Dear diary,
On the morrow, I enter the emergency room yawning and stretching. There are two bodies on the operating tables with their rib cages open.
“Good morning,” I say to the first body as I pass it, on my way to the coffee machine. “Good morning,” I say to the second body, while rustling its hair.
When I begin to use the noisy coffee-bean grinder, my colleague Toshiro Mifune wakes up and comes out of his bed-chamber rubbing his eyes.
I stop the grinder and say: “Good morning, Doctor Toshiro. Welcome to day number 537 on the Cosmonaut Space Station.” Then I start the grinder again.
When I’m done grinding the coffee beans, Toshiro grunts and sez “That thing is too loud.”
I turn around and say: “Why are you always grunting? You know, the patients have been complaining lately that you handle them un-daintily and growl too much. I think you’re overdoing this whole ‘wild uncouth gruff barbaric medical practitioner’ routine.”
Doctor Toshiro grumbles and sez nothing.
“What. Are you hungover?” I ask sincerely.
Doctor Toshiro makes a mean face and doesn’t even grunt at me.
“Am I going to need to answer the door all day, and attend to every single patient myself, now? Are you planning on giving me the silent treatment?”
My colleague Toshiro’s visage now brightens into a mischievous smile, tho he still refrains from giving a verbal answer.
Now the doorbell rings. I stand and stare at Toshiro, holding my measure of freshly ground coffee beans, and Toshiro stands staring at me defiantly, slightly smirking.
“OK, I’ll get it,” I say, now walking to the entryway with the measure of ground beans outheld stiffly before me.
The glass double-doors spring open, revealing a man with a pistol. He is short.
“Hands up,” he sez.
“Please don’t point that thing at my face,” I reply. “I haven’t had my coffee yet.”
“Listen, mister,” sez the short man, “I’ve got a wife who’s in labor now, and we need the baby delivered, and I’ve heard that you and your colleague are good with swords.”
“Ah, you’re looking to purchase the Caesar Special?” I say, touching the ground beans with the tip of my tongue impatiently.
“No!” the man is trembling with agitation: “NOT ‘purchase’ — I have no money.”
“Ah,” I relax and begin to lick the ground beans from the measuring cup, “that’s no problem at all — tell your wife to come in: I’ll give her a slice on the side and pull the lad right out. No charge; on account of the stickup.”
So, using his gun-toting hand, the man waves his wife in from the outer darkness.
“Ooh, she’s a beaut!” I say, guiding the woman to the surgical amphitheater of our Space Station and positioning her between the two half-finished bodies.
“What are these?” the armed man waves his gun back and forth nervously to indicate the patients that Doctor Toshiro and I were operating on last night before we decided to pause both procedures and get some shuteye.
“That’s Jack, and this here’s Jill,” I say. “No relation to the legendary First Couple who enacted the Fall of Mankind by attaining godhood in exchange for innocence, thus inflaming the envy of their former Master and causing him on impulse to shove them both over the slippery slope into modern mortality — as it is written, ‘Jack fell down and broke his crown / And Jill came tumbling after’; for those were humans, whereas these two are some weird new species of monster.”
“Their bodies look human,” sez the armed man, “I mean, they’re apparently homo sapiens… or at least shaven apes.”
“Well, of course, we had to defeather them before operating,” I explain; “but the one way to tell whether an unknown life form truly shares your species is if it’s able to make you blink teardrops whenever it serenades you. And, believe me, if I were to wake these two clucks up, you’d cover your ears immediately. Their song’s worse than the screeches of seagulls that divebomb phone booths. But, my dear sir, please keep your gun aimed ONLY at my head while I deliver your pregnant wife’s child.”
I then raise my glittering sword, and chop downward to make a skillful incision at the side of the woman’s belly, after administering the proper amount of soothing lotion to prohibit any pain. And the child slithers out: a healthy baby boy who is born fully clothed and speaks North American English.
The formerly pregnant woman now awakes and gasps: “Ooh! What a relief! Sew me up!”
I sew her up, and use my grabber to place the newborn into her arms.
“Can he do computer coding?” she asks.
“Yes,” I smile proudly.
Then the woman reaches forth and presses down upon her husband’s upheld arm, forcing him to holster his pistol. “It’s alright, honey,” she soothes him and begins to drag him toward the exit, “Our child was born with a marketable skill.”
So the couple leaves with their heir, and I return to my colleague Toshiro.
“Did you happen to catch any of that?” I ask.
“Any of what?”
“I just delivered a healthy baby who did not inherit the sin of nakedness.”
“Are you saying that he is the Buddha?”
“I think he is.”
Doctor Toshiro grunts.
“What’s wrong — are you jealous of a tiny child?”
Doctor Toshiro grunts.
“Ah, me too,” I lie.
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