Afterlife Crisis

by Randal Graham

  “A light shone from under the door,” he said.

  “Dash it!”

  “And I heard voices, too,” he added, making a judgmental face which suggested I wasn’t entirely cut out for cloak-and-daggering.

  I contrived to look confused.

  “V-v-voices?” I said, “how do you mean, voices? I’m here alone. I may have soliloquized a bit. Perhaps you heard me talking to myself.”

  “You were talking to Miss Vera,” he said.

  “I wasn’t!” I riposted.

  “She’s hiding under the desk,” he added, patiently, extending the long arm of the law in the direction of Vera’s hiding place and pointing it out with the showmanship of a chief inspector revealing the ID of the Masked Marauder. “She’s been there all this time,” he added, patiently.

  And I remember thinking, as he said this, that if Zeus had any fault worthy of censure, it’s that he was a touch too observant for his own good.

  “But dash it!” I began, though I’m forced to admit that what I was going to say next was a bit of a mystery. It seemed like a fair cop to me, with nothing left for me to do but turn myself in and throw myself on the mercy of the Zeus. I was saved the trouble, though, when Vera rose from her little nook beneath the desk, looking a bit like that Venus person stepping out of her clam.

  Zeus and I, each in our turn, swivelled our beans in her direction.

  “It’s no use,” she said, in a pale, saint-like voice. “He’s on to us.”

  “On to us?” I asked.

  “Yes. He must have been told.”

  “Been told what?” asked Zeus. And I was glad he did, for I was foggy on this point, too.

  “That we’re Napoleons,” said Vera.

  “WHAT?” I cried.

  “There’s no use hiding it,” said Vera. “The Regent must have already told Terrence what she discovered through her research: the two of us are Napoleons who’ve been hiding our identities. She must have informed him that she plans to have us locked up with the rest of them. That’s why we escaped our rooms,” she added, turning a plaintive face Zeusward. “We came here to steal any evidence she might have. We’re so sorry to have troubled you. It was our only hope of escape.”

  This seemed to puzzle the colossal former dog, for he now uttered the words “you’re . . . Napoleons?” in a halting manner, as though subjecting them to a taste test, while corrugating the brow.

  This Zeus, as you probably already know, was no dead-from-the-neck-up dumb brick, despite appearances. People often assume that any extra-large-sized bimbo with pumpkin-shaped biceps, legs thicker than tree trunks, and a chest that crosses multiple postal districts is a spent force when it comes to anything that might be deemed an intellectual feat. People often made this same assumption of Zeus — but it wasn’t warranted. He wasn’t dull by any stretch. He was what you might call a careful thinker. A slow, plodding, freight-trainish thinker who took a while to build up a good head of steam, but who managed to process data thoroughly and generally came to sound conclusions after spending an hour or two assiduously applying the bean. And I recognized, as a result of our long association, the symptoms of Zeus’s data-processing now. You could hear the gears turning, and I was reminded of that snatch of verse that said “though the mills of someoneorother grind slowly, they grind exceeding small,” or words to that effect.

  He contorted the mouth and squinted the eyes in a way suggesting that he wasn’t, at the moment of going to press, quite ready to string along with Vera’s claims.

  She redoubled her efforts.

  “That’s right!” she said. “You must have suspected. Why else would the Regent keep us locked away? She suspected it, too. But she wasn’t in a position to prove it until tonight. I thought she’d have told you by now. Perhaps she planned on telling you after her raid on City Hall.”

  “But Mr. Feynman’s . . . not a Napoleon,” said Zeus. “He’s . . . well, he’s the Hand of the Intercessor. The Regent told me so.”

  “You can imagine how shocked the Regent was to find that the Hand of the Intercessor was a Napoleon!” said Vera. “Shocked and angry, I’d imagine. I suppose you’ll have no choice, now, but to stick us into the cells with the other Napoleons,” she concluded, shrugging a shoulder or two in a fairly good impersonation of the Napoleonic shrug. Gallic, I think they call it.

