Mark the Dwarf

By Jack D. Harvey

Sex-starved, sex-crazed and just plain crazy midgets and dwarfs! Clowns from outer space! Adventures in restraint-land with big-breasted blondes! Plain and chocolate-covered writing! Linguistics, quantum physics, genetics, anthropology, animal husbandry! And there's more! When Mark the dwarf goes bowling, he ends up on an enormous platform high up in the middle of nowhere. He has an encounter with some clowns from outer space, who propose a mission and a Faustian bargain for Mark for the purposes of an intergalactic exchange of evil for good. With some misgivings, Mark accepts. Mark the Dwarf is the doppelgänging odyssey of a dwarf through time, metamorphosis and space. After many adventures on and off the landscape of the everyday world, along with bizarre encounters with sly and dangerous aliens, Mark, refined and reborn in the crucible of his odyssey, returns to himself, to his beginning, to his place in the everyday world, stronger and looming larger in the terrain of his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: Dec 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781634134507

Book preview

book.

Prologue

This landscape had a charm of its own, wild and woolly, jagged mountains rearing up near the sea and wary waves fomenting rebellion among the rocks, wild horrors in storms, manes white-flowering. Let us leave our imaginations fly! Sheer paltry! Not at our behest, day rides to anchor, weary in the west. Night comes on and stars heave up from the tomb of the dark and sail slowly across the sky, looking down at something, anything.

Here and there, moonlit heirs to it all, the myriad teeth of Cadmus' dragon rustle up out of the ground, armed warriors, fit to kill, minions of destruction.

And from underground, from the veins of the earth, from the dwarf guardians of the hoard, small sounds, little steps. Who comes? Hark! Hark! Mark, Mark! Here comes Mark! He ain't got much of a size, he won't leave much of a mark, he can't throw light on the dark, but he knows where he's been and he knows where he's going. Fear his fearless bark, no more, no less than the dragon's fiery bite!

Chapter One- It Ain't The Heat

Mark, a seventy-three year old Idaho dwarf, now living in a small rented house in Phoenix, Arizona, received two letters on Tuesday, May 22, the date of his birthday. The envelopes were ordinary dime-store envelopes and both were post-marked on the same day. Mark was surprised; he hardly received any mail, other than bills and miscellaneous junk. And now two letters in a single day! As one of the few dwarves in Arizona who raised and trained parakeets- perhaps the only dwarf- he led a lonely life, surrounded by the bright-colored birds screeching away in cages and by his books, haphazardly arranged on shelves. Mark was a voracious and uncritical reader. Reading was his only hobby; reading was his life.

Mark was curious about the letters, but waited nearly an hour before opening them. The first envelope contained a small old-fashioned key, wrapped in a fine thin piece of paper, on which six words were written: Assume your burden; search the lanes. Mark did not know what to make of this message. It sounded exciting and enigmatic, like the advice given to characters in fairy tales. The second letter contained a clipping from a local paper. It was an ad for a bowling alley in the city. Come one, come all, read the ad, May 31, 8:00 PM, free prizes and refreshments, as we proudly celebrate our fifteenth year at this location. Then, in large letters, the name of the place- KARMODIAN BOWLERAMA and the address. Mark went over to his stove, put on the kettle and made himself a cup of tea, while he thought over what he should do. It seemed obvious the two letters, taken together, indicated a trip to the Bowlerama to assume his burden, whatever that meant. But what burden? The last thing Mark wanted to do was to assume any more burdens; his life itself had been more of a burden than he would like to admit. A bird without feathers, a duckling without a father or a mother, he would say, though he was never quite sure what he meant by that, even if he remembered reading part of it somewhere. His only daughter, a spinster, lived nearby, visited him frequently, and sourly presided over his household. He had a brother dead for years, parents long dead and for himself, nowhere to go but down into the grave. A lingering sense of adventure, a desire to throw caution to the winds- who knows? – decided him. The gauntlet would be taken up, the Rubicon would be crossed, come what may.

