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And I swear, I will use my father’s revolver if I hear once more, “Yo, Mr. Dude Man, you got your groove slidin’.” It’s bad enough to hear the endless thumping in the cellar and the seemingly endless thumping down the hallway upstairs with the unrestrained sound effects and the smell of what I am sure is marijuana wafting from under the door. What makes it worse is that young man doesn’t seem to have a mean bone in his body. “Oh, Norman, he adores you,” Diantha tells me. “He thinks you are one classic dude, you know, like one of those worldly men you see in old movies who knows all about culture and wine and stuff like that.”

Indeed, I am so ensconced in the young man’s good graces that he deigned last night to play me a new “song” he is working on. I was taken down into the basement where he has, in a section paneled back in the thirties, if I’m not mistaken, set up what he calls his synthesizer. He had me read the lyrics from something titled “Gettin’ Rough in You Muff,” that he had scrawled while he fingered away on a keyboard-like contraption hooked up to Nuremberg-sized loudspeakers. Then, in a kind of stylized chant, he sang,

I’m gettin’ rough

I’m gettin’ rough in you muff I’m gettin’ tough

I’m gettin’ tough in you fluff

I’m gettin’ down

I’m getting down where you brown

’Cause you

’Cause you got the butt

You got the butt of no joke

I’m gettin’ rough

I’m gettin’ rough in you muff

And over and over.

I repeat these “lyrics” in the hope my good reader might make more sense of them than I could. Indeed, I have not the slightest idea what the words mean. Perhaps, I thought, as I nodded my appreciation, they weren’t supposed to mean anything. Or perhaps they were avant garde, like a lot of modern poetry, which reads, or used to read, like something written for academics to write about, the verbal equivalent of abstract art. I did mention, as an attempt to make polite conversation, that the cadence of his “music” bore some resemblance to rhythm patterns in early English verse. I cited Beowulf as an example.

“Yeah, cool, man. Beowulf. I dig where you’re coming from. They’re one grooving group, man. Punky funk with some real heavy tunes.”

It would be so much easier if we simply despised each other.

The fact is that I have larger concerns than accommodating Sixpak Shakur or placating people like Mr. Castor. And it’s not only Ossmann and Woodley, Bert and Betti, Elsbeth and Diantha. I have as well a gnawing unease about the fate of Korky Kummerbund. It’s simply not in the young man’s character to go away for this long a time without telling Elsbeth and his other friends.

At the same time, as though at another remove, I wonder what’s happening to Corny Chard. People joke that he’s probably been eaten by the tribe in whose purity and cannibalism he puts such faith, but it’s scarcely a laughing matter.

15

Not long after I arrived at the office this morning, I received an unannounced visit from Mr. Freddie Bain that turned out to be disquieting and not a little bizarre. He is, it turns out, the proprietor of both the Green Sherpa and an art, gift, and spice emporium called the Nepalese Realm. I say disquieting because in the aftermath of his visit — the lingering musk of his cologne among other things — I had the distinct impression that he had been sizing me up.

A man as tall as myself but ruggedly built with closely barbered blond hair, a handsome, feral face, and an annoying passive-aggressive manner, he waxed fake obsequious as he placed his card on the edge of my desk. “I won’t take much of your time, Mr. de Ratour,” he said, declining the chair I offered with a gesture. Instead, he walked around the office inspecting the items on display. He wore a tailor-cut hacking jacket of green-brown tweed with leather at the elbows. “Nice. Very good, yes,” he murmured in his strange British English.

I waited a polite amount of time before I asked, “What can I do for you, Mr. Bain?”

He turned on me an enigmatic smile shaded