The Defenestration of Bob T. Hash III

by David Deans

  d) Dr. Horowitz had messed up on the dosage

  e) he likes to get promoted

  7. Cattleyas underwent an (involuntary) decollation in the taxi because

  a) they were late for the meeting and the carp was getting impatient

  b) it was taxicab regulations regarding that species of flower

  c) Signora Brambilla sneezed with a measure of violence

  d) Bob Hash’s hand slipped again

  e) it sounded like a good idea at the time

  8. The police are still conducting their inquiries because

  a) the tax forms haven’t been completed properly

  b) the police like conducting extended inquiries

  c) the inquiries fell out the window

  d) the suspect has not yet been apprehended

  e) the police are not aware of any misconduct

  45

  Bob would certainly like to think that it was merely the police’s inquiries that were discharged from that window. It is in any case customary (see below, Anything to Declare?) to dispose of unwanted documents by other, more environmentally friendly means (shredders, burning, teething dogs). The rate of acceleration of a body falling to earth is 9.81m/s2. The sensitive learner will appreciate a certain tragic irony in this choice of example.

  46

  “Anything to Declare?”

  a role play at customs and excise

  Now you have to imagine that you are employed as a customs official at the busy terminal at Belmont International Airport. The scene is set with passengers lining up at flight gates, pilots and stewardesses striding purposefully across the main concourse. In the baggage area a vaguely familiar set of jet-lagged golf clubs on the carousel conveyor belt goes round and round in an unclaimed cameo.

  Students act out the following scenarios, in each of which the accused, after extensive interrogation, turns out in fact to be entirely innocent of the charge. Once through, switch student roles and repeat. To make things more “realistic,” the language instructor might like to procure a peaked cap for the customs official, and play the airport background ambience cassette (echoing heels in the concourse, velveteen flight announcements over the PA system) during role plays. (CULTURE TIP! The more certain the customs official of his/her intuition, and the more indignant the holidaymaker(s), the more entertaining this exercise tends to be.)

  • Two suntanned Olympian ladies’ doubles volleyball players on flight 243 to Acapulco are attempting to pass through the nothing-to-declare exit. The customs department has received advanced information that one or other—or both—of the volleyball players have concealed about their persons a small but valuable quantity of high-grade ergotine. In the interests of modesty the interview has been adjourned to a side room with nice comfy matrimonial-style cushions. Begin skit with the volleyball players down to lycra shorts and matching bikini tops (in team colors), with the customs official satisfied that the illegal substance is not to be found in their personal effects….

  • A notorious smuggler of contraband turbo-monsoon garden irrigation industrial sprinklers is apparently at large, planning the most audacious project of his career—to flood the fledgling Scottish market with an unprecedented quantity of the sprinklers, which apparently are being smuggled through in golf bags….

  • You have received a reliable tip-off that Belmont International Airport is being used as an exchange point by a ring of unscrupulous parrot smugglers. As chief customs official, your suspicions have in this connection been aroused by a passenger wearing a Bermuda shirt and a straw hat who, besides being rather overearnest in the exchange of the preliminary pleasantries, appears to be in possession of a talking suitcase with an uncannily parrotlike voice. Suspecting this to be a suitcase full of hallucinating parrots, you have the suitcase opened. On subsequent interrogation of one of its occupants, you discover that the parrot is under the illusion that it has turned into a human being—having usurped its erstwhile mentor and thwarted a dastardly scheme to flood the world with an apocryphal grammar primer….

  LANGUAGE TIP! Where possible try to avoid the use of foreign words and phrases to pad over gaps in your vocabulary. “Scrambling”—or gratuitous (and often wildly disconnected) polyglotism—should also be discouraged.

