The Finical Problem, Part Two

Readers of last month's P&D will remember that: (1) the usual co-columnists are on a two-issue hiatus, (2) Dr. Watson agreed to fill in for them, and (3) in the ensuing narrative, Watson, set up in the detective business in the late seventies by his current fellow lodger Robert Thorne, has just had a near encounter with a liquor of unknown origin.

THE FINICAL PROBLEM" (PART TWO)
By John H. Watson, M.D.

Scowling at Thorne, Sim San, the Fu Manchu of midwest Sherlockians, dropped the neck of his shattered bottle to the floor.

"Give it up, Thorne," he sneered. "Watson was obviously a hopeless inebriate when-you dragged him up from the gutters. All it is going to take is one drink to set him back on the path that caused him to write so many mistakes into the Canon. You saw how badly he wanted that bottle."

"Nonsense, Sim," Thorne replied, both voice and gun hand remaining firm. "If anyone was addicted to the bottle, it was Holmes, not Watson. We have only to turn to SIGN, page 40 (Doubleday edition) to find . . ."

"Ah-ha. Once more you bespatter the.good name of Holmes with foul mud in defense of your hero, that prime example of Boobus Britannicus. Sherlock Holmes was a pinnacle, Thorne, a marvel of humanity! While Watson . . . the only reason Scotland Yard never arrested him for the Ripper murders was their own ineptness!"

Sim San was shouting, and Thorne was shouting back, giving me a headache of the most aggravating sort. My seven variously-placed war wounds ached with newfound sensitivity, and bitter memories of my eleven bad marriages arose unsummoned to plague my troubled being. Was I the real Dr. John Harrison Watson, or did I die at Reichenbach? Or is my name John Handkerchief Watson? John Hippocrates Watson? I am a doctor, after all . . . or am I? I' seem to have memories of gambling professionally, and . . . singing opera? Contralto!

MY GOD, I'M A WOMAN!!!

Sim San and Robert Thorne are suddenly gone from the room, and beside me I find a great, fat fellow with the look of Mycroft Holmes about him . . . MY SON!! His name's Nero something, and suddenly he moves to protect me from a bunch of lunatics who burst into the room, waving calendars and shouting for dates.

"I don't have any dates," I manage to shout, suddenly remembering that my list of women from three continents is now useless to me. In my despair, the room begins to spin, and visions of celebrities, monsters, and societies that don't allow women flash across my failing vision.

"Watson! "

A familiar voice intrudes upon my delirium, but for the moment I am too caught up in my own anguish-clubs without women!!! Don't tell me those misogynists at the Diogenes became the model for the future!

"Watson! "

That voice is so . . . my husband's? No, I was a man, wasn't . . .

"Watson!”

When true consciousness returned, I awoke to fine Holmes shaking me loose of my familiar bed in the good old rooms on Baker Street.

"You've surely experienced the Napoleon of Nightmares, my dear Watson," Sherlock Holmes said to me with a cheering smile.

"I've never seen its like," I told him, "not even under the influence of the devil's foot root. I lost all sense of what and who I was, as if all the cells of my brain suddenly had differing opinions as to my true identity. My old war wound multiplied until I felt like a walking pincushion, and then the dream only got worse!"

"So it was the Napoleon of Nightmares," Holmes concluded. "Tell me, did this dream have puns in it?"

"Why ... however did you know?"

"We share a common nightmare, my friend. An unwanted side effect from the strain of our profession, I should think, although I have no idea how those puns get in there. Odious things. Logic, mental discipline, those are the things I've had success in using to combat the nightmares. If that fails, there is always this.”

Holmes produced an all too familiar flask from his back pocket.

I was certainly glad to be myself again.

The End

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, October 1986)