Megabride
But what if she supposed that I was somehow a “famous” writer? Might she have heard that all the scraps of a famous writer could somehow be turned into cash? Was she secretly selling the uncensored slobber of my soul, the bubbly that gushes out when I first pop my cork, to some collector? And was he saving it all up to sell to some library—where in future years some twit of a Ph.D. would have a field day reducing me to a heap of amorphous maunderings? The thought of such a long series of unsuspected pilferings–and the possible involvement of Ida —gave me heartburn. If Merkouros could manage to break into Margie’s apartment …
HE
Merkouros passed from lamplight into shadow wandering in and out among the streets of the upper West Side, threading his way delicately among dog turds, glaring at late-night strollers who paraded their pets along Riverside Drive and callously, shamelessly, involved the innocent animals in countless violations of the pooper-scooper laws. Over in his native dimension such things did not occur. There the civic-minded majority (who did not, as here, overlap so confusingly with the criminal element) did not have such laws dictating behavior that to them was as automatic as brushing one’s teeth after dinner. As he huddled against the cool of the April night, shrugging the padded shoulders of his double-breasted jacket against the sight of such wanton defilements, half his head seemed to sink into his trunk, and only a thin white nose and a slicked-back mat of dark hair peeked out above his thick woolen scarf to rebuke the quiet streets.
Detective Merkouros was vaulting from horn to horn of another of those moral dilemmas which he had to run many times through his mental computer to settle to his absolute satisfaction. The renowned C.K. Pompas (who, in spite of his reputation as a detective novelist, knew nothing about the realities of detective work) had requested his services once more. This time it was not to continue spying on the magnificent creature who was divorcing him. It was to protect himself from an elaborate defamation being concocted, he claimed, by an envious obscurity named Herman Q. Silver. The problem was that Merkouros, having earlier studied the same documents—presented to him independently by the aforenamed Mr. Silver—had just accepted a retainer from said Silver to seek further evidence of plagiarism committed against him by Pompas. When Silver had presented his arguments, with supporting texts, Merkouros had undertaken their comparative study and emerged convinced that his new client did indeed have priority. But now Pompas was presenting the equally compelling counter-construction that his earlier incarnations were being resurrected in a devious plot to despoil him of all claims to originality. (There wasn’t an author of Merkouros’s acquaintance who wouldn’t rather be called boring than unoriginal.)
Either one or the other was lying, Merkouros initially concluded. That was, at least, the only reasonable conclusion available to a man born, bred, and trained in Plane 1, his native dimension, where the logical alternatives either/or ruled supreme whether in ethical considerations or in the smooth, efficient flow of midtown Manhattan traffic at rush hour. Gridlock, a concrete parallel to both/and in the field of abstract logic, was in Merkouros’s experience a condition that existed only here in Plane 7. Merkouros had constantly to remind himself that Plane 7 was the world of both/and. Therefore, he thought, When in Rome, etc., so that he was forced to entertain a number of murkier possibilities than the merely aesthetically pleasing either/or. For example, both one and the other were lying; both one and the other were telling the truth; they were both lying and telling the truth at the same time; neither one nor the other was either lying or telling the truth; both one and the other knew each was lying in order to rescue the perceived truth from oblivion, or to conceal it from the eyes of him they demanded should reveal it. ...
