Toby is in the hospital. Or fresh out. The other night he was at the Jungle House, drinking a beer at the bar. He politely shifted his attention to the man on his left, who was at that time thundering a baseball bat into both his ulna and his radius. The man was a stranger. The bat was an honest Louisville Slugger. Imagine that-all the way across the ocean, a real Louisville Slugger. The man was also in a gang (the bat was too, by default. Incidentally though, it did not approve of the way things were run). The man’s boss, the gang’s leader, was also at the Jungle House. So was his coked-up girlfriend, who called herself Veronika. So was Jez, the well-oiled South African near the exit on whom coked-up Veronika spilled her pricey mixed drink, thereby causing Jez to call her something that insinuated about her intelligence and loose virtue. “You stupid slut!” he shouted.

As these things go, Veronika told her boyfriend about the foreigner’s insult. The gang lord told his posse left the club for exactly seven minutes and returned with chains, golf clubs, and baseball bats (including the Slugger). They unleashed three-and-a-half minutes of fury on all the foreigners in the joint. Man, woman, young, old. Every white-faced, almond-eyed body in the bar was beaten, broken, and bleeding by the end of the spree. Afterwards, the Jaguars took their leave, using the crunchy glass under their shoes and foul-mouthed mantras as exit music. Ironically, Jez missed the whole thing—he was in the can.

Toby probably had it coming. Back in Cincinnati his bad karma rarely circled back his way. But now we were all in Asia, and for some reason, karma in Asia was like an electric racetrack—someone held down the starting trigger and the little, needled bits stayed in their shiny tracks and circled round and round. It must be something like a radiation zone of an A-Bomb—stronger near the center. So, after collecting bones and bills, the party moved to a nearby hospital. Toby laughed as the doctors molded a cast onto his broken bones. He didn’t even try to pick the dried-blood bits out of his hair. He just laughed like a madman.

Toby liked to think of himself as a performance artist. We called him a scam artist. Just before the bar incident he had bought a ticket for Hong Kong and then follow-up ticket to Athens—he was running away. His act was hypnotism. After duping seven to thirteen suckers to clamber up on stage to be hypnotized, he’d give a real knockout speech about the ‘mind’ that really left some volunteers convinced they would transcend space and time. Some were already convinced it was bullshit. Either way, they were eager. Eager to step on stage, eager to participate. Toby used a hideous pocket-watch the size of a small saucer to seduce curious eyes into pairs of upturned canoes. Before that, though, he’d pass around a velvet bag, imploring those on stage to deposit their most-valuable possession into the sack—-Of course no one resisted. In went rings, gems, wallets, pictures, even locks of hair sometimes. One right after the other.

The watch itself was truly awful—it was bulky and dull brown. It seemed to be made of iron and about a hundred years old. On the cover, there was a menagerie of roughly carved, exotic animals moseying up to a bizarre, topless Turkish woman. She had extremely baggy pants and was holding a tree branch. You could never really tell if the animals were fond of the women or if they were about to devour her. It was quite worn. The peacock was the worst—its one visible eye, which was far too large for its body, stuck out too far from the metal and looked like a grotesque nipple. It intimidated the hell out of the volunteers.

So Toby would relax the people on-stage and coo the audience into quiet submission—most of them were so mesmerized by the strange pocket watch that it didn’t take long. And his hands. Toby really had beautiful hands. For the next trick, after everyone was settled in and quiet, he’d step off stage and slip out the back door with his velvet sack and ridiculous watch; he’d hop on his strategically parked scooter, and drive away.

But that wasn’t his finale. Oh no, Toby always said that the real gem of his work had nothing to do with him—he was merely the facilitator, the Setter Upper of Circumstance, if you will. He left the participants on the stage—hypnotized, of course. As some time went by and the tension in the room grew and the smoky music was no longer enough to sustain the spell, some guy would inevitably realize that not only was he not really hypnotized, but some fucker had made off with his wedding ring. Another woman would further break the spell, shrieking as she came to terms with the fact that her hand-carved jade pendant was gone forever. One by one the audience members realized they’d been had. The music stopped, but there was a problem. If they moved, they acknowledged what the skeptics knew the whole time: the hypnotism act was bullshit. If they moved, they were all suckers. To get off stage was to admit defeat, admit mortality, to show weakness to the hungry audience—this defeat was the real, pathetic act, so Toby claimed. “There’s nothing humans hate more than looking vulnerable,” he said. But it really was bullshit.

“If a Materialist is parted with her most valuable possession,” Toby would say to no one in particular, swirling around white wine in his curved glass, “then she will have no choice but to face her dependency, thereby living in a world bereft of slavery.” Long pull on his Chardonnay. Always Chardonnay. “Plus,” he would add after a drink, “that moment’s a helluva funny thing to watch.” A true performance artist would have deposited the bag’s contents into the ocean, bellowing, “Back from whence you came!” as the trinkets slumped into the lightless deep. A Robin Hood would have sold the goods and given the money to orphans or to the terminally old. And a real asshole would have just kept the booty for himself. Toby was a real asshole. A common thief who had popped around for years, living comfortably off of the depression of other people. Of course, he would’ve called it the ‘emancipation’ of other people—it’s true.

And that is why Toby laughed while the doctors in the crowded hospital wrapped that cold, slimy gloop from his wrist to his elbow. And that is why, even though he wasn’t the one to allude to Veronika the Coke Head’s lose morality and cause a ruckus in the pub, a charming baseball bat to his forearm would from that day forward render the nerves in his watch-swinging hand utterly useless. The teacup claw that remained of his once beautiful fingers could never again hypnotize even the most willing participant. He had to laugh—even he was cured.