These three were the most important beings in Davis’s life in Ivar’s land. He would have liked to have put them in a rocket and fired them off toward the stars. That way, he would keep them from being resurrected somewhere
CROSSING THE DARK RIVER 5
along the River and thus avoid meeting them again. Except in his nightmares, of course.
Later, a few hours after dawn, Davis was walking up the hill to the tower after fishing in the River. He had caught nothing and so was not in a good mood. That was when he met the lunatic gotten up like a clown.
“Doctor Faustroll, we presume?”
The man, who spoke in a strangely even tone, held out an invisible calling card.
Davis glanced down at the tips of the man’s thumb and first finger as if they really were holding a card.
“Printed in the letters of fire,” the man said. “But you must have a heart on fire to see them. However, imaginary oblongs are best seen in an imaginary unlighted triangle. The darker the place, the brighter the print. As you may have noticed, it’s late morning, and the sunlight is quite bright, At least, they seem to be so.”
The fellow, like all other insane on Earth, must have been resurrected with all traces erased of any mental illness he had suffered there. But he was crazy again.
His forehead was painted with some kind of mathematical formula. The area around his eyes was painted yellow, and his nose was painted black. A green mustache was painted on his upper lip. His mouth was lipsticked bright-red. On his chest, a large question mark was tattooed in blue. A dried fish was suspended on a cord reaching to his belly. His long, thick, and very black hair was shaped into a sort of bird’s nest and held in place by dry gray mud.
And, when the man bent his neck forward, he exposed the upper part of an egg in the nest. Davis could easily see it because the man was shorter than he. It did not roll with the movement of the head. Thus, it must be fixed
6 Philip Jos6 Farmer
with fish glue to the top of his head. The wooden and | painted pseudo-egg, Davis assumed, was supposed to : represent that laid by a cuckoo. Appropriate enough. The stranger was certainly cuckoo.
A large green towel, the clown’s only garment, was draped around his hips. The gray cylinder of his grail was near his bare feet. Most people carried a fish-skin bag that held their worldly possessions. This fellow lacked that, and he was not even armed. But he did carry a bamboo fishing pole.
The man said, “While on Earth, we were King Ubu. Here, we are Doctor Faustroll. It’s a promotion that we richly deserve. Who knows? We may yet work our way to the top and become God or at least occupy His empty throne. At the moment, we are a pataphysician, D.Pa., at your service. That is not a conventional degree in one sense, but in all senses it is a high degree, including Fahrenheit and Kelvin.”
He started to put his imaginary card in an imaginary pocket of an imaginary coat.
Davis said, “I’ll take it,” and he held out his hand. Humoring the pataphysician, whatever that was, might prevent him from becoming violent.
He moved his hand close to his bare chest to suggest that he was pulling out a card from an inner pocket of his coat. He held it out.
“Andrew Paxton Davis, M.D., Oph.D., N.D., D.O., D.C.”
“Where’s the rest of the alphabet?” the man said, still keeping his voice even-toned. But he pretended to take the card, read it, and then put it inside his coat.
“I made soup of it,” Davis said. His blue eyes seemed to twinkle.
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Doctor Faustroll’s dark-brown eyes seemed to reflect the twinkle, and he smiled. He said, “Now, if you’ll be kind enough to conduct us to the ruler of this place, whatever his or her or its names, we will present ourself or perhaps more than one of our selves and will apply for a position or positions.”