by David Deans
And now it was still in there, lying snugly in that envelope in the out tray back at the office—Bob still managing to slink off scot-free at the end of the course. To some this might seem a small detail, a mere Hash-ian fly in the ointment. For me it implied not merely a period of forced prolonged exile and further separation from Matilda; it represented a potential breach in the dam through which, if left unrepaired, the whole zany world of Bob T. Hash III might flood back and unravel all my good work.
So, top up on the Plymouth Fury, I rolled back into town to make that final outstanding modification, a Colonel Custard against the Mad Max onflow of traffic commuting home for the weekend. By the time I arrived at Fort Acme, the revelers had long since dispersed. For all intents and purposes (except, say, for producing an utterly unreliable witness or two in any eventual future court trial), the building was empty. When I went through the revolving door, I saw Bert sitting under long sad droops of colorful streamers at the foyer reception desk, like a Duane Hanson installation of a worn-out down-at-the-mouth security guard.
When he saw me, Bert jolted upright. There was a look of troubled surprise on his face, as if he’d just seen a ghost. To cheer him up, I motioned toward the streamers and called out: “Looks like someone’s been having a swell party!” I jumped aboard the elevator: ting and I was gone.
The open plan section on the top floor was a ghost party of abandoned computer monitors, draped with thin colored strips of festooning party ribbons and anarchic balloons. Here and there a plastic drinking cup with the dregs of a cheap red wine for an ashtray. (“No, thanks, I don’t smoke!”) As I weaved my way between the partitions, I was puzzling over Bert’s double-take expression.
Of course the moment I entered my office, Bert’s reaction made complete sense. Bert had looked so surprised to see me coming into the building for the very good reason that he thought I was already inside it, in my fifth-floor executive office. Because there, reinstalled at his one time executive desk, sat none other than Bob T. Hash III in person—calmly browsing through a more than familiar sheaf of typewritten pages, on which I had expended of late a fair chunk of my time.
That Bob had materialized so audaciously in his old office (a streamer/balloon-free enclave) meant he’d got wind of my postmeridian absenteeism, from which he’d deduced that the coast in the office was clear. But the intruder was not the MC meddler or the fumbling hanger-clanging idiot hiding in the wardrobe from a daytime TV sitcom that I’d envisioned finding one day dispensing of dissonant decoction through my files. Bob had somehow gained access to the facilities of bathroom and wardrobe (most probably that excellent en suite installation back on Remington Drive) and was all spruced up in a sharp-looking suit—looking more dapper, more Bob T. Hash III than ever.
Now, willingly and with great alacrity, will I spring forth from behind a discreetly placed foot-dimmer controlled Limbo Arcadia table lamp to point out a grammatical mistake; more than voluntarily will I bounce up from an indolent IKEA Extorp Two Seat Sofa with a Fixed Leather Cover to tick off the unwarranted abuse of syntax—or simply to upbraid the overlong sentence. But however horrendous the mistake, however wayward or persistent the error, I will not swat a fly with a rolled-up copy of the Belmont Gazette.
Notwithstanding this aversion to violence (and, I suppose, hoping something might happen in the meantime to avert the need for a showdown in the first place), I had of late found myself entertaining in my mind a number of picture book scenarios by which my rival might meet his doom without requiring my assistance. According to one scenario, I’d pictured a variant of the Asking for Directions situation wherein, disguised in a Bermuda shirt as a foreign tourist (camera round neck), the assassin approaches Bob with a request for directions (to the airport, to the Bristol Hotel?)—only to whip a gun out from his money belt and shoot poor Bob in broad daylight. Another nice idea was a kind of cross between the Everyday Accidents and Domestic Mishaps section and Lodging a Complaint. An altercation would develop between the bookseller and the client, rising in heat and temper, with the complainant—Bob—coming to grief beneath a falling stack of books in the somewhat extensive Foreign Language Manual section of the Belmont Barnes and Noble. I imagined him being challenged to fight a dawn duel at the edge of the golf course, tethered horses snorting vaporized plumes into the frosty morning air. I imagined him one morning getting abducted by the Limbo Martians on the drive in to work. I imagined him receiving the latest of a long line of disastrous sales results, pulling a revolver out of a drawer and shooting himself there at his desk; on the blotting pad, trailing out from a temple—to some a mere splodge, to others a clotting Rorschach test of an African gray parrot.
