The Story of the Book of the Doll

I

 

The entirety of this story concerns three, or perhaps two-and-a-half, subjects. Firstly, it is about a curious book I discovered recently, and, secondly, it's about an evil doll, and thirdly, and halfly, it is about myself.

The book is naturally the place to start. On Blood Street, in a second-hand shop, I found it. I'd been quite idle that day, being as I am an old man with little purpose in life. The store was one which I had never visited before, despite my well-earned reputation as something of a know-it-all, or at least a read-it-all--or, rather, I used to be considered so in my earlier days. Frankly, I don't think I'm very considered at all anymore. The book was a paperback. It appeared to have been read only once, by someone who knew how to read a book without breaking its spine or dirtying its edges. The title? "The Book of the Doll."

I read the summary on the back of the book, and that's where this whole tale starts. It described the main character, and that he'd acquired a doll early in his life, and the doll did terrible things to the people the subject cared about. It was framed as something of a thriller or horror story. I opened the book to the publication information. Copyrighted twelve years ago, and published in Australia. I turned to the back of the book again and read the summary again.

I felt the summary was entirely consistent, at least from a distance, with my own experience. I'd had roughly the same experience as the protagonist of the book. I felt a little dizzy at that point, standing at a shelf in a shop on Blood Street. I believe it's called vertigo, though dictionaries might tell you otherwise. All I can tell you is that the book's purchase was imperative.

I sat down to read it that evening, in my tiny apartment above a humid laundromat on Geoffrey Street. I don't suppose you know where that is or what it looks like, so let me tell you all four blocks of it consisted of former bourgeois homes which had over the years had their ground floors converted to shops. In almost every case, the shops' proprietors lived on the second floor; however, there were some exceptions to this, and I was one of them. Two rooms, a kitchen, and a bath, with outdated furniture in every corner. In any case, I kept it neat. It was not a 'dive' by any means. It was an apartment for an elderly gentleman such as myself.

So: I started to read the book, and apart from some flowery descriptions of a particular suburban milieu not unlike the one I had grown up in, the first part of the tale was of a boy and his family, very much like my own. The boy had parents, and a brother and a sister. The descriptions of the house's layout much matched the layout of my own. But, then again, all suburbs are made to the same pre-fabricated design, so I didn't attach much to it. It seemed a coincidence and nothing more.

However, I wasn't prepared to find myself reading a book that so matched my own experiences I wondered if the author had based it on myself. I checked the editorial apparatus again: I didn't recognize the name of the author, and the colophon very clearly stated that the work was a work of fiction, with no resemblance to anyone living or dead. That's all standard for works of fiction, even the ones that originate in Australia.

 

For his seventh birthday, the boy received, as a gift from his uncle who'd travelled the seven seas three times, thus twenty-one seas in total, a Singaporean doll. How precisely it had come into his possession was never known except to himself. The doll was rather an ugly thing, reed thin and with big eyes, black as coal, and with angry teeth. Somehow, he thought this little thing would delight the boy and also his parents, who pretended to like it, because they were tolerant parents and always in favour of discoveries and inventions for the boy. The boy's reaction was not all that different. What is this hideous thing? How can it possibly get along with his Johnny West and Chief Cherokee dolls? He foresaw the three would not get along with one another; for the tensions between West and Cherokee were already apparent, and bringing in a new friend for them from Southeast Asia could cause a great deal of trouble.

Later that day, he introduced 'Singapore' to his other two dolls. Singapore was a sailor who'd sailed the seas and had now come to North America for some reason. 'Howdy, I'm from Singapore!' said Singapore, and West and Cherokee were wary of him, but they did their best Prairie Hospitality. There was no room in the bunkhouse for Singapore, so he'd have to sleep out under the stars. Singapore was all right with that; he'd slept outside plenty of times. There was a name for such sleeping rough back in Singapore, but for some reason Singapore couldn't recall it.

The next morning, the day after his birthday, the boy noticed little improvement in his dolls' attitudes to each other. West was mighty suspicious of the newcomer. Cherokee a little less so, for he felt a certain kinship with the dark-skinned stranger.

 

That excerpt, from the fifth page of the book, took me back to my childhood, for I had a vague memory of having a 'Western' doll named Johnny West, and I also recalled I had a companion doll, a red Indian doll (though I'd forgotten the name Chief Cherokee). I quite strongly remembered the other doll, the one from Singapore, but I'd forgotten where it had come from. If I'd got it from some sailor-uncle, that uncle disappeared from our lives from my seventh birthday on, for he was never seen or even mentioned again. Needless to say, I don't remember how the dolls related to each other, since it was all fantasy play. Who remembers the playthings of the imagination sixty years after the fact?

