Part 4

During the next three and a half months before the first Wishing Day on August 24th, my Lemures Stone was constantly on my mind. I worried about losing it, so I did not carry it with me. I kept it in a secret drawer in an old desk at my apartment, and the first thing I did every day when I came home from work was to look in the drawer to make sure it was there and that it was allright. I took to kissing it and talking to it like it was a pet. Years later, when "pet rocks" came into fashion, all I had to say was, as the saying goes, "Been there, done that." I had completely lost all of my apprehensions about the Spell of the Lemures and decided that the noise from dead man upstairs had actually come from another apartment on that floor. That easily could have happened: in big high-rise buildings sound can travel through the steel beams and ductwork and appear to come from somewhere entirely different from its source.

I once had a lady complain to me that her husband was kept awake by my wife walking around all night in her high heels. When I told her I didn't have a wife, she said it must have been me. I told her that I didn't wear high heels. She said that her brother wore high heels. I told her that I had carpets in every room. She asked me what about the closets. I told her that even if I wore high heels, I wouldn't be walking around all night in the closet. Or in the tub. Or on the kitchen counter or any of the other places she suggested. She finally complained to the management, and I ended up carpeting my closets and submitting to an inspection for high heels and tap-dancing shoes and whatever else she suspected me of wearing. Her husband told me if I didn't stop prancing around and keeping him up, he was going to shoot me. He actually said that. I was going to reserve a very special wish for the tenants in 11F.

As for what the first wish would be, I really wasn't sure. I went through an endless wish list. One day it would be frying Bull Robot' tongue. The next day it would be owning a green Rolls-Royce convertible. At one point Betty and I talked about this and decided that we had to tread carefully, because the lemurs were pranksters and were likely to play tricks on people who made greedy or unrealistic wishes. Like maybe a Rolls-Royce convertible with no engine. On several occasions I took the stone back out on the terrace when the moon was full, hoping to see the face again and confirm that I had not just been seeing things. Eventually I had to accept the fact that the face would naturally have appeared on the night of the third ritual and would not reappear just because I went out and stared at the moon. So I let it go at that.

The fried egg in the percolator idea was presented to the client about a month after the cafeteria fire. There were endless meetings before that, however, in which everybody in the ad agency worried about every possible disaster, especially Bull Robot.

We were in the main company conference room one morning with a group of executives and creative personnel where it was rumored that Bull Robot was going to announce that he "had problems with the idea." This was a standard opening line in the advertising business made by anyone who didn't like something somebody else had created.

I was sitting at the far end of the table next to Betty, who was taking notes on the meeting. "This is going to be a barrel of grins," she said. I groaned as Robot stood up at the other end of the table and made the usual face he made before he started speaking, jutting out his lower lip and flaring his nostrils upward like he was trying to snort something out of his sinuses.

"Um. Ecccch." he began. "We're going to have to buy half of America new coffee percolators when they start frying eggs to see if it works. And then they're going to sue us when they burn their houses down."

Saul Glockstein, the company lawyer said, "We'll put in a disclaimer, like 'Do not try this at home' or 'This is a demonstration' or something." Glockstein was a master of what was known in advertising as the "legal weasel", which was a way of saying something that was a lie but saying it in a sneaky way so that you could get away with it. The whole thought process reminded me of real weasel slipping through a little hole and running off with a big chicken.

Obviously annoyed that Glockstein had provided a solution to his first objection, Robot continued. "How are you going to get the camera down inside of the percolator?" he asked. "Its dark down in there. Nobody will be able to see the egg. The lens will get fogged up. It's not going to work."

"We'll saw the percolator in half right at the base and lift off the top," said Amanda Pandayear, the prop manager. "Then we'll crack open the egg like we were putting it in a skillet. It'll look great."

"Somebody's going to get electrocuted," said Robot. "What if somebody tries to saw their percolator in half while its still plugged in?"

I thought to myself: sure, half of America is going to go out and get a hacksaw and cut their coffee pot in two and fry an egg on it. I closed my eyes and imagined a mound of cow patties slowly building up on top of Robot' head. (To the bovinely challenged: cow patties, or cow pies, are splats of cow manure shaped kind of like Frisbees. In fact you can use them like Frisbees if they've dried out enough. Then they're called sail patties). The cow patties were popping on top of Robot' head one by one until the stack got so high it was leaning over like the Tower of Pisa. As he moved his head from side to side the pile swayed back and forth as if it were a cobra mesmerized by a flute.

"There's a cow tick on your tie," said the ad agency medical director.