May 31 was hot and humid. He trundled his misshapen body down the stairs and out the door at seven o'clock in the evening, excited and afraid. He had the letters in his pocket, just in case credentials or identification was needed. There was no doubt in his mind that something was going to happen tonight. Magic and hope were in the air. The parakeets had been strangely silent all day and he could feel the tension building inside him. After riding on a series of buses, he limped along a street to the address printed in the advertisement and was surprised to find a very ordinary-looking bowling alley, at least on the outside; inside it was something else again. No dowdy housewives in curlers, no fancy fake-satin bowling league shirts; in fact, there were very few people there, although it was nearly eight o'clock in the evening. The few people there looked too upper-class and over-dressed for a run-of-the-mill bowling alley. Another thing that struck Mark as out of the ordinary was that people paid no attention to him. When you are a dwarf, people always give you a special look, one way or another. They either look at you and immediately look away, as if by averting their eyes quickly enough, you might disappear, or they stare at you good and hard, as if by staring at you long enough, your deformity might disappear. Either way was unpleasant. But Mark had lived with this all his life and here at this bowling alley the few people present did not seem to pay any attention to him, which was not easy to understand. Now what to do? Mark decided to sit down at one of the booths along the wall and order a coke. The gum-chewing waitress, in her late teens with large hips and a flourishing case of acne, came slowly out of nowhere, not interested in her job or in him. When she came back with his coke, Mark noticed that she walked kind of funny, not a limp or a limitation of movement, but as if she were just learning how to walk again after a long illness and how slowly she walked! Stoned or medicated, she struggled like a deep-sea diver through murky waters, bent on a forgotten salvage. Mark finished his coke and was idly looking at the glass when he noticed with a small shock that printed in red letters on the bottom of the inside of the glass were the words bowl right now. Mark thought this might be an incentive from the bowling alley, but on closer examination decided against it. The script was peculiar, with a Gothic cast, but somehow clearer and easier to read. It had the irregular look of handwritten script. A desk-bound scribe in the middle ages, copying chronicles, stories, sagas. Memories of Parsifal, Gottfried and Gandalf the Good danced through his head. What was he thinking? A peculiar sensation came swimming over him and he had to take a few deep breaths and sit a minute before he got up. He rented a pair of bowling shoes and went over to the lane the counterman had indicated. Mark had never bowled and didn't know or care to know anything about bowling. He managed to get his stumpy misshapen fingers in the holes of the smallest and lightest ball he could find and, with great difficulty, rolled the ball down the alley. About three-quarters of the way down the alley, the ball rolled off the alley, into the gutter and stopped dead, looking heavy and inert as a spent cannon ball. Now what, thought Mark. Should I wait until someone comes? Are there pin boys? Mark doubted this, as the pins seemed to be cleared by some kind of clanking automatic mechanism, which he could hear and partially see on the alleys around him. He waited five minutes, ten minutes. Nothing. Mark decided to retrieve the ball himself. He walked cautiously a few steps out on the alley and looked around to see if anybody noticed. Nobody was paying any more attention to him than they had from the time he walked into the bowling alley. He moved down the alley towards the ball, feeling embarrassed and exposed. Just as he was about to pick up the ball, the ball, by itself, rolled farther along the gutter toward the pin end of the alley. This was unexpected and peculiar. Mark followed slowly after the ball and it stopped dead just short of the kingpin. Mark reached down to pick up the ball and suddenly felt himself being dragged through the pins, which fell in all directions, and into the back end of the alley, behind the pins. Mark was more embarrassed than afraid and thought that he might have accidentally tripped the mechanism that set up the pins. He could not see what was dragging him along, as it had become very dark. He felt around and was horrified to feel nothing; not even his own body. He held a hand up in front of his face, but could see nothing. After a short period of time, Mark had a sensation of descending at a tremendous rate of speed- like being in an elevator free-falling through space. Mark remembered something he read about Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and an elevator- the concept of no frame of reference; a simple analogy for the common reader and this analogy had always frightened