Abnormal Occurrences

by Thomas Berger

  I protested, and he cried, with snapping teeth in a face blanched with hysteria, “Don’t you see it’s a trap?”

  He broke from us and ran across the field, brandishing his tiny weapon. Sickly I watched him close on Lu Pok, and breathed relief when the governor’s great hand came up and then descended in a precise karate blow to the neck, which felled my executive producer.

  “Poor devil,” said Lu Pok when I arrived. He shook his massive head. Bud lay flat, but the red dust was stirred by suspirations from his half-open mouth. Walt Riley, now recovered from his fright, knelt for a close-up while the other two cameramen panned over the governor and me from various angles. It was curious that, with all the excitement, only Bud Servo acted unprofessionally. Lu Pok directed his chauffeur to attend to the fallen, and said to me: “Come and meet Poon.”

  I have known more easy momenta than that in which I entered the dim coolness of Dr. Poon’s laboratory and walked across its rush-strewn, earthen floor, expecting momentarily to tread upon a reptile. But my apprehensions proved needless. Other than the usual small lizards that prowled the buildings in this region, and the insects on which they fed, no living thing met my eye but a diminutive brown man sitting at a bamboo table which stood against the far wall. Dressed in loose white garments like a coolie, he sat rigidly staring through an open window that looked onto a stretch of dense brush.

  “Poon is meditating,” said Lu Pok. “He is not yet aware of one’s presence.” The governor stamped his weighty foot, and the little man’s head began to turn slowly in our direction. He had the typical wide, bland face of his countrymen and short-cropped black hair, but his eyes were striking: hyperthyroid, turretlike, they looked as if capable of seeing independently of each other. At the moment, one seemed to be fastened upon me, while the other stared at Lu Pok.

  “To tell him what’s what,” the governor said to me as he simultaneously fluttered his fat hands at his brother, in what was apparently their private sign language. “Poon can read lips, but prefers this mode of communication when emerging from contemplative pursuits.”

  Both of Poon’s eyes suddenly focused on me, and he began furiously to shout in a high, almost animal voice, beads of saliva flying from his brown lips.

  I recoiled against Lu Pok; it felt as though I had backed into a wall.

  “Tell him,” I hastened to say, “that our intentions are honorable.”

  The governor proceeded to translate his brother’s denunciation. “He says Westerners come only to mock him. He says your scientists know nothing of cobra. Etcetera.” Lu Pok’s smile was superficially apologetic; actually, I saw quite clearly that he enjoyed transmitting an attack on white men without flouting the conventions of diplomacy.

  “Sir,” I said to the governor, ostensibly for transmission to his brother, “you may be right in your hostility to us, but the fact remains that we will pay a thousand U.S. dollars to see your cure for cobra bite.”

  In his greed the governor did not bother to simulate a discussion of the terms with Poon, but said immediately. “Fifteen hundred. For which my brother will cause a snake to strike him, then apply his cure and recover, all in the sight of the camera.”

  “O.K., but no con!” It was not I who spoke: Bud Servo stood in the doorway, shaken, pale, unarmed, but more or less himself again, and naturally showing no shame

  Lu Pok communicated with Poon, who had since fallen back into his dreamy silence, and the little scientist, if he could be so termed, rose and in a bow-legged stride led us out into the ruthless sunlight. He resembled Lu Pok in no feature, being in every particular but his bulbous eyes exceptionally small and finely made; whereas the governor was huge in all but the slits through which his crafty vision passed. Perhaps they were not even blood relatives, if indeed that consideration matters when all is said and done.

  The cameras picked us up when we four emerged from the building. I have my own print of the film and in later days I viewed it many times. I suspect my direct memory of the experience is by now inextricably intermingled with the cinematic representation—I see the event as if I were not involved, as art and not life. I see the three of us follow Poon behind the building: Bud’s disheveled figure; my own rather rigid form, walking as though on a surface of broken glass; then the broad back of Lu Pok, surmounted by his brown neck, juglike ears, officer’s cap that sweeps up and forward like a reversed wing.

