Chapter Five

Bob Spracken was a calm man. If a man could be constructed of four short letters, "calm" would do it for Bob Spracken. He was oppressively calm. His calm was so utter it galled. Such calm invariably reminded one of a beneficent Diety, or a jackal with a full stomach, or some similar fount of repose. So inscrutably imperturbable, he was also casual, self-assured, and polite. Little wonder, then, that he was so despised and feared. He unfailingly dispensed practical advice to his patients which, the few times it had been followed, had brought gratifying results. His knowledge of his profession was encyclopedic, and his skill as a surgeon was complete. He cut with the elan of a mongoose, and a scalpel. His only professional shortcoming, if it could be called that, was one of mere oversight: he had accidentally neglected to attend a medical school. Bloody luck! On this single technicality the hospital administration had refused him employment, and made him a hunted man within its haunts.

But the altruistic vocation of Hippocrates tugged at Bob Spracken's heart with no little pull. It grappled that vital organ in talons of carborundum and flew straining after the vector of compassion with the original irresistible force. Bob Spracken, thought Bob Spracken, had no choice but to alleviate the Suffering of Man, come hell, high water, or legalistic nitpicking. His sympathetic ears bent to every carp and cough, and his reassuring hands smoothed the troubled waters of every incontinency. His was the true gift of healing, and a more capable and compassionate set of kidneys never before strained blood.

"Doc," said Horace as they walked across the parking lot, "those folk in there seem to covet your derma. Perhaps we ought to hie us hence."

"Not to worry," said Spracken calmly. "They have to check through Post Follow-up Examinations and Dismissals, and the Morgue, before they can get to the one Egress Only! gate, which is on the roof. I figure we have about a three-day head start. And besides, it's you they are after. Officially, you were never treated, and so you can't be taken to litigation for nonpayment once you leave the hospital grounds. That, they find irritating."

"They don't consider the administration of aspirin a treatment?"

"They don't consider me a doctor."

"Ah," ah'd Horace. "I thought you were suspiciously competent. Should have been a dead giveaway."

"Yes," mused Spracken sadly. "Not an easily forgivable fault, that."

Horace smiled to himself. Here was a man, it seemed, who could be communicated with. While perhaps Spracken couldn't be said to modulate on precisely the same wavelength as his own, conversationologically speaking, he was close. Their give-and-take, Horace similed to himself, was not unlike two high-pitched whistles shrilling tantalizingly near the same tone, producing that wonderful howl in the ear that seems to filet the listener. While most folk might agree that to be an unpleasant sensation, Horace was not most folk, and the present resonant harmonic interference was as close as he could remember being to truly consanguine concourse in a coon's age. He felt a budding comradery; a laying of hands on one's Essence; a violent impaling thrust of blunt amiability. It was a sympathy previously unknown to him. His first reaction to it was, understandably, cryogenic horror; but that soon gave way to a more manageable but somewhat less palatable sort of queasy dread. Something here was not quite right. A shaft of light was penetrating the hymen of his protective gloom, and, as is usually the case with victims of such initial intrusions, Horace was not sure whether the experience was pleasant or painful. He resolved to sound out the matter.

"You seem to be a pally enough sort of worm, but there's a wriggle here that I can't quite put my finger on," Horace cooed ingratiatingly. "What is it about you, Doctor - or rather, I guess, Mr. - Spracken, that - "

"Bob."

"Eh?"

"No `eh': `Bob'."

"No, `Horace', Noah."

"My name," said Bob, "is Bob. Not Noah. Call me Bob."

"My name," said Horace, "isn't. And don't."

"What is it about you, Aeiouaey," asked Spracken, "that reminds one, or, I suppose, two, of having one's teeth filed pointy?"

"I was trying, before you interrupted me, Bob, to ask you a similar question."

"You were going to ask me what it is about yourself that's so deadly to society? That's most, er, unusual. You pique my professional curiosity."