him. Just as he was about to become nauseous, the sensation of movement stopped and Mark sat down as quickly as he could. Whatever he was sitting on felt cold and gritty, like an old cement floor. Mark waited motionless for what was coming next. Slowly, the pitch-black dark gave way to grayness and then to a kind of pearl gray that seemed to emanate from every direction. Mark began to make out some features far below him, emerging from the mist. As the air cleared and visibility was restored, he realized immediately that he was high up in the air, maybe a thousand feet or more from the ground or whatever the surface was below and that he was sitting on the edge of a dilapidated cement sill that stretched on as far as he could see. The flat green surface below was so far away that he might as well have been in an airplane for all the detail he could make out- was this a shallow green sea or a green landscape? The only thing that he could be sure of was that the color of the surface below was green; a green that was indescribable and almost unendurable to look at; the greenness of green, the color green, stripped of its disguises. No shimmer or glow- just solid green and giving out green the way the sun gives out light. Mark closed his eyes. A body couldn't look at that too long. Mark was afraid to move, as he was right on the edge of the sill and the edge led to a steep and pebbly incline that looked dangerous to traverse. Above the incline was a flat surface that looked like a cement floor. He sat still and soon he noticed that he was not alone. What he first thought were irregularities on the flat surface above the sill and the incline turned out to be objects at a great distance. Were these objects moving? Gradually, one object became larger and larger and Mark could make out that he was being approached by a two-legged creature and, as it came closer, he could see that it was human. Soon the man, for it was a man, came up to the edge of the flat surface above Mark, cautiously slid down the incline and sat down next to him. The man was perspiring profusely in his blue serge business suit, even though it was not hot, and held a briefcase across his chest with both hands. He looked familiar, but Mark could not place him. How much insurance do you carry? he asked Mark. Mark was taken aback by this abrupt question and pretended not to understand English. "Nem tudom, said Mark. No English by me. The man looked startled and began to bark and squeak like a lap dog. Mark had never heard such sounds come out of a human throat. The noise was deafening and had a peculiar resonance in the atmosphere. Things were getting out of hand. OK, OK, said Mark, I know English. The man stopped his noise and his face contorted, as if he were going to cry. After a moment, he gained his composure, becoming very serious and introduced himself as Mordred Hasso from Bell River, Arkansas. Mark gave his name and place and the conversation moved on briskly from why are you here, why I am here, how did we get here, where are we and how do we get back to where we started? Mordred knew no more about any of this than Mark, other than the last question and on this he was quite positive: Oh, said Mordred, there is no way back. I have weighed all possibilities and come up with a goose egg. This sill and the platform behind it stretch on for miles and miles. Why not buy some insurance to pass the time? Mark could not determine whether Mordred was balmy or cryptic or both, but he gathered that ordinary life was possible, even here on this sill in a Cloud Cuckoo Land; in fact, possibly not more difficult for a seventy-three year old dwarf than life back in Arizona. Like the famous American hero of the seas, John Paul Jones, he decided to do what he could to put himself in harm's way;" he instinctively knew that this was the only way back if there was a way back. He remembered a Latin tag from slogging through Virgil in high school, fortuna iuvat audentes, fortune favors the brave, but he was no Aeneas. The important thing now was to get away from the edge of the sill. He started backing up the sill to the pebbly incline and then backed slowly up the incline to the flat surface above. Done and done and easier than he expected. Mordred sat where he was, looking up curiously at Mark. Above Mark's head, the sky had turned pearly-white, too bright to look at for long, but there was heat in the brightness and it felt good on his warped back. I'm on Venus, said Mark to no one in particular. Chen the Choiceless, evil emperor of Antares, has sent me here on a space raft to pick the perilous mushrooms of Musgurd the Meretricious, mad Tetrarch of the Western Quadrant. Me, little and alone, with no help and no chance of reward. Carried away in a rapture of science fiction, Mark began to wander on away from the sill and towards the inner part of what Mordred rightly described as a platform. Mordred still sat where he was. His briefcase was open and he was riffling through papers and talking to himself in a high-pitched voice.