  47

  At the foot of page 5 of the morning edition of last Thursday’s Belmont Gazette, there was a small article indicating the disappearance of a certain Miss Scarlett, native citizen of Belmont and model employee at the Acme International Institute of Languages. According to friends and colleagues interviewed by that illustrious tabloid, in the run-up to her disappearance Miss Scarlett had shown no sign whatsoever of the slightest disaffection, psychological imbalance, or Rilkian wanderlust. On the evening before her presumed disappearance she and a colleague had eaten a pizza at Mario’s on Main Street and she had packed a suitcase for a ski trip. Her apartment was tidy, her office files were in order. Belmont is a law-abiding city. While a perfunctory dredging of the pure-flowing River Caxton had been conducted, and a pack of sniffer hound dogs had (twice) been sent round the local nine-hole golf course, the impression given by the article was that the police had carried these things out more as some kind of practice drill than as any concern for a threat to Miss Scarlett’s actual welfare. The general tone was no more tragic than if the article had been reporting that Miss Scarlett had gone off on a week’s skiing trip to the mountains, which as it would later turn out, she had!

  No mention was made at any point in the article of a missing Bob T. Hash III; and no appeal was made for information leading to his whereabouts.

  48

  Guess Who I Saw…?

  Guess who I saw down on the beach promenade, slinking away from a pile of garments discarded above an outgoing tide?”

  “Bob T. Hash III?”

  Bob T. Hash III is correct! Now see if you can answer the following questions with equal alacrity and aplomb. In each case, choose from the list of given possibilities (answers to be found at the back of the book):

  a) Guess who I saw milling around at the mall yesterday morning, a battered leather briefcase under his arm, breakfasting on a takeout doughnut? (Warren Crosby/Chester Cash/Jack the construction engineer/a security guard/Bob T. Hash III)

  b) Guess who I saw peeking from behind the curtains of the lodgings in Bellville? (the dwarf chef from the French restaurant/Lucinda the Ping-Pong player/Señora Gonzalez/the editor of the Belmont Gazette/Bob T. Hash III)

  c) Guess who I saw making his getaway in a golf buggy in some farcical slow-motion car chase? (Mr. Gleason the printer’s assistant/Heinrich from Hamburg/Christopher Columbus/Lee Trevino/Bob T. Hash III)

  d) Guess who I saw taking a siesta in Señor Gonzalez’s garden hammock? (Señor Gonzalez/Gulliver the Grammarian/Steve Winshaw/Señora Gonzalez/Bob T. Hash III)

  e) Guess who I saw perched on a patch-eye pirate’s shoulder? (Dr. Horowitz/Miss Novák/the wise owl on the way to Bellville/the patch-eye pirate’s identical twin/Bob T. Hash III)

  f) Guess who I saw trying to turn back the clock hands when no one was looking? (Winfield Norton/Miss Ratcliffe/the Cat in the Hat/the horologist/Bob T. Hash III)

  g) Guess who came to clean out the birdcage and remove the cuttlebone from the bars of the cage in the process? (Dan Arbuckle/Mick Aldehyde/Miss Scarlett/Factotum Bert/Bob T. Hash III)

  h) Guess who popped up in the office foyer the other day and started interrogating the concierge about the upcoming office party? (Signora Brambilla/The concierge’s long-lost identical twin/the olive-skinned, almond-eyed, trilingual jet-black ponytailed receptionist from the Hotel Bristol/Bob T. Hash III)

  “I doubt it, Thomas. Didn’t you hear Bob had a tragic accident at the office? You probably saw somebody who just looks like him.”

  49

  The first tangible evidence that someone might be taking an unwelcome interest in my repair work on the new Forward with English! came in the form of an apparently anonymous memo, delivered to my in tray just
a few days after I’d made my first test submission to the printers. Composed largely in the tone of a routine pronouncement and distributed not only to my own illustrious in tray but to those of all desks on my floor and to all floors underneath (Fifth floor’s the highest she goes, madam), the memo began with an outline of the new fire drill procedure before suddenly rounding off with a warning to employees to be on the lookout for what it called “oddity of linguistic intrusion”—a rather cryptic formulation in itself, one might note, and, to my eyes, a distinct giveaway as to its authorship. No indication was given where said intrusions might become manifest (in grammatical tips announced over the public-address system?), nor as to their possible source (from within the husbandry of the tenses itself?); nor was there any suggestion as to what action should be taken if any such intrusions were encountered.

