An excerpt from “The Wicked Son,” a picaresque novel about skepticism and truth, etc.
Dr. Aster, who is a psychiatrist on Earth and a wanderer with magical powers in the land of Wendle, has volunteered his services to help a congregation of union members, anarchists, and the like stand up to their oppressors, who are capitalists, wizards and other assorted villains. Naturally, they turn on him. After taking a vote, they decide to castrate him on a nearby table. He objects.
“Stop where you are,” he said in a loud voice; but they kept coming. “Stop, I said, before I make a magic spell that’ll wrinkle your spines and crumble you kidneys, that’ll scorch your pancreas and pop out your eyes, that’ll shrink your heads to the size of peas.”
“Ach,” said a voice from the crowd, “a headshrinker.”
The nasty-looking men slowed considerably. One suggestible fellow threw up. Near him a second man hid behind a pregnant woman. A grey silence settled over everyone. The feeling drained out of the gathering. The party spirit was no more. The liquor was gone and the record player was broken. There was nothing left to say or do but look at the ceiling or the floor.
Box up the violin, still its sweet voice
Blow out the candle’s sweet light.
Who will have heart to carouse and rejoice,
When there’ll be no castration tonight?
Take down the bells from the flowered arcade,
Take down the lanterns so bright,
Quiet the singing, the sad serenade,
For there’ll be no castration tonight.
The sorrows of life are so many and more,
The pleasures so slender and slight.
Yet it profits us not to complain and implore
For there’ll be no castration tonight.
But must we stand so, in solemn arraignment,
Is that our unwarranted plight?
We only wanted a small entertainment,
But there’ll be no castration tonight. (c) Fredric Neuman