult.i.tude No, maybe not; but it'd sure as s.h.i.+t keep' emfrom getting cranky till you did find the answer.

Dept. Of "Trivial Pursuit" Dept.

Since the early 1970s, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has run, from time to time, a compet.i.tion for (and often suggested by) its readers. Here is a sampling of Harlan's entries to five of these compet.i.tions. Most of these pieces appear here for the first time.

Compet.i.tion 4 (F&SF; November 1972/ April 1973) [The first date shown is the cover date of the issue announcing the compet.i.tion; the second is the cover date of the issue publis.h.i.+ng the winners and runners-up of that compet.i.tion.]-openings or endings of stories that could be included in THE YEAR'S WORST FANTASY AND SF.

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. He was bored. He had been sitting there for several years, taking time from his boredom only to eat. He had raided twenty-nine supermarkets for all their TV dinners and, having jerry-rigged a freezer system, he was able to keep alive without leaving the room. He had started out eating nothing but Swanson chicken pot pie TV dinners, but had moved on to Stouffer's gourmet dinners-braised beef tips with mashed potatoes, sukiyaki with little Oriental vegetables, Midwestern Family TV dinner with apple pan dowdy-and now found himself fond of Hickory Farms all-vegetable dinner, beef patty with home fries dinner, lamb and apple sauce dinner, scallops with tartar sauce dinner...He was bored.

"Thwarted!" Kril trumpeted. "I've thwarted you, Drusilla! Even with your secret agent rating and your unearthly beauty, I've thwarted you! The Fantellion Micro-Tapes have been posted, and now you can return to your superiors and tell them your wiles failed this time," he vociferated.

The beautiful girl stared at him. "I concede," she made the concession, "you've outdone me in cunning. But..."and her face slid into lines of sadness, "...I've come to love you nonetheless." Tears glistened at the corners of her eyes.

Kril swallowed hard. "It can't be," he penultimated, sadly. "For I, too, have come to feel...a closeness to you. But it can never be..."and he opened his s.h.i.+rt and palmed open the stikfast sealing his chest, revealing the gears and cogs that gave him life- "Oh!" she trilled. "Happiness is mine," and she ripped open her chiton, to unzip and show him her transistors and coded circuits. "Oh, Krill my love...1, too, am a robot..."

The great stars.h.i.+p Pequod sailed across the black sea of interstellar s.p.a.ce. In the control country, Captain Aaral Habbe stalked about, the sound of his plasteel leg making sharp clankings against the deckplates. "I'll get him," he snarled, throatily. "That d.a.m.ned white s.p.a.ce-devil, Moebius!"

Count Volta von Zarknov stood in the shadows, the eldritch fog of Boston swirling about his shoulders. Cape wrapped tightly about his thin body, only his wan and blood-empty face shone like a beacon in the night. He watched the front doors of Boston's Good Samaritan Hospital, knowing eventually they would have to bring in a new supply of plasma for the blood bank. His body cried out for sustenance.

Compet.i.tion 8 (F&SF May/September 1974)-near-miss t.i.tles.

LAST AND NEXT-TO-LAST MEN by Olaf Stapledon RINGWORM by Larry Niven I HAVE NO MOUTH, AND I DON'T FEEL SO HOT by Harlan Ellison THE THREE HICKEYS OF PALMER ELDRITCH by Philip K. d.i.c.k SMITH IN AN UNFAMILIAR PLACE by Robert A. Heinlein STOP PUs.h.i.+NG! STOP PUs.h.i.+NG! by Harry Harrison THE ANDROMEDA HERNIA by Michael Crichton THE FRANGIBLE PERSON by Alfred Bester VAGUELY DISTURBING VISIONS edited by Harlan Ellison TOWN by Clifford D. Simak THE WORLD OF +/-A by A.E. van Vogt THONGOR AT THE MOUND OF VENUS by Lin Carter A CLOCKWORK RUTABAGA by Anthony Burgess THE DOORS OF HIS FACE, THE WINDOWS OF HIS EYES, THE PORTALS OF HIS EARS, THE ARCHWAYS OF HIS HANDS, THE BRIDGE OF HIS NOSE, THE STEPPES OF HIS FEET, THE COLUMNS OF HIS THROAT, THE PUFFS OF HIS CHEEKS, THE LASH OF HIS LIPS, THE NEEDS OF HIS NOSTRILS, THE MOVEMENTS OF HIS BOWELS. BLUES. by Roger Zelazny FREDENSTEIN by Mary W. Sh.e.l.ley HEAVY ERRAND by Hal Clement THE MOON IS HECK by John W. Campbell (revised by K. Tarrant) PLINTH by Isaac Asimov PLINTH AND CONDOMINIUM by Isaac Asimov ANOTHER PLINTH by Isaac Asimov Compet.i.tion 23 (F&SF; September 1979/February 1980)-long, unwieldy and entertaining sf t.i.tles of 50 words or less.

