A Good Story and Other Stories

The Burglar and the Whatsit

“Hey, Sanity Clause,” shouted the drunk from up the hall. “Wait up. C’mere.”

The man in the red Santa Claus suit, with the big white beard on his face and the big heavy red sack on his shoulder, did not wait up, and did not come here, but instead continued to plod on down the hall in this high floor of a Manhattan apartment building in the middle of a cold evening in the middle of December.

“Hey, Sanity! Wait up, will ya?”

The man in the Santa Claus suit did not at all want to wait up, but on the other hand he also did not at all want a lot of shouting in this hall here, because in fact he was not your normal Santa Claus but was something else entirely, which was a burglar, named Jack. This Jack was a burglar who had learned some time ago that if he were to enter apartment buildings costumed like the sort of person who in the normal course of events would carry on himself some sort of large bag or box or reticule or sack, he could probably fill that sack or whatever with any number of valuable items without much risk of his being challenged, questioned, or — in the worst case — arrested.

Often, therefore, this Jack would roam the corridors of the cliff dwellers garbed as, for instance, a mailman or other parcel delivery person, or as a supermarket clerk pushing a cart full of grocery bags (paper, because you can see through plastic, and plastic bags don’t stand up). Just once he’d been a doctor, with a stethoscope and a doctor’s black bag, but that time he’d been snagged at once, for everybody knows doctors don’t make house calls. A master of disguise, Jack even occasionally appeared as a Chinese restaurant delivery guy. The bicycle clip around his right ankle, to protect his pants leg from the putative bicycle’s supposed chain, was the masterstroke of that particular impersonation.

But the best was Santa Claus. First of all, the disguise was so complete, with the false stomach and the beard and the hat and the gloves. Also, the Santa sack was more capacious than almost anything else he could carry. And finally, people liked Santa Claus, and it made the situation more humane, somehow, gentler and nicer, to be smiled upon by the people he’d just robbed.

The downside of Santa was that his season was so short. There was only about a three-week period in December when the appearance of a Santa Claus in an apartment building’s public areas would not raise more questions than it would answer. But those three weeks were the peak of the year for Jack, when he could move in warmth and safety and utter anonymity, his sack full of gifts — not for the nearby residents but from them. And all in peace and quiet, because people leave Santa Claus alone, when they see him they know he’s on his way somewhere, to a party or a chimney or something.

So they leave Santa alone. Except for this drunk here, shouting in the hallway. Jack the burglar didn’t need a lot of shouting in the hallway, and he didn’t want a lot of shouting in the hallway, so with some reluctance he turned around at last and waited up, gazing at the approaching drunk from eyes that were the one false in the costume: They definitely did not twinkle.

The drunk reeled closer and stared at the burglar out of his own awful eyes, like blue eggs sunny-side up. “You’re just the guy I need,” he announced, inaccurately, for clearly what he most urgently needed was both a 12-step program and a whole lot of large, humorless people to enforce it.

The burglar waited, and the drunk leaned against the wall to keep the building from falling over. “If anybody can get the goddamn thing to work,” he said, “it’s Sanity Clause. But don’t talk to me about batteries. Batteries not included is not the problem here.”

“Good,” the burglar said, and then expanded on that: “Goodbye.”

“Wait!” the drunk shouted as the burglar turned away.

The burglar turned back. “Don’t shout,” he said.

“Well, don’t keep going away,” the drunk told him. “I got a real problem here.”

The burglar sighed through his thick white beard. One of the reasons he’d taken up this line of work in the first place was that you could do it alone. “All right,” he said, hoping this would be short, at least. “What’s the problem?”

“Come on, I’ll show you.” Risking all, the drunk pushed off from the wall and tottered away down the hall. The burglar followed him, and the drunk touched his palm to an apartment door, which clicked and swung open — that was cute — and they went inside. The door swung shut, and the burglar stopped dead and stared.

Jack the burglar had seen a lot of living rooms in his business, but this one was definitely the strangest. Nothing in it looked right. All the furniture, if that’s what it was, consisted of hard and soft shapes from geometry class, in a variety of pastel colors. Tall narrow things that looked like metal plants might have been lamps. Short wide things that crouched could have been chairs. Some of the stuff didn’t seem to be anything in particular at all.

The drunk tottered through this abstract landscape to an inner doorway, then said, “Be right back,” and disappeared.

