The Book of Counted Sorrows Read online

  Eventually the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals became suspicious after Heff and Bea adopted 3,624 cats from various animal shelters in the greater Los Angeles area. When the ASPCA representative paid a surprise visit and interrupted Hisser at dinner - a live-cat sandwich and a side of carrot slaw - the jig was up. By order of the court, the child was made a ward of the state and was conveyed to the compassionate but high-security facility known as the Malibu Home for Monstrous and Dangerous Mutant Children.

  To us, in this more enlightened age, it seems all but impossible to believe that mutant children, regardless of how monstrous or how dangerous, would ever forcibly be separated from their parents and kept in a locked facility. We now understand that the right thing to do is embrace even the most monstrous and dangerous mutants - nay, not merely embrace them but celebrate them - in recognition of our awareness that there is a little of the mutant in every one of us, even if we don't eat live cats, the brains of unwary schoolteachers, or masses of steaming cow guts. In that intolerant and ignorant era, however, all dangerous mutant children were sequestered, men were expected to be courteous to women, women were expected not to discuss gynecological problems over dinner in a fine restaurant, and all non-mutant children uniformly respected their elders and never used the word ass in any context whatsoever. We have come a long way, and we have every reason to be proud.

  The court-ordered seizure of Hisser was the blow that destroyed the Heffalope marriage. After the divorce, Bea at first resumed her career as a female wrestler, but soon she disappeared from human ken. Heff struggled to earn a few dollars here and there, writing doggerel for tawdry magazines about naked female scientists and for other tawdry magazines about busty blonde philosophers. (Pornography was illegal in those days, very much underground, and salacious material had to be disguised as publications with redeeming social purpose. Fortunately for pornographers, most of the upstanding citizens were so innocent and naive that the thinnest tissue of serious intention could convince them that a collection of photos of bare-naked women fondling themselves was entirely pure if a microscope or Bunsen burner, or volume of Plato's writings, were included in each shot.)

  Sickened by the venereal verse that he composed for these sleazy rags, and inspired by something that he had read in The Book of Counted Sorrows (which was at that time in his possession), Heff fled to a shabby room in a shabby seaside motel in a shabby beach town on the magnificent Pacific coast and in one week wrote Ode to My Mutant Child in 754 rhyming quatrains. The film rights sold immediately to Orson Welles for $612,004, a colossal fortune in those days, and not exactly chump change in our own time.

  This astonishing good fortune had a profound effect on Heff. He confided to friends that for the first time in his life, he did not feel doomed, and to those enemies who knew him as Alope, he confided the same thing. A cloud had lifted from him. A dark storm had at last passed through and moved on. A slough of despond had drained. His sinuses were clearer, too, and he credited the wisdom of The Book of Counted Sorrows for all these improvements in his life. He purchased a fine house in the flats of Beverly Hills, made plans to marry a pretty and good-hearted former high-school sweetheart named Tess, purchased a cute little kitten with no intention of feeding it to a mutant, acquired a brighter and more cheerful wardrobe than the black robes that had been his usual attire, and in September, 1939, he began work on Ode to My Wrestler Wife: Good Riddance and Goodbye, which sold to films for $806,045 on the basis of the first eight rhyming lines and a two-word synopsis.

  In early October, 1939, his head exploded. This was as great a disappointment to his friends as it was good news to his enemies, but the most profound effect was on the tender members of the children's choir in front of whom it occurred. Because Heff always had as great an interest in music as in doom, and because his newfound optimism motivated him to give something back to his community, he had become the unpaid and highly enthusiastic director of the choir at Our Ladv of the Timid Waifs Orphanage. The orphans were indeed waifs, and timid; consequently, the horrid spectacle of Heff's exploding head traumatized them so thoroughly that most never sang again, and one of them was unable to pee for a week, though all the others peed a split second subsequent to poor Heff's violent self-decapitation. And peed copiously, I might add.

