The Water-Method Man

Later Bogus went to the library, to mull over his little-used alcove, not really expecting to find anything he'd want to take with him. Predictably, he didn't. His cubby-neighbor, M.E. Zanther, discovered him 'doodling on an otherwise blank page', he later reported. Zanther remembered this well, because when Trumper left the library, Zanther slunk into Trumper's alcove to read the doodles. Actually Bogus was hiding around the end of the row of cubbies. What Zanther saw was the crude beginnings of a poem about Harry Petz, a badly drawn obscene drawing, and, broadly printed with a Magic Marker across the surface of the desk blotter, HI, ZANTHER! ARE YOU RUNNING OUT OF THINGS TO READ?

'One thing I've noticed,' said Dr Wolfram Holster, Trumper's thesis chairman, 'is that witless behavior can be a very calculated thing.' But that was much later; at the time, he was thoroughly bamboozled.

Trumper called Dr Holster and begged for a ride to the nearest Iowa airport with the quickest connection to Chicago. This would have been Cedar Rapids, about three-quarters of an hour from Iowa City, and Dr Wolfram Holster was not in the habit of cultivating familiar relationships with his students. 'Is this an emergency?' he asked.

'There's been a death in the family,' Trumper told him.

They were almost at the airport, Trumper not speaking a word, when Holster asked, 'Your father?'

'What?'

'Your father,' Holster repeated. 'The death in the family ...'

'My own,' said Trumper. 'I'm the death in the family ...

'

Holster drove on, maintaining a polite pause. 'Where are you going?' he asked after a while.

'I prefer to fall to pieces abroad,' Trumper answered. Holster remembered that line; it was from Trumper's translation of Akthelt and Gunnel. On the battlefield at Plock word comes to Akthelt that his wife, Gunnel, and his son, Axelrulf, have been foully molested and dismembered back home at the castle. Thak, Akthelt's father, suggests that they postpone their planned invasion of Finlandia. 'I prefer to fall to pieces abroad,' Akthelt tells his father.

So Dr Holster suspected some melodramatics on the part of Trumper.

Actually, what Holster didn't suspect was more interesting. The whole passage - the battlefield at Plock, the business about Gunnel and Axelrulf being foully molested and dismembered, and Akthelt's comment - was bunk. Trumper had lost track of the plot, needed more work to show Holster, and had invented all of it. Later, he had thought of a way to revive Axelrulf and Gunnel: it was a case of mistaken identity.

So actually Trumper's line was original, after all.

'I prefer to fall to pieces abroad.'

Holster's reaction must have shaken Trumper up a bit.

'Have a good time,' Dr Wolfram Holster told him.

The Lufthansa flight for Frankfurt was less than half full at the take-off from Chicago. It picked up a few more passengers in New York, but it was still pretty empty. Even with all the seats available, a Lufthansa stewardess sat down beside Trumper. Perhaps I look like I'm going to throw up, he thought, and promptly felt sick.

The stewardess's English wasn't very good, but Bogus didn't feel up to speaking German yet. He'd be speaking it soon enough.

'Dis your furzt flighct?' the stewardess asked him in a sensuous guttural. Most people don't know what a lovely language German is, Trumper reflected.

'I haven't flown in a long time,' he told the stewardess, wishing that his stomach wouldn't bank and circle with the plane.

Over the Atlantic they leveled off, climbed, then leveled off again. When the lighted sign saying PLEASE FASTEN SEAT BELTS went off, the nice stewardess unfastened hers. 'Veil, here ve go,' she said.

But before she could get up, Trumper tried to lunge past her into the aisle, forgetting that his own seat belt was still attached. He was jerked back against her, knocking her back to her seat. He vomited in her lap.

'Oh, I'm sorry,' he gurgled, thinking how he'd lived for the last few days on beer.

The stewardess stood, holding her skirt up, making a tray of it, and smiled, or tried to. He said again, 'Oh, I'm sorry.'

She told him sweetly, 'Pleeze, don't vorry about it.'

But Bogus Trumper didn't hear her. He saw the blackness out his window and hoped it was only the sea. He said again, 'Really, I am sorry ...'

The stewardess was trying to get away from him to empty her skirt. But he caught her hand not looking at her and staring out the window fixedly, and said again, 'I really am sorry, really! Fuck it, anyway, damn it! But I am! So very fucking sorry ...'

The stewardess knelt awkwardly in the aisle beside him, balancing her skirtful of slop. 'Pleeze, you ... hey, you!' she crooned. But he began to cry. 'Pleeze don't even tink about it,' she pleaded. She touched his face. 'Look, pleeze,' she coaxed. 'You von't believe me, but dis happens all der time.'

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