The book goes on, plausibly enough, with a detailed description, too detailed to verify, for childhood amnesia.... It seems memory, a functioning memory, only begins at about the age of five. I understand that the brain and nervous system are up to that point too busy learning the rudiments of existence: how to control your excretory functions, how to walk, how to speak, etc. Only after those rudiments are acquired, can the human organism begin to arrange and 'memorize' its experiences. In any case, the organization of memory develops from the age of five, soaking up information, but not soaking up information it cannot connect to information already memorized. Thus, I can remember the dolls much more than I can remember where they had come from. I got the dark doll from somewhere, and since my uncle vanished from my life, I had nothing to connect the two.

The details of the disappearance of Johnny West, however, as they are recounted in the book, differ from my memory of the event--for it was a rather traumatizing event.

I remember losing my Johnny West doll. I couldn't find it no matter where I looked. I turned the house upside down looking for it, and it was nowhere to be found. I asked my brother, my sister, my mother, my father: no-one had seen it. I recall crying myself to sleep about it: about a plastic doll.

However, the book gives a different story. As it happened, in the days after Singapore arrived at the bunkhouse, the hostility got to be too great. Singapore, pretending friendly and let-bygones-be-bygones, lured West out of the bunkhouse and out of the house. They crossed the driveway, down to the sewer grating. Singapore was saying: "You won't believe what's down there. It's a goldmine!" West, who was frankly kind of stupid, took Singapore at his word, and followed at a swift pace. They climbed down the curb to the grating. West leaned over it, and looked down through the thick iron bars. He drawled: "I don't see nothin', pardner." "Lean in a bit more," said Singapore. West leaned further in. He was on his stomach, he head down between the bars. He leaned as far as he could without falling in. "I don't--" but that was all he had time to say before Singapore pulled up West's boots and feet and legs and let him fall down, down, down, into the sewer! West cried: "Help me, I'm drownin'!" He repeated it and repeated it until he was gurgling and then was heard no more, while Singapore watched and listened and enjoyed the sounds and sights. He stood up, wiped his hands, returned to the house, and his cardboard bunk. He became master of the ranch. Chief Cherokee, understanding what had happened, lived the rest of his days in terror of the doll from Singapore.

 

 

II

 

Part Two of the book jumps ahead a number of years, to 1986 precisely, to a time when the protagonist, and incidentally myself, were both attending Righterton College, some fifty or sixty miles away from the milieu of Part One. I recall the days of moving from the former to the latter, though Part One skips over those bits, jumping rather right into the heart of the action, namely to a day which the book brought to mind as I read it, and as I read it, I found it to be plausible, with details its little memory-nudge made vivid again. Part Two starts with a day in a celestial mechanics class, on a Tuesday morning (and I clearly recall Tuesday mornings in a celestial mechanics class, since Tuesdays were pub discount days).

The protagonist meets a fellow student in that class, and not just any student. She is described as 'the first true love of his life,' and I cannot argue otherwise. She receives quite a physical description which sounds plausible. (I have no photographs from that time with which to compare it.)

A week later, after the class, the protagonist and the woman go to the pub discount day, where they talk for well into a third hour. They are getting along, and they like one another. (The narrative is clear about this, as if it had access to her inner self. I, however, had no such access.)

A couple weeks later, they can't think about much other than their objects of mutual affection. And so, as is the course of nature, they wind up at his apartment a bit of the way off campus. He apologizes for the mess of the place, although it's not all that messy. Perhaps some plates on a shelf, and cigarette butts in a saucer.

I remember. I'd brought Singapore with me to my place near Righterton College, and I had it on a shelf beside my hi-fi speakers. It was like she noticed it immediately. She picked it up and said in amazement: "What the hell is this?"

I explained that it had come from an uncle; an uncle I'd never seen since.

She said: "It's pretty grotesque. What's with the teeth? You could cut your hand on them."

I told her I thought they've been carved from ivory, or maybe some shark teeth or something like that.

"Are you trying to ward off evil spirits? Is it a talisman? Does it prevent uglier things from coming at you?"

I told her I thought so. Nothing had come at me since!

She put it back on the shelf, whereupon it flopped over backwards, hitting its head on the wooden shelf.