Woe is me, woe is me, alack and welladay, said Mark to no one. Who's going to pull my chestnuts out of the fire? Not an insurance salesman. Behind him, he heard Mordred (was it Mordred?) shouting out: Beware the hides that parch! Beware the Exxon of the Sun! At least that is what it sounded like. In any event, Mark continued on his path, rolling and lurching like a galliot on the inconstant waves of the sea. Progress was slow and the surface was not as flat as it seemed from the sill. Somehow, Mark had the impression of climbing and descending, even though his eyes told him all was flat in front of him and under him. Night fell and Mark was still muddling along in the middle of nowhere. There was no twilight; in a few minutes, it was pitch-dark, no stars, no clouds, no moon. There was nothing to do but stop. Mark could not see his hands in front of his face. Black as a coal-scuttle, black as Hades, black as King Black. Mark curled up as best he could. At least it's warm, he thought. I wonder what's going to happen to my birds? Who will feed them? His landlady had lost her son in Vietnam and had no patience with anything but her own grief. Mark was sure he would have been evicted because of the noisy birds, if not for his prompt payment of the rent each month and his polite interest in the landlady's long-winded eulogies on her departed soldier son.

Chapter Two- A Chapter Between Art and Commerce

Biff Boff, literary agent and all-around bad hat, sat in his office in downtown Los Angeles, idly picking his nose and waiting for Luke Samjohn to be ushered into his enormous pretentious office, strewn with manuscripts, screen-plays, correspondence from his authors and ephemera of all sorts and sizes. Luke was his most successful client and his first book, A Lark With A Dwarf, had already gone through two editions and there was talk of making the book into a movie. The fact that Luke was a dwarf and a pretty winsome dwarf at that, added more fuel to the merrily burning flames of publicity generated by the book tour and Biff's endless flogging of his contacts in the business, developed over a lifetime of kissing behinds and providing favors. Luke had sent Biff the outline and the first dozen or so chapters of his second book, Midget Haven, and Biff was far from happy with the result, which seemed to him a complete departure from the happy-go-lucky secret life of little people adventure story which was Lark. Haven seemed an adventure in self-indulgence; a hyper-literary tour de l'ennui and he intended to tell Luke as much.

So, ushered in by Grethe Verloren, his Swedish (so she claimed) secretary, Luke Samjohn, dressed, as usual, to the nines, in a blue pin-striped suit, silk tie and shirt, red galluses and, last but not least, a pair of snakeskin shoes, expensive as a Pharaoh's relics, carefully made his way across a carpet, lush and deep as golf course grass, and climbed up into the plush chair opposite Biff. Biff wasted no time. Sammy, he said, waving the manuscript in one hand, what is this? Are you out of your mind? How are we going to sell this? What is all this arcane bullshit, these obscure references? What happened to you in Yucatan? You started the book there, right? Luke sat impassive, waiting for Biff to finish shooting his wad, before he answered. He knew how Biff operated. For Chrissake, Biff went on, you know studies have shown that the average American can't read a comic-book and figure out what's going on and here you are, talking about Gregory of Tours, nuclear fusion and using three-syllable words all over the place. You want to make money or you want the fucking book remaindered thirty days after it comes out? How much do you love your work? More than your life-style? Banging hookers two at a time? Well? Whaddya gotta say?

Luke thought. What was the switch here, what was the right touch that would tune Biff's ears to what he was trying to do in Haven? OK, go with the Space Balls Yiddish lead-in; although a closet anti-Semite, Biff liked to play being Jewish and knew some Yiddish. Well, Luke started, "you know people love not understanding and they have an unholy reverence for sounds and pictures. Look at TV and the movies. Remember Space Balls? Remember the scene where some character in the movie uses the word bupkes? How many goyim sitting in the movie knew what bupkes meant? Yet most of them laughed. Is it the sound of the word? Not knowing what the word means? Meaning is overrated anyway. Plot is overrated. People want rhythm, song, drums, repetition. The first musical instrument was the drum, pound, pound, pounding away, like fucking. Aside from the fact that Joyce couldn't see well, why do you think there's so much music in Finnegans Wake and Ulysses? Same with Milton. See with the ear, hear with the eye."

Jesus Christ, said Biff, that kind of talk is just what I'm talking about. It's all word-play and dubious imported erudition; the public is never going to take to a book that reads like a doctoral thesis. Biff was a Yale graduate and had studied Greek at The American University of Athens, but he tried to conceal his education as much as he could; in his business, education was not a virtue. So let's go through this thing from soup to nuts; a quick walk on the analytical side and we'll straighten you out. You want to sell books and not only to the intelligentsia because their number is not legion, unlike the devils in hell or the scrofulous adolescents hanging around the mall. You want to connect. A little purple prose maybe, but lay off the Nick Lucas pick and go for the pap and the baby powder. You love your work too much; it's just work, after all, and not much of that for a guy like you. The reading public...Biff trailed off, as he saw that Luke has closed his eyes and seemed to be deep in a plangent glide to another level of unawareness. Oh, for Chrissake, wake up, Luke, and listen to me. You start off well enough with this story; maybe a little too much Truman Capote rip-off, too much Eudora Welty, too much tip-toeing around, but OK, enough of a hook with the surrealism; people are fascinated with midgets and dwarves, but not with all that literary folderol; you need more story and less language and you got to head someplace at a reasonable pace. Blow up a few things and stick in some sex. By the time you get to Greta, you've lost them. By the way, more graphic details in the Greta chapter and less Lady Chatterley's Lover. You're awkward writing about sex and I don't know why; you fucked every cocktail waitress between here and New York City, some of them twice. Another thing is the platform is too abstract and there isn't enough scenery and a big enough cast. Put in more people or make those far-off objects you describe into something interesting, some chance encounters between them and Mark would be a good idea; some kind of Boschian landscape, except the women are hotties and doomed to walk the platform in skimpy crotchless outfits for all eternity. Maybe stick 'em up on a runway. Chance for some good weird dialogue between Mark and the babes. You might stick a Marilyn character in there, that fucking bitch, up to her eyebrows in shit like the pope in Dante's Inferno would be good, but don't give her any good lines. Marilyn was Biff's third ex-to-be wife in waiting. Luke came back to life and rolled his eyes. Don't give me that shit about prostituting your art, continued Biff, this is business and unless you want to go back to teaching English Lit at Green Mountain College, you'd best heed me. I know whereof I speak. Love your work less and the money more."

