Posts by Dr. Boli
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DEVIL KING KUN.
From the Department of Things We Can’t Leave Well Enough Alone.
—
CHAPTER ONE.
I was sitting up reading late one evening, at the end of what I may truly call in hindsight the last ordinary day of my existence, when my man Banks came padding into the room.
“Excuse me, sir. A gentleman to see you.”
At that moment the clock beside me struck eleven—the last hour I would ever hear it strike.
“Who would be calling at this hour?” I asked. “Well, show him in.”
But that proved unnecessary, as the gentleman in question appeared in the doorway, pushing his way past Banks, who shrugged and padded off into the pantry. It was my old friend and former colleague Norbert Weyland—the square, resolute jaw and piercing blue eyes were unmistakable.
“Good old Peevish!” he greeted me cheerfully, turning out the overhead light. “Didn’t expect me at this hour, did you?” He yanked the desk lamp out of its socket. “In fact, didn’t expect me back from Tierra del Fuego at all, I’ll wager. How are you, old boy?” He stepped into the bathroom for a moment and flushed the night light down the toilet. “You look fit and happy, or at least you did when I could see you. Now, bolt all your doors, lock your windows, nail the cat flap shut, push heavy furniture in front of the vents, stop all your drains, stack telephone books on the toilet lid, and put child safety covers on all your electrical outlets. There. Expeditiously done, old boy, especially in the dark. Now write a note to whom it may concern saying that you’ve moved to Kansas City and taken a job selling beets from a cart with no fixed address. Splendid. I always could rely on you to take directions. And now, I expect you’re wondering what all this is about.”
“A little,” I admitted.
In the dim illumination from the streetlights outside, I could see his silhouette: he was peering intently through the window. “Fact is, I’ve come here on the trail of an archfiend.”
“A what?”
“An archfiend. It’s a bit like an archbishop, but fiendier. Anyway, that’s why I came back from Tierra del Fuego, by way of Sao Paolo, Chittagong, Lagos, Tristan da Cunha, and Monroeville, following his fiendish trail. But now it looks as though the wily devil is on my trail instead. If we’re lucky, I gave him the slip on my way here. If we’re not—well…”
“But who is this fiend? It’s not like you to be rattled like this.”
“He has many names,” Weyland said softly. “Irving Spatz, for one. Alias Manuel Ormsby, alias Rudolphus Cramm, alias Jimmy Smatter the Dancing Barber of the Boulevard of the Allies, alias President James Buchanan, alias Sir George Pickerel-Farmington, alias Blanche ‘Boom Boom’ Helmholtz, alias Weng Fao of the Sûreté, alias the Great Blando; but he is known to his legions of fanatical followers as Kun, the devil king.”
“Why would they follow someone they think of as the devil?”
“He gives them free beer. Do you see the fiendishly intricate brilliance of the man’s mind?”
He turned to face me, or at least it sounded as though he was facing me now. “Peevish, old man, you need to know the facts. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say the future of our race depends on my success.”
“What race is that?” I asked, rather stupidly I fear.
“The African, North and South American, Asian, Australian, European, and Oceanian race. In other words, the non-Andorran race.”
“Well, that’s a strange way of putting it.”
“Not if you know Kun, the devil king. He has sworn destruction or slavery to all non-Andorrans. In his mind, he is the messiah of the Andorran race, a race peculiarly formed of two of the great conquering peoples of the world, and a race as it were distilled and epitomized in himself. His keen Andorran brain combines all the Spanish passion and Jesuitical intellectual precision with all the French dexterity with sauces. He knows that the eighty-five thousand restless Andorrans only await their leader, and he knows that they will be invincible with him at their head.”
“But what kind of name is Kun for a man from Andorra? It doesn’t sound Catalan, or French or Spanish for that matter.”
“We think it’s an acronym.”
“An acronym? But an acronym for what?”
“Ah, Peevish, old boy, if we knew that!”
“And you say this Kun means to enslave us all?” I still found it difficult to believe that such evil could exist in the world.
