Tale IV: Doctor to the Gods
There is, in Tulipville, a quite adequate if unexceptional hospital, the Serenade General, which is located near the Town Hall off the right bank of the river, and to the northeast of Serenade Park. There are also the expected assortment of minor health clinics and offices, catering to ailments of body and mind. But it is in none of these that Dr. Alan Werstock holds his practice, and he shares with them no patients.
He will set no bones, fix no teeth, nor measure temperatures; not for him the intricates of surgery, as usually practiced; there are none who can say that he saved their life, although many would say that he transformed it; not one citizen of Tulipville has benefited directly from his care, and yet the well-being of the town depends on him more than any other; he knows little of blood, but a great deal of ichor; for Dr. Werstock treats the ailments of gods.
It is for reasons of his divine practice that Alan, alone of the medical profession, attends his patients in the Library of Tulipville itself, infused as it is with the otherworldly.
The Library, on the left bank of the Serenade River, has as its base a square with four floors. Above these floors there extends a tall cone, with offices around the outside, and the interior empty aside from a central elevator and walkways. The Library also extends underground, and it is here that the books have their permanent storage, when not in active use. Below the first level of the basement mortals are not permitted, and so its formation is unknown, except perhaps to the Director of the Library, Emma Wilkerson; but it is speculated to mirror the structure above ground, with square floors topping a descending cone.
The ground floor, or zeroth floor, is a common area open to all. It contains a dining area. To the south, down a short flight of stairs, a semicircular locus faces the returning path of the Serenade, as it bends back and flows to the east; and beyond the river, to the south and southeast the tulip fields disappear into the distance and the forests. This southern exposure is often used for music, and by sculptors and painters. To the east on the zeroth floor is a corridor with an art gallery on either side, real art to the left and modern art to the right.
With exceptions, the first floor is devoted to lecture halls and meeting rooms; the second to administrative offices and permanently resident scholars; and the third floor, until recently, to four collectives of scholarship: literature, history, fine arts and other such matters; science; mathematics; and applied arts, mostly engineering.
Literature held what was considered the most gracious of the quarters, in the northwest of the third floor, facing the mountains over the river and town, particularly spectacular in the sunrise and sunset. But perhaps this was to their downfall, as noted below, while science to the northeast, engineering to the southwest, and mathematics across from them, have fared better.
The offices in the slanting architecture above the third floor are so thoroughly associated with visiting scholars that these ephemerals are themselves often referred to as “The Cones”. But near the top of the cone are viewing areas, for this is by far the highest point in Tulipville and the panorama is striking; and the office of the Director Emma Wilkerson; though generally she is found on the second floor. Near the top of the cone is a giant globe, a residence reserved for visiting deities.
It was on the second floor that Alan Werstock originally took his office, to the northwest facing the mountains, and there he stayed, until very recently.
Dr. Werstock was brought to Tulipville by agricultural concerns. The blossoming of nature, and of the town’s lucrative tulip fields in particular, is dependent on divine spirits. As Aristotle tells us, “There must be something or other really existing corresponding to what we call by the name of Nature.” That something includes the agents of the goddess Demeter.
It had unfortunately come to pass that several of Demeter’s nymphs, assigned to Tulipville, had developed allergies to pollen; and in their understandable abstinence from their divine labors, the flower fields, the beauty of the town’s southward perimeter, were in danger of utter collapse, and the town economy with it.
It was through Dr. Werstock’s precise knowledge of ichor, the living essence of divinity, that he was able to devise a cure for these allergies, and thus preserve the economy and heritage of Tulipville.
He is perhaps most famous for his treatment of the flying horse Pegasus. The stallion in question is responsible for carrying the thunderbolts of Zeus, and is therefore essential to the proper functioning of the weather, and, in turn, of agriculture. And yet the poor stallion was plagued with morbid thoughts and insecurities which increasingly impeded the successful conduct of his duties, bringing the very world food supply into peril.
Dr. Werstock is no Freudian, being neither a fool nor a fraud, but he asserts the value of the talking cure in matters of emotional turmoil. It was with some difficulty that a chaise longue of equinal proportions was procured for the case; and Dr. Werstock had it carefully undergirded with a stack of bricks, to avoid that sudden collapse of furniture which is so detrimental to therapeutic proceedings.