  Needless to say, someone was being nosy, and, despite the banality of its terms and the vagueness of its object, I did not regard this memo development in a particularly favonian light. That morning, I had to force myself to join in the office canteen chortle, pretend to agree with the general opinion of my colleagues that the memo—“yes, I got one of them in my in tray too, Bob!”—was nothing more than a general warning shot across the bows from some nutcase—but maybe a very nice nutcase notwithstanding, I suggested. My smile probably came out as a lemon grimace or fingers dragging down teacher’s blackboard like eight sticks of chalk. While the memo had pointed no fingers at anyone in particular (Bob might have guessed someone was trying to salvage his opus, but he had yet to identify more precisely who that someone might be). It contained a barely veiled threat to my ongoing and unfinished repair work.

  Funnily enough, my initial suspicions as to the identity of the person looking over my shoulder at my literary endeavors had fallen not on Bob himself, but on Mr. Formaldehyde, neighbor and amateur taxidermist (see Hobbies and Pastimes). Mr. Formaldehyde’s horrible, inaptly named living room (visible from the Hashes’ own living room window) was adorned with a motley menagerie of deceased furry beasts, the centerpiece of which was a preternaturally calm marmoose, which thirteen falls back he’d brought home from a trip to Canada lashed to the roof of his car, its nostrils drooling on the windshield.

  A few years back, from a makeshift laboratory he’d set up in his cellar, Mr. Formaldehyde had started up a small malodorous mail-order service operation, specializing in stuffed weasels. He dreamed of opening a big store with gleaming window displays in the mall downtown (“Yes, we’ve got branches in New York, London, and Paris. What kind of weasel were you looking for, madame?”) He imagined taking a trip to India to bag a tiger, or to the Arctic for a polar bear—must be big bags. His abiding ambition was to hunt down, bag, there’s the word “bag” again, and stuff, the so-called Bird-Man of Easter Island, which, to my then paranoid ears, sounded more like “messing around in the sawdust with which I will one day fill your gut.” Alas (except if you’re a small furry animal such as a weasel), just as it seemed his mail-order business might get off the ground, the market for stuffed animals flattened out and went into terminal decline. Mr. Formaldehyde’s business went bust. He was offered a job in the accounting department of Acme with quite reasonable remunerative prospects.

  Even now in my new human guise, I couldn’t but feel a certain unease in his eponymously smelly presence. For my liking, he was taking a little too much interest in the story of the window and the fate of Comenius. When he paid us a house call, I did not approve of the way he strummed on the bars of my empty cage. Had I not heard the rumor that Comenius the parrot—eight good handfuls of sawdust and a yard of fine-grade catgut—had dropped stone dead in his airspace? But, understandably wary as I might have been of Mr. Formaldehyde, I do believe we have a more obvious author for that memo to hand.

  Before he eloped, Bob had given his final royal approval of the galley proofs, informing the master printer that there would “therefore be no need to check them again”—adding that he trusted Mr. Gleason might have them directly for their “speediest” publication, outlet distribution, etc. As per contract, the remaining two thirds of the advance, as well as all subsequent accruing royalties (as per terms of, etc.), were to be deposited directly to Miss Scarlett’s Swiss bank account. And, to round off his arduous lexical labors (and basically to tie up the last loose ends of his dastardly scheme—till Commissioner Rex arrived on the scene), Bob had further announced that, as with immediate effect, he was going to take an extended sabbatical. With a theatrical, quite pointlessly cryptic tap on the window, he’d added: “Yes, Mr. Norton—I might be gone indeed for some time.”

