My 4th housecall

[Cont.]

Arriving in Boston at about the time when I normally have my ninetieth drink of the day, I ask Toshiro if he wouldn’t mind stopping at a pub to get some saké. He sez: 

“Not at all — I think that that’s an excellent idea.”

So we get drunk, and then we go to perform our next housecall.

“Welcome,” sez the mechanical butler of the mansion that we just rang the doorbell of. “Please enter.” 

So we are led thru a maze of hallways until we end up at a bed. Lying under the covers is a beautiful foreign princess. 

“What seems to be the problem?” I begin my medical inquiry.

A maid who is standing near the bed answers for the princess: “Madame cannot stop sneezing.”

I glare at the maid, because at first I’m angry that she spoke instead of the gorgeous foreign princess, but then my look softens when I realize that the same actress is playing both roles. “Please, I would prefer if the princess answered for herself,” I say. 

“We need to hear it from the horse’s mouth,” adds Toshiro.

“But Madame cannot speak English,” the maid replies. “She is a princess, very attractive (as you can see), who came here on a ship from a faraway land.”

“But what is a foreign princess doing in Boston?” I ask.

“She had become a nuisance to her parents, the King and Queen, because her beauty caused all the people of the land to send letters of admiration to the princess continually — the royal mail-bags overflowed with declarations of love: the amount of letters threatened to flood the entire kingdom — so they sent the princess away, to come and live her life in the U.S., where aesthetics are unimportant and the only thing that matters is money. But now poor Madame cannot stop sneezing.”

I gaze again at the face of the sleeping foreign princess and fall in love. “But I haven’t heard her sneeze even a single time, since my nurse and I arrived — have you detected any sneezing, Doctor Toshiro?”

“No sneezing. Achoo!” Toshiro sneezes. “That was me,” he adds. 

“God bless you,” the maid and I murmur in unison.

Now I rise to my feet, after checking the pulse of the bedridden beauty: “Well, it looks as if your princess is cured. Call us again, if she ever awakes — I’d love to talk to her directly. In the meantime, stay healthy and preserve yourself on celluloid so that your soul does not age.” Then I grab Toshiro by the arm and we proceed at a professional pace toward the bedroom’s exit. 

Before leaving, however, Toshiro stops and turns around. He thinks in silence for a moment, apparently trying to find the right words for what he wants to express; and then he shouts: 

“One final question. Has your princess EVER awakened? Or is she the infamous Sleeping Beauty?”

The maid blushes and answers nothing. She shrugs and shakes her head, not knowing what to do, because these lines that Toshiro improvised are not in the script.

“Doctor Bryan,” shouts Toshiro, “go and kiss the pretty princess on the lips. My scientific hypothesis is that this act shall awaken her.”

Now I myself shrug and shake my head noncommittally; then I begin to pace back toward the bed where the damsel is lying. When I’m about halfway there, the foreign princess bolts up and exclaims, in a strange tongue that nobody understands but which is subtitled in English: 

“Ay me! What a strange dream I just had. The plot was simply climax after climax — this pure bliss seemed likely to go on forever... But then suddenly I awoke; and now I am cured!”

§

So Toshiro and I collect our fee, which is four drachmas apiece, and we visit a local tavern to spend our earnings on drink; but, when the bartender who approaches to serve us keels over in sudden pain and bumps his head on one of the levers that dispenses beer on tap, thus causing him to faint, as soon as the amber liquid begins streaming into his mouth, threatening to drown the man, Toshiro and I dash over and pull back the tap-beer’s handle, to stop the flow; then we very lightly and daintily slap the sides of each of the cheeks on our bartender’s face until he revives. 

“You’ve had a hard fall,” I say to the man. 

“We must unclog your arteries,” adds Toshiro. 

Then we adjust the bartender’s position on the floor and cut open his collared shirt with half a scissor that we found on the ground nearby. Now my colleague, Doctor Toshiro Mifune, plunges his fist into the man’s bare chest and fixes his heart, while a dove from the heavens comes down at that instant and hovers near my colleague’s face, offering a fresh heart that was taken from one of the Christ-clones to replace what it assumes was a faulty organ; but Toshiro waves off the annoying bird while cursing and shouting: “Take it back! I don’t want any extra pumps — this one is still fine; it just needs a good cleaning.” 

So we save our bartender, and he springs back to life and cheerfully serves us our beverages. “With the tubes of my heart no longer clogged up with gunk, I have limitless energy” our server rejoices: “I feel newly reborn — as if I’m an illiterate ne’er-do-well again!”

“You are,” Toshiro winks, and this action is accompanied by the sound effect that’s traditionally used when a cartoon character gets bonked on the head. The result is humorous.