  Poon stops at a cluster of large, tightly woven wicker baskets. Removes the top of one, stares bulbously within. Makes fluttering motions with hand. Slowly, slowly comes into view the head of a cobra, glittering eyes, blunt muzzle. The scene is suddenly blurred, owing either to Walt Riley’s wavering hand on the camera or to my own temporary agitation: as I warned, I am shuttling between reality and film here. But in the realm of the actual, I remember Bud Servo’s intrusion at this point.

  “A ringer,” he said, sneering at the reptile though keeping well back. “Defanged, poison sacs removed. I’ll never buy this, Pok.”

  The governor softly replied: “Then let it strike yourself, dear sir.”

  Dr. Poon had now extended a dark, twiglike finger and was caressing the snake’s throat ever so gently—and I ask you to believe that the cobra, given the anatomical difference, was reacting much as might a dog, arching its slender neck, swallowing with a glimpse of wet mouth, and had it been equipped with eyelids I am sure it would have closed them in pleasure. Then all at once Poon made a little brown fist and punched the snake lightly but firmly in the snout. Instantly its head drooped into the basket. Then up rose the reptile again, up, up, terrifyingly up, a good foot beyond the height of Dr. Poon, its head now a tiny bump tapering off into the wide flat flare of the hood, but the eyes were evident, enraged, and horribly aware. It wavered above Poon, and the little man stood firm, giving as good a stare as he received. This subtle battle of eyes was not to be measured in time. On film it consumes no more than six seconds. But there is an area in my memory in which it continues still, Dr. Poon and the cobra, forever frozen in their heroic exchange, man against nature, good versus evil, the preservative principle in opposition to the destructive.

  Then Poon put forward his left wrist and the cobra struck it, not so fast as one might have thought, but with a force that drove the whole arm back, twisting the Doctor’s little body, and I saw Poon wince, show his own teeth, as the fangs hooked him. And the beast hung on, actually chewing into the wound, enlarging it for entry of the venom. The sight was unbearable. I averted my head, and in so doing noticed Lu Pok. If I had to characterize the violent feeling that contorted his features and bleached his swarthiness, in all truth I must say it was envy rather than sympathy, mixed with more brutal gratification than horror.

  Bud maintained his stupor. Yet on the film he looks poised, alert, capable. And unless one peers closely, Poon himself shows up as a dusky little gardener, watering a lawn with a recalcitrant hose.

  In its own good time the cobra was drained of venom and rage, disengaged its teeth from the Doctor’s arm, retracted its hood, sank back into the basket until only the head remained in view, turned that hither and yon like a periscope, and then gave Poon what I swear was a shy, demure look, an almost loving glance. In return the Doctor saluted the serpent with a waggle of the hand, the traditional goodbye in this section of Asia, loose wrist, floppy fingers, but there was more than courtesy in the gesture, perhaps even more than affection.

  Thereupon Poon returned briskly to the laboratory, dusted his wound with a saffron-colored powder, drank an ounce of colorless liquid, lay down on a bamboo cot, and stared through his protuberant eyes at the ceiling. Our crew had started the portable generator and set up the lights for interior shooting. Poon was bathed in the glare. By contrast we others stood in shadow. The first nine minutes were more difficult to endure than anything that had gone before. Drops of sweat coursed my backbone like spiders, a nerve throbbed in my big toe. To my left, Bud alternated from foot to foot as if the earthen floor were aflame. I could sense beh
ind me the bulk of Lu Pok, and occasionally I could hear a distant rumble in his vast gut.

  But Dr. Poon lay calm, or so it looked, his breathing regular, his color somewhat pale in the light but in no respect ill, and even his bulging ayes were serene. All minor sounds were obliterated by the hoarse noise of the generator’s gasoline engine, just outside.

  I say nine minutes—Bud later provided this statistic, for in the midst of everything he somehow remembered his watch.

  Then Dr. Poon died.

  Cobra venom works on the nervous, rather than the circulatory, system. Paralysis comes soon, and the heart stops beating. It is apparently not a painful end. At a certain point, Dr. Poon closed his eyes and breathed no more. In actuality the incident looked precisely as it does on the film.

