7

“By virtue of the fact that you sought me out and have understood the purpose of my book, if not the precise meaning, I invite you to remain and study with me. All intelligent seekers sooner or later realize that a teacher is necessary to their development. The most important part of knowing is knowing when you will never know. No and Know are non-exclusive antitheses of both Virtual and Repugnant Paradox. Even Einstein and, later, the unfortunate Gödel, decided that there was indeed a Desirable Gap. The question this provokes, of course, is how to process regret without falling prey to the Jonah Compulsion, which Gödel called Informal Fallacy, or some such nonsense. Are you hungry?”

Pace had been listening to Dr. Furbo for two hours. What Furbo had to say about knowing and not knowing reminded Pace of something but he could not remember exactly what.

“Yes, Dr. Furbo. I’m both hungry and a little tired.”

Furbo jumped up from the large wicker rocking chair in which he had been sitting.

“I’ll barbecue some spare ribs, then,” he said. “I’m in the fourth week of the Bromige-Rosen Diet. First week, potatoes and oatmeal; second week, collard greens and dandelion soup; third week, pasta and ice cream; fourth week, ribs and beer. Bromige-Rosen recommend beer be taken only twice a day, but since there are to be four feedings per day, I find it a tad difficult not to imbibe with each serving. I’m looking forward to next week’s menu of sauerkraut and honeydew melon. No fish in Bromige-Rosen; absolutely verboten. I agree entirely. All fish carry the undetectable funambular cell, which causes vertigo.”

“If the cell is undetectable,” Pace said, “how do you know fish carry it?”

“Molecular deviation detected centuries ago by the Mesopotamians. They were the pioneers of ichthyology, did all their work in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Everyone credits the Egyptians but they were just the first to alter their diet by decree. No pharaoh ever expired due to funambular seizure, remember that.”

Pace fell asleep in Dr. Furbo’s attic guest room following his having heartily partaken of a slab of beef ribs slathered with the doctor’s original sauce, which recipe included a modest dash of Chiefland, Florida, boar urine.

“That’s what gives it such a lively undertaste,” Furbo informed Pace.

Late the next morning Pace awoke feeling slightly sick to his stomach and thought immediately of the boar urine in the barbecue sauce. He dressed and went downstairs and found Dr. Furbo, all seventy-nine inches of him, still dressed as he had been the night before in a black suit with a black shirt and black tie, stretched out on the kitchen floor with his eyes closed and not moving.

“Dr. Furbo, are you all right?” Pace shouted into the doctor’s right ear.

Furbo did not budge. Pace knelt down and felt the doctor’s left hand. The fingers were cold and slightly stiff. His chest was not rising and falling. Pace stood up and looked at Furbo. He had not noticed until now a deep indentation on the far right side of Furbo’s forehead. Pace used a wall telephone in the kitchen to dial O.

“Hello, operator, could you please connect me to the police? I want to report a death.”

While he waited for the police to arrive, Pace took a look around the livingroom. An open book lay on the coffee table. It was The Confidence Man by Herman Melville. At the top of page 88, underlined in red pencil, was the title of Chapter 17: “Towards the End of Which The Herb-Doctor Proves Himself a Forgiver of Injuries.”