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 pinhead 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.
"How about we consider instead who is correct. Der Siggy Freud? All those interesting theories? like how anal retention becomes compulsive repetition and causes some sort of blockage what he called petrification? Und how this blockage could be dissolved with enough analysis, like enough castor oil? Please, mine colleagues, let us speak truthfully, doctor to doctor. We have all observed the application of these theories. Interesting though they may be, we all know that they are for all practical purposes useless in the psychiatric ward. Castor oil would be more effective, and Sigmund would have been more useful had he written romances for a living. The romantic ideal can be useful in the world of fiction; in world of medicine, never. Und we are all medical men, yah? We must be able to distinguish medicine from fiction. We must be able to know what is psychological results and what is psychological soap opera, never mind how the one is so discouraging while the other is so fascinating. You are all just as capable as I am of knowing who is really who and what was really what, so you all must have suspected what I am trying to tell you before now: that Sigmund Freud was a neurotic, romantic, coke-shooting quack!" When he said this he slapped the podium a sharp crack. The effect on the convention crowd would not have been greater if he'd said Albert Schweitzer was a Nazi, then fired a Luger at the ceiling. He swept his black-goggled gaze about the hall until the air subsided.
"Old daydreamer Carl Jung mit his sugar-glazed mandala? Willy Reich teaching orgasm by the numbers? All quacks. Yah, they were all very good writers, very interesting. But if you are a woodcutter, let us say, and you purchase a woodsaw - what does it matter how interesting the sawmaker writes about it? If it does not saw good it is not a good saw. As a woodcutter, you should be the first to detect the cheat: it won't cut straight! So take it back to that lying sawmaker, or paint a sunset on it, or throw it in the river - but don't pass the crooked wood on to your customers!" He paused to reach down and pick up Dr. Toocter's wadded napkin. He bowed his head to dab at the sweat that had begun to glisten on his neck and throat. He waited until his breathing calmed before he looked back up.
"Also, you are bad woodcutters for more reason than you invest in bad saws. You are afraid to go into the forest. You would rather invent a tree to fit your theory, and cut down the invention. You cannot face the real forest. You cannot face the real roots of your world's madness. You see the sore well enough but you cannot heal it. You can ease the pain, perhaps, but you can't stop the infection. You cannot even find the thorn! Und so" - he lifted his shoulders in a deprecating shrug - "that is the reason why I have flown to speak to you here tonight, even here, in the very heart of the festering American dream: to point out to you that thorn. Miss Nichswander?"
She was already rolling out the blackboard. When it was secured behind the dais she took a stick of chalk from her jeweled handbag and handed it to her boss. He waited until she was out of sight through the curtains before he turned back to us.
"Okay, some concentration if you please." The hand began pushing the chalk around the slate rectangle. "I will explain you this only once."
It was the same annotated sketch from ten years before, only honed far finer, with more bite to it. I smiled to think of those who had been worried about getting a dull gumming this evening. The old wolf was maimed and mangy, but still plenty sharp. His history of James Clerk Maxwell and the laws of thermodynamics was more ex
tensive, his drawing more detailed. The demon had acquired a set of horns and a very insolent sneer. And the seams of the whole concept had come together so ingeniously that he could move the metaphor back and forth at will, from the machine to the modern mind, hot and cold to good and bad, smooth as a stage magician. "This problem of nonavailability was grasped by only a few during Maxwell's day: William Thomson, Lord Kelvin; Emanuel Clausius. Clausius understood it best of all, perhaps; he wrote that, while the energy of the universe is constant, entropy is always on the increase. Only a handful of the smartest, back then. Today every illiterate clod with an automobile is beginning to get it; every time he sees the price of petrol go up, he sees his world go a little emptier, and a little more mad. So you educated doctors ought to be able to see it. Of all people, you must have seen the signs. Your ward rollbooks should trace the trend: as the power shortage increases, enrollment in your institutions follows along? What are your most recent statistics? One American in five will be treated for mental illness sometime during their lifetimes. What? Did I hear someone say it is now one in four? Ach, don't you see? You are no longer the gentlemen curators of some quaint Bedlam, displaying such mooncalfs as once were accounted rare. You are the wall guards over increasing millions. In ten years it will be one out of three; in thirty years one out of everyone -- millions and millions, and rundown walls in the bargain."