When the stage was properly set, Pegasus, laying on his back on the therapeutic couch, laid bare his innermost heart.
One might suppose the source of Pegasus’ anguish to have been his birth from the blood of his decapitated mother; or possibly doubts as to whether carting thunderbolts was a fulfilling career; but, as Dr. Werstock discovered in his careful questioning, it was another matter entirely that brought crop production into peril.
In his youth, the other ponies had made fun of him for having wings; and called him “horse fly”; and made buzzing sounds like insects when he approached; and in his emotional anguish at the memory, Pegasus wept and his wings flailed at high speed.
Dr. Werstock, in his otherwise meticulous preparations, had failed to properly consider the wingspan of the horse in question. And so it was that he was soundly whacked in the head by repeated blows from the powerful right wing; but of more concern, as indeed Alan is not without his vanity, was that the left wing was scattering his many awards, not to mention the finest books of his personal collection.
And so, while having reached that point in the proceedings in which the therapist generally suppresses with difficulty the natural phrase, “O, dry up you silly twit,” and instead listens patiently to any amount of additional twaddle, Dr. Werstock, not feeling it appropriate to request that the patient be less agitated in his emotional turmoil, and motivated perhaps more by the twin wounds to his body and his possessions than by that unwavering concern for the patient expected of the medical profession, opted to move directly to the cure.
“You are a fine horse! Loved and respected! And you must love yourself; you deserve your love!”
And Pegasus, suddenly still, stared at Dr. Werstock and sobbed cathartically; and they hugged as well as their relative geometries allowed; and thus was agriculture saved, and the reputation of Dr. Werstock enshrined forever.
Of more recent note is Alan’s treatment of Dionysus, the god of wine, although this was uncharacteristically to no avail, for reasons beyond his control.
After the unfortunate incident in which Larry the Large tossed Dionysus, flailing and drunk, into the Serenade River, subsequent to which he was found passed out against the Southern Bridge of Vincent Avenue, it was to Dr. Werstock that he was carried, rather like the ashes of a phoenix in need of resurrection.
And it was to that resurrection that Dr. Werstock directed himself with his invariable intensity and insight. Checked in for treatment of exhaustion, as the saying goes, Dionysus was strapped to a bed, unable to partake of that wine which flows spontaneously from his fingers, much less the assembled vats of fermented grapes for which he is famous. And so, for the first time in millennia, he sobered up.
A sober Dionysus is rather like a sheep that has been sheared. Beneath the wool of a sheep one finds surprisingly little substance; and without wine-induced revelries Dionysus appeared, if one may say so, rather sheepish.
He was disoriented by sobriety, as well one might be after a three thousand year bender, but not distressed by it. He might have meekly adapted to his new state.
But the soul of divinity infuses the world, as that of mortals does not. A sober Dionysus caused the grape vines to the north of Tulipville, primarily the northeast but not exclusively, to wither. And the assembled wine producers and merchants of Tulipville and surrounding regions appeared at the Library, not precisely with pitchforks and torches but in that general vein, and liberated, though in his general meekness it could not be said whether he wished to be liberated or not, the god of wine from the bounds of sobriety.
To the undoubted benefit of the wine industry; but that it was to the benefit of Dionysus, that he was reintroduced to wine with a bottle held to his lips while leading merchants held his arms to his sides, may well be questioned. May a divinity, for his own advantage, even for his own soul, justly refuse the mandate of his particular divinity? The question can be and is debated in the hallowed halls of the Library. I know only this: it will likely be a thousand years before Dionysus is again seen sober, when there arises another Larry the Large.
For many such cases has Dr. Werstock justly achieved his fame and honors. But there can be no question that the most important case of his career lies before him now, though its contours are mysterious to all but a few. For the treatment of a single patient, the entire literature wing on the third floor has been emptied; its former residents, in their tweed jackets like squirrels removed from comfortable tree holes, scurry in search new abodes; and the whispering in the halls is that, for The Great Case, as a code it is so called, the entire library would be emptied if necessary; but that decision has not been made, or at least, not yet.