Unfortunately, Bob appeared to have fewer qualms on the subject of violence than I did. For, when I stepped forward into the room, my eye was caught by something that looked very like a large water pistol on the mouse pad—having brazenly usurped the gray-backed beetle itself—and who knows, it was quite possibly loaded. Bob may have looked as bland as a Thunderbird, but he sure could turn nasty if things didn’t go the way he’d planned them.
“Ah, there you are,” said Bob, looking up, as if this were just some meeting he’d thrown together in the late afternoon to finalize some last-minute details of a report. “How good of you to turn up.” Despite his composed air, Bob was unable to stop a look of unguarded astonishment from flashing across his face—not so unlike my own reflection on that Cat in the Hat day when I first saw my face in the mirror. Mirrors aside, surgery waiting rooms aside, neither of us had till this point actually confronted his doppelgänger at such close quarters; nor had we yet exchanged words in our identical voices. Having lived our entire lives as autonomous beings, we had both simultaneously acquired a fully fledged identical twin who’d managed to turn up in an identical suit, with an identical haircut and necktie—the only difference between us being that my twin had come prepared with that little extra military protection.
“I’ve been having a look through your work here,” he said with a professional tap and an air of self-possession that, rather worryingly, suggested he was several moves ahead after all, being perhaps abreast of some fact to which I was blind—e.g., his having a wee vial of grammarian’s kryptonite in his pocket. When I heard the man speak, he reminded me of somebody—me.
“You are to be congratulated on a sterling performance.”
Flattery would get him nowhere; get him nowhere at all…
“However,” he went on, his tone subtly changing. “I can’t help noticing a number of things I do not recall having specified as requiring attention.”
As if he’d summoned to his office an applicant copy editor to whom he would now dispense some indispensable and wise advice that he, the applicant copy editor, would treasure from that day on till the pinnacle of his professional career, Bob went on to spin me the story of how he, as president of the Acme International Institute of Languages, had not long ago finished working on a new edition of the in-house course book called Forward with English!, that he had been away—only to come back to find it had suffered such corruptions that it was beyond recognition. Toying with the pistol on the mouse pad, he asked me if I had any idea who the perpetrator of these alterations might be?
I made this shrug and told him I’d only come into the office to pick up a flip chart, that I wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about, and, oh, was there going to be a new eighth edition of Forward with English!, that’s nice, but maybe if he’d seen a flip chart lying around here I’d be very grateful. I said it was nevertheless an interesting question and that I would let him continue with his work in peace. Bob felt he should have got that report done sooner.
Immune to my request he went on:
“If I might just read you out an example or two of what I’m getting at,” he said, ignoring my polite request for the flip chart. “In my section on Polite Requests my ‘He knocked on the door and waited to be admitted’ has become—during my temporary absence—‘he heard a knock on
the door and wondered who it could be.’ In my section on the Past Simple, my ‘Bob Hash came into the office to make a final adjustment to his Forward with English!…’ now reads”—looking up at me with a significant pause—“he pretended to ask for a flip chart….”
The odd thing was how both the examples of purported errancy he claimed to be reading out and condemning (I was obviously not following his eyes along the page) and his examples of shining melamine rectitude were very much both in the same vein as his own purple absurdities—to which I think we have had by now quite ample exposure. There was nothing to distinguish one from the other. In other words, Bob didn’t have a hope of not uttering his gibberish point of view of the world whenever he opened his mouth. And, needless to say, he was incapable of reading out even a single one of my own sparklingly limpid compositions from the version in front of his nose—from which, thanks to all my hard work, all such above gibberish had been turned into a salted Carthage.
