Dear dairy,
Then Doctor Toshiro Mifune and I decide that this nightlong series of housecalls that we have been engaged in since about 2:30 a.m. when I first met him does not offer enough opportunities to set up interior shots of the two of us at desks and wearing fedoras, so we decide to copy what Tolstoy and Jesus and I did in our other book, where the three of us became the owners of a successful fruit stand; except, this time, instead of fruit, Toshiro and I wisely opt to vend health: that is, we open up a business called Ghost Cowboy Medical Professionals. That’s the name that we paid to have chiseled into the frosted glass of our French sliding entry doors. We had an argument about whether to use the word “Cowboy” or “Samurai”, and I won. But we do keep glittering swords instead of shotguns in all the wall-mounted gun-racks which we use for our in-office operations. Or, rather, two of the racks have shotguns (for we need a way to protect ourselves from bank representatives), but all the rest have swords.
So our first few customers are all pregnant women who have gone into labor. We deliver their babies by administering a local anesthetic to their belly area and then using the samurai swords very carefully to make a caesar-slice right where the fruit is ready to fall from the vine, so to speak. And the child slips forth out of the incision as if this whole routine were a waterslide at an amusement park. Seventy-five percent of our first patients actually remark in awe “That was fun!” and ask Toshiro and I if we can let their child “do it again” — so we oblige them by carefully fitting the infant back into the tummy chamber and then pretending to welcome it to life again; and the magic of this rebirth — which we include without extra charge, simply to please our customers — is that the laughing babe free-falls out of the jackpot slot the second time accompanied by a river of golden coins, all bearing the divine image of Julius Caesar.
“Good thing we bought a burgundy wet-rug to cover the center of our business office,” I say; “otherwise we’d have a lot of mopping up to do, with all the blood and all.” I refer to the afterbirth.
“Medical procedures requiring invasive surgery can be messy,” replies Doctor Toshiro, “but, yes, it’s lucky that the color of the fluids that tend to splash onto the floor of our rented office here just happen to blend in with the natural color of this rug. So, I agree.”
Then we both wipe the gore from our respective brows with the respective sleeves of our respective trench-coats, and we adjust our respective fedoras while we sit back down behind our respective desks.
Soon the black rotary telephone starts to ring loudly. “Hello?” sez Toshiro. “Yes? ...Yes? ...Yes? ...Yes? ...Yes? ...OK, we’ll welcome you at the door. My friend Doctor Bryan and I will give you a thorough examination.”
When Doctor Toshiro hangs up the receiver, I ask: “Who was that?”
“Another patient,” he replies. “It’s a beautiful woman. She’s in distress. I told her to stop by.”
“Ah,” I nod. “Sounds important.”
“It is.”
“Maybe her husband got murdered recently, and she’s one of the prime suspects, therefore she’s angst-ridden.”
“No, not that,” sez Toshiro. “At least, she didn’t sound like someone who would let jealousy drive her to slay a person she loves.”
“But my point,” I say, in exasperation, “is that she never really loved her husband in the first place. She only married him for his money, and she’ll only get her hands on THAT when the fool kicks off.”
“Kicks off?”
“Yeah: kicks the bucket — you know: when the guy bleeds to death from all the knife wounds that his wife gave him, and NOT in the heat of passion or from jealousy, but after coldly calculating what place on the body to stab (the chest, specifically the heart) and how many times (at least one hundred) — only THEN can she get her mitts on the loot, which is to say: the insurance money, as well as custody to their children, or whatever...”
Now the door of our office opens, and a gorgeous damsel emerges from the darkness. “Hi there,” she sez, very breathily.
“Good evening — or good morning, rather,” I stand up from my swivel chair and put out my cigarette.
“Greetings, mademoiselle,” sez Toshiro, arising from his desk also and extinguishing his cigarette in a bronze ashtray. “Are you the one who just called on the telephone?”
“I am,” smiles the damsel.
We all three pause awkwardly for a moment and just stare at each other.