  In Heff's defense, if he'd known that his head was going to explode, he would doubtlessly have arranged to be elsewhere: maybe home alone or on the beach, perhaps in a rose garden or at a dime-a-dance hall in the arms of a lovely and coquettish stranger. He would never have intentionally detonated in front of children. After all, no one can reasonably be expected to anticipate such a thing as a head explosion, and the Los Angeles Times, as usual, was judgmental and sensationalistic when it headlined the story IRRESPONSIBLE POET TRAUMATIZES ORPHAN WAIFS WITH EXPLOSIVE DENOGGINIZATION, recalling their equally shabby treatment of Langford Crispin.

  Upon his death, Heff's considerable fortune - enhanced by wise investments in Human Stupidity Bonds, the value of which soar with the rise of stupi ditv in the species, but fall with any indication of increasing human wisdom - was inherited by his only child, Hisser Heffalope, ward of the state. At the age of eighteen, having survived into more enlightened times, Hisser was released into society. It became a wildly successful criminal defense attorney, specializing in clients who were wealthy serial killers; Hisser won not-guilty-by-reason-of-entertaining-legal-defense verdicts for the most savage, unremorseful, bloody-minded, and ill-dressed murderers of its time, winning kudos, plaudits, accolades, and prize Cadi1lacs from the wards committee of the hoity-toity American Bar Association. Hisser also pioneered the profitable practice of suing the grieving families of a killer's Victims for damages, sucking them drier than an empty coconut husk. A secondary career as a cat rancher was far less successful, because Hisser routinely ate the profits.

  Fortunately for the fate of mankind, The Book of Counted Sorrows did not fall into Hisser's several hands upon Addison Heffalope's choir-traumatizing death, but was reacquired by Ed Thomas, the Orange County rare-book dealer. By this time, Thomas was no longer operating out of a converted burlesque theater. He had moved his business into a former whorehouse that for decades had specialized in providing midget prostitutes for sailors of equally diminutive stature.

  (A parenthetical aside: The term "midget prostitute," much in use in the 1930s, is not one we would use these days. Now we would say "height-challenged hooker." or perhaps "pocket Venus, if we were of a poetic bent, or possibly even "very small, not to say unusually small, not to say remarkably small, lady of the night.")

  This whorehouse, by now a shop called Book Orgy, in a commercial district overlooking Newport Harbor, was a wonderfully atmospheric structure of many rooms, all filled with treasures upon treasures of magnificent books, and conducive to leisurely browsing, especially because the omnipresent odor, though as odd as that in the burlesque house, was frequently more appealing. Thomas, always present and assisted by his charming wife Pitty, was more of a host and friend to his customers than he was a retailer. By all accounts, he was an affable man and happy in his work, though he might have been dour if he had known that three years hence, in 1942, he would be run down by that 30,000-pound Acme steamroller and squashed flatter than a page of onionskin paper. Customers spent hours in this charming former bordello for midget prostitutes and height-challenged sailors, roaming room to room, and not one ever complained that the five-foot-high ceilings required them to browse on their hands and knees. If from time to time a small but highly aroused and extremely agitated sailor burst into the shop, looking for action and exhibiting little or no appreciation for literature... Well, this was no more awkward for Ed and Pitty than when they had been obliged to deal with the elderly strippers who had shown up at the former burlesque house, down on their luck and offering to take off their clothes for two dollars.

  In 1941, Ed Thomas sold The Book of Counted Sorrows to Clete Reet, a breathtakingly stylish and hugely successful b
ig-band leader who was as famous in his time as Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, but who is now, sadly, as forgotten as Cream-'o-Chaff, once the most popular breakfast cereal in America. On stage and off, Reet dressed the same, in top hat and tuxedo and white silk scarf, as if he had stepped off the cover of Vanity Fair. An Art Deco icon, he went everywhere with two elegant borzoi hounds on leashes, smoking a slim cigarette in a six-inch carved-ivory holder, with a monocle over his left eye - and with an incredibly witty wisecrack always on his lips, as was expected from every icon in that glittering era. In our own time, of course, icons are expected only to be surly, grunt out half-articulate sentences, scratch their crotches, and whine about their inadequacies and addictions on boring talk shows hosted by butt-kissing celebritymongers.