OH DAD, POOR DAD, MOM'S HUNG YOU IN THE CLOSET AND WHEN THE LOBSTER INVADERS FROM NGC 3077 .CONQUERED EARTH LAST WEEK THEY MISTOOK YOU FOR A THREE-b.u.t.tON CASHMERE SPORT JACKET AND NOW THEY'VE BURNED A HOLE IN YOUR LAPEL AND I'M FEELIN' SO SAD.

BUH-BUH-BY THE SUH-SEA, BUH-BY THE SEA, BY THE BALBUTIENT SUH-SUH-SEA.

Compet.i.tion 26 (F&SF, November 1980/March 1981)-imaginary collaborations.

TIME CONSIDERED AS A HELIX OF WORTHLESS SAND by Samuel R. Delany and Frank Herbert SLANBEAU by A.E. van Vogt and C.L. Moore INTO CLEVELAND DEPTHS by Stanton A. Coblentz and Fritz Leiber DANCE OF THE CHANGER AND THE THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS by Terry Carr and Poul Anderson A TORRENT OF FECES by James Blish & Norman L. Knight and Brian Aldiss [conceived in collaboration w/ Alan Brennert]

CONAN VS. THE Sp.a.w.n OF THE PEOPLE by Robert E. Howard & Karl Edward Wagner & Bjorn Nyberg & L. Sprague de Camp and Zenna Henderson THE HURKLES LOOK UP by Theodore Sturgeon and John Brunner DEMOLISHED LENSMAN by Alfred Bester and E.E. Smith, Ph.D.

SON OF THE PUPPET MASTERS by Carlo Collodi and Robert A. Heinlein

I HAVE NO NERVES, AND I MUST TWITCH by Harlan Ellison and Lester del Rey DAVY AND THE DROWNED GIANT by Edgar Pangborn and J.G. Ballard Compet.i.tion 39 (F&SF, November 1985/March 1986)-complete the following sentence: You know you've really landed in an alternate universe when you discover that...

...old time fans are sitting around reminiscing about the big splash THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS made when it was published fifteen years ago.

...when you come out of the theater discussing the existential nuances of the latest Steven Spielberg film and Sylvester Stallone tries to panhandle some change from you, your date, Kelly LeBrock, tells him to p.i.s.s off.

...the Queen Mary / Spruce Goose guided tours have added the Enola Gay as a new attraction.

...last night Orson Welles broadcast The War of the Worlds and today President Steinem began negotiations with the enemy for the release of hostages.

...Mexican President Leon Trotsky III has signed into law a bill outlawing the use of the new Edsel robot matador in all minotaur corridas.

...James Tiptree, Jr., is a six-foot-five ex-lumberjack with a full beard who writes Exterminator paperbacks under the pseudonym E. Howard Hunt, and he introduces you to his wife, Ursula, a mere slip of a woman who writes sf under the pseudonym Jerry Pournelle.

