I moved past the iron bars of the unpredictable elevator and started to climb the stairs.
“Toby?”
I looked up seven flights. Jeremy Butler was standing at the railing in front of his apartment, the only apartment in the building.
“It’s me, Jeremy,” I said, continuing to climb and wondering whether I should have taken a chance on the elevator from hell. Stairs were not a good idea for my sensitive rear.
“I heard the door open,” he said.
“I was coming to see you,” I said, pulling myself up by the railing.
“You are hurt?”
“You’ve got it,” I said, halfway up the second floor. “Remember that stuff you used on my back, the stuff you used when you were wrestling?”
“Of course.”
“Think that’ll help a sore rear end?”
“Yes,” Jeremy said. “Take the elevator.”
I took his advice and pressed the elevator button on the second floor. Two decades later the elevator arrived. I pulled back the grille and took the scenic century-long ride up to the eighth floor. From the elevator I could see as we passed the sixth floor that the lights to Shelly’s and my office were out.
When I finally reached the eighth floor and opened the grille, Jeremy had gone back into his apartment. His door was ajar. I followed the light and knocked.
“Come in,” Jeremy said. “Alice took Natasha to her cousin’s in Monterey for a few days.”
Jeremy stood massive, bald, and wearing black slacks, shoes, and a turtleneck sweater. In his hand was a large green bottle of a clear liquid. The room, which had once been the office of a doctor named Hamarion, who proved to have no license, was big and served as living room and office for Jeremy. He had put a door in the walls on either side and used the adjoining offices for a kitchen-dining room and a pair of bedrooms. It was well-ordered, comfortable. In a big open box near the window, Natasha’s toys overflowed.
“Take off your pants and lean over,” he said.
I closed the door behind me and moved to Jeremy’s desk near the window. I dropped my pants and underpants and leaned over.
“This was done by Kudlap Singh?” he asked.
“The Beast of Bombay,” I confirmed.
Then a cold liquid sensation washed through me, from my sore behind to the tips of my fingers. It didn’t hurt exactly, but I couldn’t say that it felt great.
“Give it a moment before you put your pants back on,” he said. “And don’t sit yet.”
I turned, still tingling, and faced Jeremy.
“There is a poetic irony here,” Jeremy said, putting the cap back on the bottle. “I learned of this treatment from Kudlap Singh. The year was 1930. The Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento a few years after it opened. We were the main event. It was his turn to win. I suffered a sprain in my right thigh when I did an airplane spin.”
“You hoisted Kudlap Singh over your head?”
Jeremy nodded.
“And he used this on me and told me how to get more from an Indian apothecary in Kansas City.”
“Can I pull my pants up now?”
“Yes.”
I pulled my underpants up slowly. I can’t say the pain was completely gone, but it was certainly almost asleep.
“I think it worked,” I said as Jeremy put the bottle on his desk.
“It has remarkable anesthetic qualities,” he said. “Take the bottle. Return it when you’ve recovered. It should only be a day or so.”
I pulled my pants up, took the bottle, and thanked him.
I tested my new freedom from agony by sitting in Jeremy’s wooden desk chair. It wasn’t bad.
“I was just writing a poem,” Jeremy said, reaching behind me and picking up a pad of paper. “Would you be interested in hearing it?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Stephen Vincent Benet died in New York early today,” Jeremy said. “He was only forty-four.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“You know who he was?”
“Poet,” I said.
“When I was still perspiring in wrestling rings from Seattle to Miami, that twenty-nine-year-old genius had written ‘John Brown’s Body,’ more than one hundred thousand words in a single poem, and he had won the Pulitzer Prize.”
Such enthusiasm was rare in Jeremy so I kept my mouth shut and listened.
“Have you read ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’?” he asked.
“Don’t think so,” I said.
“I’ve got copies in two anthologies. I’ll let you read it and ‘John Brown’s Body.’ ”
“Thanks,” I said, savoring my relative freedom from pain.
“The poem,” Jeremy said, looking down at the pad in his hand as he stood in front of me.
John Brown’s body lies a moldering in the grave
joined by poet, freeman and ghostly slave.
What can one say
of Stephen Vincent Benet?
He came, was struck by fevered urge
to pen his genius in a massive dirge.
Meteor burned young on entering the uncertain air
of earth, burned and took his talent rare
to the far reaches of time
where he will soar and rhyme
and carry on conversations that through Heaven resound
with Daniel Webster and old John Brown.
Jeremy looked down at me over the top of his pad.
“Resound and Brown do not rhyme,” he said. “I’m not sure whether I should find something to rhyme with Webster and switch the names or live with the closing with a slant rhyme. Your feelings?”
“Sounds great to me the way it is,” I said. “What rhymes with Webster?”
“I’m inclined to leave it as it is,” Jeremy said, reaching past me to lay his pad on the desk.
I got up, tested my tingle, and pronounced myself almost cured.
“More irony for you, Jeremy,” I said. “I’m probably going to see your old friend Kudlap Singh in less than an hour.”
“Is the situation such that he might inflict further pain on you?”
“It is a distinct possibility,” I said, testing my powers by walking across the Persian rug covering most of the wooden floor.
“My poem is finished. I think I’d like to accompany you, if you have no objection.”
“It could be uncomfortable,” I said. “I’m going to see Kudlap’s boss, who has been known to remove the fingers of those who he finds annoying.”
“An odd and phallic fetish,” Jeremy said.
“You’re telling me,” I said. “I promised Alice I wouldn’t put you in danger again.”
Jeremy folded his arms and looked at me without a smile. Jeremy had no smiles except for his wife and daughter and no frowns except for the endless parade of men without a place to sleep who sought out the corners of the Farraday.
“If you hide from every possible danger,” he said, “you find yourself discovering more and more dangers until