You don't know shit from Shinola, thought Luke as he shifted uncomfortably in the soft and limitless chair. How do I explain to him what I am trying to do and why this book will be viable, even for the unwashed and uneducated? Doesn't he see what's coming? Kindle me up a Kindle digital gizmo and you can take paper and stick it up your ass, along with the printed words; look at these adolescent saw-toothed apes sitting in the movies, the malls, the cars, the buses, the banks, the schools, the bedrooms, texting away on cell phones in their ugly mutilated shorthand of symbols of sounds. We all want to escape from something; it's the same thing, really. Love itself is a great escape.

Are you fucking Grethe? Luke felt this was a good gambit. That's none of your business, said Biff, and anyway I am almost a free man or will be as soon as Marilyn jews down her lawyer on the fee and signs the papers. Not a problem, as she is banging him four times a week, according to the detective I got on her. Why do you ask? You got eyes for Grethe?

No, I don't, said Luke, "you just seem heated up today and that usually means you have a new woman gnawing on your bone. But getting back to the book, I want to explain to you what I am not trying to do. First thing, I am not writing another Lark With A Dwarf. That was all well and good when I wanted to break out of academia, but now it's a little different. Now I want to make more than money."

Unperturbed, Biff continued. Like here's an example and I'm just spitballing a few style and story points here, but you'll get the idea. First, eliminate the prologue; too artsy and I don't get it and if I don't get it neither will the civilians. Second, make more of a description of Mark and make him kind of cute. You start off by telling us nothing other than he's a transplanted Idaho dwarf. Might as well say he's a transplanted Idaho potato. Why not say something like, 'Mark, an old dwarf with little hands and little feet and a little body and a big head and a little beard, with two pig-tails sticking out of it, and a little green suit and twinkling little bright eyes ...'

Luke groaned and rolled his eyes again. What are you doing? Is he supposed to be a fairy tale dwarf? He's not a fairy tale dwarf. Why pimp him out and anyway, the public is fed up with cutesy Snow White and Cinderella characters who never in their lives shit or fart and wouldn't know a sanitary napkin from toilet paper.

Biff, oblivious, rambled on. Then, when you get to the bowling alley and he orders a drink from the waitress, have a little dialogue. You want him out of fairy tale land and a hairy grownup? Have him hit on the waitress; all the folklore says midgets and dwarves are randy as hell. Some good schmutzy dialogue like 'Hello honey, I'm small but I'm big, if you know what I mean. What are you doing after you get off work? Why not grab dinner someplace?' You can fold the whole shtick into something else later, sex, or she can give him a good kick in the ass on the spot. Some kind of dramatic rejection or how about she falls in love with him, like Anna Karenina and Vronsky, a doomed love affair. She can follow him around or even get sucked onto the platform with him while she is sucking him off at the back end of the bowling alley; then you have the two of them on the platform and a chance for dialogue between two people coming from the same place in the same world. Get what I mean? More rooted that way and less dreamtime. OK, we're done here. Go out and sin no more. Bring me something I can fucking sell.