"Oops! Sorry, doll," she said. "Didn't mean to hurt you!"

I told her that Singapore had been with me a long time.

"Singapore. Is that where it's from? That's something I find pretty easy to believe."

She pulled him upright, and set him straight. "There, there," she said.

We were still standing in the middle of my room. I said: "I got a couple beers in the fridge."

"Only a couple?"

I confessed there were six.

"I think we should get started, then. Lay one of those puppies on me."

I got the beers from the galley kitchen's refrigerator, and I put on some music--REM maybe--and we drank our beers and talked about this and that. Then another, and then I folded out the couch to make it into a bed and we got in and had sex and then we slept.

 

He could see she was disturbed by the doll with its sharp teeth and over-sized eyes. It was like she was afraid of 'getting off' in its presence. He 'got her off' regardless, but it was an uphill battle. They had a restless night and a restless sleep. She seemed to be looking at the doll all night long. The thing was definitely an obstacle, and he had to make a decision before he invited her over again, for sex.

For a whole week he couldn't decide, but then it came down to the crunch. On Tuesday morning, before Celestial Mechanics 101, knowing, as he did, that he wanted her to come over after class, for sex, he picked up the doll, apologized to it verbally, and slipped it into the dresser drawer in which he kept his socks. He told it the solution was only temporary. The doll, of course, had nothing to say. It hid its abilities from him, as all good dolls do. He closed the drawer. As he carefully washed and dressed for the day, he stole the occasional glance at his sock drawer. There was something melancholy to the whole event.

She came over, of course, after the class. Perhaps she didn't notice the absence of Singapore, or perhaps she noticed but didn't want to draw attention to that fact. Regardless, she was much more relaxed for their afternoon delight that day, and after a couple hours they went out to a nearby bar to get a bite to eat. After that, still in states of heightened intimacy, they went back to his apartment and continued more-or-less where they'd left off. They exhausted themselves that day. He could have exhausted himself more if only he could not have looked at the sock drawer so often, but it was exhausting enough. After all, you don't want to damage your health.

 

I know it happens all the time, but we were both damaged when it came time to break up. As it turned out, we didn't have enough in common, and we simply couldn't sustain the feelings. I started looking afield, and so did she. It's not possible to pinpoint when the end happened; instead, we simply slowed down with the phone calls and the meetings, so when she finally broke it down by saying: "It's not really working out, is it?": I replied with only a shrug. Neither of us knew how it had happened. We'd simply gotten bored or something. We were both fooling around with others, so it had to end. We were civil to one another for about another year, and then it all stopped. It stopped.

I brought Singapore out of my sock drawer, and returned him to his rightful place beside my hi-fi speakers. It didn't matter much to me, but I did it anyway.

Some time later, I tried to contact her, but she was gone. Where to, I didn't know, nor did anyone else. She stopped going to classes, according to the registrar, and her parents or someone cleared out her apartment. She was a genuine Missing Person. However, by that time, I merely thought it curious she'd vanish like that. I imagined at the time she'd been swept off her feet by a brave knight--she was pretty, you see--and she'd said goodbye to everything, and moved to Europe. I had nothing to tell the police when they came a-calling; we'd had no contact for quite some time, and they left me alone. (They gave me a contact card, which I no longer have. I must have thrown it out at some point.)

Part Two ends with a shocking and terrible event. I don't believe it happened at all.

According to the book, Singapore had become aware of his powers of hypnotism. (He recalled experimenting with Chief Cherokee, back in the cardboard bunkhouse.) His abilities had increased because he'd been a sock drawer that had acted like a sensory deprivation tank. He climbed out the slightly-ajar window, climbed down into the street, and started for her house, the address of which he'd learned from overhearing the two talking.

He found her, in her dorm room. He stood atop her like an incubus and gazed deeply into her eyes. She responded, though she didn't awake. He made her choose her sharpest and strongest knife, then, with him hiding in her pants, they travelled by bus to the Teflon factory on the other side of town.

Singapore searched the factory until he found the hydrofluoric acid vats. He got her to roll one of them to the seldom-travelled road behind the factory. He made her take out her knife. Not a word had been spoken, nor would any word be. He made her cut off her left leg and dump it into the acid vat, where it fizzled and bizzled. Then she cut off her left arm, and into the vat it went. Singapore meanwhile constructed a staircase of sorts up to the rim of the vat. She got onto the top step, and sliced off her remaining leg, and into the vat it went. She looked small enough, so he pushed the rest of her into the vat.