  But however meticulous his planning, however thorough his preparations, Bob was not stupid: he knew there was always the risk of some unforeseen last-minute hitch. Had he really thought through all the possible outcomes? What if, on that fateful morning, waiting to pass through the gate for Acapulco, he suddenly decided that there remained in his fiendishly ingenious watertight foolproof plan one great big gaping loophole—the possibility that Comenius had turned into his doppelgänger and would proceed in his absence to dismantle his shambolic Forward with English!—not to mention the hanky-panky the parrot might get up to with his wife? What if—a cartoon lightbulb pinging into surprise over his head and a palm slapstuck to his forehead—he and Señora Scarlett had ducked out of the line, doubled back from the airport, and taken “rooms” in some shady downtown lodgings in Bellville (neighboring town to bromidian Belmont), where the landlady would turn a blind eye to the grammatical faux pas and marital credentials of her new tenants? And there lie low, just long enough to discount that absurd possibility about his parrot turning into his double, etc., make sure that, in all its bogus glory, the miscreant primer got safely into the bookstores; long enough to see that the errant compendium was up and stalking, cut loose from its creator—Belmont today, the world tomorrow—like an unstoppable Frankenstein’s monster. After all, we did not wait to see him actually boarding that plane.

  Even before Bob might have read that bland little article in the Belmont Gazette (the first tangible evidence that something was wrong on Bob’s side of things), one can well imagine him, bunkered down within his day-curtained den, with the days ticking over and his glossy derangements failing to materialize in the bookstores, becoming increasingly concerned that something really was amiss with his plans: Miss Scarlett (today disguised in a frizzy peroxide wig and an old pink coat she’d found abandoned in the landlady’s wardrobe) setting out on forays to the local bookstore, Bob thumbing impotently through a dog-eared thesaurus to pass the time, only for her to return, like the dove, empty-handed. Why the delay? Why were his frivolous diffractions not in the stores yet as the printer had promised?

  And now not only had the Belmont Gazette failed to mention the mystery—nay, scandal—that such an eminent disappearance as his, Bob T. Hash III’s, should have created, it had had the gall to mention Miss Scarlett’s, whether or not she was just on a ski trip. Why had missing fly posters not been glued to lampposts, to curbside trees, in both Belmont and Bellville? Why had search parties not been sent out to roam round the streets, roadblocks not set up on the outskirts of town? Why had vans not gone round with rooftop megaphone announcements, like the knife grinders of old? Why had an inflatable dirigible not cat-cradled to and fro over the city, Bob’s noble, oblong face on the side, with a caption ribbon reading Have you seen Bob T. Hash III? trailing behind it. Why had his wife not made a tearful TV appeal?

  Did nobody seem to think something just a tad bit odd that he’d not come back from his business trip? It was one thing to worry about a last-minute holdup with regard to the distribution of Forward with English! (eighth edition). But the lack of concern for his own disappearance—this was one factor Bob could not have foreseen.

  I’m afraid all this business is beginning to take its toll on my health.

  50

  Say “Ah”—A Visit to the Doctor

  Feeling a little under the weather one day, you drop in
at your local general practitioner complaining of a stiffening of the forelimbs. Explain to the doctor (congenial half-moon glasses and obligatory stethoscope) that this is most likely the first sign of the onset of multiple sclerosis. Suggest that he make out a special prescription for medicinal cannabis that might bring relief to your muscular spasms.

  A few days later you decide to pay another visit to the local clinic, convinced you have terminal cancer. Explain to the doctor that although you are unable as yet to indicate any precise manifestations, you feel sure that some nabilone derivative would make more bearable any symptoms that might in due course arise.

  The next week you return again, this time with a suspected extremely exotic and highly contagious form of Parkinson’s disease. According to a recently translated article published in the New Belmont Journal of Medicine, trembling and other side effects of this condition can be ameliorated through the use of medicinal marijuana. Discuss the article with your family physician, comparing the English translation with its Portuguese original. In particular, you might point out to the doctor (whose Portuguese is a little rusty) an important section in the original that has for some reason not been brought forward into the English version. According to this extirpated fragment, the prescription of cannabis brings not just relief to the patient but ensures immunity to the sufferer’s prescribing physician.

  This time you have the sniffles and a nasty cough. Although cannabis therapy has not yet in medical circles been put forward as a possible cure for the common cold, volunteer yourself as fearless pioneering guinea pig for cutting-edge (home-based) research into the potential beneficial effects of Sativex on its symptoms.