But Mary was gone already, and in a few minutes it sounded as if a small, heavily booted army were mustering in the hallway.
“Bone, are you still in there?” Mary. A foolish question, but Bone replied in the affirmative. The lock clicked—someone picked it, evidently. Bone heard rather than saw Mary, Cash, and the Mexicans tumble in—his view of his own rescue confined to the little window, its frame, the yellow-painted wall, and the white tile below. No one commented on his being in the bathtub fully dressed, but they couldn’t understand why he didn’t simply step out. They seemed to believe that he’d merely been awaiting an audience before doing just that, and kept inviting him to turn around and extricate himself. Only after reiterated explanations did they accept that his inability to do so was precisely the problem.
Finally, Bone, who’d had more time to consider this calamity than anyone, said, “Just work my legs. Like a marionette.” Cash’s hands grasped Bone’s calf, bending the knee’s hinge. It took several experimental manipulations—accompanied by much onlooker advice—to get the hang of walking with someone else’s legs. As Cash lifted and planted Bone’s feet in turn, marching him in place like a life-sized toy soldier, several sets of hands assisted in turning Bone by the shoulders. Worried faces of Mary and several curious Mexicans, and the top of Cash’s head—he was still kneeling to work Bone’s legs—rotated into view. A cautious clomp of one foot across the porcelain wall, and then, carefully, precariously—ready, steady!—he swayed back dangerously like an unmoored scarecrow before they could seize his shirt to stop him from toppling—they brought his second foot alongside the first.
Once he stood on the bath mat, the spell was broken, and, lo, he could walk.
B, b
From the Semitic beth (b), “house,” e.g., Bethlehem, “house of bread.” The Greeks upended the letter, renaming it beta and, in the upper case, adding a balcony on the second floor.
Babel: The legendary site of a tower threatening to reach “unto heaven itself” until God “confounded the tongues” of man, creating the world’s profusion of languages. Tempting as it is to believe, babble does not descend from this but from baby and the Germanic suffix -le, which connotes small, repetitive actions, as in wobble, twinkle, and gobble. Babel is derived from Babylon, an ancient city whose cuneiform script was cousin of the Semitic alphabet, whence all Western European alphabets are derived.
backformation: Removing what appears to be a suffix or prefix from an existing word to form a new one. Thus, buttler is derived from butler, burgle from burglar, and more recently conversate from conversation.
barbarian: A native of a land where they aren’t as civilized as we are. From barbarikos, a derisive onomatopoeia for foreign languages, which to the Greeks sounded like baby talk or bleating sheep: hence, baa-baa-rian.
Cliché inventory compiled by Bone King during visit to the Northside Hospital Emergency Room
| Cliché item | yes | no |
| Interminable and meaningless forms to complete1 | x | |
| Time passing with gelatinous slowness while waiting to be seen by physician | x | |
| Young man with head wrapped in bloody gauze | x | |
| Suspiciously juvenile-looking physician | x | |
| Mysterious and alarming tests performed | x | |
| Phrase “overnight for observation” used | x | |
| Humiliating hospital gown that fails to cover backside | x | |
| Room with motorized hospital bed capable of achieving any angle, slope, incline, or combination thereof conceivable to Euclidean geometry, but which on no account can be made comfortable | x | |
| Flavorless hospital food served on plastic tray | x | |
| Visit from priest | x | |
| Referral to specialist with exotic-sounding name2 | x |
Notes
1. To wit: “In case of emergency contact.” What do they mean, “in case of emergency”? This is the emergency room. And the person to contact is who came with me. (Pointed this out to Mary, who was not amused.)
2. Dr. Limongello, whom everyone calls “Wonderful Dr. Lemon Jell-O.”
Although Bone was capable of navigating on his own steam once he was free of the tub, helpful hands herded him to the living room. Cash and the Mexicans stood stupefied, stiffly shifting from foot to foot, while Mary stroked Bone’s cheek with her fingertips and smoothed his hair, as if this terrible episode were somehow attributable to grooming. “Sweetheart,” she said, “what happened?”
Bone couldn’t say what had happened because he knew only that he couldn’t move, and that’s what he told her. Her kiss left a tingling spot on his forehead, like a priest’s blessing. Her dark eyes looked into each of his eyes in turn, as if trying two doors to find the unlocked one, while down her blouse he could see the silken hemispheres of her breasts. “We’re taking you to the emergency room,” she said, the first order of business as far as she was concerned. But Bone demurred; it was only a onetime occurrence, surely.
“I bet you’re right, buddy,” Cash said with a man-to-man sort of compassion. “Probably just a onetime thing. But don’t you think you need to go to the emergency room anyway? Just in case.” A Hispanic murmur of consent rose from the Mexicans, and Bone thought what a good friend Cash would make. Bonhomie’s sudden sunshine filled the room. So Mary drove Bone to the hospital, her face filled with the solemn joy of taking sensible measures in a crisis, Bone suppressing the unspeakable urge to smile.
At a traffic light Mary asked, “What were you doing in the bathtub?”
“Oh, just looking at those lines of Chaucer,” Bone said as nonchalantly as he could, gazing with unusual attention at a sign offering to buy ugly houses.
“But I thought you were done studying Chaucer,” Mary pointed out.
“There was just something I wanted to check on,” Bone explained. In the subsequent silence, Bone felt uncomfortably certain she knew he was lying.
In the emergency room, Bone invited Mary to join him in a game of Cliché Hunt while filling out forms, but she only said, “You can’t make everything into one of your little games, Bone.” So he retreated into his ruminations, leaving Mary to hers.
He was calm throughout his examination by his Clearasil-scented physician: the futile formalities of reflex testing, blood sampling, X-raying, and peering into his skull holes. He was unruffled at being made to walk from one end of the room to the other, stand on one foot, then the other, squeeze with his left hand and then the right. Bone was a patient patient with all of it. It was incredible that the bizarre episode of immobility—already so remote it seemed to belong to another lifetime—would recur; nevertheless, it was charming to be the object of Mary’s concern.
The inconclusive