A day passed, and it was all over. Singapore dumped the goo, now neutralized by its overdose of carbon, into the ditch beside the road.

Then he went home.

I don't believe it because I would have noted Singapore's absence.

 

 

III

 

In the third part of the book is recounted a painful and tragic episode, and again it quite paralleled my own in many ways, though it differed because of the introduction of some ridiculous material that simply could not have happened. In fact, I found it somewhat frustrating to find a fly in the ointment--namely, its recourse to absurd fantasy.

We pick up the protagonist of the story in his early middle age. There are not many connections to the previous parts. The episode with the Johnny West doll is not referred to, nor is the disappearance of his college sweetheart. Rather, it begins with him at his job. He is taken for granted, and he resents it. He wants to get fired so he can start anew. It's a dead-end job, in other words. However, he is not alone in any of this (which is a conclusion I came to when I was the protagonist's age); almost to a man or a woman they all feel like life is passing them by: "So long, life." And yet they banter and talk meaninglessly, incapable of facing or communicating the dread they feel at the steady approach of the grave.

I think I'm putting thoughts into the protagonist's head.

Anyway, he is also not alone, in that he is married and he has two children. He loves his wife, and he loves his children. He thinks about them often. They are the cause of his continued employment. They keep him there, and they keep his nose to the grindstone--and he doesn't regret any of it, all in all and in the end.

They live in the suburbs, and he drives there after work. He parks his car beside his wife's slightly smaller car. He gets out and trudges through the snow. (It was winter, I remember.) He goes into his house, his home, his hearth (whatever a hearth is). His wife, whom he finds in the kitchen making dinner, tells him that his workplace called. That there is an emergency. That he's been told to go somewhere that night, and he'll have to be there overnight. She doesn't know all the details.

He telephones his boss and gets the details. There's a serious problem at one of the distant warehouses. He has to fly to another province to sort it out. The ticket is waiting for him at the airport. (I remember all these details, every one of them. They keep me awake some nights. The dialogue is almost word-for-word.) The boss says: "You can fix it. No-one else can. It's an emergency."

Due to the timing of the flight, he doesn't have to leave for the airport for an hour, so the four of them have dinner together. None of those present in the dining room know it's to be their last meal together.

"How was your day?" "How was your day?" "School good? School okay?" There's nothing much to report on, except for the facts in the case of what happened the night before, which is something that had been uncovered in the last hour or so. His wife had been dusting, and she noticed that Singapore the doll, which was kept on a shelf in the living room, was missing one of his front teeth. She took the doll to the boy's room to see if he knew anything about it. What happened to Singapore's tooth? The boy said he didn't know anything about it, because he didn't play with dolls and he thought Singapore was ugly.

 

She went to her daughter's room, doll in hand. The daughter was looking guilty, but the mother still wanted to hear the words from her. She held out the doll and said: "Did you get carried away some time recently? Were you playing with your father's monster doll, the one he'd gotten from his aunt the brave female sailor?"

The girl nodded slowly and said: "It was fighting with my Barbies, and he fell against the table and he broke his tooth. I'm sorry, Mommy."

"Maybe you shouldn't let your Barbies play so rough, young lady."

"I'm really very sorry."

"Where's his tooth?"

The girl reached under her pillow and showed the tooth. "I was gonna try and fix it with some glue."

The mother took the tooth in her hand. She looked it over, then fitted it into the doll. It was possible it could be fixed. It wouldn't be too difficult, really. Maybe she and the girl could fix it together on the morrow. No, it was not something to hide from her husband. He'd have to be told.

"Okay," she said: "We're going to fix it, but your father can't be kept in the dark about it. You're going to have to apologize to your father."

"I'll apologize."

"And you'll have to swear you'll never roughhouse with his doll again."

"I'm never even gonna look at it."

Mother kissed daughter on the forehead.

So, it was all settled. She could tell him at the dinner table. She had to go make pork chops and potatoes and carrots then. It was getting pretty late in the day. It was five-thirty, and he usually got home at six. That didn't leave her much time. She went downstairs and put the doll back in its place.

 

I wasn't a witness to their discussion, so I can't say if it really happened or not. However, I can say the gist of it is true, because at the dinner table I heard about what had happened. I pretended to be very disappointed in my daughter for letting her play get out of hand, but really I wasn't. I loved that little girl, and I would have done anything for her, given time. I told her: "You have to get some self-control. Not everything in your life is going to go your way. You'll make mistakes. Some will be irreversible. All you can do is pull up your pants and get on with it. However, be certain you'll get a little happiness out of it." Or words to that effect. All this took place some time ago.