Prince Myshkin, and Hold the Relish It's not only that Pink's has the best hot dogs in what we have come to accept as the civilized world (and that includes Nathan's, the original stand out at Coney Island, not those fast-shuffle mickeymouse surrogates they've opened up from time to time all the way from Broadway to the San Fernando Valley, which, in a less enlightened era, I thought was the dispenser of the ne plus ultra of frankfurters), it is also that Michael, who works at Pink's, is one of the best conversationalists on the subject of Dostoevsky in what we have come to accept as the civilized world (and that includes the academic-turned-screenwriter from New York who did a sorta kinda Dostoevskian film about an academic-turned-gambler, back in 1974).

Which double incentive explains why I was down there at 711 N. La Brea Avenue, almost at the corner of Melrose, at Pink's, founded in 1939 by Paul Pink with a pushcart at that very same location where a heavensent hot dog cost a decent 10, what now sets one back a hefty dollar-and-a-quarter punch under the heart, even if the quality of dog has not diminished one iota, or even a random scintilla...quality and Michael Bernstein who knows what there is to know about the Fabulous Fyodor were the double incentives to drag me out at dead midnight.

Because I had been lying there in my bed, all the way out on the top of the Santa Monica Mountains in the middle of the Mulholland Scenic Corridor, overlooking the twinkling lights of the bedroom communities of the San Fernando Valley which, I have been led to believe, each one represents a broken heart that couldn't make it to Broadway, unable to sleep, tossing and turning, turning and tossing, widders.h.i.+ns and tormented, backing and filling in my lightly starched bedsheets, and of a sudden visions, not of sugar plums, but of dancing hot dogs, fandango'ing frankfurters, waltzing wienies, gavotted through my restless head. Eleven-thirty, for G.o.d's sake, and all I could think about was sinking my fangs into a Pink's hot dog and discussing a little Karamazov hostility with this Israeli savant who ladles up chili dogs on the graveyard s.h.i.+ft behind the steam table. Go figure it. Facts are definitely facts.

So at midnight I'm pulling into the parking s.p.a.ces beside Pink's, right next door to that shoe store that sells funny Italian disco shoes the heels of which fall off if you spin too quickly on the misguided belief that you are the reincarnation of Valentino or merely just the latest Travoltanoid to turn female heads, and I'm slouching up to the counter, and Michael sees me coming even before I'm out of the car and he's got a hot one working, ready to hand me as I lean up against the clean but battered stainless steel counter.

Just a dog, light on the mustard, hold the relish. No chili, yuchhh the chili; I'm a purist.

And as the front four sink into that strictly kosher nifty, Michael opens with the following: "It wasn't his fault he was so mean to women. Dostoevsky was a man swayed by pa.s.sions. Two of these, his lamentable love for Paulina Suslova and his obsession for gambling, overlapped."

I'm halfway finished with the first frank as Michael is building the second, and I respond, "You see how you are? You, like everyone else, are ready to condemn a genius simply because he was a liar, a cheat, a pathological gambler who borrowed from his friends and never paid them back, a man who deserted his wife and children, an epileptic existentialist who merely wrote at least half a dozen of the greatest works of fiction the world has ever seen. If he brutalized women it was simply another manifestation of his tormented soul and give me another dog, light on the mustard, hold the relish."

Having now defined the parameters of our evening's discussion, we could settle down to arguing the tiniest, most obscure points; as long as the heartburn didn't start and the hungry hookers and junkies coming in for sustenance didn't distract Michael too much.

"Ha!" Michael shouted, aiming his tongs at my head. "Ha! and Ha again! You fall into the trap of accepted cliche. You mythologize the Russian soul, several thousand years' retroactive angst. When the simple truth that every man in Dostoevsky's novels treats women monstrously invalidates your position. The canon itself says you are wrong!

"Name one exception of substance. Not a minor character, a major one; a moving force, an image, an icon...name one!"

I licked my fingers, nodded for my third sally of the night and said, with the offensive smugness of one who has lured his worthy opponent hipdeep into quicksand, "Prince Myshkin."

Michael was shaken. I could tell, shaken: he slathered too much mustard onto the dog. Shaken, he wiped off the excess with a paper napkin and, shaken, he handed it across to me. "Well...yes...of course, Myshkin..." he said slowly, devastated and groping for intellectual balance. "Yes, of course, he treated women decently... but he was an idiot!"

