“BALDY THE DUMMY is still on the air,” I remarked later, at the bar, where Lou was again playing bartender. “I tune him in sometimes late at night when I can’t sleep.”
“Really?” asked Jane. “I don’t think I’d want to listen to him late at night in a darkened room. There’s something creepy about dummies.” She shuddered theatrically. “They make my flesh crawl. I think it’s the expression on their little faces, you know — that smile, that creepy smile.”
“It puts me in mind of the risus sardonicus,” said Lou, polishing a glass.
“What the heck is that?” asked Dick.
“It’s a bizarre grin that forms on the faces of tetanus victims, brought on by spasms of the facial muscles,” said Lou. “Not a pretty sight.”
“You don’t say,” said Dick, pushing his glass across the bar for a refill. Jane reached toward the glass and held her hand over it to indicate that she would rather Dick did not have another.
“Why do they call it the — what was it again?” she asked.
“The risus sardonicus,” said Lou, “so called because in ancient times there was supposed to be a certain plant that grew in Sardinia, which, when eaten, produced convulsive laughter — sardonic laughter — ending in death.”
“Ooh,” said Albertine, with a theatrical shudder like Jane’s. “That is creepy.”
“And on that creepy note,” said Dick, “I think we’ll call it a day.” He took Jane’s arm and led her toward the door.
To Albertine and me, Lou said, “I’ll leave everything in shipshape shape here. You two turn in.”
“Thank you, Lou,” said Albertine. “You’re the perfect guest.”
When we reached the doorway, Lou called to us, in an imitation of the voice that I had used for Baldy the Dummy, “Good night, boys and girls,” and when we turned around to wish him good night he twisted his face into a bizarre grin.
IN MY BEDSIDE TABLE, I kept a small radio with an earphone. The battery was nearly dead, and something was wrong with the volume control, which made the sound rise or fall unpredictably when I tried to adjust it, but if the atmospheric conditions were right and if I rotated the radio until I had it aligned so that the signal was at its strongest, I could still pull Baldy in.
“Well, Bob,” Baldy said above the static, “it’s about time to make another entry in the catalog, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Bob.
“Gather ’round the radio, boys and girls, ’cause it’s time to open Baldy’s Catalog of Human Misery.” This announcement was followed, as always, by a creaking sound, as if the catalog were contained in an enormous box with rusty hinges. “Yes, indeedy. Every night at this time, we bring our listeners fresh proof that things could be worse, don’t we, Bob?”
“Yeah.”
“You know how it is, boys and girls — some days you think that things will never go right for you. You begin to think dark thoughts about slipping into eternal night, and you wonder whether anyone would even miss you, am I right?”
“Yeah.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, Bob.” He dropped his voice and said, “I was talking to you, listener. When those dark thoughts threaten to get the best of you, I am here to bring you comfort! Every night I bring you the story of someone, somewhere, suffering a misery more miserable than yours. Tonight, I want to tell you about a woman who was living with her three children in a housing project somewhere, anywhere, who knows where. Things were not going well, not at all. In fact, things got to be so bad that, a few nights ago, she got to thinking her dark thoughts about eternal night, and wondering whether anyone would even miss her if she were gone, and whether things would ever be any better for her children than they were for her, and many more things that it is not given to us to know, and in her misery she went up to the roof of her apartment building and she pitched her three small children from the roof, one by one, and then threw herself off after them.” Silence, a long silence. Then, “File that under ‘Inconsolables,’ would you, Bob?”
“Yeah.”
“Boys and girls, that’s despair, the real thing, the bottom, bad as it gets, not the blues, not the mopes, not that nameless dissatisfaction you feel. If you are not all the way down there where that woman was, then take heart! Your little life could be much, much worse. You just roll that rock in front of your cave, and you sleep tight. Tomorrow is another day.”
There was a brief silence, but I didn’t switch my radio off. I waited. In a moment, Baldy laughed his wooden laugh and added, almost inaudibly, “Well, Bob, that ought to satisfy the little — ” and then the microphone was switched off abruptly, and I switched my radio off and lay there in silence, wondering what, exactly, had made that woman so miserable, so desperate, waiting for sleep, hoping for sleep.
[to be continued]
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