Since I know little of the matter, and can say less, I must leave it as a question; but this is appropriate, as Dr. Werstock is noted for his questions.
“I would know,” he has said, “What are the ailments caused by the world, and what by ourselves? In what proportion? And what is the proportion of their cure?”
It has lately been in the practice of Dr. Werstock to rehabilitate a colony of gnomes who live in vast mountain caves not far west of Tulipville, and who have shunned the light for centuries, for they filled themselves with an irrational fear of sunlight and the creatures that live under it.
While gnomes are not citizens of the divine world themselves, they are ancillary to it; and as Zeus finds himself with a labor shortage, he requested to Dr. Werstock, through his messenger Hermes, to apply his best efforts to return these gnomes to the surface of the Earth; so that, though the practicality of it was not stated so plainly, they might be engaged to the work of the gods. And so Alan applied his best efforts to unraveling the terrestrial phobias of his new patients, with considerable if not complete success.
A powerful incentive to the gnomes, which Dr. Werstock made great use of, was their native love for beer. They were quite unfamiliar with modern human brewing. And so, as a first trepidated journey to the surface, he escorted a gnome delegation to that storied pub of Tulipville, the Prose and Verse. By prior arrangement with the owner, Helen Goldsmith, the gnomes and the good doctor entered discreetly from the rear door on Henley Street, and took a table in the dimly lit southwest corner of the pub, where they might enjoy their new beers with a minimum of distraction, and corresponding fright.
At the Ladies Table to the east wall of the pub, Helen Goldsmith presided over collected notables, including Emma Wilkerson, the mayor Susan Wigen, and other women of social and artistic standing.
Helen rose to make one of her periodic rounds of the tables, greeting familiar faces, welcoming new ones, and providing her light but thoughtful banter which is so well-liked. She thanked Mr. Alfred Wilkerson in particular for coming, seated not far from the Ladies Table. Mr. Wilkerson, as Treasurer of the Moral Rectitude Union, disapproves of pubs; but he disapproves even more of leaving his wife unescorted in one, and so makes his attendance.
It was a Wednesday night, which, at the Prose and Verse, means that the stage against the south wall was open to any poet wishing to make a gift of words to the an appreciative, or not, public. And, as the public at the Prose and Verse tended towards ‘not’, at least for the poets generally making themselves heard, it might have been expected that the pub would be lightly attended.
But Helen Goldsmith, herself a poet among her many accomplishments, and perhaps overly supportive of aspiring versifiers, had quietly told the regulars that if there was not sufficient attendance, or a sufficiently appreciative endorsement, then Poetry Night would be replaced by Novel Night; and that Michael Howthal would hold forth for several hours on The Fall of Syracuse; and this on a Friday night, not a Wednesday, which few of the regulars would care to miss.
It may be said that Howthal’s novels are classics, in the sense given to us by Caleb Winchester, of a book everyone wants to have read, and no one wants to read. And the question of what Archimedes might have felt, while frying Roman soldiers with a large mirror, is best not contemplated over bangers and mash; and particularly not at great length; and Michael Howthal is nothing if not thorough.
And so Helen’s threat was a dire one, and the regulars reluctantly fell in line, and were present in force for poetry night, and could be counted on to applaud enthusiastically for the utmost of tripe. But as this weekly ordeal was well known, a number of them had grown their hair long, to better disguise rather thick earplugs. And one of these was Sordo Taub, to whom Helen addressed a question.
Helen was pleased with her recent hair dye, not being indifferent to her appearance. “Do you like the color of my hair?”, she asked playfully.
Sordo Taub, seeing her lips move but hearing little, and knowing a response was required, was dreadfully aware that he could not admit to having not heard her words, nor those of the poets whose elegance he had vigorously applauded, and so strained to think what she might have said.
And his best deduction was that it had been the plea “Please knock his bowler off the chair,” referring to the adornment resting next to Mr. Wilkerson. Reflecting on her recent exchange with Mr. Wilkerson, it came to Sordo’s firm conclusion that the fine lady had been insulted; and, rising in defense of her honor, he marched to the chapeau in question with a sense of duty and bearing appropriate to the military training of his now distant past.