“Yes, and I have good reason to believe I know where he intends to start. And that’s why I have to warn the archbishop.”
“Who?”
“The archbishop. He’s like an archfiend, but on our side. And that’s where you come in, Peevish, old man. We’ll be needing your car. That, in fact, is why I came to you. No one else drives a car as blandly inconspicuous as yours. It is positively the only vehicle in which we have any chance of reaching our destination.”
“I’ll have Banks bring it round,” I told Weyland; and I immediately rang for Banks.
When I received no reply after half a minute, I rang again. There was still no reply.
I called out. “Banks! Banks, stop lallygagging about and get the car ready!”
Suddenly I felt a hand grip my arm. “Peevish!” Weyland whispered. “Where did you leave Banks?”
“Last time I saw, he was headed for the pantry.”
“Where is the pantry?”
“It’s just back there, through the library and the music room, down the hall past the conservatory and through the dining room. You can’t miss it. It’s a small apartment, after all.”
“Lead the way. I fear the worst.”
I led him through the darkened apartment until at last we reached the pantry, which I announced by saying, “This is the pantry.”
“Put on the light,” he said.
I did.
The scene of horror that met my eyes was so unexpected that at first I could not parse it at all. Banks was there on the floor; or, rather, his legs were there. The rest of him was completely obscured by a gigantic anvil that had evidently been dropped on him from the ceiling. Some of the hoisting tackle was still scattered about the pantry.
“The fiend!” Weyland whispered, with a peculiar combination of frustration and disgust. “I should have known! He got Sir Gregory Pramwheeler the same way.”
“But how did he get an anvil into my apartment? And how did he hoist it and drop it without our hearing it?”
“You see now what we’re up against,” Weyland replied grimly.
—
This story will be continued only if there is sufficient interest. By “interest,” of course, Dr. Boli means his own, not yours.
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: Why does my mom keep asking me “What did I just say?” Has she forgotten already? —Sincerely, Emmanuel Proust, age 7.
Dear Sir: Parental amnesia is surprisingly common, especially in subjects with young children. Your mother has indeed forgotten what she just said, and is hoping that you will repeat it so she can be sure it was not the embarrassing nonsense she fears it might have been. When you do so, she will probably say “that’s right” or something similar in a smug tone of voice, as if she were only “testing” you; but you see through her clumsy bravado. You know that she has a serious problem. You should be prepared with a better answer than the literal truth the next time your mother asks “What did I just say?” For example, you might tell her, “You said that you can’t get hamburgers from a rusty spigot,” or “You told me to grab Aunt Irma’s Parthenon before it gets to Erie.” If you say these things seriously and convincingly enough, you will eventually persuade your mother to get the medical attention she obviously requires.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
DR. BOLI’S COLLECTION OF HANDS.
Perhaps you have a hobby that you never mention to anyone. Perhaps you fear that others might find it a little—what is the best term for it?—creepy.
Dr. Boli has a hobby like that. He collects hands.
Not just any hands. They have to be librarians’ hands, and Dr. Boli collects them from Google Books.
The scanning of thousands upon thousands of books is necessarily done in haste, and with a broad tolerance for error. Usually the librarian, or deputy sub-under-librarian, charged with the scanning is careful; but accidents do happen, and fingers are photographed.
Some of the images are wonderfully artistic—surreal and suggestive—like this blurred hand captured in the act of retreating from the camera. This image tells a whole story, rich with metaphor, about the half-seen truths of other people’s lives, the things we glimpse only occasionally and very briefly before the veil of conventional behavior falls over them again.
More often, though, what we see is just a finger or two in the corner of the image, often in vivid color, because librarians wear brightly colored finger shields when they scan old books, and apparently Google’s algorithms trigger full-color mode when they detect color content in the image:
There seems to be another algorithm that attempts to blur out these straying fingers, with different levels of success, as we see here, where the thumb is clearly visible but the fingers have been clumsily obscured:
Every once in a while, though, we get a magnificent full-page, full-color hand:
These are the rare moments of discovery that make Dr. Boli think life is worth the trouble after all.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
ART NEWS.
