Dear diary,
Now enough time passes to help us all forget everything that happened previously. We are centered upon the present moment. I am seated in the swivel chair before my desk in our medical office in Antarctica, and my nurse Doctor Toshiro is seated in his own swivel chair before his own desk. Both of us are waiting for the next patient to show up and ask for help.
Suddenly we hear a knocking noise that’s insistent and repetitive.
“Do you hear that?” I say to Doctor Toshiro. “It sounds like the bony hand of a skeleton rapping against wooden floorboards. We didn’t attempt to murder anyone recently and bury their still-living corpse underneath our main office, did we?”
“Not that I remember,” grunts Toshiro. “But much time has passed since we engaged in any foul play, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we found a revenant trying to tunnel into our medical facility from beneath the earth’s crust, like a tree root — he or she might have even escaped from jail. As we know, forty percent of ex convicts live in the underworld.”
I grab the pickaxe and the lantern that are leaning against my desktop computer. “Well, there’s only one way to find out, and that’s to begin to hack away at the flooring. I sure hope this is easy — for, if there’s one thing I cannot stand, it’s an honest day’s work.”
Toshiro grabs his pickaxe and lantern as well, and we both begin to pry up our clinic’s floorboards.
When the wooden floor has been ripped up, I point downwards at the place where we’ve been digging and say: “Look! a coffin!”
Doctor Toshiro helps me develop a chain-pulley mechanism, which we employ to lift the coffin onto the non-damaged part of our office’s floor.
“Would you like to do the honors?” I gesture toward the lid.
“Sure,” grunts Toshiro.
The coffin’s lid is removed, revealing a perfectly preserved human body within. It is a gentleman, very distinguished in appearance, who looks peacefully asleep: his arms are folded over his chest.
“Oh my gosh,” I gasp, “it’s Count Tolstoy! Yet he’s not clawing at the interior of his burial place or rapping with his knuckles on our floorboards — meanwhile, that awful, insistent knocking noise still fills the air.” Now I turn and face Toshiro directly and say: “What do you think is the solution to this enigma?”
Toshiro looks over at our front glass double doors and points and sez: “My guess is that our entryway’s automatic opener must have jammed.”
Now we glance at the security monitor, which presents a shot from outside of our office, revealing that it’s the living Leo Tolstoy (not the one in the coffin) standing there, rapping and rapping with his knuckles against the opposite side of the glass of our frosted French double-doors.
“Hold your horses,” I say; “we’re coming!”
Doctor Toshiro hastens forth with me and helps me pry our entry doors slightly open.
“Sorry,” I say to our visitor, “the mechanical opener must have malfunctioned, or the sensor is dirty or something… Oh, here I see that the ‘lock’ switch is still engaged — we must have forgotten to flip it to the ‘unlock’ position this morning.” I now hit the switch, and the doors glide open the rest of the way freely. “Now, what brings you here to our clinic, O physician — I’m dying to know: for I say that WE have need to be healed of THEE, and yet THOU comest to US!? (This is my nurse, Doctor Toshiro Mifune, by the way.) And what are you doing alive and well, out here at the entryway, when Tee and I just dug up a coffin that had you inside?”
Tolstoy’s eyes grow wide: “Do NOT open that coffin.”
“You’re a little late,” grunts Toshiro; “for we already did.”
“Then shut it immediately, and bury it fifty fathoms under the earth — that’s my undead soul, you fools! Long ago, before even the dinosaurs usurped Eden from us, I had it planted here, at the dead center of Antarctica, underneath your medical clinic.”
Toshiro nods and goes and seals the coffin, nailing it down with a hammer; then he and I carefully reposition it in the ground and shovel the dirt back in and replace all the floorboards.
“There: just like new,” I say. “Now what was the reason for your visit?”
“I wanted to thank you in person,” sez Leo Tolstoy, “for what you did to improve my composition The Death of Ivan Ilych. At first I was enraged at the vulgarity of your idea, allowing my protagonist to live out his days in peaceful health, as a smug judge who is rather distant from his unloved wife and family; but then, when I read your version over again, it began to grow on me, and I realized that you might be on to something: there’s an evil charm to the thing now — it’s like a warning, some sort of bitter pill… It leaves one with a desire to commit self-slaughter. And that is, I think, a far better outcome than the original story presented. So, although I am a much, much, much, much, much better writer than you will ever be, I do acknowledge that, in this instance, the tampering that you and your God did to my manuscript managed to augment its genius in a way that is not altogether detrimental. So, congratulations — at the very least, you got a rise out of me: it’s hard to do that, nowadays.”
“Oh, dear Count!” I bow and embrace his legs, bathing his boots with my tears. “Thank you, thank you! Your kind words mean the world to me!”
Leo Tolstoy allows me to worship him for a great deal of time. Then, when I’m all out of teardrops, I arise and announce:
“The idea that came to me, while I was kneeling and extolling you just now, is that it would be nice if you, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, would allow me to scientifically fuse your identity (both mind and body) together with my colleague here, Doctor Toshiro Mifune, so that both of ye can be merged into one single being. That way, the barbaric exuberance of Toshiro would be amalgamated with your aristocratic humanity, O noble Count. Yes, I think the resultant monster might prove to possess more charisma than either of you could ever dream of enjoying on your own — and, best of all, the finished product will be made of ruby glass. So, what do you say? Will you each lie upon these tables and allow me to manacle your extremities?”
Toshiro and Tolstoy agree that my plan is the best way to proceed in a novel whose author is me and not them. So I shackle my beloved colleague to one of the metallic slabs, whose bracelets are connected by wires to the neighboring slab, upon which I shackle the Count. This is the familiar setup from old monster movies, where you gather two folks that you want to make a mix of, and you place them onto electrical beds and then yank the huge scary lever from the “SAFE” position to the position labeled “TERROR EVERYWHERE” [“magor-missabib”; see Jeremiah 20:3], which causes lightning from God to fire down and bless your illicit miracle.
So that’s how I created my new best friend, whom I named Tolsteer-Yoshi.
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