  During the first year that he owned Counted Sorrows, overwhelmed by the demands of being an icon, with little time to read, Clete Reet sampled only a few of the verses in the book. In 1942, however, he became obsessed with the volume. He read it more than a hundred times, cover to cover, backwards, forwards, upside down, with monocle and without, abed and afoot, tipsy and sober, to his dogs with a keen eye for their reactions, at a distance of twenty feet with the assistance of high-quality binoculars - and finally at a distance of only sixteen feet but still with binoculars, this time bending forward from the waist, looking backward between his legs.

  Two months after Ed Thomas met his end in a delicate dance of death with 30,000 pounds of rolling doom, on the fateful night of December 10, 1942, while having dinner at the Brown Derby, Clete Reet - dining with the suave William Powell and the delightful Myrna Loy, with dancer extraordinaire Fred Astaire and the incomparable Ginger Rogers - suddenly sat bolt upright in his chair and swallowed his tongue, whereafter he swallowed his teeth, his lips, his chin, his nose, the remainder of his face and skull, his neck complete with wing collar and black tuxedo tie, his shoulders, both arms, then his torso, his hips, his legs, and his feet, shoes and all, until nothing remained of him but a toothless red pulsing orifice. This toothless red pulsing orifice hungrily sucked in three poppy-seed dinner rolls, a champagne flute filled with Dom Perignon, Ginger Rogers' exquisite pearl necklace, one of William Powell's cufflinks, and a hapless busboy before at last imploding on itself and vanishing with a rude noise that would have embarrassed the stylish and impeccably well-mannered Mr. Reet if he had still been alive to hear it.

  Clete Reet's last will and testament bequeathed his estate to his sister, one "Miss Scuttlesby," of Ennui Plains, Kansas. This third female Scuttlesby with no first name might seem significant, but I am assured by our Mrs. Scuttlesby (whose assurances have the fearsome conviction and the blistering heat of a long burst of hard radiation from a malfunctioning nuclear-power plant) that Reet's sister was no relation of hers. I also do not believe that Reet's sister was related to Langford Crispin's clothespin-on-the-nose housekeeper, the other Mrs. Scuttlesby, because the nine private detectives that I sent to the once bustling town of Ennui Plains, in search of leads, discovered nothing along those lines before they all perished, one by one, in a series of tornadoes. No, the appearance in this story of the three Scuttlesby women without Christian names is just one of those amazing coincidences that litter our lives, but which I, as a novelist, could never use in a work of fiction, lest I be criticized for perpetrating a plot full of improbabilities.

  By the way, I say "once bustling," as regards Ennui Plains, because the town no longer exists. Shortly after Clete Reet's will was probated and after the full sum of the inheritance was settled upon his beloved sister, something catastrophic happened to this picturesque prairie hamlet. I say "something catastrophic," because I have insufficient information to be more specific. On the morning that Miss Scuttlesby was to leave on vacation, Ennui Plains ceased to exist. No smallest splinter or stone of the community was ever found, no roof shingle or bent rusty nail, not one shattered teacup or one dented soup pot, not one severed finger or mangled foot belonging to a resident, not one pile of steaming guts or even one freestanding kidney. Ennui Plains had simply vanished. Some scientists speculate that the town spun away into a time vortex, while others suspect that it came into contact with an anti-matter Ennui Plains and was swiveled into an alternate universe; theologians, however, believe that God used Ennui Plains as a cosmic Kleenex, filling it with a great wad of divine snot and tossing it away into deep space. Any of these explanations might be correct, although the truth is most likely stranger still.

  In any event, I have not been able to trace Miss Scuttlesby, the big-band heiress, from that fateful moment. Perhaps she disappeared along with Ennui Plains. If she left on vacation just prior to the catastrophe, I've no way to discover her whereabouts, for any of her neighbors or friends who may have had knowledge of her travel plans have themselves vanished into a void.