"I assure you it is entirely unintentional. At the risk of incurring ire, may I suggest that you wilfully misinterpreted my remark?"

"Yes."

"I suggest that you wilfully misinterpreted my remark."

"Your acuity credits you."

"I feared as much," admitted Horace. "Now, what is it about you, Bob, that puts such a cold squeeze on my duodenum?"

Spracken's professional pique congealed. "Right around here?" He prodded Horace's abdomen in a familiar kind of way.

"Figuratively speaking," Horace explained coldly.

"Oh." Spracken's crest fell, but he considered the query. "Well, let's see. I guess it's that I try to be straightforward and considerate, and always treat people fairly," he confessed. "That's usually more than enough to alienate the maxima populi."

"Not in my class, those," said Horace. "I don't suppose your being a fraud has anything to do with it?"

"I am only a `fraud' - your term, by the way," huffed Spracken, "in the opinion of Legislation, which cannot be confused in any instance with the real world. Let's face it: I did more for you in five minutes than the rest of the hospital staff had done in four hours, didn't I?"

"Closer to six," corrected Horace.

"Minutes?"

"Hours."

Yes, thought Horace, this was the base fault. Bob was able and invested with self-knowledge: a virtual extraterrestrial. No wonder he was so roundly hated. A kindred spirit manifests itself in a fellow outsider; and while Horace shunned Society, while Society shunned Bob, Horace felt this was a distinction without a difference. Allies are found through common enemies, and Horace felt he had just discovered one. Ally, that is.

"So tell me, Aeiouaey," said Spracken, sealing alliance, "what it is that makes you such an unexpurgated sphincter? Do you think it's your insufferable condescension, or is it merely your physical meanness?"

"Are you always given to posing personal fault-examining questions to casual acquaintances, or am I something out of the ordinary?" asked Horace, evading the issue.

"Yes." They walked a few steps in silence. "Say, Aeiouaey - "

"Aeiouaey."

"Say, Aeiouaey - "

"Aeiouaey."

"Say - no wait a minute - "

"No wait a minute."

"Where's your car? You seem to be following me."

"At my apartment, I hope," Horace answered. "Why?"

"Is it far? Do you want a lift? I mean, I could give you a ride on my bike."

Not having been conscious when the contractor had dumped him onto the parking lot, Horace hadn't since thought of the problem of getting home, which was some way from the hospital. Inexplicably, though, the notion of riding the handlebars of a bicycle for several miles did not send waves of ecstasy scouring through him. He was relieved therefore to see Spracken gesturing toward an aging but substantial Harley. Horace had never ridden a motorcycle before; but he had never been knocked out by a hardhat, either. So, figuring this to be a day of firsts, he accepted the offered ride.

The cycle was loud.

As if raw noise was not oppressive enough, the rumble pureed his internal organs, and after they got on the road the wind whipped his face, arms, and legs with a designing fury he had never imagined possible of a mere gas. An occasional ill-advised glance down at the striated blur that should have been recognizable features soaked Horace with terror. Closing his eyes did not help. The vibration, the deafening roar, and the digestively disruptive acceleration of the ride darkly enveloped him in a cocoon of helplessness; and he struggled to fight off a vague but insistent sensation of chronic elephantiasis.

But hey! disease is a strange, dark concept any way you look at it; a popular notion - the brooding menace lurking Out There - the common enemy: alien, and at the same time the indisputable proof of community, aparadoxically. That we attend an imperfect universe is a manageable crisis of despair, but we scream bloody murder when that imperfection manifests itself on a personal level. Is the imperfection not, then, innate? The troubling doubt that disease may be the norm and not the exception does not heartily recommend itself to beings too caught up in auto-worship to allow visions outside fantastic utopia to exist. Nevertheless, as each succeeding expedition into the oxymoron of human health incrementally legitimizes the superiority of inferiority, self-knowledge glacially gravitates toward detente with, rather than destruction of, disease. Death - simple, final death - becomes the ghoulish gauge of last resort registering victory or defeat on the battlefield of Health, and the cheating of death (at any price) is so unanimously assumed noble that even the mere existence of the resultant misery can only be admitted by the bold few willing to suffer seemingly universal denunciation as negligible pre-evolutionarily subhuman pikers. Jacob Marley has inflicted more pain on humanity since his death than he could have dreamed of doing in his lifetime; and he chuckles his chains in eternally enraptured impenitency.

