“I’ll help you.”

Amid sporadic cheers and weak applause, Laszlo climbed over the bass drum and grabbed the microphone.

“Friends!” he lied. “Nah, let me call you colleagues.”

I was too weak to resist.

“Doubtless you have all heard about my Reality Pills, no doubt. Some of you have dropped ’em for yourself already, and even if you haven’t, you seen what they can do, right?”

Once more, “Michael,” I whispered, so to speak.

“Speak.”

“I think it’s too late to worry now.”

“Check.”

The only bright spot of the evening so far was that Laszlo kept making full stops for applause, but no one was applauding. Guessing this might be the only bright spot, I treasured it carefully.

“Now, everybody knows,” Laszlo hinted, “that I’m the only connection for my famous Reality Pills. Nobody can’t score ’em offa nobody else, you dig: just me, Laszlo Scott. An’ everybody knows how I been a Good Guy an’ just give ’em all away, mostly: just layin’ my famous Reality Pills on everyone I see, right? ’Cause that’s the kind of cat I am. I just can’t help it. If ol’ Laszlo’s got it, baby, it’s yours. Just ask me.”

I was growing ill, for any one or more of a number of reasons, take your pick. Two from Column A and one from Column B, but no one was applauding. Pass the mop.

Laszlo fumbled on. “An’ that’s just what I’m gonna do for each and every one of you people here tonight. In fact, dig it, I already done it. There’s been a great big dose of Laszlo Scott’s famous Reality Pill in Liquid Form in everything you people drank tonight. So all you people just go have yourselves a ball, an’ remember good ol’ Laszlo Scott’s the cat who turned you on.

“An’ now I want to close up with a brand-new poem I have wrote for this occasion.”

“Michael!” I was fighting like a netted panther, but Laszlo, the bastard, the inhuman friend et cetera, turned the volume up for his epic and I couldn’t even move my arms.

Laszlo made a great show of searching his pockets for the manuscript (though a rumor, made up by myself, that he could neither read nor write was generally accepted). Finally he gave up.

“Shucks,” he promised. “I must’ve left it home.” Tantalizing pause. “But I think I can remember how it goes.”

I doubted I’d be lucky enough to die.

Laszlo threw his cape back in a silent movie gesture that knocked Gary the Frog and the bass drum to the floor, struck a plaster of Paris pose, and began: “Love Song in a Summer Loft, by Laszlo Allen Scott the Fourth.

All the lights went out. The amplifiers quit. Mike and I fell to the floor in bruised and splinter-ridden heaps. Laszlo became blessedly inaudible.

“There is a God!” I yelled.

“Where are the fuses?” some idiot asked.

“Don’t tell him,” ordered Mike.

Lots of people screamed, but after what we’d just been through, the peace, though merely relative, was wonderful.

“Let’s get out of here,” I suggested.

“Great. How?”

“Crawl.”

“Which direction, pray?”

“Any direction. If we can’t find the door, I’m willing to make do with the windows by now.”

“Seven stories?”

“You’d rather stay here?”

“Lead on.”

I did, keeping my right shoulder against the wall for a guide and crawling staunchly toward what I was almost certain was the door.

“Keep in touch,” I whispered back to Mike.

“Roger.”

“That word again.”

“Right.” He grabbed my left heel and held on.

“Toot! Toot!” I stated in my best steam locomotive accent. This was fun! In fact, the whole party had been fun, come to think of it, but this was clearly the best part. I felt great.

Part of me worried about that. Why should I feel so good? After (“Pardon me, ma’am”) what I’d just been through, at the very least I ought to ache all over. (“Excuse me, sir or madam.”) Instead I was feeling downright euphoric, which wasn’t natural. Something (“Toot-toot, toot-too… Oops! Sorry ’bout that.”) was wrong. (“Toot-toot.”)

Then my prancing fingers found the doorjamb. Aha. Anderson was right again, as usual. When would these fools ever learn not to doubt me?

“This way,” to Mike as I pulled myself erect. He joined me and we slipped quietly out of the loft and into the hall. It was much darker there, but the air was clearer and there was no crowd, so I could find my way around by ear nearly as well as I could’ve with my eyes if the lights had been on, but I stuck close to the wall to keep from worrying Michael.

We found the stairs with no trouble at all and started carefully down. I was feeling better by the second. To think, a few moments earlier I’d been worrying because I felt good. How absurd! Why should anyone worry about feeling good? What sort of old-maid-Protestant thinking was that? Probably thought didn’t deserve feel good, right? Bull. Felt great. Greater. Greatest. Yeah!

In fact, I felt so unprecedentedly good I could almost hear Handel’s Water Music playing behind me, my favorite happy music.

Halfway down I said, “Are you okay, Mike?”

“Of course.” Hmm. He sounded lots more vibrant and virile than usual. Echoes from the stairwell, doubtless. “Why shouldn’t we be okay?”

“Groovy.” We? Really? Poor old Michael. All that noise upstairs must’ve finally unhinged him. I’d seen it coming years ago, but what can you do?

I could still hear the Water Music. It was an amazingly lifelike illusion: the sound seemed to reverberate through the all but deserted old building, and the interpretation, which was brilliant, was completely unknown to me. I realized I’d have to have something done about that tomorrow, but for now it was a gas.

“Chester?” My God! Michael sounded ten feet tall.

“Yeah?”

“Must they play so loudly? We can hardly hear ourself think.”

“They?”

“That orchestra.”

I stopped. Mike bumped into me. He wasn’t ten feet tall.

“You,” I said, “you can hear them, too?”

“I could hardly fail to. They’re probably audible in Brooklyn. Do they have to play so loudly?”

“Hmm. I refuse to believe any of this.”

“Believe what you like, but please ask them to cool it. They’re hurting our head.”

And then the lights came on.

Mike says it was five minutes before I could move again, but he’s probably tinting the facts a bit. I distinctly remember that the gaudily liveried baroque orchestra that filled the stairs behind us played a little less than half a minuet before I screamed.

The music stopped. “Your pleasure, sire?” said the fiddler in the fore, bowing deeply, fiddle straight out at a 45-degree angle behind him and bow held horizontally across his chest in what was clearly a salute, though I’d never seen it done before.

“What,” maintaining my cool, “is all of this in aid of?”

“Doctor Handel’s Water Music, sire. I was given to understand that you were fond…”

“No. I mean you. The orchestra.”

“Ah. Your privy band, sire. Did you not, upon many a time yet fresh in memory, express a fond desire that such as we might…”

“Cancel.”

“Sire?”

“Tilt.”

“Your pardon, sire.”

“Forget it. Please play on, maestro, ma un poco mezzo forte, if you please.”

“Your most humble servant, sire.” He bowed again, then nodded his white-wigged head, and the minuet I’d screamed to pieces began anew, but softer now. We all continued down the stairs.