After dinner, I packed up a little overnight bag, kissed all goodnight, drove to the airport, and flew to another province.

At around three o'clock a.m., while I was asleep in a hotel room in said other province, something went wrong with my house's gas-powered furnace. I don't recall the details, but it started leaking hydrogen monoxide. As I'm sure you know, hydrogen monoxide has no smell, or taste, or anything. All our windows were sealed up for the winter, with plastic wrapping all over the place. As I understand it, hydrogen monoxide bullies oxygen in some way or another. Takes it out of service. I took an airplane back to my city and drove to my house. An ambulance was outside, which I thought was curious. A little conversation with a bystander gave me all the information I needed. A woman and her two children had died of carbon monoxide poisoning. They'd died sleeping, and probably peacefully.

It had been a mishap.

Everyone was so sorry for me at the funerals. Family gone, he'll take to drink, nothing left to live for, etc. But I soldiered on nonetheless, and got back on my feet. And frankly I felt a bit more free. I had a second chance, though in the end I'd blow it all to hell.

According to Part Three, it hadn't been a mishap. I'm sure you saw this coming.

Singapore was angrier than ever that evening after having his tooth knocked out. He spent the afternoon plotting his revenge. He recalled something he'd heard somewhere, something about hydrogen monoxide. Whole families can be wiped out with the stuff, because it's a narcotic or at least a soporific.

When the house was quiet, he crept down to the basement, to the heater. The manual he read upside-down: instead of reading how to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning, he reversed the sentences to read about how to create carbon monoxide poisoning. His missing tooth bothered him terribly. He had been mutilated by that little bitch. The whole place stank. The hypocrisy of it all made him wretch. What did they know about anything? They had all this stuff and they'd always had all this stuff, but he himself had been created from slavery pure and simple. I'm doing the universe a favour.

He located the proper switch. He opened a valve. He opened the safety valve. Once they were dead, he'd return to set them all up proper again.

He went to the daughter's room, to watch her die. She died first, in just three hours. A trip to the boy's room to see that he was dead, and he was, good. Then the woman's room. She was asleep, but gasping. Soon the gasping stopped and all was serene.

He went down to the basement and returned the settings to their proper places.

 

 

IIII

 

I have to go down to the cellars in a little bit, but I thought I would catch up before doing so. I have read Part Four, and it's shocking.

The character in Part Four is again much like myself, and I can't say there are many noticeable differences. I went to funerals, down-sized my life to this little apartment, and retired from my job. For fifteen years I've lived here, and I am an old man now. Elevators are a godsend. All my meals are modest meals, and I go to bed early though I get up at two or three to putter around hopelessly. Even so there's not much doing, I get along. I play cards with friends on a regular basis. Some days I don't say anything to anyone.

I put into storage in the cellars several boxes of things from my past. I've meant to go down there one of these days to sort it all out, but I haven't had the time. I think I've only been down there to retrieve a photograph of my family from some time around 1973. Other than that, I think, I haven't bothered. The past is a painful thing, and no-one wants to court pain. (Also, the cellars are bleak and dreary and there's dust everywhere.)

Each apartment gets a small cage down there, for storage purposes. When I put my boxes there, in my cage, I didn't encounter anyone. Many of these will be cleaned out by the landlord, I suppose. The things down there, Lord, they're abandoned and worthless for the most part. And the time I went down there for the photograph, again I encountered no-one. It's a place for things you think may be worthwhile, while they are mostly not.

Part Four has two narratives running alongside one another. The first one, fractured into sections, is the story of the protagonist, who leads a life very much like my own. (There are perhaps some differences, but I can't put my finger on them. Perhaps it has something to do with style.) The other narrative is about--you guessed it--Singapore, or the book's version of Singapore. (I will be able to let you know in a while if these two are one and the same.) Apparently, Singapore, whose analogue is down in the cellars in some box or other, is having a grand old time. He has the run of the place, and with such bric-a-brac to mess around with and control, he's been up to no good, let me tell you, as the book reads. He has discovered many other dolls in other boxes in the other cages. There's a lot of dolls to choose from, at least one in every cage, sometimes eight or nine in musty cardboard boxes. Unfortunately, he has trouble relating to them, since they're much older than he is. Sometimes as much as fifty years older, and the age gap is too great, though he had some fun torturing three of them by pulling at their seams and stuffings. It wasn't until he found, quite hidden away at the back of one cage, a box of special metal toys, wind-up toys, obviously of some value, some with 'Made in American Sector' embossed on them. What could be done with these self-propelling automatons? He didn't spend long puzzling over it. He gathered them all together in his home cage and studied their mechanisms and properties. All of them objected, some in extreme distress, because toys can tell what motives other toys have.