Granted, then, that a lack of impurities in any given physical volume is the rare exception, does recognition of this constitute any particular advantage? "I am ill, but everyone is ill, so I'm OK." This can be reassuring only through a sense of conformity, although admittedly "a sense of conformity" is indeed all the reassurance most people ever get (or seemingly need). The realistic alternative can then be compelling only to the remaining few: "I am ill, but everyone is ill; so what? tra-la, tra-la, tra-la." Everything being for the best in the best of all possible worlds is, after all, a double-edged blade: the best of all possible worlds isn't all that great, is it?

So the challenge becomes: how best to cast a flattering light on this, a repulsive void? Survival of the fittest has plummeted straight past survival of the fattest to land with a cow pie splat as survival of everything. "The right to the pursuit of" is truncated to "the right to." Maintenance of the status quo has transcended evolution itself on the altar of Progress: were the dinosaurs only now becoming extinct our own last gasps would be spent . . . practicing lizard CPR! Is this what we have come to, then? Is this it? Is -

"Is this it?" Spracken put his foot out to support the bike. "Is this your apartment? Hey! You fall asleep or something?!"

Horace looked around alarmed as the Resusci-Dinos were sucked into the void, drawing the world back into his head through his stupidly blinking eyes.

Killer Eneri stole into the familiar midnight alley, as stealthy as a second, as invisible as a shadow's shadow. He silently slid across, took his premeditated place (standing in the black hole doorway behind O'Mick's), carefully extinguished his fag on the dirty brick frame, and calculated the time. They want cash, do they? Well, they'll get their dough, but they won't be happy about it. Wimps! A siren whined a couple of blocks away - somebody bought it - but in the leaden alley it was so still he could hear his breath hit the gravel a yard in front of him. It won't be long now.

Ah, here they come, disgustingly predictable. Eneri heard the grate of four feet heedlessly approaching Doom. Fools! He checked his piece, watching for the telltale streetlight shadows' dance across the opposite wall. Almost . . . almost . . .

"Your money, or your life!"

"Get lost, Iamb!" Horace groused at the twirp. Iamb jumped melodramatically, if not athletically, into their path in the hallway from behind a gargantuan concrete barrel which at one time had held a promising fig tree, but now was reduced to collecting candy wrappers and junk mail. Spracken pulled the distressed door shut behind him as Horace opened his mailbox.

"Your money or your life!" shouted Iamb undeterred, standing splay-legged across the hall and hoisting a .44 Magnum with stiff arms.

"Get lost," Horace mumbled, sifting through his mail.

"Hi, buddy!" said Spracken brightly. "I'm Bob. What's your name?"

"Don't fuck with me!" the six-year-old warned in his most menacing contralto. "Everybody knows Killer Eneri! Your money or your life! Hand it over!"

"Ignore it, Bob, or we'll never get rid of it."

"Say, `Killer'," Spracken smiled warmly, taking a couple of steps toward the youngster, "that's a pretty cool gun you have there! Can I see it? It almost looks - "

"You asked for it!"

The bullet sailed about an inch on the lucky side of Spracken's right ear and instantly shattered the transom over the door. The terrific boom, the crashing glass, the boy's surprised shriek, Horace's momentary verbal conversion, and his own spontaneous disclaimers of alimentary dysfunction simultaneously and painfully converged in his ears. After he had shaken his head vigorously and groped a hasty inventory, and the smoke in the hallway had cleared, Spracken noticed that Iamb was on his back on the floor, apparently cold-cocked by the recoil.

