Essays

Marie, one of my wife’s cousins, and Marie’s husband, Rod, sent me a birthday gift that all of us here in Koontzland found amusing—a Bobblehead doll in my likeness and a Bobblehead dog, Elsa, gazing up at Bobbledean with the adoration that, of course, the real Elsa regards me. I put it on my desk, and all went well for a few days, but I must admit that for a while I came to regard Bobbledean with uneasiness.

I’m sure it meant nothing, but on more than one occasion, when I saw movement from the corner of my eye, I discovered Bobbledean nodding his head at me even though no one had given him a shake to get him going, even though there was no draft or source of vibration to have set his head in motion.

I’m sure there was no reason to be disturbed by Bobbledean’s perpetual smile. He looks pretty much like me, so his smile is very similar to the smile I’ve seen so often when I stand in front of a mirror for a few hours to admire my face. He even has dimples, as I do. So cute! Sometimes, however, his smile seemed more like a grin, a fixed grin with a spooky quality, as if some appealing thought had occurred to him, some plan of action that excited him.

It shouldn’t have bothered me that Bobbledean stared at me, unblinking, throughout the day. After all, he has no working eyelids. And he has nothing else to do but stand there, watching me as I write, watching me eat a cookie, wondering what the cookie tastes like, perhaps envying me. If I were in his shoes—which are far too small to fit me, but let’s just for a moment imagine that some curse was cast on me to shrink me down to Bobbledean’s size—I am sure that in time I would go quite mad and would yearn to be able to seek vengeance on the lookalike, that bastard, for whose amusement I was fashioned.

I am sure it meant nothing, but last night I dreamed that hundreds of Bobblehead dolls had surrounded our house, drawn there by whatever Presence inhabited Bobbledean. In their tiny voices, they were shouting, “Kill him, kill him, kill him.” In the dream I went into my office to demand that Bobbledean send his minions back to their homes. But Bobbledean was gone, as was the stiletto I used as a letter opener. Only Bobblehead Elsa was there; she said to me, “Nevermore.”

When I woke abruptly, the real Elsa was at a window in our dark bedroom, growling at the moonlit night beyond. I switched on the outside lights, but of course there were not hundreds of Bobbleheads out there. For a moment, I thought I glimpsed an immense figure shambling away through the misty, murky distance, a figure twenty feet tall with a head the size of a car, as if it were the demonic god of Bobbleheads. I laugh now as I recall how absurd it was of me to let a nightmare so disconcert me that even for a few seconds I could, after coming fully awake, imagine that a mere phantom of moon shadows and fog was a giant, evil Bobblehead.

When I went to my home office after breakfast, Bobbledean was where he should have been, and Bobblehead Elsa was there, too, but my stiletto letter opener was missing just as it had been in the dream. If I were a superstitious man, which I am not, I might have been alarmed or at least disconcerted. In but a few minutes, of course, the stiletto turned up. It was in the spare bedroom, the full length of the blade buried in the mattress, only the handle visible. It appeared as if the mattress had been stabbed half a dozen times, but that was the only damage.

Regarding this entire episode, the only questions that remain are the following. How did the stiletto get to the spare bedroom? Did one employee or another take it upon himself or herself to open my mail? Was there one package particularly difficult to open, so that the knife slipped and gouged the mattress repeatedly? If that was the case, where was the mail that was opened? We live in a time of unreason, when many people would embrace absurd and fearful theories in answer to those questions, but I am not of their ilk. As a man of reason, I know the answers will prove to be mundane and will come to me in time if I am patient.

Meanwhile, my spell of foolish uneasiness regarding Bobbledean has dissipated. I no longer find anything disturbing about his fixed smile or his lidless eyes. Indeed, he now seems to be a little icon of happiness who knows his purpose and is content with it. We nod at each other now and then, both of us smiling, our dimples as cute as anything. Funny how we sometimes allow our imagination to run away with us.

I am at work on a new novel, but while I’m thus engaged, you can indulge in a scary-comic work of mine, Going Home in the Dark (available in hardcover, eBook, and audio), about which one kind reviewer who liked it very much declared that I “didn’t just break the fourth wall, but drove a bulldozer through it.”