He paused again to catch his breath, swaying with the effort. I noticed Joe was swaying slightly in concert as he stared, like a bird watching a cobra.
"Still, you are true to your duty. You walk your watch, chin high and diplomas shouldered for all to see, though you are secretly certain that if the rabble decides to rush the walls, that roll of paper will be as useless against them as Freud's theories. You are up on that wall armed with only one weapon with any proven firepower. Can anyone tell the rest of the class what that weapon is? Eh? Any guesses? I shall give you a hint: Who is paying the bill for this august gathering?"
No hands went up. The whole hall was spellbound. Finally the old man gave a disgusted snort and unrolled the napkin for all to see: embossed around the border, like a record of registered cattle brands, were all the logos of the convention's sponsors.
"Here's who!" he declared. "The pharmaceutical companies. Their laboratories manufacture your weapon - drugs. They are the munitions dealers and you are their customers. This gathering is their marketplace. Each of those displays downstairs was designed to appeal to your need up on that wall, to convince you that their laboratory can provide you with the most modern ammunition - the very latest in the high-powered tranquilizers! painkillers! mood elevators! muscle relaxants! psychodelics!"
This last category could have been aimed at the table where Joe and I sat, but with those black glasses it was impossible to be sure. "That is all you have in your arsenal," he went on softly, "the only armament known to work on both the demon and the host: a few chemicals - though the host has become a horde, and the demon, he is legion. A few feeble spears and arrows, dipped in a temporary solution to which that horde will soon become immune. Miss Nichswander?"
The blond was already coming through the drapes to retrieve the blackboard. She wheeled it away without a word. The drapery closed behind her, leaving Woofner sucking thoughtfully on his piece of chalk. It was the only sound in the room - not a shuffle or cough or clink else.
"I apologize," Woofner said at length. "I know that at this point in the program one is expected to follow up his diagnosis of the disease with a prognosis for a cure. I am sorry to have to disappoint you. I do not have a cure for your problems up on that wall, and I refuse to offer temporary solutions. I should have made it clear to begin with that I bring you no salvation. All I can do is bring you to your senses, here, in the present. Und if you find that the pressure of this here-and-now is too much for you to bear, ach, then -?" He wagged his head derisively. "Then it is quite an easy task to simply step over the wall and join the happy hippos."
If most of his audience was left in the dark by his closing metaphor, this time at least I was certain: it was a parting shot at none but me. He must have recognized me at my table during his talk and at the hippopotamus tank both, probably even on the Sky Ride. His shoulders sagged and he drew a long ragged breath; he was hunched so low that the sound whistled loudly through the mike. His whole body appeared to shake with the effort, like some kind of holy ruin about to collapse before a gale. Then he took off the pitch-dark glasses; the contrasting beam that burned forth was a shock. The temple roof might have been in ruin but the altar still held its fire, blue as the arc from an electric welder, and as painfully bright. Don't look away if he turns it on you, I told myself. Try to meet it. Sure. Try matching eyes with skull-necklaced Kali. At the first searing touch I bent and focused on the congealing butter sauce around my lobster shell, for whatever unguent the oil might offer.
"So? That is that, yah? Yah, I think so. I thank you all for your attention. Guten Abend und auf wiedersehen! Miss Nichswander?"
When I looked back up she was wheeling him through the velveteen slot.
The Bellevue Revue couldn't understand why their crazyhouse hilarity received even less laughs than it deserved, which was damned little. My leftover lobster was funnier than they were; I was sorry when the waiter took it away. After the banquet broke up, however, the conventioneers set about dispelling the heavy pall the best way they could, by trying to make light of it. The remainder of the evening was spent drinking hard and listening to a lot of lampoons of the Woofner address. His heavy accent made him easy prey to parody. The joking got so uproarious in the wide-open hospitality suite the La Bouche Laboratories had reserved that kindhearted Dr. Mortimer fretted the old man might hear.