Chapter Three- Show and Tell

During the night Mark slept soundly. He seemed to hear wings swooping and sweeping around his head. Next morning, feeling hungry and tired, he pushed on across the limitless waste of the platform. Dawn had come as quickly as night. After what Mark reckoned were three hours, he began to make out some kind of structure ahead. A small building or shippan. Mark got closer and realized the building was a carnival booth, one of the kind where balls are thrown at a target for cheap and useless prizes, collected if the target is knocked down. The target in this case was a clown's head, hideously colored and grinning like an ape. No one was visible behind the counter of the booth, where the balls were stacked neatly. Well, said Mark, why not? And walking under the counter, picked up a ball, went back out in front of the counter and threw the ball without a great deal of conviction or accuracy at the target. The ball went nowhere near the target, but immediately another clown head popped up and began talking: Well I'll be cloned, it said, I thought I'd never get a turn on top. The first clown head said, that's not the switch, Mark; go for the gelt, play for keeps and keep your eye on the prize- throw another ball! Mark did. The ball described a graceful arc and landed alongside the two clown heads where, swelling up like a balloon, it soon assumed their more or less identical size and shape. Now we have three talking heads, said the erstwhile ball and babbling away, the other two heads bobbed up and down like corks. Forget throwing another ball, said the first head, have a piece of fruit, thereupon spitting out three or four pear-shaped objects at Mark which, in fact, turned out to be pears. Surprisingly enough, considering their origin, they were clean and dry and looked edible. As he was terribly hungry, Mark munched away while the second head, clearing his non-existent throat, began importantly: "Since I am the second head and second is the golden mean, never too late or too early, always fair and steady, I will begin this piece. Where you are is not important. You are not in another dimension or an alternate universe because we don't do that any more. You are certainly not on this page dreaming or suffering from delusions or trauma or drug-induced rambling. Leave those tricks to the author. This is, metaphorically speaking, the house that Jack built, except it's not a house, but a convenient platform for you and us to meet and greet; for us, a kind of pied-à-terre, if we had feet, and for you, imagine it as a magnitudinous concrete cube, floating above the bright green sea of planet Mango. Flash Hardohn. Remember? And by the way, it's Mang the Merciless, not Chen the Choiceless, like you said before, after you got off the sill. You, Mark the dwarf, for the moment are not anything more or less than you ever were or ever will be, but here, on our turf, in our deluxe alfresco laboratory, we will do wonders to make you anew. You're gonna go through a lot of changes, buddy, but you're going to have some fun along the way. Fame, fortune and all that goes with the world, the flesh and the devil. You'll have all the earthly pleasures any man can claim. And don't worry, Mark the Flash, cooked up in the pan; you'll plant your romantic dart in your own special and ardent Dale's garden; the target's bull's-eye will present, by and by. It's all in the cards, along with everything else we got planned for you and it's plenty, plenty."

The head had a disembodied (not surprising under the circumstances) pleasant voice, not mechanical, but somehow Mark knew that the lack of accent and the strange phrasing concealed a gulf between him and it as deep, in earthly terms, as the Mariana Trench.

The voice went on: "And of course these heads, like you, are just an inexpensive trick; a trick from way back and less than a treat for them or for you. As a matter of fact or for the purpose of this fiction, we have bodies and our bodies are wide and short by your standards and later maybe you will see us as we are. It won't be a great thrill, I can promise you that- you'd have more fun looking at holograms of a turd. Now, to get on with it. We know what you people need. We sell our services or trade them for what we want that you have and you have something we want and you don't want. Now before I begin to talk turkey and get down to brass tacks, trading metaphor for metaphor, some background is in order. As you know, there are many stars and other unseen forces in the sky. Rings of heavenly spheres, which make a strange music in ears that can hear. The big dying suns woopsing out waves of energy and such like this and that particle, ion, gas, membrane, cosmic rays, curls of dimensions, quasars, pulsars, vacuum fluctuations. It's a frigging zoo out there, but inspiring if you like racing way above things you stand on every day. We are from (here, the second head blew out his lips and looked extremely foolish) Out There. We are the creatures of creation, kind of like Durga-Kali-Shiva all rolled into one, many-armed and many-legged, and never the same faces and never dancing the same dance. The big knock on God has always been that he is always someplace else when you need him and in his infinite wisdom and indeterminate confusion shows his love, his concern and his divine immutable existence by hurting you and punishing you, not according to your own just desserts, but according to His. We are different from him in all his manifestations and work differently, kind of like gods, but not like him and not at all concerned with concealment, which is the great sin of God. Adam in the garden hiding? Balderdash. God in the garden hiding from Adam.