And the six-foot-two pimp with the five working girls at the far end of the counter started screaming about sleazy kike honkie muthuhf.u.c.kuh countermen who let their Zionist hatred of Third World peoples interfere with the speedy performance of their duties. "But... the image of the brutalizer of women was the one with which Dostoevsky identified..." He started toward the other end of the counter where black fists were pounding on stainless steel.

"Myshkin was his model," I called after him. "Some men are good for women..."

He held up a chili-stained finger for me to hold that place in the discussion, and rushed away to quell the lynch tenor in the mob.

As I stood there, I looked across La Brea Avenue. The street was well-lit and I saw this guy standing at the curb right in front of the Federated Stereo outlet, all dressed up around midnight in a vanilla-flavored ice cream suit as pale and wan as the cheek of a paperback heroine, his face ratty and furtive under a spectacular Borsalino hat that cast a shadow across his left eye. Natty and spiffy, but something twitchoid and on the move about him. And as I stood there, waiting for Michael to come back so I could tell him how good some men are for some women, this ashen specter comes off the curb, looking smartly left and right up and down La Brea, watching for cars but also watching for typhoons, sou'westers, siroccos, monsoons, khamsins, Santa Anas and the fall of heavy objects. And as I stood there, he came straight across the avenue and onto the sidewalk there at the front of Pink's, and he slouched to a halt right beside me, and leaned up close with one elbow on the counter just touching my sleeve, and he thumbed back the Borsalino so I could see both of his strange dark little eyes, set high in his feral, attractive, strange dark little face, and this is what he said to me: "Okay. This is it. Now listen up.

"The first girl I ever fell in love with was this raven-tressed little beauty who lived down the block from me when I was in high school in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. She was sixteen, I was seventeen, and her father owned an apple orchard. Big deal, I said; big f.u.c.king deal. An apple orchard. We're not talking here the Sudetenland. Nonetheless, he thought he was landed gentry, my old man worked with his hands over in Kutztown. So we ran away. Got all the way to Eunice, New Mexico, walking, hitching, slipping and sliding, sleeping out in the rain, she comes down with pneumonia and dies at a lying-in hospital over at Carlsbad.

"I'm shook. I'm ruined. What I'm sayin' here, I was distraught.

"Next thing I know I'm signed up with the Merch Marine, s.h.i.+pped out to Kowloon. Twenty minutes in town on sh.o.r.e leave I fall across this little transistor girl named Orange Blossom. I don't ask questions. Maybe her name was Sun Yung Sing, how'm I to know? She likes me, I like her, we go offhand in hand to make a little rice music, if you catch my drift. Sweet, this was sweet, two young kids, okay so it's miscegenation, a little intermingling of the Occidental with the Oriental, so what? It was purely sweet, and we're talking here about cleaning up some bad leftover feelings. I treat her good, she has respect for an innocent young man, everything's going only terrific until we're walking up Three Jade Lacquer Box Road looking for this swell little dimsum joint that's been recommended to us, when some nut case off a harbor junk that caught fire and killed his wife and three kids comes running down the street brandis.h.i.+ng a kukri, this large knife used for hunting and combat purposes by the Nepalese Gurkhas, and he sticks it right through this sweet little kid possibly named Orange Blossom, and the next thing I know she's lying in a pool of it, right at my feet as this maniac goes screaming up Three Jade Lacquer Box Road.

"Well, let me tell you. I'm devastated. Freaked out of my mind. I'm down on my knees wailin' and cryin', what else was there to do?

"So I get myself s.h.i.+pped back home to recuperate, try to blow it all away, try to forget my sorrow, they put me up in a V A hospital even though I'm not a vet, they figure, you know, the Merch Marine's as good as the service. Well, I'm not in the hospital three days when I meet this terrific candy striper name of Henrietta. Blonde hair, blue eyes, pet.i.te little figure, a warm and winning personality.