The medical director was nicknamed Dr. Poison. He was at every meeting or filming of a commercial involving food or cosmetics to make sure we weren't going to tell somebody to do something that might poison them or make their hair fall out. Odd that he never worried about any of our client's products that were full of cholesterol and salt and sodium nitrate, and that were guaranteed to poison you eventually for good. He later sent me a memo saying he was worried about the reaction of the aluminum base of the coffee pot with the sulphur in the egg and the potential risks if somebody actually fried an egg in an electric percolator and then ate it. I sent him a memo back asking him how many people died each year in the United States from eating an egg fried in an aluminum skillet.

Robot took the end of his tie and held it out like one of those things a lizard sticks out under its neck. "Where's the tick." he asked.

"It went down your pants," said Dr. Poison.

Robot stood up and stretched out the waistline of his pants. "Where?" he said. "I don't see any tick." He leaned further over. The tower of patties tipped dangerously forward. "Where's the goddamn tick," said Robot. He lowered his head and looked down his pants the way a cat does when inspecting its privates. The tower fell. Patties scooted across the table like shuffle board pucks. One landed in front of everyone at the conference table.

"My, a Danish Pastry," said Amanda Pandayear. "It looks delicious." She took a bite and gagged, spitting a mouthful of cow patty across the table into Glockstein's coffee cup.

"I'm going to sue your ass," he said. "Spitting at someone is a chargeable offense. If it misses you, its assault. If it hits you, its battery. In this case, you spit in my coffee and you might have syphilis or something and the charge could be upgraded to attempted murder, at the least alienation of affection if my spouse thinks I've been sleeping around."

"Are you implying that I have syphilis?" asked Amanda Pandayear.

"I said syphilis or something."

"Something what?"

"Ask Jack," said Bull Robot. "He's got a diseased mind." He pointed at me with his lecture baton. "Can you catch syphilis from a cow patty? Jack... JACK! Answer the question! Are you asleep?"

I was. I had nodded off. My chin slipped off the heel of my hand and I jerked myself awake. There weren't any cow patties. Everybody was staring at me.

"Answer the question," repeated Robot.

"I think I broke my tooth," I said and got up and left.

"It was a divine excuse," Betty told me later. She said that the meeting had come to an abrupt end and was to continue after the weekend when Amanda Pandayear would bring in a selection of hacksaws, percolators, eggs, and a fire extinguisher. The question Bull Robot had actually been asking me was if I had spent my formative years in some kind of hippie commune smoking dope.

On Saturday Betty and I went to check out the fortune tellers and palm readers at Coney Island, that wonderful honkey-tonk beach and boardwalk just a subway ride away from Manhattan. When I first moved to New York it was the home of the famous roller coaster, the Cyclone, which by this time probably has been torn down or replaced. But I did have the opportunity to ride it once, and once was enough. It can only be described as hair raising. Beyond hair raising. I wouldn't have been surprised if I had arrived back at the unloading dock totally bald. I had read about an incident in France involving a roller coaster, about which I had forgotten, but which I unfortunately remembered just as the car reached the apex of the first plunge.

Apparently a dazzling new roller coaster ride had been constructed in France and was billed as the world's fastest and most death defying. The cars had been tested by loading them with sandbags double the weight of their full passenger capacity, even if the passengers had weighed two-hundred and fifty pounds each. The test had been repeated several times without incident. As the mayor and his entourage, which also included numerous prominent citizens of the area, rode up the incline, there was much fanfare and tossing of hats. Then, amidst a great din of delighted squealing, the car raced down the track and disappeared, hidden by the superstructure. Moments later it could be seen in the distance rounding the first curve. Then up another incline. Then around curve after curve. The crowd at the dock waited breathlessly for the car to return. And finally it appeared, struggling up the last hill, then coasting slowly in under the station roof. The passengers seemed limp and exhausted. Some appeared to be in a daze. In fact, they were all dead. Every one of their necks had been snapped by the centrifugal force of the turns. At the court trial, the owners of the amusement park were acquitted of all charges of negligence. According to the judge, they had tested the device to the best of their knowledge. He tapped his gavel on the bench to close the court and said simply, "Sandbags have no necks."

This uncomforting thought rode down the precipice with me like the Grim Reaper sitting by my side. For those of you who may not have ridden a roller coaster, the first plunge feels like the car has totally left the tracks and is falling straight down into oblivion. Your stomach rises up to the top of your throat and wedges itself there as if you had half upchucked a balloon. I watched in apprehension as the car approached the first curve. I didn't know whether to lean the side of my head into the curve or turn my head toward the curve and put my chin on my chest. I finally pulled my head in like a turtle and put one hand on the side of it as a brace. People say you see white hot flashes of light when you neck breaks. I would know in a moment what it felt like to be hanged.

Obviously I didn't die because I'm still here, but that was my last rollercoaster ride.