His idea was to lure me in on the joke. Presumably, by making no distinction between the two kinds of sample, between the legit and the ludic, Bob thought he could trap me into proffering some silver-tongued alembication of my own—in the same joshing spirit—so that he could pin the blame on me, and that way bump me off and reclaim his throne.
“What in heaven’s name do you think that is meant to mean? What the dickens is this?” he said, whacking the manuscript with an avuncular General de Gaullian thump and a mischievous wink. “For all I know, this may be only the tip of the iceberg. By the way, the whole tail is crimson, not just the tip.”
He then went on to give me a long list of paired examples, which I shall not repeat here. I had Aphex Twin looping around on my imaginary Walkman.
I will not deny that at moments his raving funambular infractions had an almost infectious joviality, and my face may now and again have broken into an occasional smile as he “read out” his examples. “Tut, tut, Mr. Hash,” I agreed, wiping a bead of laughter from my brow, “that does indeed take the cake!—yes, yes, biscuit in British—Vladimir who?” But, at several points, when I felt he was removing the water, I also made a clear show of differing—firmly, with respect—from his tone of apparent approval. There was a double game going on here. This man (Bob) was clearly a raving lunatic. But given the water pistol, I decided it best to tread carefully. At least till I got the bearings of the situation a little bit more clearly.
To stall for time, I gave Bob a succinct sound-bite-rich elucidation of my own point of view on these matters. I explained that I myself was a great enthusiast of the Occam’s razor approach to the simplification of things in general, how in matters grammatical I above all else esteemed the clarity flagship pabulum of pig Esperanto Ingleses (imperatives especially I admired for their lack of ambiguity). When Bob then went on to “cite” further his litany of balderdash (see the apocryphal Forward with English!, above), I provided him with helpfully interjected suggestions of how those perversions might stand better corrected. His wooden dysphasia I checked with the discretion of a friend. Incursions of the foreign word or phrase provoked in me the earnest request for a swift and faithful translation, which I then myself provided (“Yes, I think the demise of other languages is a blow to variety too, Jack…”). I pruned his guerrilla rum boobies, brushed aside the executive dysfunction and the hop-skip-and-jump of the melamine prosthesis. There on the spot I annuled the Gradgrind malarkey, the perturbation of vernacular pillage (no mercy for either of the double entendres!). I parried the Dionysian dance of the spanner, I neutralized his poetic embellishments, his Gnostic interjections, his unauthorized ventriloquies, his mongrel macaroni, his homeopathic pre-Acapulcan decoctions, his caravansaries of perversion, his sesquipedalian grandiloquencies, his recreational Lord Lucansian delinquencies, his asinine assonances, his pernicious mescolations, his loose-cannon Wonder-Breadish air-conditioned genetically modified ethnically cleansed politically corrected Tourette-syndromish fast-track amphibious frottage. A final wobbling spoonerism I restored to the upright, like some empedestaled Ming vase brushed by the hem of a passing guest’s oblivious tail coat that I’d caught and replaced on its plinth with great tact and cool savoir faire….
“No, no,” I said, by way of wrapping up, “that kind of stuff may in some circles be very amusing, perhaps, but it simply won’t do for the new eighth edition of Forward with English! at all.”
Disappointed at his failure to outwit me, Bob leaned back in my hydraulically sprung-loaded executive chair and scratched his head (“No, Miss Scarlett, I must have left them at your place). The dexterity of my defense had dispelled his suspicions in a trice! So cleverly had I outmaneuvered him at his own game, so exquisitely timed, so unflustered were my responses (“If I could just pick up that flip chart now, Mr. Hash, and I’ll be off”), that Bob immediately realized that somehow in the course of his armchair investigations he’d got the wrong end of the stick. He might rightly try to accuse me of borrowing one of his suits and demanding a flip chart. Of these I stand guilty as accused. But it was a long step from those minor offenses to authorship of the hack work in question. Could Bob not have been “barking up the wrong tree”?