  Where was I?

  Who am I?

  From whence come I?

  Wither do I go?

  Wherefore art my thumbs?

  Is there balm in Gilead?

  Where is Gilead?

  What is balm?

  How much does it cost?

  Has it been approved for sale by the FDA?

  Is it available in a cheaper generic form?

  Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

  Who shot Liberty Valance?

  Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  Who's who?

  What's what?

  How's that?

  Why did the chicken cross the road?

  Or did the egg cross it first?

  Where did the egg go when it got to the other side?

  Do you want fries with that?

  Do you think this mole looks funny?

  I mean, not funny-ha-ha, but funny as in funny-creepy?

  Why do fools fall in love?

  Why ask why?

  Why not ask why?

  Who are you to tell me what to ask and not ask?

  Where do you get off ?

  For that matter, where do you get on?

  Does that feel good?

  What about this?

  Hmmmmm?

  And this?

  Do you want to find a motel?

  In a real dark night of the soul, is it always three o'clock in the morning?

  Or sometimes is it more like 2:45?

  What time is it?

  What is time, anyway?

  Is time a dimension or a force, or entirely an illusion?

  Does my Wristwatch serve any important purpose other than to reinforce a delusion that time matters?

  What time are we leaving?

  Wither do I go?

  From whence come I?

  Who am I?

  Where was I?

  Oh, yes, Clete Reet swallowed himself in the Brown Derby, the heiress sister disappeared with Ennui Plains, and The Book of Counted Sorrows was not reacquired by Ed Thomas because he had by then been crushed under a steamroller driven by a coyote. But by diverse means far too diverse to divine, the magical and dangerous volume passed through the hands of a series of bibliophiles, always bringing with it the curse of too much knowledge, and leaving a trail of frightful destruction from 1942 until the present day.

  I need a massage.

  7

  Bruno Kronk, Masseur Extraordinaire and Monkey Mechanic.

  Bruno Kronk's mother was the best friend of my second cousin twice removed. Please understand: The cousin was twice removed, not Bruno's mother, and as far as that goes, the cousin was brought back twice, as well, after being removed, although by a majority vote of the family, she was removed yet a third time and never brought back again.

  Bruno's mother, Brunetta, was an attractive but hulking woman, who drew whistles from lumberjacks, though they were as likely to be whistles of respect as whistles of romantic intention. She could bench-press a 400-pound Sumo wrestler, whether he wanted to be bench-pressed or not, and as a consequence, she was not welcome in Japan. As far as lumberjacks went, she could bench-press them, as well, two
at a time, even while eating a breakfast of buckwheat cakes in garlic syrup, and she could fell a mighty redwood with her breath.

  Brunetta left home at the age of seventeen with twelve dollars and a suitcase full of shoes, determined to see the world, every remote nook and crevice of it, but she returned at eighteen, barefoot and six months pregnant. Trailing behind her was Babe the Blue Ox, bigger than a house and bluer than one of the sleazy sex-and-science magazines for which Addison Heffalope, the doomed poet, wrote erotic doggerel. Brunetta's mother, Brunhilde, was certain that the father of the unborn child must be the owner of Babe: Paul Bunyan, the legendary giant lumberjack and American folk hero, who was also an infamous womanizer. (Do you want to see my Douglas fir, baby? How about a little log-rolling contest, sweetie? Believe me, this is a side of Bunyan that you don't want to explore.) Brunetta's father, Brunplotz, whose friends affectionately called him Plotzie, would have traced Bunyan down and either killed him or done something unimaginablv more brutal; however, Brunetta managed to persuade him that she had not been impregnated by the giant lumberjack but by Big Foot. Because Big Foot is mysterious in the extreme, as elusive as a ghost, and most likely mythical, Plotzie reluctantly conceded that a quest for revenge would be futile. Thus he resigned himself to living with the shame of his precious daughter's dishonor. Tree months thereafter, the family was left without vengeance but with little Bruno and a lifetime supply of blue sausages.