Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (37 page)

Harvey and Suzie nodded bleakly.

On the way down to Centre Street, they sat in the back seat of Lieutenant Serpio's car and argued in whispers.

“Show him with a Danish,” Suzie kept whispering.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don't want to.”

“Well, he doesn't believe you. That's plain enough. If you take out a Danish, maybe he'll believe you.”

“No.”

“A hamburger?”

“No.”

Lieutenant Serpio led them into an office where there were a lot of cops in uniform and some not in uniform, and he led them to a bench and said, with some solicitude, “Both of you sit down right here, and just take it easy and don't get nervous. You want anything, you ask that fella over there by the desk.”

Then he went over to the desk and spoke softly to the cop behind it for a minute or so; and then the cop behind the desk came over to Suzie and Harvey and said, “Now just take it easy, and don't get nervous, and everything's going to be all right. You want a prune Danish, Harvey?”

“Why?”

“If you're hungry. Nothing to it. I send the kid out for it, and in five minutes you got a prune Danish. How about it?”

“No,” replied Harvey.

“I think we ought to call our lawyer,” said Suzie.

The cop went away, and Harvey asked her whom she expected to call, since they never had a lawyer.

“I don't know, Harvey. Somebody always calls a lawyer. I'm scared.”

“Either they think I am crazy or they think I am a murderer. That's the way it goes. I wish I had never seen that lousy brother of yours.”

“Harvey, you took the Danish out of the air before my brother set foot in the house.”

“That's right, I did,” said Harvey.

At which moment the Medical Examiner sat facing both Lieutenant Serpio and the Chief of Detectives, and said to them, “It is not a murder, because that large blond tomato was never alive.”

“I'm a busy man,” said the Chief of Detectives. “I have eleven homicides tonight—just tonight on a Sunday night, not to mention two suicides. So don't confuse me.”

“I'm confused.” “Good. Now what have you got on that dead blonde?”

“She is only dead in a technical sense. As I said, she was never alive. She is the incredible construction of a bewildered Dr. Frankenstein or some kind of nut. Mostly on the outside she is all right, except that whoever put her together forgot her toenails. Inside, she has no heart, no kidneys, no liver, no lungs, no circulatory system, and practically no blood, and what blood she has is not blood, because nothing she has is like what it's supposed to be.”

“Then what's inside of her?” Serpio demanded.

“Mostly a sort of crude beefsteak.”

“Just what in hell are you talking about?” demanded the Chief of Detectives.

“You got me,” said the Medical Examiner.

“Come on, come on, I bring you a dead seven-foot blonde that makes you wish you were a single basketball player even when she's dead, and you tell me she never was alive. I seen many tomatoes that are more dead than alive, but there has to be a time when they're alive.”

“Not this one. She hasn't even a proper backbone, so she could not have stood up to save her life, and I think I'll write a paper about her, and if I do I'll get it published in England. You know, it's a funny thing, you can get a paper like that published in England and it commands respect. Not here. By the way, where did you get her?”

“Serpio brought her in.”

“Naked?”

“Just like she is,” Serpio said. “We found her on the floor, stretched out like a lox, in the apartment of two people whose name is Kepplemen. He's an accountant. I got them upstairs.”

“Did you charge them?”

“With what?”

“Absolutely beautiful,” said the Medical Examiner. “You know, you go on with this lousy job for years and nothing really interesting ever comes your way. Now did they say where she came from?”

“This Harvey Kepplemen,” Serpio replied, watching the Chief of Detectives, “says he took her out of the air.”

“Oh?”

“Serpio, what the hell are you talking about?” from the Chief of Detectives.

“That's what he says. He says he takes prune Danish out of the air, and he got her from the same place.”

“Prune Danish?”

“Danish pastry.”

“All right,” the Chief of Detectives said. “I got to figure you're sane and you're not drunk. If you're insane, you get a rest cure. If you're drunk, you get canned. So bring them both to my office.”

“I got to be there,” said the Medical Examiner. “I just got to be there.”