"Jesus Christ!" Horace reasserted.

"Nice place," Spracken calmly commented. "What's your rent here?"

"Murderers!" Mrs. Eneri issued from her apartment in a way very like the way a bullet Spracken had recently almost been intimately acquainted with had issued from her son's plaything. "Help! Help! They've killed him! Help! Help! Help! Anybody, please! They've killed my boy - oh, my poor little boy, my little boy, oh, my poor boy! Murderers! Oh, won't somebody do something? Oh God, oh God look what they've done! What have you done to him, what have you done? Oh, my God, my God what am I going to do? what can I do? what can I do? oh please help me, somebody help me, somebody help me, help me, please!" She bent over the motionless form of her child, sobbing uncontrollably, pitifully beating his tiny chest with her quivering fists in an apparent attempt to revive or tenderize him. "Oh, Death! Death! Death! Death! Death!" she wailed for some seven and a half minutes. "Death! Death! Death! Oh my God, what am I going to do - they've killed my baby! My baby, my baby, my baby, my baby, my poor little baby, my little boy, my boy, my little - " she suddenly stopped and looked up at them through streaming tears with a rather perplexed expression betraying some unexpected uncertainty.

"Boy?" Spracken prompted helpfully.

"Iamb," Horace pronounced.

"My little Iamb, my poor little Iamb, they've - " she glared at them - "No! YOU killed him! You killed him! You killed him! Oh, won't somebody please help me? Help! Help! Help! Murder, murder, murder, murder, murder - " this pleasing repetition soon fell quite naturally, soothingly, into a sort of deranged mantra, and she willingly devoted her tirade to it for some eleven minutes. " - murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder - "

Horace found himself looking rather wistfully at the .44, but, he was forced to admit, there were witnesses.

" - murder, murder, murder, murder, murder - "

"I am rather embarrassed to tell you," Spracken whispered confidentially to Horace, "that, at least immediately after he tried to kill me and nearly succeeded, I considered the boy to be the dregs in the grease-bin behind the Diner of Life. Little did I then realize what abhorrence he must aspire to, or what an impossible example has been set for him."

" - MURder, MURder, MURder, MURder, MURder - "

"She thinks she's a poet," Horace explained. Spracken's eyes flew open wide in horror.

"No wonder!"

"Yes . . ."

" - MURDER! MURDER! MURDER! MURDER! MURDER! - "

"Perhaps you can do something for her, Doc."

"Surely she can't continue like this much longer, can she?"

"Well, let me put it to you this way: no one in the building slept for a week after her parakeet's suicide."

“ - MURDER! MURDER! MURDER! MURDER! MURDER! - "

"Good God! That poor bird!"

"Perhaps if we reanimate the victim . . ."

"The parakeet?"

"Uh, no. `Killer'."

" - MURDER MURDER MURDER - "

"Ah," Spracken ah'd. He bent down to the mourner. "Ma'am?"

" - MURDER MURDER - "

"Excuse me, ma'am, er, Mrs. - "

"Eneri," Horace said.

" - MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER -"

"Uh, Mrs. Eneri? Ma'am? I'm a doctor - "

"Or a reasonable facsimile."

" - I'm a doctor, and I want to help."

" - MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER- "

"Your son is not dead."

" - MURDER MURDER- "

"Your son is not dead."

" - MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER - "

"Your son is not dead. He - " Spracken examined the boy's face - "He has a broken nose, and a bruised ego, and a pending armed robbery prosecution, which I intend to pursue whether your institutionalization proceedings are successful or not. Do you understand, ma'am? Ma'am?"

The words "not dead" eluded Mrs. Eneri's attention entirely. The phrases "broken nose" and "bruised ego" likewise elicited no response. Even "prosecution" did not impress. But something about her air-hose gasp for breath and the suddenly funereal pallor of her complexion implied to Spracken that the concept of "institutionalization" registered in a meaningful way.

