Emergence, Part One
Long ago, in a galaxy far away, a voice was droning:
“Stewart. Wake up, Stewart. Wake up, Stewart. Wake up…”
Over and over, so many times, so that two arms bumped against the walls of a dark space, and a chubby index finger went into each of two ears. The voice droned on for maybe a half a year, when the resident of this horizontal cubicle could stand no more, and in a crinkled voice of his own began to sing to block out the noise.
“Toc toc toc,
Qui frappe a ma porte?
C’est le diable
Trouble mon plasir.”
“Steward, is that you?” the voice asked hopefully.
“Trouble mon plasir,
Oui oui oui!
Trouble mon plasir,
Non non non,
C’est le diable
Trouble mon plasir!”
And on and on, as the man in the box sang out his musical protest at the sheer indignity of being awakened at this particular time of night. Punctuated always by its rhythmic partner, “Stewart — is that you?”
How many choruses, how many volleys, how many stanzas, paragraphs, sound bites of minimalistic music would their unrelenting thrust and parry eat up? Some say six thousand years, because a Jewish mother attempting to get her son off his behind simply doesn’t give up. A hundred years later, click, and she’s singing, “Come out, come out, wherever you are, and see Mama’s nitwit who fell from a star. He fell from a star, oh haven’t you heard? He tried to start flying, but wasn’t a bird…”
“Not very nice, Mama — what do you want?” Impertinent, groggy.
“I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts, too bad my boy has lost his own,” it continued, giving the doctor a taste of his own medicine. “He never writes his mother, he’ll never get another, and now he doesn’t call her on the phone…”
“Okay Mama, I’m coming! Where are the sticks? How do you expect me to get up without…” He tried anyway, and bumped his head against the lid of the coffin so hard that you, dear reader, might fear he had chosen the second death.
Anyone who might have peeked into this most intimate of spaces (more so, in fact, than a ladies room — and they have separate stalls) could see that his chest continued to rise and fall regularly, with his belly continually speaking a language of its own. “Sugar Free Bubble Up has a pizazz, that’s what Sugar Free Bubble Up has.”
Because in truth, our intrepid doctor, alienist to the last, had retired to his own private space — not really, but only merely dead.
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