This time Serpio called Harvey Mr. Kepplemen. “Mr. Kepplemen,” he said politely, “the Chief of Detectives wants to see you in his office.”

“I'm tired,” Suzie complained.

“Just a little longer, and maybe we can clear this up—how about that, Mrs. Kepplemen?”

“I want you to know,”. Harvey said, “that nothing like this ever happened to me before. I have good references. I have worked for the same firm for sixteen years.”

“We know that, Mr. Kepplemen. It won't take long.”

A few minutes later they were all gathered in the office of the Chief of Detectives, Harvey and Suzie, Serpio, the Chief of Detectives, and the Medical Examiner. The Chief of Detectives poured coffee.

“Go ahead, Mr. and Mrs. Kepplemen,” he said. “You've had a long day.” His voice was gentle and comforting. “By the way, I am told that you can take Danish pastry out of the air. I can send out for some, but why do that if you can take it out of the air. Right?”

“Well—”

“Harvey doesn't really like to take things out of the air,” Suzie said. “He has a feeling that it's wrong. Isn't that so, Harvey?”

“Well,” Harvey said uneasily, “well—I mean that all my life I never had a talent for anything. My mother was Ruth Kepplemen …” He hesitated, looking from face to face.

“Go on, Harvey,” said the Chief of Detectives. “Whatever you want to tell us.”

“Well, she was an artist. I mean she painted lots of pictures, and she kept telling her friends, Harvey hasn't a creative bone in his body—”

“About the Danish, Harvey?”

“Well, Suzie and I were driving through Baltimore—”

“Detective Serpio told me about that. I was thinking that here we all are with coffee, and it's past midnight, and maybe you'd like to reach out into the air and get us some prune Danish.”

“You don't believe me?” Harvey said unhappily.

“Let's say, we want to believe you, Harvey.”

“That's why we want you to show us, Harvey,” said Serpio, “so we can believe you and wind this up.”

“Just one moment,” the Medical Examiner put in. “Did you ever study biology, Harvey? Physiology? Anatomy?”

Harvey shook his head.

“How come?”

“We kept moving around. I just missed out.”

“I see. Come on, now, Harvey, let's have that Danish.”

Harvey reached out, two feet in front of his nose, and plucked at the air and emerged with air. His face revealed his confusion and disappointment. He plucked a second time and a third time, and each time his fingers were empty.

“Harvey, try water rolls,” Suzie begged him.

He tried water rolls with equal frustration.

“Harvey, concentrate,” Suzie pleaded.

He concentrated, and still his fingers were empty.

“Please, Harvey,” Suzie begged him, and then when she realized it was all to no end, she turned on the policemen and informed them that it was their fault, and threatened to get a lawyer and to sue them and to do all the other things that people threaten to do when they are in a situation such as Suzie was in.

“Serpio, why don't you have a policeman drive the Kepplemens home?” the Chief of Detectives suggested; and when Serpio and Harvey and Suzie had gone, he turned to the Medical Examiner and said that one thing about being a cop was that if you only kept your health, you would see everything.

“Now I have seen everything,” he said, “and tell me, Doc, did you lift any fingerprints off that big tomato downstairs?”

“She hasn't any.”

“Oh?”

“That's the way it crumbles,” said the Medical Examiner. “Every American boy's dream—seven feet high and a size forty-six bust. How do I write a death certificate for something that was never alive?”

“That's your problem. I keep feeling I should have held those two.”

“For what?”

“That's just it. Are you religious, Doc?”

“I sometimes wish I was.”

“What I mean is, I keep thinking this is some kind of miracle.”

“Everything is, birth, death, getting looped.”

“Yeah. Well, make it a Jane Doe DC, and put her in the icebox before the press gets a look. That's all we need.”

“Yeah, that's all we need,” the Medical Examiner agreed.

Meanwhile, back in the four-room apartment, Suzie was weeping and Harvey was attempting to comfort her by explaining that no matter how much he tried, he would have never gotten the ten-dollar-bill problem completely licked.

“Who cares about the damn bills?”

“What then, kitten?”

“Kitten! All these years, and what do you want but an enormous slobbering seven-foot blonde with a forty-six bust.”