  Was there any sound evidence that Poon’s antidote had ever worked? Or had we watched the failure of its first trial? Was his reputation, well established throughout his own country, wholly a matter of hearsay, superstition, chauvinism, and other unscientific factors?

  Perhaps it was to answer such questions that Lu Pok included in Poon’s funeral ceremonies, two days later, a peculiar demonstration. The obsequies began with moan of flutes, thud of drums, and the wail of fifty professional mourners assembled in the village square. Towering above them was a pyramid of dry brush upon a substructure of teak logs, surmounted by the rigid form of the little doctor wrapped in clean linen. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand natives came in from elsewhere throughout the Southeast Province, and what passed for streets in the little capital were thronged with pungent, chattering humanity. Nugi vendors set up their stands along the highway, and on spits above a long trench of hot coals turned the roasting bodies of three fat boars.

  The sun was low on the evening horizon when Lu Pok mounted a bamboo platform and began his eulogy. Contrary to my expectation, it was not long. First he spoke briefly in his own language, and then presumably said the same in English, for our benefit. The significant passages, as I remember, were these:

  “Poon was a great man, a dedicated man, a wise man, but we owe it to ourselves to understand that he was, through no fault of his personal responsibility perhaps, a limited individual, a primitive soul. So to speak, Poon looked to the sunset rather than the dawn. To our American friends he was a curiosity rather than the sort of fellow who had gained the status of a colleague.”

  Lu Pok smiled at us across the dark heads of his surrounding countrymen—somewhat obsequiously, I thought.

  “In the presence of modernity, Poon’s old powers failed him. Cobra he had defeated many times, but with contemporary reality he could not cope. How, through the generosity of our friends, who are providing U.S. dollars for the purpose, a modern laboratory, a brick building, will arise on the site of Poon’s jungle hut.”

  On these words the crowd turned as one man and looked at us through many pairs of dark eyes. Bud reluctantly opened his shirt, took a fat handful of cash from a sweat-stained money belt, and sent it by small boy up to Lu Pok. Like me, Bud had no doubt seen at the edge of the audience a group of rough characters wearing head-rags and carrying submachine guns and machetes. Whether they were revolutionary guerillas or mere bandits, the money was better lost through extortion than violence. It was surely a modest amount with which to build a modern laboratory, but then the costs of labor in that country were minuscule.

  “Thank you again,” said Lu Pok. “Now all that remains is to remove from Poon’s name the possible shadow. He was an archaic thinker and his power over cobra was limited, but in its day it had been most effectual.”

  The governor clapped his hands, and from the crowd tripped my little tan friend of the steam bath. Carrying a covered basket, she mounted the platform and stood shyly before Lu Pok.

  “This then is our tribute to Poon,” said the governor. He signaled the drummers, and they applied fluttering fingers to their instruments, producing a soft rumble, a susurrus really, much like the sound of the wind through a grove of bamboo.

  The girl took the cover from the basket. After a long moment the dark head of a cobra rose above the rim. With none of Dr. Poon’s preliminaries, the maiden extended her arm and the reptile struck it near the wrist. Lu Pok drew from his tunic a packet of the saffron powder and sprinkled the wound. The girl drank the contents of a vial of colorless liquid, sat down on the platform, and waited.

  Alongside me, Bud in a low voice expressed a wish to inspect the linen-wrapped body atop the funeral pyre, but made no move towards it.

  Five minutes passed, then ten. The girl’s smile never faltered. After a suspenseful quarter of an hour, Lu Pok took her hand and raised her. She curtsied, her face like a flower, displaying no damage to flesh or nerve.

  “Bring fire!” ordered Lu Pok in a stentorian voice, in two languages, and from nowhere breech-clothed men appeared with blazing torches, ran to the pyre, hurled them thereon. In a trice the brush was enkindled and a great roaring rush of red flame, plumed by white smoke and black, obscured the little form atop the pyramid.

  Whether it was indeed the lifeless remains of Dr. Poon that were here incinerated; whether he had simulated death, arising soon as we white men left the jungle hut and substituting for his own body a dummy, to be wrapped in burlap and carried back to the capital by Lu Pok; whether the situation was more sinister than it seemed—who can say?