 

Down in the cellars, in the cages, in his own cage, Singapore had control over each and every mechanical metal wind-up toy he could ever desire. How could it be he'd never before seen such creatures? He must have been travelling in the wrong circles!

He wound each one up beyond its spring's capacity and glared at them as they squeaked and squealed in agony. Then he would release their keys and watch them get relief as they scurried around the floor or sang crazy Mozart melodies.

After a while, he realized he could pull parts of this one and parts off that one and combine them into monstrous creatures never before seen. He especially enjoyed the pulling apart; he liked how they groaned in agony as he dissected them. A pile of metal and rubber parts would remain: wings, wheels, beaks, fenders, springs, keys, tines. Then he would guess haphazardly which pieces could go where. Could this leg be attached to this cylinder? How about making this eye roll in this claw? The possibilities were not endless, constrained as he was by the non-plasticity of the metallic parts. However, it delighted him to see the terror in their hearts as he made his mutations.

He had taken nine or so of them and made them fit together: a leviathan of battling creations! He laughed to see it try to navigate from one corner of the cage to another, hobbling and squabbling as it crawled and rolled along. He felt insane with delight as if he'd made some defiance to all creation, a release of all the bitterness that was at the bottom of his black heart.

He was now the doll-maker; he was now the God of his dominion.

 

Part Four continues with the protagonist, on an ordinary day, on an ordinary street, wander quite at leisure into a used book store he'd never been into nor even seen before. What is this place? he wondered. A few rounds of the shop kept taking him back to a particular book, appealing to him in its design. He picked it up, recognizing his whole life was about to be changed in an instant. He read the back cover, the publisher's advertisement, honed and perfected throughout an editorial department somewhere, and, oddly enough, it echoed his own life. An uncle gives the book's protagonist a doll. He suffers some tragedies. And the doll is always with him, leading to a 'horrifying conclusion'.

Meanwhile, as he doesn't know, as he stands reading the back of the book, but is going to find out, the doll is down in the cellars doing terrible experiments to mechanical toys.

He buys the book and takes it home. He writes up his own reflections as he reads the book, part by part. He is thrown back into his past, parts of which he never wanted to think about again. Finally, he reaches the part about the doll, Singapore, in the cellars, in the cage, and he begins to think that maybe, just maybe, the book is more true than his own memories. After all, so much happens to us of which we are unawares, for life is long and we only have five or so senses to take care of us, isn't that right? He sees it's possible that he has been cursed his entire life, with an evil doll that made his most terrible experiences take place. He can hardly believe it, but by an act of will he decides it is time to find out what's been going on down in the cellar of his apartment building.

He leaves his apartment, to go down into the cellars.

And that's the end of Part Four!

That's it! The last paragraph!

Well, I know this can't stand.

The story was going along so well, and then ... nothing.

I don't know if it's a co-incidence, or co-incidental, or what have you. It was coming along so nicely, then ... deliberate ambiguity.

I guess you can see how upset I am about the whole thing. I mean, the tale itself is ludicrous. Do you mean to tell me that, right now, right this instant, my doll Singapore down in the cellars has been fucking around with wind-up toys, pulling them apart, putting them back together in crazy ways? First of all, the idea is absurd, to think you can pull apart metalworks and put them back together harum-scarum and they will function? The world of metals doesn't work that way. It's like saying you could combine a television set, a toaster and a lamp and be rewarded with something that worked.

And on top of all that, the earlier bits in the other three parts don't make any sense either. Johnny West was alive in some way? Singapore hypnotized my ex-girlfriend and took her to a Teflon plant--a Teflon plant, for God's sake!--and made her dismember herself? That he somehow managed to get a furnace to emit carbon monoxide, enough to kill three people in a matter of hours? Everything about it is gonzo!

I have not led a life with fantastic elements included. It's simply not the case.

And so, now I am going to go down into the cellars. I'm going to find Singapore in a cardboard box, and not dissecting and recombining other gizmos.

I'll be back!