Dabchick

Dabchick is both a bird proposed as the answer to a password riddle and, in a sudden comic shift, a small, anthropomorphic character awaiting death in an armchair. The word comes unbidden to the applicant trying to gain entry; the imagined bird then appears as a weary office superior, only to be interrupted by news that someone has arrived knowing the very password under dispute. The episode makes Dabchick an embodiment of the story’s playful slippage between a word, an animal, and a person.

Identity and Introduction

Dabchick first enters as a candidate answer to a riddle. The clues specify a word beginning with D, eight letters long, connected with water, small enough to fit in a hand, and supposedly inedible. The applicant settles on “Dabchick” despite never having seen one and not knowing how the word came to mind. His certainty is improvised: he turns a single remembered word into a confident description of palm-sized birds that taste so bad even a dog would refuse them.

The person guarding the password challenges the answer. He says that a dabchick can be eaten, though he admits uncertainty about whether it would taste good; the applicant counters that his proposed bird is too small to be worth eating. Asked whether he has ever seen a dabchick, the applicant concedes that he has not. The other man likewise knows nothing about waterbirds, having grown up in central Tokyo, although he can recite the stations of the Yamanote Line in order. Neither speaker can verify the bird’s appearance or taste, so the riddle’s supposed facts accumulate as comic invention rather than knowledge.

From Password to Character

The applicant persists because “dabchick” seems to fit every clue, and asks that he be announced to the superior under that name. The guard gives in, though he doubts that the attempt will help. The applicant thanks him and insists that palm-sized dabchicks exist somewhere, while still being unable to explain how the word surfaced in his mind. His invented certainty supplies the image that the next scene makes literal.

Dabchick is then shown as a palm-sized creature in an armchair, wiping his glasses with a velvet square. He sighs, and his lower right molar throbs. The pain leads him to dread another visit to the dentist; his thoughts gather up taxes, car payments, and a broken-down air conditioner as further reasons the world feels burdensome. The scale of the figure is absurd, but the discomforts are ordinary and specific. The shift gives the riddle’s implausible bird an interior life shaped by familiar adult irritations.

Death and the Interruption

Dabchick has been thinking about death frequently. Reclining against the leather-covered armchair, he closes his eyes and imagines eternal rest, picturing death as silent as the ocean bottom and sweet as a rose in May. The fantasy reaches a small, definitive image: his tombstone bears the inscription “Here lies the palm-sized dabchick.” Death is not introduced as danger or spectacle; it is a private, weary daydream, made comic by the epitaph’s insistence on his diminutive identity.

The reverie is broken when the intercom buzzes. Dabchick shouts at the device, and the doorman reports that a man is there to start work that day and knows the password. Dabchick scowls and checks his watch: the applicant is fifteen minutes late. The announcement confirms that the password has admitted someone, but does not establish that “Dabchick” was the correct password; the dispute remains unresolved even as the waiting figure becomes the person on the receiving end of the call.

Narrative Role and Significance

Dabchick’s brief appearance depends on a deliberate change in scale and status. At first he is a word the applicant grasps at, dressing uncertainty in an elaborate claim about taste and size. Then he is a being with a sore tooth, bills to worry about, a preferred picture of death, and authority enough to receive a new employee. The transition never pauses to explain how an imagined bird becomes a person. Instead, the story treats the leap as part of the joke.

The final interruption also folds the riddle back into the scene: the applicant’s password claim has led him to Dabchick, while Dabchick’s private fantasy of a tombstone is cut short by the ordinary business of someone arriving late for work. His character is drawn from this collision of the fantastic and the mundane. The tiny bird is not granted an elaborate biography, but his vivid mixture of physical pain, impatience, and thoughts of death makes the absurd figure momentarily recognizable as an exhausted officeholder.