O l i v e r B e n j a m i n
puppets?”
“We made a whole bunch out of your Dad’s socks,” Wade exulted
proudly, “Show him Leonard.”
The scrawny mess of bones, acne and rags that was Leonard held
up a sad assortment of dirty, holey white socks upon which he had
drawn faces with a permanent marker. For hair, he cut fur from Bob’s
foster dog Trusty and pasted it on top, while the wardrobe came from
the doll collection of Bob’s foster sister.
“Awesome!” exclaimed Bob.
“Now all we need is some stuff for them to say. Like, a story,
man,” said Leonard in a deep baritone that didn’t match his tiny
frame.
“A story,” said Bob dreamily, tapping his temple and smiling.
“Leave that to me, man. I could write a
great
story.”
Bob walked over to the stereo system, which neither Trusty nor
his friends seemed to have damaged, and switched it on loud so that
it could be heard against the construction going on in his living room.
He always thought better when there was music on, and sometimes
wondered if maybe there was some connection between music and
how smart you were. Musicians, Bob knew, were the smartest people
around.
Bob figured that since there were thousands of languages in the
world, and music was the universal language, and language was what
made us smarter than the animals, then—well, that meant that
musicians spoke thousands of languages and were pretty fucking
smart too.
With the stereo blasting out the twanging sounds of a live blues
performance, Bob sat down with a crayon and wrote a story on an
empty donut box. As he wrote he felt a remarkable, unfamiliar
sensation, that the universe was writing through him, filling his head
with words and guiding his knobby fingers without his input. His
crayon flowed freely against the cardboard as if taking dictation from
a higher source—albeit a higher source that suffered severe spelling
and grammar problems.
•
Deaf Lemon Hopkins was relaxing in the studio of local radio station
KBLU, having just finished a rousing live performance (his manager
assured him that he sounded particularly grand). Meanwhile, a
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