Demon Box

I shook my head, explaining I had come to expect olives with my gin. Joe finished the bottle and dropped it between his legs into the wastebasket. I heard it clink against other bottles. He looked at his boss pacing foolishly with the phone, then started singing, “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf…”

Mortimer got the point and finally hung up. “I know you’re both disappointed”—he sighed—“but it may be just as well. According to some of my colleagues our big bad wolf has long ago lost his fangs. And who wants to sit through a dull gumming? The program will be just fine, regardless. We’ve got last year’s minutes, and the Bellevue Revue, and Dr. Bailey Toocter from Jamaica has already volunteered to fill in as keynote with his—what did he call it, Joe?”

“Therapeutic Thumb harp,” Joe answered. “Soothes the savage breast.”

It was just as well with me, too. I had realized as much locked out on the balcony—that I’d been wishful dreaming. Only a pin-head fool would hope to find the wild and woolly Big Sur of bygone days in the Florida torpor. I stepped over Joe’s legs to the closet where my gray suit hung.

The dinner was held in an elegantly appointed wedge-shaped hall, its point focusing on the raised dais. Dr. Mortimer was seated at this head table between the square-jawed Dudley DuRight who was to be the evening’s master of ceremonies and a wild-headed black man in a coral pink tuxedo. First served, they had already finished eating. Dudley was sober and serious about his evening’s role—he kept checking backstage, reading messages, going over his handful of notes—while the black man and Mortimer whispered and giggled like carefree schoolgirls. On the table in front of their plates was a hinged wooden box inlaid with mother-of-pearl butterflies. I assumed it was the thumb harp.

Joe and I were about three tables back, still picking at our lobster Newberg but already into our third bottle of Johannesburg Riesling. I admitted to Joe that he was right; the cold wine was relieving to the outside of my burned head as well as the inside. I didn’t mention the main relief I was feeling—that I would not have to face my old mentor after all. I wasn’t disappointed and I found I was rather pleased with that fact. I saw it as a significant stride. If you feel that nothing is owed you, then you owe nothing. I leaned back with my chilled Riesling and newfound wisdom, prepared to enjoy a peace I had not enjoyed for months. Screw the nuts and to hell with the heroes. As far as I was concerned, the change to the thumb harp was just what the doctor ordered.

But when Dudley got up and took the mike and launched into a grandiloquent introduction of the great man who was to speak to us, I wondered if anybody had told him about the change.

“A legend!” he proclaimed. “A star of Sigmund Freud’s magnitude, of Wilhelm Reich’s radiance, of Carl Jung’s historic brilliance! A pillar of fire burning before most of us were born, yet still listed in the Who’s Who of Psychology Today! Still considered a giant in the contemporary field—a giant!”

This didn’t seem to describe the dreadlocked Dr. Toocter, not even the thumb harpist himself, now frowning perplexed up at the MC. Indeed, all seated at the main table were turned toward the master of ceremonies in wonder. It was nothing like my amazement, though. When our speaker rolled in from the curtain wings, I saw it was the hairless dwarf from the Sky Ride after all.

The tall blond nurse had changed from her nurse’s uniform into a beige evening gown, but her patient was wearing the same dark glasses and rumpled shirt and slacks, as though he’d never left the chair. She wheeled him to the podium through an uncertain flurry of clapping, then helped him stand. When she was sure he had a good grip on the podium she wheeled the chair back off, leaving him swaying and nodding in the spotlight.

He was not merely hairless; he was partially faceless as well. The corner of his upper lip and much of the lower had been pared away, all the way down his chin, and the scar covered with flesh-colored makeup. This was why he had looked to me like some kind of long-lived Down’s syndrome this afternoon. And without his hat the Florida sun had burned his head even brighter than it had mine. He was a blazing Day-Glo purple everywhere except the painted scar. This hand-sized swatch looked like the only island of natural flesh on a globe of synthetic skin, instead of the other way around. The clapping had been over for a long minute before he finally cleared his throat and spoke.

“Who’s who,” he murmured, shaking his head. “Das ist mir scheissegal. Who’s who.” Then the voice lifted a little. “That’s what you really want to consider, yah? Who was, who is, who will be who, when next season’s list is published?”

The accent was thicker and the speech halting. It would never be the fine instrument of old, but there was still a ring to it.