“Well,” sez the damsel, “shall we begin the examination?” She removes her coat and Toshiro jumps forward to take it.
“I wasn’t on the line when you explained the reason for your visit,” I say. “Could you maybe brief me? — you know: cue me in, or at least give me a hint about what you’re expecting to happen today? After all, this is a medical facility: we do operations here, right the floor — complex surgeries, mostly — and it’s not our custom to cut people open and explore their internal ornamentation for no good reason.” I twiddle my thumbs. “Do you catch my drift?”
The woman laughs. “Everything will turn out fine, don’t worry. Just trust me.”
“OK, but you still haven’t explained what you’re here for,” I say.
“I’m not nervous at all,” she replies. “Not even one bit.”
I now pull Toshiro aside by the sleeve of his trench-coat. When I do this, his fedora slides down over his eyes, and he presses it back again so that he can see me when I say: “I’m not sure we should get involved with this one, Doc. It’s generally a bad idea to just poke and prod around aimlessly inside a living cadaver. And this dame seems like she came here solely to have a good time — I don’t believe she’s interested in being operated upon: I think that she presumes she’ll be able to seduce us before we have a chance to swing our swords, and then in fourteen months she’ll show up at our door again desiring another session, because this time she’ll have adopted a child whose fathers are some other team of doctors who refuse to admit to all their malpractice (no doubt the kid was raised from a petri dish, as some sort of lab experiment), and thus she’ll try to blame the horrid act of fleshly regeneration upon us, even tho you and I are strictly against doing wrong — we even advertise ourselves as anti-evil, despite the fact that it was you and I, Toshiro, and NOT GOD, who invented Life Itself. Don’t shake your head: don’t try to deny it: it’s obvious we’re guilty of this crime: there’s video evidence — we DID create the phenomenon of existence. (You and I personally spearheaded the campaign to establish the farce of reproduction which led to the gender duopoly, I mean.) And when we try to prove this woman wrong by noting the incompatibility of OUR diaries with HER diaries, not to mention all the diaries of our jealous rivals, plus all the diary-length critical studies that will have been published in the meantime in an attempt by our detractors to muddy the waters, this dame will just force us to take a rigged paternity test that shall prove to the celestial court that we are guilty of the original sin — you know what I’m talking about: eating the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden. (Lo, did not our local news rag, The Star Tribune, print all the details?) You can’t tell me that you already forgot all the fun times we had between housecalls earlier last night.”
“Calm down, Bry,” Doctor Toshiro pats my shoulder, “I think that everything will turn out perfectly fine, just like Mrs. Butterworth sez.”
And, as much as I hate to admit it, my colleague Toshiro Mifune and our seductive patient, who goes by the name Mrs. Butterworth, were both correct when they predicted that this episode would lack any climax. For, all that happened was that we measured Mrs. Butterworth’s blood pressure, and then we tapped her knees with a mallet to admire their pitch-perfect reflex.
“You’re good to go,” announces Doctor Toshiro.
“That’s all?” the beautiful woman looks like she expected that she would end up making love to at least one of us.
“That’s ALL,” I say. “Now run on home and kiss that husband of yours.”
“My husband’s dead.”
After politely nudging the woman out of our frosted front French doors, I make the “dusting off one’s hands after a job well done” gesture and drape my arm around Doctor Toshiro Mifune. Then I reach into the secret pocket of my trench coat and retrieve some official paperwork, which I hold forth for my colleague to inspect.
“What’s this?” sez Doctor Toshiro. “You stole Mrs. Butterworth’s identification papers?”
“That I did,” I admit, very smugly.
I can’t remember whether the event comes before or after this present episode, but, in another one of my novels, I end up using Mrs. Butterworth’s personal I.D. to gain access to some spy-level secrets… either that or to pass a checkpoint or something — honestly, I’m writing all these masterworks too fast to recall exactly what impact this accomplishment had on the master-plot that runs thru everything I compose; all I know is that my act of securing a false identity for myself is a crucial development.
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