"All this ridicule, this loud laughing - what if the poor fellow happened to come by? It could be injurious to someone in his condition."
"This isn't laughing," Joe said. "This is whistling in the graveyard."
It was long after midnight before the revelers wore it out and Mortimer got everybody quieted down enough to listen to Dr. Toocter play his harp. It was the perfect soporific. Within minutes people were yawning good nights and stumbling off toward their rooms.
As much as I'd drunk I was sure I'd drop straight off when I hit the bed, but I didn't. The air of our room seemed too close, the pitchy dark full of racket. The air conditioning throbbed brokenly and Mortimer snored along. I was so tired and dehydrated I could barely think, not even about Woofner. I'll think about him tomorrow. I'll look him up in the morning for a quick hello, then get on the first thing I can find flying west. Tonight all I want is a little sleep and a lot of liquid.
On one of my trips to the bathroom to refill my water glass, I met Joe coming out carrying his. He frowned at me from the crack of light.
"Christ, man, do you really feel it that bad?"
"Not quite," I said. "But I feel it coming."
Joe took me by the arm and pulled me into the bathroom and shut the door. He gave me a big pink tablet from his shaving kit.
"Remedy number one," he prescribed, "is to duck it. Before it hits."
I took the pill without asking any questions. After that I got up only once more, to get rid of some of that liquid. The room was still black but still at last. The broken throbbing had been fixed and Mortimer's bed was quiet as a church. It seemed I had just lain back down when he shook me awake and told me it was Sunday.
"Sunday?" I squinted at the light. My head hammered. "What happened to Saturday?"
"You looked so wasted we decided to let you rest," Joe explained. He was drawing open the drapes. In the cruel light my two roommates looked pretty wasted themselves. Mortimer said I must be hungry but there would be time for a bite of breakfast before our flight; we'd better hurry.
I didn't feel hungry or rested either. I just had a cup of airport coffee and bought a box of Aspergum to have in my shoulder bag - the hammering in my head promised to get louder. Boarding the airplane I confided to Joe that whatever I h
ad ducked seemed to be swinging back for another shot. He sympathized but said that big pink pill had been his last. He gave me a peek in his sample case, though; he'd managed to buy a quart of black rum from one of the Cuban maids.
"Remedy number two: if you can't duck it, try to keep ahead of it."
It was a long sober return flight even with the rum. While Mortimer slept, Joe and I drank steadily, trying to keep ahead of the thing. The rum was gone before we got to Denver. Joe looked at the empty bottle mournfully.
"Yuh done somethin' t' the booze, Hickey," he muttered in a thirties dialect. "What yuh done t' da booze?"
The mutter was for my benefit, but Dr. Mortimer was roused from his doze by the window.
"What's that, Joe?"
"Nothing, Doctor." Joe slid the bottle out of sight. "Just a line that came to me from O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. It's in the last act, after Hickey's given them all 'The Word,' so to speak, and one of the barflies says something to the effect of 'The booze ain't got no kick t' it no more, Hickey. What yuh done t' da booze?' "
"I see," Mortimer answered, and dug his head back into the little airplane pillow. He saw about as well as anybody did, I guessed.
With the help of Aspergum and overpriced airline cocktails I was still in front of the thing when we landed in Portland, but it was closing fast. The banging in my skull heralded it like the rising toll of a storm bell. Mortimer phoned his wife from the airport to have her meet him at the big Standard station on the edge of the hospital grounds. He said he simply did not have the energy to check on the ward just now. Joe said he would do it. Dr. Mortimer gave Joe a grateful smile but allowed as how the nuts had been cracking right along without either of them for two days and nights now; another night probably wouldn't hurt.
"Besides, our guest has to be driven home," he added. "Unless he'd like to lay over a night with us. Devlin? It would give you an opportunity to study the set sketches the producers sent up."