  We Feynmen are pretty quick-witted, and my grey cells finally managed to process all of the convoluted data that was whizzing about the room. The mists cleared. I saw all, including what this soothsaying pipsqueak was driving at. It was a ruse, and by no means the worst of them. She hoped, by convincing Zeus that she and self were Napoleons, to have us deposited with the rest of the Napoleons, where the two of us might be in a posish to make some tactical moves. And because we Rhinnicks are quick thinkers, it was for me the work of an instant to dive in head first and string along with a bit of corroborating evidence.

  “J’ai besoin d’un pamplemousse!” I declared.

  “What in Abe’s name does that mean?” said a puzzled-looking Zeus, and I remember thinking that he rather had me there. It was just something I’d once heard Napoleon Number One say in the midst of a game of Brakkit. Or possibly in one of the hospice cooking classes. I couldn’t be sure. But I remember thinking it sounded impressive, and it felt rather pleasant rolling off the Feynman tongue.

  “Zere is no use,” said Vera, unleashing a hitherto hidden talent as a Napoleonic impressionist. “We might as well drop ze pretence. We are caught and will offère no furzer reseestance.”

  Dashed impressive of her, I thought, to pull that off on short notice. Zeus seemed less taken with the performance, though, for rather than clapping his hands and requesting an encore or two, as a Napoleon might have done, he merely sighed one of those sighs which seem to come up from the soles of the feet, closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose, a procedure I’ve seen many times before, generally when people feel they’ve had more than the recommended adult dose of Feynman.

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t know what’s going on here, but you have to get back to your rooms. Enough of this Napoleon business.”

  “But ze proof eez right ’ere!” said Vera.

  “Where?” said Zeus.

  “On zis datapad!” said Vera, pointing out one of the instruments laying face-up on the desk.

  Zeus bent down to examine it.

  “I don’t see any proof, biff.”

  He didn’t actually say “biff.” That was the sound of Vera sloshing him on the back of the bean with the heavy vase which had hitherto been atop the Regent’s desk. I suppose the word “biff” doesn’t do it justice, as it was more reminiscent of the eardrum-shattering crashes that the famous bull must have made when charging about the china shop — although why the bull was in there is a mystery. I mean to say, he can’t have been shopping. But however you’d like to describe it, this loud crash was followed by the sound of pottery shards tinkling to the floor and then a final, dull thud, this one caused by Zeus collapsing floorward where he now lay, looking peaceful.

  “Vera!” I cried.

  “What?” she riposted.

  “You can’t go beaning chaps on the head every time it suits your needs!”

  “I had to do it!” she protested.

  “No, you didn’t.” I riposted. “The Napoleon ruse was working. We just needed more time to sell it.”

  “He was onto us!” she yipped.

  “Vera,” I said, doing my best to calm matters. “This is your third episode of cranial biffing in the space of a couple of days.”

  “Weeks,” she protested, “you spent a long time in that coma.”

  “Weeks, then,” I allowed, for one doesn’t wish to give in to hyperbole. “But in any case, you must check this behaviour instanter. No doubt you say to yourself that the thing isn’t habit-forming, and that you can aban
don the practice of sloshing exposed beans whenever the opportunity presents itself, but after another biff or two the thing will have you in its grip. Just look at the escalation of your burgeoning addiction. First you’re biffing Jack, an admittedly deleterious slab of damnation, and already you’ve progressed to biffing loony doctors and troubled friends. Next thing you’ll be biffing everyone who steps within your orbit, beaning heads like a trained percussionist.”

  “All right!” said Vera, “but what’s done is done.”

  “This is profoundly true,” I admitted, “but it raises another issue for discussion, viz, what’s to be done now? We can’t just leave Zeus lying here on the floor, at the scene of the crime, as it were.”

  “Of course we can,” said Vera. “And we can take his keys!” she added, grabbing the key ring from his belt and secreting it in the recesses of her costume. She seemed heedless of the danger of adding a charge of mugging to what had hitherto been a simple, straightforward assault.

  “We can’t just leave Zeus here!” I protested. “If we are — as any sensible person would be in the circs — intent on ditching this joint at the earliest possible moment, we have to take Zeus along with us if we’re to have any hope of restoring his memory!”