The boardwalk at Coney Island was like a carnival and was loaded with con artists, and fortune tellers, and cotton candy carts, and corn dog vendors, and hootchey-kootchey acts, and everything you would expect at a big state fair. The beach was wall-to-wall umbrellas. You couldn't even see the sand. That's the way Coney Island was always portrayed in paintings and described in stories, because that's exactly the way it was.

A palmist, a woman of about sixty or seventy years, beckoned us to her table and pointed to a little brass dish scattered with coins. I put a quarter on the plate. The woman had fingernails the length of tiger claws, painted white with black spots like the markings on dice. We sat, and Betty held out her hand. The woman began to trace the lines in Betty's palm with the tip of the nail of her index finger. I noticed that Betty was not watching what the woman was doing; she was watching her face. (That's how you know if they are telling the truth she said).

For a while, the woman said nothing. She continued to chart the lines in Betty's palm, glancing occasionally at the plate of coins as if she expected me to steal something. I put my hands in my lap. She glared at me and began go over Betty's palm all over again. Finally she looked up at Betty and said in an ominous tone of voice:

A clap of summer thunder sent the woman scurrying to gather up her paraphernalia, and we too, ran for cover. The rain came with a gusting southern wind, uprooting the beach umbrellas and creating a stampede of confusion on the boardwalk. We made our way to the subway entrance and ran down into the gloomy station. There was always the smell of electricity from the electrical contacts on the tracks. It was probably how an execution chamber smelled after an electrocution.

"What did the palmist mean by 'that'll be the end of you'?" I asked Betty as we rode home.

"That I was going to die," she answered flatly.

"Everybody's going to die," I said. "What's so brilliant about that? You're going to die. I'm going to die. She's going to die."

"Not soon enough," laughed Betty. "If you'd put fifty cents on the plate she would have said I'd live forever."

The next Monday, at 9:30 AM sharp, Amanda Pandayear sawed a percolator in half before our very eyes.

"What if somebody does try that and gets shards of aluminum in their egg?" asked Dr. Poison enthusiastically. "Aluminum poisoning can make you feeble minded."

"They could get them out with a magnet," said Amanda Pandayear. She had a look on her face like she had just discovered the theory of relativity.

"I don't think magnets will pick up aluminum," said Robot.

He was brighter than I thought.

And so it went all summer long. Meeting melted into meeting. Stupidities leapt over stupidities like idiot frogs. I fantasized frying every removable appendage of Bull Robot' body. His brain cooked up nicely in about fifteen seconds. It was the size of a prune.

Finally, only weeks before the first Wishing Day, the new fireproof coffee was launched with astounding success; so successful in fact that every major coffee manufacturer in America put out its own version of an insipid electric percolator coffee. It was everywhere on every shelf in every grocery store in every town in the United States. I had helped create a coffee monstrosity. I was a national traitor.

August 24th was a sizzler, as hot and muggy and stifling as, I suspected, the jungles of Madagascar where the lemurs lived. Maybe hotter. In New York there is so much pavement to store up the heat that I once had the soles of my shoes stick to the concrete while waiting for a jammed traffic light. It was perfect weather for a Wishing Day.

We decided to make our wish at sunset on top of the Empire State Building, just at the moment that night began. (If you ever go up there, let me tell you, take some chewing gum. The elevator goes about a hundred miles an hour without stopping, and if you don't chew gum your eardrums will start pulsating back and forth like trampolines.) By the time we got to the top, I was as deaf as a stone. I instinctively felt my pocket to make sure my Lemures Stone was safe. It was in there, in a little velvet bag, secured to my pants leg with a two-inch-long safety pin.

"Huh?" I said, cupping my ear.

Betty's mouth was moving, but no words came out. She pointed to my pocket, then to the pay telescope mounted on the railing. I reached in to get some change and the safety pin came undone . I felt a sharp prick and snatched out my hand. A little drop of blood beaded up on my index finger.

"Something in there bite you?" she asked.

"Rabbit," I said, trying not to let myself get upset.

"A rabbit bit you?"

"No, a lemur bit me. A little bitty lemur with little bitty beady eyes and little bitty sharp teeth put there by little bitty Betty who is going straight to hell and guess who the Devil is?"

"Bull Robot, I imagine."

Bending over slightly, she put her eye to the telescope and turned it toward the glowing ball on the distant horizon. The twilight haze was bathed in fire. A huge flock of pigeons, startled by some unseen menace, took off from the ledge below, flew directly toward us, then veered away at the last moment in a wild whirring of wings. It was obviously the end of the world.

"Make your wish", she said. "The sun is going down."

I removed my Lemures Stone from its velvet bag and Betty took hers, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, from the pocket of her dress. We closed our eyes and made our wishes silently. What she wished, I did not know. And what I wished, I did not tell.

But the magic was soon to begin.

Go to Part 4 The Lemures Stone starts to take over my life.