Side Effects

'Bear with me, sugar,' Kugelmass said. He was pale and sweaty. He kissed her again, raced to the elevators, yelled at Persky over a pay phone in the Plaza lobby, and just made it home before midnight.

'According to Popkin, barley prices in Krakow have not been this stable since 1971,' he said to Daphne, and smiled wanly as he climbed into bed.

The whole week went by like that.

On Friday night, Kugelmass told Daphne there was another symposium he had to catch, this one in Syracuse. He hurried back to the Plaza, but the second weekend there was nothing like the first. 'Get me back into the novel or marry me,' Emma told Kugelmass. 'Meanwhile, I want to get a job or go to class, because watching TV all day is the pits.'

'Fine. We can use the money,' Kugelmass said. 'You consume twice your weight in room service.'

'I met an Off Broadway producer in Central Park yesterday, and he said I might be right for a project he's doing,' Emma said.

'Who is this clown?' Kugelmass asked.

'He's not a clown. He's sensitive and kind and cute. His name's Jeff Something-or-Other, and he's up for a Tony.'

Later that afternoon, Kugelmass showed up at Persky's drunk.

'Relax,' Persky told him. 'You'll get a coronary.'

'Relax. The man says relax. I've got a fictional character stashed in a hotel room, and I think my wife is having me tailed by a private shamus.'

'O.K., O.K. We know there's a problem.' Persky crawled under the cabinet and started banging on something with a large wrench.

'I'm like a wild animal,' Kugelmass went on. 'I'm sneaking around town, and Emma and I have had it up to here with each other. Not to mention a hotel tab that reads like the defense budget.'

'So what should I do? This is the world of magic,' Persky said. 'It's all nuance.'

'Nuance, my foot. I'm pouring Dom Perignon and black eggs into this little mouse, plus her wardrobe, plus she's enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse and suddenly needs professional photos. Also, Persky, Professor Fivish Kopkind, who teaches Comp Lit and who has always been jealous of me, has identified me as the sporadically appearing character in the Flaubert book. He's threatened to go to Daphne. I see ruin and alimony; jail. For adultery with Madame Bovary, my wife will reduce me to beggary.'

'What do you want me to say? I'm working on it night and day. As far as your personal anxiety goes, that I can't help you with. I'm a magician, not an analyst.'

By Sunday afternoon, Emma had locked herself in the bathroom and refused to respond to Kugelmass's entreaties. Kugelmass stared out the window at the Wollman Rink and contemplated suicide. Too bad this is a low floor, he thought, or I'd do it right now. Maybe if I ran away to Europe and started life over… Maybe I could sell the International Herald Tribune, like those young girls used to.

The phone rang. Kugelmass lifted it to his ear mechanically.

'Bring her over,' Persky said. 'I think I got the bugs out of it.'

Kugelmass's heart leaped. 'You're serious?' he said. 'You got it licked?'

'It was something in the transmission. Go figure.'

'Persky, you're a genius. We'll be there in a minute. Less than a minute.'

Again the lovers hurried to the magician's apartment, and again Emma Bovary climbed into the cabinet with her boxes. This time there was no kiss. Persky shut the doors, took a deep breath, and tapped the box three times. There was the reassuring popping noise, and when Persky peered inside, the box was empty. Madame Bovary was back in her novel. Kugelmass heaved a great sigh of relief and pumped the magician's hand.

'It's over,' he said. 'I learned my lesson. I'll never cheat again, I swear it.' He pumped Persky's hand again and made a mental note to send him a necktie.

Three weeks later, at the end of a beautiful spring afternoon, Persky answered his doorbell. It was Kugelmass, with a sheepish expression on his face.

'O.K., Kugelmass,' the magician said. 'Where to this time?'

'It's just this once,' Kugelmass said. 'The weather is so lovely, and I'm not getting any younger. Listen, you've read Portnoy's Complaint? Remember The Monkey?'

'The price is now twenty-five dollars, because the cost of living is up, but I'll start you off with one freebie, due to all the trouble I caused you.'

'You're good people,' Kugelmass said, combing his few remaining hairs as he climbed into the cabinet again. 'This'll work all right?'

'I hope. But I haven't tried it much since all that unpleasantness.'

'Sex and romance,' Kugelmass said from inside the box. 'What we go through for a pretty face.'

Persky tossed in a copy of Portnoy's Complaint and rapped three times on the box. This time, instead of a popping noise there was a dull explosion, followed by a series of crackling noises and a shower of sparks. Persky leaped back, was seized by a heart attack, and dropped dead. The cabinet burst into flames, and eventually the entire house burned down.

Kugelmass, unaware of this catastrophe, had his own problems. He had not been thrust into Portnoy's Complaint, or into any other novel, for that matter. He had been projected into an old textbook, Remedial Spanish, and was running for his life over a barren, rocky terrain as the word tener ('to have')-a large and hairy irregular verb- raced after him on its spindly legs.

My Speech to the Graduates

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. I speak, by the way, not with any sense of futility, but with a panicky conviction of the absolute meaninglessness of existence which could easily be misinterpreted as pessimism. It is not. It is merely a healthy concern for the predicament of modern man. (Modern man is here defined as any person born after Nietzsche's edict that 'God is dead,' but before the hit recording 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.') This 'predicament' can be stated one of two ways, though certain linguistic philosophers prefer to reduce it to a mathematical equation where it can be easily solved and even carried around in the wallet.

Put in its simplest form, the problem is: How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world given my waist and shirt size? This is a very difficult question when we realize that science has failed us. True, it has conquered many diseases, broken the genetic code, and even placed human beings on the moon, and yet when a man of eighty is left in a room with two eighteen-year-old cocktail waitresses nothing happens. Because the real problems never change. After all, can the human soul be glimpsed through a microscope? Maybe-but you'd definitely need one of those very good ones with two eyepieces. We know that the most advanced computer in the world does not have a brain as sophisticated as that of an ant. True, we could say that of many of our relatives but we only have to put up with them at weddings or special occasions. Science is something we depend on all the time. If I develop a pain in the chest I must take an X-ray. But what if the radiation from the X-ray causes me deeper problems? Before I know it, I'm going in for surgery. Naturally, while they're giving me oxygen an intern decides to light up a cigarette. The next thing you know I'm rocketing over the World Trade Center in bed clothes. Is this science? True, science has taught us how to pasteurize cheese. And true, this can be fun in mixed company-but what of the H-bomb? Have you ever seen what happens when one of those things falls off a desk accidentally? And where is science when one ponders the eternal riddles? How did the cosmos originate? How long has it been around? Did matter begin with an explosion or by the word of God? And if by the latter, could He not