The burglar made a circuit of the room, and to his surprise found items of interest. A small pale pyramid turned out to be a clock; into his sack it went. Also, this avocado with ears seemed to be a CD player; pop, in it went.

In a far corner, in amazing contrast to everything else, stood a Christmas tree, fat and richly green and hung with a million ornaments, the only normal object in sight. Or, wait a minute. The burglar stared and frowned, and the Christmas tree shimmered over there as though it were about to be beamed up to the starship Enterprise. What was wrong with that tree?

The drunk returned, aglow with happy pride. Waving at the wavering Christmas tree, he said, “Whaddya think?”

“What is it, that’s what I think.”

“A hologram,” the drunk said. “You can walk all around it, see all the sides, and you never have to water it, and it never drops a needle and you can use it next year. Pretty good, huh?”

“It isn’t traditional,” the burglar said. He had his own sense of the fitness of things.

“Tra-dish-unal!” The drunk almost knocked himself over, he rocketed that word out so hard. “I don’t need tradition, I’m an inventor!” Pointing at a whatsit that was just now following him into the room, he said, “See?”

The burglar saw. This whatsit was a metal box, pebbly gray, about four feet tall and a foot square, scattered all over with dials and switches and antennas, plus a smooth dome on the top and little wheels on the bottom that hummed as the thing came straight across the bare gray floor to stop in front of the burglar and go, “Chick-chick, chillick, chillick.”

The burglar didn’t like this artifact at all. He said. “Well what’s this supposed to be?”

“That’s just it,” the drunk said and collapsed backward onto a trapezoid that just possibly could have been a sofa. “I don’t know what the heck it is.”

“I don’t like it,” the burglar said. The thing buzzed and chicked as though it were a supermarket scanner and Jack the burglar were equipped with a bar code. “It’s making me nervous.”

“It makes me nervous,” the drunk said. “I invented the darn thing, and I don’t know what it’s for. Whyn’t you sit down?”

The burglar looked around. “On what?”

“Oh, anything. You want an eggnog?”

Revolted, the burglar said, “Eggnog? No!” And he sat on a nearby rhomboid, which fortunately was more comfortable than it looked.

“I just thought, you know, the uniform,” the drunk said, and sat up straighter on his trapezoid and began to applaud.

What’s he got to applaud about? But here came another whatsit, this one with skinny metal arms and a head shaped like a tray. The drunk told it, “I’ll have the usual.” To the burglar he said, “And what for you?”

“Nothing,” said the burglar. “Not, uh, on duty.”

“OK. Give him a seltzer with a slice of lime,” he told the tray-headed whatsit, and the thing wheeled about and left as the drunk explained, “I don’t like to see anybody without a glass.”

“So you got a lot of these, uh, things, huh? Invented them all?”

“Used to have a lot more,” the drunk said, getting mad, “but a bunch got stolen. Goddamn it, goddamn it!”

“Oh, yeah?”

“If I could get my hands on those burglars!” The drunk tried to demonstrate a pretend choke in midair, but his fingers got all tangled together, and in trying to untangle them he fell over on his side. Lying there on the trapezoid, one eye visible, he glared at the domed whatsit hovering near the burglar and snarled, “I wish they’d steal that thing.”

The burglar said, “How can you invent it and not know what it is?”

“Easy.” The drunk, with a lot of arm and leg movements, pushed himself back to a seated position as the bartender whatsit came rolling back into the room with two drinks on its head/tray. It zipped past the drunk, who grabbed his glass from it on the fly, then paused in front of the burglar on the rhomboid, who accepted the glass of seltzer and suppressed the urge to say “Thanks.”

Tray-head wheeled around the enigmatic whatsit and left. The drunk frowned at the whatsit and said, “Half the things I invent I don’t remember. I just do them. I do the drawing and fax it to my construction people, and then I go think about other things. And after a while, dingdong, United Parcel, and there it is, according to specifikah — speci — plan.”

“Then how do you find out what anything’s for?

“I leave myself a note in the computer when I invent it. When the package shows up, I check back and the screen says, ‘We now have a perfect vacuum cleaner.’ Or, ‘We now have a perfect pocket calculator.’ ”

“How come you didn’t do that this time?”

“I did!” A growl escaped the drunk’s throat and his face reddened with remembered rage. “Somebody stole the computer!”

“Ah,” said the burglar.