"Hello!" She stood up and smiled, extending her hand. "I'm Etta Eneri. Can I help you?"

"Er, yes, Etta," Spracken glanced nervously at Horace, who shrugged. "Can you get a glass of water?"

"No sweat!" she chirped, vanishing into the apartment.

"Right, Etta," reinforced Horace, "water only."

"Whitman disciple," mumbled Spracken disparagingly.

She momentarily returned with the requested refreshment, which Spracken directed her to pour onto Iamb's face. The delinquent soon sat up spluttering, until he recollected the recent collision between his septum and the pistol butt and the resultant extreme pain, at which time he left off spluttering in favor of an accomplished six-year-old bawl. All in all, a stellar performance in light of his alleged lifelessness. Mrs. Eneri seemed genuinely relieved and grateful at hearing his familiar cries, for about thirteen seconds; then her shoulders drooped and her face snapped back into its habitual wince.

"I suggest, Etta," Horace suggested, eyes twinkling with the satisfaction of retribution, "that you take him directly to the Hospital."

"And I suggest," said Spracken, "that you secure that cannon in a safe place."

"Oh, my husband doesn't let me handle it!" she said, adding thoughtfully, "but he always encourages Iamb, for some reason."

"Hospital!" hissed Horace, as he and Spracken made their way toward the elevators at last.

"Not - so - fast!" a flitting hand seized Horace's arm as they passed a dark open doorway. "What happens?"

"Nothing, widow Pavlovna," Horace groaned. The old woman suspiciously eyed the smoky ceiling, the crying bloody boy, the broken glass, the revolver, and Spracken, and then, apparently satisfied, turned back into her rooms.

"Good!"

Horace's apartment was seasoned with a striking melange of styles. From Louis Quatorze mock-ups to Bauhaus knock-offs, his taste in decorating could only be described one way: eclectic and cheap. OK, two ways: eclectic and cheap, and ruthlessly efficient. Three ways: eclectic, cheap, and ruthlessly efficient, with an almost fanatical devotion to Pop. Amongst the ways of describing . . .

It wasn't that he had no appreciation for style; it was more to the point that he appreciated too many, and could not devote himself to any one in particular. Complicating this was his almost dyslexic difficulty in recalling whether, while shopping for furnishings, he was a function-follows-form or form-follows-function sort of fellow. This philosophical befuddlement led directly to his only real consistency in the art: his selections invariably proved to be both unattractive and uncomfortable. And so, through a combination of ignorance, confusion, and kismet, Horace achieved an aboding ambiance which perfectly mirrored his own personality.

Spracken peered about tentatively, instinctively bracing himself for assault. Suddenly he popped.

"Heavens, Horace, is that a Hepplewhite?!"

"It's called `chair,' Bob."

"But for a moment I thought . . ." He turned excitedly toward an old-looking secretary. "But look at this! No, it isn't . . ." Only momentarily disappointed, he picked up an Art Deco-ish statuette. "Say! that's a - "

"That's a."

" . . no, I guess not after all . . ." Brightening after yet another letdown, he spotted a framed print. "Ah! a Wilbur Streech!" He rushed over to inspect the imprimatur. "Wait - it's signed `Walter Skreech'. Walter Skreech? What kind of museum slash mausoleum of ad nauseam do you curate here, anyway?"

Horace inclined one shoulder. "It suits me. Pull up a Hepplewhite." He disappeared around a corner for a few moments. When he returned, he handed Spracken a tall glass with a straw, and sat down, starting up the television.

- animal-rights group which maintains that all grain should be reserved for foraging wildlife, is picketing here on Twenty-first Street in front of the Sampson Bakery. With me now is Congresswoman -

"Thanks," said Spracken without thinking, taking the glass. Then he eyed the beverage. "Er - Aeiouaey, what are we drinking?"

"My specialty," Horace returned proudly. "It's in the martini family."

