whatsit

“Over here, and around the fountain. And sprinkled in and around these other plants on the right. And in a large clump over there, near that shrubby thing, the whatsit. Lilac. Oh! And look what else is here in the garden, come springtime....”

The head-shaped whatsit floated on the surface of a large puddle of uncertain depth, which no doubt had been left by the strong rains of the previous night.

Now, the Entity intends to annihilate humanity in four days unless it can be taken offline by a key that accesses a gizmo in the Arctic Sea that connects to a whatsit that Ving Rhames’s weary Luther is attempting to invent from a makeshift hospital bed somewhere in the subway tunnels of London.

If you’ve seen his fleet, clever 2019 whatsit “Chained for Life,” about the vanities troubling a low-budget mad-scientist movie shoot starring a cast of disabled actors, you know how attuned Schimberg can be to everyday snubs and microaggressions.

“Demolishing the puny vocalizations of ‘folk’ trios like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Whatsit, Koerner and company showed how it should be done,” David Bowie wrote in a 2003 article in Vanity Fair in which he included “Blues, Rags & Hollers” on a list of his 25 favorite albums.