“So, here I am,” the drunk went on, pointing with his free hand at himself and the whatsit and his drink and the Christmas tree and various other things, “here I am, I got this thing — for all I know it’s some sorta boon to mankind, a perfect Christmas present to humanity — and I don’t know what it is!”

“But what do you want from me?” the burglar asked, shifting on his rhomboid. “I don’t know about inventions.”

“You know about things,” the drunk told him. “You know about stuff. Nobody in the world knows stuff like Sanity Clause. Electric pencil sharpeners. Jigsaw puzzles. Stuff.”

“Yeah? And? So?”

“So tell me stuff,” the drunk said. “Any kinda stuff that you can think of, and I’ll tell you if I did one yet, and when it’s something I never did we’ll try out some commands on Junior here and see what happens.”

“I don’t know,” the burglar said, as the whatsit at last wheeled away from him and out into the middle of the room. It stopped, as though poised there. “You mean, just say products to you?”

“S’only thing I can think off,” the drunk explained, “that might help.” Then he sat up even more and gaped at the whatsit. “Looka that!”

The whatsit was extruding more aerials. Little lights ran around its square body. A buzzing sound came from within. The burglar said, “It isn’t gonna explode, is it?”

“I don’t think so,” the drunk said. “It looks like it’s broadcasting. Suppose I invented something to look for intelligence on other planets?”

“Would you want something like that?”

The drunk considered, then shook his head. “No. You’re right, it isn’t that.” Perking up, he said, “But you got the idea, right? Try me, come on, tell me stuff. We gotta get moving here. I gotta figure out what this thing’s supposed to do before it starts doing it all on its own. Come on, come on.”

The burglar thought. He wasn’t actually Santa Claus, of course, but he was certainly familiar with stuff. “A fax machine,” he said, there being three of them at the moment in his sack on the floor beside the rhomboid.

“Did one,” the drunk said. “Recycles newspapers, prints on it.”

“Coffee maker.”

“Part of my breakfast maker.”

“Rock polisher.”

“Don’t want one.”

“Air purifier.”

“I manufacture my own air in here.”

They went on like that, the burglar pausing to think of more things, trying them out, bouncing them off the drunk, but none of them right, while the whatsit entertained itself with its chirruping and buzzing in the middle of the room, until at last the burglar’s mind had become drained of artifacts, of ideas, of things, of stuff. “I’m sorry, pal,” the burglar said, after their final silence. Shaking his head, he got up from the rhomboid, picked up his sack, and said, “I’d like to help. But I gotta get on with my life, you know?”

“I appreciate all you done,” the drunk said, trying but failing to stand. Then, getting mad all over again, he clenched his fists and shouted, “If only they didn’t steal my computer!” He pointed an angry fist toward a keypad beside the front door. “You see that pad? That’s the building’s so-called burglar alarm! Ha! Burglars laugh at it!”

They did. Jack himself had laughed at several of them just tonight. “Hard to find a really good burglar al—” he said, and stopped.

They both stared at the whatsit, still buzzing away at itself like a drum machine with the mute on. “By golly,” breathed the drunk, “you got it.”

The burglar frowned. “It’s a burglar alarm? That thing?”

“It’s the perfect burglar alarm,” the drunk said, and bounced around with new confidence on his trapezoid. “You know what’s wrong with regular burglar alarms?” he demanded.

“They aren’t very good,” the burglar said.

“They trap the innocent,” the drunk told him, “and they’re too stupid to catch the guilty.”

“That’s pretty much true,” the burglar agreed.

“A perfect burglar alarm would sense burglars, know them by a thousand tiny indications, too subtle for you and me, and call the cops before they could pull the job!”

Behind his big white Santa Claus beard, Jack the burglar’s chin felt itchy all of a sudden. The big round fake stomach beneath his red costume was heavier than before. Giving the whatsit a sickly smile, he said, “A machine that can sense burglars? Impossible.”

“No, sir,” said the drunk. “Heavier-than-air flight is impossible. Sensing guilt is a snap, for the right machine.” Contemplating his invention, frowning in thought, the drunk said, “But it was broadcasting. Practicing, do you suppose? Telling me it’s ready to go to work?”

“Me, too,” the burglar said, moving toward the door.

“Go to work. Nice to—”

The doorbell rang. “Huh,” the drunk said. “Who do you suppose that is at this hour?”