We go from place to place battling pests, plagues, general imbalances and improprieties, locusts and lizards, inordinate lust and other fevers on all levels. We are here to free your world from the big red devil or the big black evil or whatever else comes to hand and the price is right because we are now in bonus bargain days through the end of this here lucky thirteenth Mayan Baktun. So get out your wallet and climb on the Viconian bicycle; time's a wastin'."

Here, the head looked sly and turned in turn to each of his compatriots. "The sooty engine of all evil, the motoring Adversary or simply the Devil, whatever you name it or him, has large horsepower. We want it and can use it and you it don't do no good. So here's the deal. Remember Jesus Christ? The divine semi-conductor? Remember the vicious little girl who made fun of your dwarfhood in the third grade? It's the same job, except we have ways of drawing it on you that your Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ or that little girl never thought of. Peccata mundi, pecking away at your peace of mind and your once and future third grade humiliation and the other humiliations at the hands and feet of the drugstore bad boys. Now you, little father, are going (here the clown enlarged his eyes until Mark thought they were going to pop out of his head) to assume the burden. At these last words, the three heads laughed, whistled, grunted and talked in tongues or maybe plain gibberish. You have the key we mailed to you? asked the second head. Mark answered in the affirmative and pulled the key out of his pocket. Good, said the head, I haven't the faintest idea what it's for or what it opens, but that may come clear in the future, which is always around the corner. More about the key sooner than later. Now we have laid everything out for you and all you have to do is some fantastic stunts of mind and body and I can promise you you will have a practically new and low mileage young body to work with; the mind stays more or less yours and you got to share the coop with the owner of the body, a guy named Lance, but nothing's perfect. The time goes back to yesteryear, but you don't, you stay the same, an old dwarf in a new body. We'll walk you back through the sandy footsteps of your own chronology to an earlier time, so things don't get more or less confusing. You got that straight? Even then, it ain't going to be easy for you to keep track of everything, but you will be the resurrection and the life of your own true destiny, which we know and you don't. Got it? By the way, are you familiar with the doctrine of original sin, predestination and the Port-Royal brand of Jansenism?"

By this time Mark, exasperated and strengthened by the repast of pears, began to speak his mind: Listen, clown-head number two. I don't believe one thing you told me. I am not here. I probably got hit on the head by the bowling pin machine and have a good case against the bowling alley. OK, maybe not such a good case. Yes, I am vaguely familiar with the doctrine of original sin, predestination and what you call the Port-Royal brand of Jansenism. What does that have to do with my future transformation? Is this Lance a Catholic priest? I was brought up Catholic, but my faith, as some medieval poet said, is as wavering as the sleeve of a coat in the wind. As far as going off on some adventure, I am not going anyplace any time sooner or later than now and don't give me any of that looking backward line of malarkey. I will wait here until I come to my senses and you and all this fiction disappear. Leaving not a rack behind, interrupted the second head. OK, buddy, suit yourself; you got a long wait. You like mush melon?" Before Mark could answer, the three heads had metamorphosed into cantaloupes. Mark, after realizing that he was hungry and that in a dream anything makes sense, walked under the counter and picked up one of the cantaloupes. It looked delicious, but as he bit into the sweet flesh, he heard within it a muffled, but distinct voice intone without a trace of humor: Hic est corpus meum. At this point, Mark was ready for anything and instead of becoming amused or alarmed, he began to think of his own body. Corpus meum. The body that had let him down even before he was born. Misshapen and ugly, his parents had never concealed their distaste for him. Sex? Girls? As a lad, he couldn't even masturbate with any pleasure because he was aware of how ridiculous his erection looked coming out of his deformed body.

Stop moping around in the past and pay goddamn attention, said the second head, we already told you we'd have to do something about your outside, change your age and physique and hide you inside a new and low mileage body. What do you say to 6' 2, blond and we reverse the numbers of your age, 37 instead of 73? You got that straight? And we'll send the now you back in time and throw in the rest of the bargain then. Mark started to smile. The lamebrained patter of the melon-heads was faintly amusing. Sounds good to me, said Mark, when do we start, if we haven't started already?"

"Wait till the lights go out, kid, then we do magic. We will put you under for a long long time and sprawl you out on this here platform real comfortable, like that Indian sleeping giant of yore, dreaming anew your past and re-constituting