“It's just that I never got anything that I really wanted,” Harvey tried to explain.

“Not even me?”

“Except you, kitten.”

Then they went to bed, and everything was about as good as it could be.

14
The Wound

M
ax Gaffey always insisted that the essence of the oil industry could be summed up in a simple statement: the right thing in the wrong place. My wife, Martha, always disliked him and said that he was a spoiler. I suppose he was, but how was he different from any of us in that sense? We were all spoilers, and if we were not the actual thing, we invested in it and thereby became rich. I myself had invested the small nest egg that a college professor puts away in a stock Max Gaffey gave me. It was called Thunder Inc., and the company's function was to use atomic bombs to release natural gas and oil locked up in the vast untouched shale deposits that we have here in the United States.

Oil shale is not a very economical source of oil. The oil is locked up in the shale, and about 60 percent of the total cost of shale oil consists of the laborious methods of mining the shale, crushing it to release the oil, and then disposing of the spent shale.

Gaffey sold to Thunder Inc. an entirely new method, which involved the use of surplus atomic bombs for the release of shale oil. In very simplistic terms, a deep hole is bored in shale-oil deposits. Then an atomic bomb is lowered to the bottom of this hole, after which the hole is plugged and the bomb is detonated. Theoretically, the heat and force of the atomic explosion crushes the shale and releases the oil to fill the underground cavern formed by the gigantic force of the bomb. The oil does not burn because the hole is sealed, and thereby, for a comparatively small cost, untold amounts of oil can be tapped and released—enough perhaps to last until that time when we experience a complete conversion to atomic energy—so vast are the shale deposits.

Such at least was the way Max Gaffey put the proposition to me, in a sort of mutual brain-picking operation. He had the utmost admiration for my knowledge of the earth's crust, and I had an equally profound admiration for his ability to make two or five or ten dollars appear where only one had been before.

My wife dislikes him and his notions, and most of all the proposal to feed atomic bombs into the earth's crust.

“It's wrong,” she said flatly. “I don't know why or how, but this I do know, that everything connected with that wretched bomb is wrong.”

“Yet couldn't you look at this as a sort of salvation?” I argued. “Here we are in these United States with enough atom bombs to destroy life on ten earths the size of ours—and every one of those bombs represents an investment of millions of dollars. I could not agree more when you hold that these bombs are the most hideous and frightful things the mind of man ever conceived.”

“Then how on earth can you speak of salvation?”

“Because so long as those bombs sit here, they represent a constant threat—day and night the threat that some feather-brained general or brainless politician will begin the process of throwing them at our neighbors. But here Gaffey has come up with a peaceful use for the bomb. Don't you see what that means?”

“I'm afraid I don't,” Martha said.

“It means that we can use the damn bombs for something other than suicide—because if this starts, it's the end of mankind. But there are oil-shale and gas-shale deposits all over the earth, and if we can use the bomb to supply man with a century of fuel, not to mention the chemical by-products, we may just find a way to dispose of those filthy bombs.”

“Oh, you don't believe that for a moment,” Martha snorted.

“I do. I certainly do.”

And I think I did. I went over the plans that Gaffey and his associates had worked out, and I could not find any flaw. If the hole were plugged properly, there would be no fallout. We knew that and we had the know-how to plug the hole, and we had proven it in at least twenty underground explosions. The earth tremor would be inconsequential; in spite of the heat, the oil would not ignite, and in spite of the cost of the atom bombs, the savings would be monumental. In fact, Gaffey hinted that some accommodation between the government and Thunder Inc. was in the process of being worked out, and if it went through as planned, the atom bombs might just cost Thunder Inc. nothing at all, the whole thing being in the way of an experiment for the social good.

After all, Thunder Inc. did not own any oil-shale deposits, nor was it in the oil business. It was simply a service organization with the proper know-how, and for a fee—if the process worked—it would release the oil for others. What that fee would be was left unsaid, but Max Gaffey, in return for my consultation, suggested that I might buy a few shares, not only of Thunder Inc., but of General Shale Holdings.