"She takes a real fancy to me, sees I'm in need of extensive chicken soup therapy, slips in late at night when the ward's quiet and gets under the covers with me. We fall desperately in love, I'm on the mend, we go out to lightweight pizza dinners and G-rated movies. Move in with me, she says, when my time is up at the hospital. Move in with me and we'll whistle a jaunty tune forevermore. Okay, says I, okay you got it. So I move in all my worldly possessions, I'm not there three weeks when she slips boarding a number 10 uptown bus, the doors close on her left foot and she's dragged half a city block before the driver realizes the thumping sound is her head hitting the street.

"So I'm left with the lease on a four-room apartment in San Francisco, you might think that's a neat thing to have, what with the housing shortage, but I'm telling you friend, without love even the Taj Mahal is a cold water flat. So I can't take it, I'm whipped, really downtrodden, sorrowful and in misery.

"I know I shouldn't, but I get involved with this older woman on the rebound. She's sixty-one, I'm twenty, and all she can do is do for me. All right, I admit it, this wasn't such straight thinking, but I'm crippled, you know what I mean? I'm a fledgling bird with a crippled wing. I need some taking care of, some bringing out of myself. She's good medicine, maybe a little on the wrinkled side but who the h.e.l.l says a sixty-one-year-old woman ain't ent.i.tled to a little affection, too?

"Everything's going great, strictly great; I move in with her on n.o.b Hill, we go for long walks, take in Bizet operas, Hungarian goulash in Ghirardelli Square, open and frank discussions about c.l.i.toral stimulation and the Panama Ca.n.a.l. All good, all fine, until one night we go a little too deeply into the Kama Sutra and she has this overwhelming uplifted celestial experience which culminates in ma.s.sive cardiac infarction, so I'm adrift again, all alone on the tides of life, trying to find a soul mate with whom I can traverse the desert of loneliness.

"Then in rapid succession I meet Rosalinda, who gets polio and refuses to see me because she's going to be an invalid the rest of her life; Norma, whose father kills her because she's black and I'm white and he's disappointed she'd rather be just a housewife for some white guy than the world's first black female heart transplant specialist; Charmaine, who was very high on me till she got hit by a cinderblock dropped from a scaffold on a construction job where she was architect in training, working during her summer college session toward a degree in building stuff; Olive, who was a stewardess who got along fine with me even though our political orientation was very different, until her dinner flight to Tucson came in a little too low and they sent me what was left of her in a very nice imitation Sung dynasty vase from the Federal Aeronautics Administration; and then Fernanda and Erwina and Corinne, all of whom wound up in destructive relations.h.i.+ps with married men; and finally I meet Theresa, we'll call her Terry, she preferred Terry, I meet her at the track, and we're both on the same horse, a nice little two-year-old name of Leo Rising, and we get to the window at the same time and I ask her what's her sign, because I overhear what horse she's betting, and she says Virgo, and I say I'm a Virgo, and I ask her what's her rising sign and she says, of course Leo, and I say so's mine, and the next thing I know we're dating heavily, and she's gifted me with a sterling silver ID bracelet with my name on the front and WITH LOVE FROM TERRY on the reverse, and I've gifted her with a swell couple strands genuine natural simulated pearls, and we name the date, and we post the bands whatever that means, and I meet her family and she can't meet mine because I haven't seen mine in about twenty years, and everything is going just swell when she's out in Beverly Hills going to select her silver pattern, something simple but eloquent in Gorham, and they left a manhole cover off a sewer thing, and she slips and falls in and breaks her back in eleven places, her neck, and both arms.

"Sweet kid never comes out of the coma, they keep her on the machine nine months, one night her father slips in there on all fours and chews off the plug on the electrical connection, she goes to a much-needed peace.

"So that's it. That's the long and the short of it. Here I am, deeply distressed, not at all settled in my mind, at sixes and sevens, dulled and quite a bit diminished, gloomy, apathetic, awash in tribulation and misery, confused and once more barefoot on the road of life.

"Now what do you think of that?"