- On the other hand, or I should say, At the same time, we - that is, The American People - we cannot, we should not, we shall not, and in the future, we will never - although I admit there are those who persist in this heinous, callous, selfish, and, if, that is, When my bill is passed, illegal activity, which goes without saying Immoral - of eating baked goods -

"A rather distant relative, I'd say," Spracken answered dubiously. "Why is it brown?"

"Actually a variation on the screwdriver theme. Taste it." Horace indulged himself in a lengthy drag on his straw.

- admitted today that the tractor tires manufactured by one of his corporation's foreign subsidiaries, tires which are about to be put on the market in this country, contain more than eighteen parts per trillion of a suspected carcinogen, triumpticarbohydrobigooey-abilene II, ingestion of which -

"It's sweet!" Spracken remarked somewhat tentatively, "and . . . and chocolate? What's in this?"

"Three parts Absolut," Horace whispered secretively, "and three parts Yoo-Hoo. The chocolate milk tended to curdle. Don't blab it around, will you? that's a good Bob. I prefer the world maintain its ignorance of my perfected recipe for the chocolate screwdriver."

"Aeiouaey, you surprise me!" Bob exclaimed. "You are a true humanitarian!"

- tried to downplay the danger. Professor Skjrskj: "Scaling the experiment up to human proportions, we estimate that before any detectable incidence of triumpticarbohydrobigooeyabilenoma occurs an adult would have to eat approximately eighty-seven or eighty-eight tractor tires a day for nearly eleven thousand years. At that dosage we feel the resulting increase in dietary fiber alone may actually reduce the risk of the so-called `commode widow' -

"Say, Horace - "

"Horace."

"Cut that out! I just wanted to ask how your head was feeling now."

"All right."

"All right?"

"Yes; all right, ask!"

- the overnight fire-bombing of an Italian sausage-packing plant. A splinter faction of the communist-sympathetic self-styled Liberation of the Oppressed Movement, going by the translated acronym RWFPX, -

"So how is it feeling?"

"Tolerable. The old Choc SD comes through again."

"Indeed. You said you attributed your lump to a brainstorm?"

- telephoned from its suspected headquarters in Boise to Roman Interpol agents late last night claiming responsibility for the explosion, and apologizing for missing its intended target which apparently was a nearby industrial chemical facility, which the RWFPX claims is producing Red Dye number 4 in sufficient quantities to -

"Brainstorm is not too strong a term," Horace said proudly. "An inspired bit of noodling, I'm not abashed to claim."

“Are you inclined to share this inspiration which you at first thought too large for your head?"

"Are you prepared for your rebirth? It's that kind of thing."

- Oh my goodness Amy are you all right?"

"I'm fine! Silly me; it's all my fault!"

"What happened? Where did all the water go?"

"I forgot I was wearing my Ultra-Comfy Femina-Slim Hyper-Absorbant Lunar Pad when I dove in!" -

"I'm all ears," Spracken responded.

"Have you ever remarked," Horace began, "how many assholes there are at large?"

"A universal burden of life, I fear," sighed Spracken.

- "It's a natural mistake! Ultra-Comfy Femina-Slim Hyper-Absorbant Lunar Pads are so extra-naturally comfortable, its easy to forget you're wearing one!"

"But I'm so embarrassed, Jackie - won't people miss Lake Michigan? Hee-hee-hee! Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!"

New Ultra-Comfy Femina-Slim Hyper-Absorbant Lunar Pads. Don't touch one with -

"Assholes individual, assholes unguided, assholes drifting aimlessly through the bloodstream of society without hope of coagulation," Horace warmed to his subject.

"You, er, see hope in this?"

- which astonished many pundits as well as this reporter, today the Senate failed to pass a bill which would have made all forms of profit illegal. House leadership immediately called for an independent bipartisan investigation into alleged Big Business pressure against the automatic death-penalty provision, which would have ensured, among other things, -

"I see," saw Horace, "many, many things in this."

"Interesting," mused Spracken, calmly. "Please, go on!"

Back | Next: Apple-butter bath.