  “We have to save Nappy, first. Nappy and the other Napoleons.”

  “But how do we do that encumbered by an enormous snoozer?” I said, pointing Zeusward to make my meaning clear for the meanest i. “You hadn’t thought of that, had you? A fat lot of good it does bringing a medium along when she goes about dishing out sloshes upon the beans of amnesiatic pals without foreseeing what she’ll do next! It’s one thing to tune into your television, Vera. It’s quite another to rub the brain cells together and plan for future events. The former is optional. The latter essential.”

  “We could tie him up for now and collect him later,” she ventured.

  “No good,” I said. “When he comes to he’ll squeal to the FBI.”

  “What’s the FBI?” she said.

  “No idea. Just an expression that came to mind.”

  “We can’t carry him. He’s too heavy.”

  “A travois!” I suggested.

  “A whatois?” she said.

  “Napoleonic expression. It’s a thingummy that you use to drag a person around. Take a couple of logs of wood in a roughly V shape, sling some fabric across them, and what ho, you have yourself a conveyance of sorts. We haven’t any logs of wood, but we could use one of the Regent’s tapestries, laid out on the ground for dragging purposes. We dump Zeus on the thing and tug him along.”

  “He’ll slow us down,” she observed, and I admitted that, in this one, limited respect, her prescience was spot-on. But lacking anything in the nature of a superior plan, this was how we chose to proceed. A few minutes later, after we’d strained to roll the recumbent colossus onto a handy tapestry, we heaved-ho and made our way down the hall, I wishing I’d stopped Vera’s hand and asked Zeus for directions before the former had brought a vase crashing down on the latter’s head.

  Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever dragged an unconscious buddy of behemoth proportions around hallways in an otherwise quiet house, but if you have, you’ll know it’s hard to do these things with any degree of what is called stealth. We did our best to skulk, but still clumped and puffed our way along the hallway with more volume than any proper spy or ninja might endorse. I suppose we managed to stay fairly quiet, but it still seemed to me — what with my overwhelming desire for secrecy and surreptition, if that’s a word — that we sounded like the percussion section of an orchestra being dropped through the roof of a conservatory.

  “I don’t think I can pull him much further,” said Vera.

  “You’ve said a mouthful. The chap must weigh four hundred pounds.”

  “Perhaps we can tuck him into a closet for safekeeping. We’ll come get him before we leave. If everything goes to plan we’ll have a whole team of Napoleons to help us drag him along.”

  I weighed this. It was, I could see, an idea. An idea that seemed dashed attractive given the now aching state of what I believe is called my lumbar spinal region. This Zeus was a man of many sterling traits, but one couldn’t attribute to him the virtue of portability.

  As I sized up Vera’s plan, it just so happened that we were passing by a likely spot to hide our recumbent oaf — a smallish sort of door, set in a wall, perhaps four feet above floor level. Some sort of storage bin or other, and one with a door sufficiently dusty that I perceived it wasn’t subject to frequent inspection.

  I pointed it out to Vera.

  She said the word “dumbwaiter.” I failed altogether to take offence, for I recognized in a j. what she had meant by the term in question. This was not another opprobrious remark about yours truly, but a diagnosis about the cubbyhole I’d spotted. For it was, you see, one of those elevatorish things sometimes found in great houses, intended to transport goods and materials, rather than personnel, along what is sometimes called the z axis, viz, in an upward or downward motion. They’re generally used for moving books or boxes or trays of food and not for storing sleeping Zeuses.

  I opened the door and inspected. It was a cozy little nook not more than six feet in depth, and perhaps a few feet across and as many high.

  “What do you think?” I asked, admitting, as I did so, that only a folded Zeus would fit.

  “I have a knack with machinery,” said Vera, who of course did. She then said a good deal about pulleys and magnets and electronic control mechanisms, which she subsequently translated into English: “We can stuff him in, move the dumbwaiter between floors, and then I can jam the mechanism so he’ll be stuck in there until we come back and unstick him,” or words to that effect.