We shook hands, Bob and I. We were the best of pals. Bob gave me his business card. I had a stack of the things in a drawer of my desk but I took one anyway. He apologized for his initial tone of suspicion and hoped I would not hold it against him. I was a man he could do business with, both today and in the future. If I saw any signs of the corrupting fiend I should not hesitate to contact Bob. I looked back at his card…prefix if you’re calling from outside of Belmont. Sales figures for the last quarter have been exceptionally good. It was a pity I’d missed the little party, he said with an imperial sweep of the arm to the scene beyond the venetians. If I wanted, I could take a balloon home. “Any color you want.” He was under a bit of stress these days. I said I could well understand. I advised him to get some rest, put his feet up. “Take things easy for a bit, Bob,” said I, “treat yourself to a vacation,” backing this up with a helpful recommendation or two of competitively priced offers on Main Street in Belmont.
Our interview was over. “No need for beefeaters around here,” I said, pointing to the three-foot-diameter clock two feet from the front of my nose. I think he appreciated the allusion. It was time I got going. It was time I hit the road. All bonhomie, Bob stood up to accompany his illustrious guest across a swath of plush pile carpet in the direction of egress (the door).
“Oh, don’t forget,” he announced in a solicitous tone, picking up a fallen flip chart, “your Golftasche.”
I took it from him and stared at the flip chart.
“Das ist nicht meine Golftasche,” I told Bob, holding it out at arm’s length with a look of mock consternation on my face. “Nein, nein. Das ist NICHT meine Golftasche!”
78
Courtesies and Polite Requests
In many everyday situations we ask strangers for information or want them to do something for us. Use of the correct form of wording is important when approaching people in order to avoid undue offense.
Examples of “wish”: “I wish you wouldn’t point that gun at me like that, please.”
79
My momentary and very near fatal slip-up will no doubt remind you of that famous scene in The Great Escape with Richard Attenborough and Gordon Jackson in the roles of dapper musicologist and expert in rare Tyrolean musical scores, accompanied by his piano-tuning assistant. Having managed to elude their pursuers through the sleepy Alpine village, they are waiting in line to join traveling villagers (peasant head scarves, baskets of eggs) aboard the little bus that will take them to a glockenspiel convention in a neighboring village nestled among chocolate bar mountains and oblivious cowbells. I too had almost reached freedom, my foot up on the running board of the bus. I too had converted my interrogator’s initial suspicions into credulity and a solicitous “good luck” till my gaffe with the Golftasche.
“For a moment, for a millisecond…�
� Bob said, motioning me over to a side chair with the barrel of his gun. “Very good. Excellent,” he said. “You nearly had me there…Mr…. Mr. Hash.”
Any sense of goodwill there’d been up till then now drained from the room. (My “Come come!” holding up objects to hand—“Is this a book? Is this a pencil?” for example—was not well received.) As I said, Bob could get a bit rattled when things didn’t go according to schedule. He snatched back his flip chart. Bob’s accusation that it was I who’d planted the mangled poppycock errata (of which he of course was the author) was such a preposterous reversal of truth—no, was so outrageous…that it was almost impossible to refute. In any case, the loaded pistol advised me against trying to explain that, far from being the prankster, I was the shining knight who had interceded to restore the course book to its pristine condition. There was room in this world for only one Bob T. Hash III. Only one of us was going to leave that room alive. By extension, there was room for only one version of Forward with English! And, as things currently stood, the prognosis for my version did not look too brilliant.
Suddenly Bob went left-field. “It appears we have the same taste in suits.” He was swiveling about in the comfy executive bucket seat. It was true, we wore identical suits, identical ties, identical glasses, had the same heads and the same vocal intonation. It could be said that Bob was my double. “But I hear our shared tastes extend beyond suits, don’t they, Mr. Hash?” (see appendix Question Tags, Supplementary Examples). As Bob said this, he reached over the desktop to pick up the framed family photo of the Hashes en famille, the one where they’re standing on the lawn in front of the veranda and a section of white picket fence. “While I’ve been away, Mr. Hash, I believe you have been making the acquaintance of my wife? She is hygienic, punctual, and enchanting; she bakes, you’ll agree, a most excellent meatloaf.”