  Bud Servo immediately decamped from Asia altogether, abandoning the other projects. Back in New York, he took to a research laboratory samples of the cobra antidote which he had managed to filch from Poon’s hut in the solemn moments after the little doctor’s death. When analyzed the saffron-colored dust proved to be—saffron. The fluid, a neutral alcoholic spirit similar to vodka. Bud was also assured by leading authorities on reptiles and toxicology that neither of these substances could neutralize the venom of the king cobra, that furthermore even a genuine antidote would never be administered subcutaneously or through the gastrointestinal tract.

  To Bud these reports were irrefutable evidence that he had been victim of an Oriental swindle, and perhaps no feeling is so poignant as that of the charlatan who believes he has himself been gulled.

  For whatever it is worth—though, as elsewhere throughout my life thus far, in this affair I cannot be called a true principal—I might conclude by saying that I see Dr. Poon as certainly exotic, surely complex, and perhaps mad. But it is also quite possible that he was the only genuine hero we ever depicted on Courage.

  Granted Wishes: Embittered Super

  CHARLIE BOLGER WAS THE “super,” which is to say, janitor of a large apartment building in the middle of the city. He had had this job since as long as he could remember, and he hated it, and the tenants he served, more every year. He spent most of his days sitting in an old overstuffed chair, down in his rent-free one-room ground-floor apartment that the management used as an excuse to pay him very little in wages, and what he did when he sat there, though a working television set was just across the room, was to nurse his hatred of the people who lived in the building that rose above him.

  He was fond of pointing out to himself—he had never had many friends—that you didn’t know the human race until you served them as a menial and were called to unclog their drains and unlock their brats from the bathroom and clean up after their wives committed suicide (which happened once in his building) and shuffle your feet while they fumbled for a stingy tip and go to the door of every apartment at the appropriate time and wish the occupant thereof a Merry Xmas and take the niggardly envelope offered in response.

  Charlie had remained a bachelor, because in his earlier years the occasional professional supplied all he needed of femininity. He had always disliked talking to women, believing them, however pleasant they appeared, to be secretly critical of him. Finally the day came when he found himself totally devoid of even the feeble physical need the other sex had sometimes stirred in him, and from then on his only association with the human race was as flunky to master or mistress, and he had hundreds of those.<
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  But Charlie’s hatred might well have remained passive, impotent, and routine in a city full of such types, had he not, apparently by chance, discovered a device with which to express it effectively, even devastatingly, and incur no personal risk whatever. This discovery was preceded (one evening after an especially obnoxious day in which a faulty dryer in the laundry room had burned up a load of clothing belonging to a woman who was peevish and importunate in the best of times) by Charlie’s uttering a sequence of oaths, followed by a fervent wish that he had some clean, quiet, secret means by which with impunity, he could rid the world of persons who annoyed him.

  It was the next morning, while wrestling the garbage cans out to the sidewalk in preparation for the visit of the Sanitation truck—singlehandedly: his wretched helper had once again called in sick—that at the top of a lidless container Charlie found his weapon, a red-and-blue plastic toy pistol, a so-called Galaxy Disintegrator modeled after one brandished by the hero in a blockbuster science-fiction movie. This had obviously been discarded by one of the innumerable spoiled children who lived in the building. It was probably not even out of order: the kid had simply been bored. Charlie seized it by the butt, which was molded of flimsy, almost weightless plastic, and probed the wedge-shaped trigger, with its visible spring. No doubt it made a clicking sound when “fired.”

  He had not been especially childish even as a little boy, and whatever playfulness he had known had long since been exhausted, yet now, almost lightheartedly, Charlie raised the toy and pointed it at the approaching mailman, a malicious individual who loved to load building supers with armloads of packages too large for the postal boxes.

  At the moment this worthy was already extending toward Charlie a document to be signed—perhaps a registered letter containing a subpoena for a man who was delinquent with his child-support payments: you could imagine his gratitude to the super for accepting the envelope.