  I subscribed to the plan without delay. There was then a bit of a stage wait as Vera and I engaged in more heaving and hoing than your average Volga boatman, Vera pulling from inside the dumbwaiter and I pushing from behind.

  And we were positioned thusly — Vera and Zeus clowncarring within the dumbwaiter, with scarcely space to spare, and self pushing on Zeus’s lower reaches in order to get the last bits in, when another of those dashed “reality quakes,” as the Regent called them, made its presence known down the hall. It took the form of a bulging ripple in the scenery, bending everything in its path and featuring small electrical arcs along its surface.

  I had no urge to meet the thing head on. Indeed, I was conscious of an urge to be elsewhere.

  The thing approached. And while a lesser man might have shot down the hallway — away from ground zero, as it were — in the hope of preserving self from the coming thingummy, I felt it best to do what I could to keep the team together. So I did the only thing I could do. I jammed Zeus’s remaining bits into the already cramped dumbwaiter, and then jammed myself inside it, right along with the rest of our little gang.

  Those who know Rhinnick Feynman have frequently commented on his slight, svelte, and pleasingly delicate frame, and I found on this occasion that my figure came in handy, for I was able to fit in the already cramped compartment with a touch of room to spare, but not so much that Fenny, still nestled in my pocket, didn’t utter a squeak or two of objection to the conditions. I won’t say the space was roomy — not by a jugful. To any outside observer we would have looked like a pack of Ramen noodles, a tin of well-dressed sardines, or, more accurately, perhaps, like a pack of unfortunate goofs who’d boarded a standard elevator only to be compressed into our current, compact state through a fall from a great height.

  I was just musing on this simile, viz, us looking like we’d suffered a fall from a great height, when irony once again spat on its hands and made its presence known. The reality-quake bubble-thingummy passed, bending and stretching the landscape in a way the architects of the Regent’s hall had never anticipated, and left in its wake the sounds of cables snapping, gears whirring, and various bits and bobs parting from their
moorings.

  The air was vibrant with the squeals of unhappy metal.

  There were a pair of terrified cries — I imagine they came from self and Vera — as the dumbwaiter plummeted toward the lower floors of the Regent’s lair. There was also an annoyed, officious grrnmph from Fenny, possibly indicating that we should have thought things through before jamming several hundred pounds of human flesh into a smallish device designed for carrying tea trays between floors. I found myself thinking, as I’ve often done in these situations, about how it is that life sometimes hands you lemons, and just as you’re hoping to make a bit of lemonade, they turn out to be poisoned lemons with razor blades inside.

  There were the beginnings of a crash, and all was darkness.

  Chapter 29

  I don’t know if you’ve had the same experience, but a longish fall in a cramped dumbwaiter had a profound impact on me. Not only did it render me non compos mentis for a space — perhaps three quarters of an hour, according to contemporary accounts — but it also came within an ace of making Rhinnick Feynman a cynic. I mean to say, life in the Regent’s hall had started out all right, what with the lavish furnishings, the pristine grounds, the toothsome provisions, the attentive staff, and other accoutrements of fine living, but once you really settled in and got to know the place, or scratched beneath the gilded surface, the whole set-up seemed precisely calculated to blot the sunshine from my life. I’d been locked in my room, separated from friends and colleagues, exposed to a series of reality-bending bubbles, and now I’d been dropped down an elevator shaft alongside a four-hundred-pound amnesiatic pal and a fortune-telling beazel beset by problems of her own. Only an especially sunny houseguest could take all of this on the chin and keep on smiling. I mean to say, the mere hustle and bustle of it all was enough to cloud the Feynman brow, not to mention what it had done to the nervous system, and that’s without even bringing up the fact that somewhere in this house of horrors dark forces seemed to be tuning up the iron maidens and thumbscrews for use on Napoleons. And so it was in no jocund mood that I regained consciousness and inserted myself into a conversation that was already in progress between Zeus and Vera. The first voice that presented itself to the Feynman ear was Vera’s, saying, “I think he’s waking up.”