Simply to knock the offending bowler from the chair he held far inadequate; and so, approaching Alfred from behind, he grasped the item like a frisbee and, with considerable vigor, tossed it at high altitude towards the southwest of the pub, for which its path was more or less elegant, perhaps less, but nonetheless exhibiting unexpected aerodynamic integrity.
It must be said that Alfred has a deep attachment to his bowler, transcending that of man for possession, and more near to the bond between fellow travelers in life. And, after the unfortunate incident recounted earlier in which the bowler had been shot from his head, Alfred grew ever more guilty at his irresponsibility in putting his felt companion at peril, and had sworn a solemn oath to this contraption of fashion that it would never again touch the ground.
It was therefore with agility more in keeping with his athletic youth than with his present age and station that Alfred leapt to the top of his table, scattering cutlery and items of consumption, and there to the next, with similar effect. And in his progression, in pursuit of his flying bowler, there is called to mind the approach of Achilles to Hector outside the walls of Troy, pursuing, as Alfred did his hat, revenge for the death of his beloved Patroclus; although Plato speculates, and not without sound reason, that it was perhaps Patroclus who was the lover, and Achilles the beloved; and to those unfamiliar with the terms, I might expound at greater length; perhaps too great; but I am, for reasons known to my faithful readers, at pains to avoid digression; and so I return to the matter at hand, with that characteristic simplicity and directness for which I am justly noted.
It came to Mr. Wilkerson, in his unstately progression, rather like a herd of elephants through a forest, after which there is no forest, that the bowler had begun its descent, and a lateral progression was insufficient; and so, bringing forth capabilities which had worthily brought attention as a collegiate receiver, he airborned himself, deftly executing a rotation of half a cycle about his long axis in midair, so as to maintain visual contact with his headpiece, which indeed he acquired successfully with outstretch arms; however neglecting, or perhaps not caring, that by doing so he lost that visual engagement groundward so necessary for an informed landing; and so it was that he crashed, bowler tucked safely to his chest, backward into the table of gnomes, chaired by Dr. Werstock, with an assortment of culinary matter of solid and liquid form thus caused to adorn the assembled patients.
Dr. Werstock, knowing a professional calm to be necessary to the well-being of those under his care, said politely “It is so nice of you to drop in.”
Meanwhile, back at the Ladies Table, Emma had watched matters with her usual unflappable calm. She had, frankly, seen worse from her husband. The rest of her table, however, had their mouths agape. And as vino sometimes veritases a bit too much, Janet Fraser of the Garden Club turned to Emma Wilkerson and said what was on the minds of many: “You are such an elegant, intelligent and sophisticated woman. I can’t imagine what you saw in him.”
Here Emma silently separated the palms of her hands, to a distance that shall not be here specified, to raised eyebrows, which did much to end that topic of discussion.
At the table of gnomes, the diminutive ancients were much less inclined to politeness than was Dr. Werstock. There was honor offended; there were fine clothing ruined; but above all stood the matter of spilt beer, a high sin for those of gnomic persuasion.
And so it was that more than ten gnomes leapt on the tabletop, armed with canes of remarkable stoutness and wielded with even more remarkable dexterity, speed, and force; and proceeded to provide the prone Mr. Wilkerson with most heartfelt attention. It was the best Alfred could do to protect his hat, at the expense of his head; making a judgment, which one may agree with or not, as to which was the more valuable.
And one is reminded here of the observation of Gibbon, “When their lungs were exhausted, they had recourse to the more solid arguments of sticks and stones.”
It was only the timely arrival of Larry the Large, intimidating even to enraged gnomes, that saved Alfred from more serious injury.
Sometimes the best therapy is applied indignation: and nothing in Dr. Werstock’s course of treatment was so effective in bringing the gnomes into acceptance of the world as was the thrashing of the worthy Treasurer of the MRU.
So much so that the belief arose that Dr. Werstock had deliberately arranged the occurrence. And while this was not true, it was so characteristic of his ability as to come to be thought to be true; for genius attracts accolades as gravity does matter.
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