Do you have an extra steam turbine taking up space in the basement? Installation artist Eli “Bonkers” Johnson needs it for a new work opening this fall, Autumn Leaves. No compensation can be offered, but a contingent of students from the Creative and Performing Arts High School will remove the object from your basement free of charge.
The Duck Hollow Museum of Art would like to remind patrons of the “no snickering” policy in the contemporary galleries on the second floor. Museum security guards will strictly enforce this policy, and are authorized to use force.
An investigation has determined that custodial staff were responsible for more than $350,000 worth of damage to Another Man’s Treasure, the work by Spanish artist Luis Goya y Hoya y Carambolla in the Mattress Factory that was reported vandalized yesterday. According to the curator, one of the staff explained, “When I see garbage on the floor, I sweep it up.” Staff are working with Mr. Goya y Hoya y Carambolla to restore the work to something close to its original condition. A call for grapefruit rinds, eggshells, and half-empty Chinese takeout containers has gone out to the community, with a gratifying response so far. Meanwhile, a press release from the Mattress Factory states that “philistines” on the custodial staff have been replaced.
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: Yesterday I was in the shower washing my hair with a new “clarifying” shampoo I bought at the Pharm-Aid when suddenly I understood everything. I saw with perfect clarity how democracy makes peace impossible by giving active expression to the unfiltered xenophobia of every drunken barroom orator. I understood how capitalism makes us all complicit in our own oppression, and saw that no alternative to capitalism was possible without absolutism and tyranny. It was transparent to me that politics is nothing but a team sport, in which the colors and rallying cries of the teams are different, but the only thing that matters is winning the game. I saw with crystalline sharpness that Mary Beth from Accounting was only toying with me. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the people who claimed most insistently to speak for Christ or Mohammed were only giving voice to their own selfish prejudices. I understood that our entire economic system is a clumsy fiction in which the value of a person’s life is determined by the tall tales we tell ourselves about what constitutes worth. I saw through all my comfortable illusions, with no veil between me and the pure, unvarnished truth, and my question is how can I make it stop? —Sincerely, Stanislaus Perkins Kennan, Dutchtown.
Dear Sir: Dr. Boli has been telling his friends at the FDA for years that these “clarifying” shampoos need to come with warning labels. At present, unwary consumers may purchase them with no knowledge whatsoever of their potential side effects, with resulting fits of despair that make them, at best, unproductive citizens.
It is fortunate, however, that the antidote is easily obtained. Go back to the drug store and pick out a shampoo with as many irrational claims on the label as you can find—”hydrates,” “invigorates,” “nutritive,” “stimulating,” “fortifies,” “heals traumatized hair,” and so on. These are known in the cosmetics trade as obfuscating shampoos, and they will soon have you sorted out and back to normal.
Dear Dr. Boli: Are you planning anything special to celebrate the two hundredth “Ask Dr. Boli” feature? —Sincerely, A Numerically Inclined Reader in Bloomfield.
Dear Sir or Madam: No.
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: As a devoted homeschooler, I am grieved and offended every time another parent asks me how my son Theobald will learn the social skills vital to a successful adult life. Why do they suppose that homeschooling must be a form of child neglect? Any responsible homeschooler understands the importance of the social aspect of schooling, and I for one will not let my son grow up without the formative experiences every schoolchild ought to have. I steal his lunch from him every day. I often beat him for no reason. I ridicule his choice of clothes and do not neglect to laugh at his funny name. I hire attractive neighbor girls (for a small hourly fee) to sneer at him and reject his advances—pre-emptively if he has not made any. I accuse him of crimes he has not committed; I hold him responsible for faults he cannot avoid. I establish arbitrary rules that I will not reveal to him, and I punish him for violating them. When he exhibits physical changes normal in a growing boy, I make him believe he is a freak of nature. I ask my detractors, is this not an education every bit the equal of what Theobald could get in the finest public school in the country? Let me hear no more questions about my boy’s social adjustment! I can assure you all that he is not missing anything by staying home from school. —Sincerely, Willibald Peach, Ormsby.