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One Mukluk(continued) This problem of the transfer of responsibility, unfortunately,
has not yet been resolved, for I am not sure that Adams ever had an
Aunt Eloise, or any aunt who was still alive. Nor are DOST officials
even doing anything about this matter. When I asked Taylor-Mailer why
this might be so, he said that he thought that there was a problem of
logic involved here. As he pointed out to me recently: "How do
you transfer responsibility from one person who didn't have any responsibility
to another person who won't have any responsibility?" "I don't know," I responded to his question,
"but I thought that at DOST just about anything was possible —
mind you, senseless, mindless, absolutely ridiculous, but possible nonetheless." By the way, after this conversation, I finally understood
what Adams meant when he always said that Taylor-Mailer was too angular
looking for his own good, and perhaps everyone else's good, as well.
I don't know why I finally understood it following that conversation,
but I did. This problem of the transfer of responsibility was similar
in kind, though perhaps dissimilar in number (I'm not sure what either
part of this sentence means, though I've heard knowledgeable people
talk like that before, and I thought I'd give it a try) to another problem
that Adams's disappearance and presumed death posed. This was an issue
raised by the maniacal Huck Hockenhokey and one, therefore, that I assumed
immediately to be completely absurd. I can't remember exactly what Hockenhokey said, but he
posed it sort of like this: "How can a guy who was never here not
be here any longer? Did you ever think of that, Harvey old boy?" "Why is that, Harvey?" he responded. "Because Adams was here, and after his disappearance
he is no longer here. See?" He thought for a moment as his index finger tapped lightly
on his bottom lip, and then he said: "Yeah, Harvey, I guess you're
right." "Maybe Adams joined Demmo Klunkk in his role as Monster
of the Marmalade in one of the Marmalade's zillion sub-basements,"
Drumrole said to me one day as both of us were trying to count the number
of leaky soap dispensers in the men's rooms on the seventh floor of
the Marmalade, something which we usually did on odd and even months.
"Maybe the Monster of the Marmalade is really two people, now,"
Drumrole added. "Yes. So?" I said. Drumrole looked at me in a half-angry, half-puzzled, and
half-smart alecky sort of way, the way he always tended to look at me,
and actually the way he tended to look at everyone, and then said: "So
nothing, 'heaven-help-us' Harvey." When Sidney Sinews heard the news of Adams's disappearance
during a meeting of his People-Who-Make-it-a-Point-Not-to-Hold-a-Grudge
support group, of which he was the only member, he got so upset that
he dropped the heavy circular mirror which, in order to make conversation,
he invariably held high above his head while he rested on his back on
the floor. The impact of the falling mirror apparently broke his nose
in three places. Thank God, Hockenhokey said, that nothing actually
happened to the mirror. Soon after Adams's disappearance, according to a special
article in the Outlook Section of the Washington Clarion one
Sunday, Adams sightings were reported as far away as Paris (where he
was seen climbing the Eiffel Tower backwards and totally nude, with
mincemeat on his head and an olive up each of his nostrils), Bari Bari
on the North Coast of Italy (where he was spotted doing cartwheels in
front of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir when the Choir was visiting the
Holy Sepulchral of that city), the little sleepy village of Moose Mountain
Lake, Montana (where he was identified at a wholesale postage stamp
auction run by Arnold Schwarzenegger's second cousin, Wolfgang) and
Area 51 in the Nevada Dessert (where what he was doing is classified
and cannot be revealed). DOST Security investigated these claims and attributed
all of them to copycat Adamses.
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