Ortho Bob Dulang

Ortho Bob Dulang is a hitchhiking Thanatoid who enters Takeshi Fumimota and DL’s story by eating half of Takeshi’s abandoned order of ribs. His comic, bodily arrival gives a concrete face to the Thanatoid condition, while his request for revenge makes its central tension personal: people suspended between life and death remain bound to injuries they cannot settle through ordinary means.

Identity and Introduction

Takeshi returns to find a stranger occupying his place in a dim booth, surrounded by beer bottles and the sauce-smeared remains of a lavish serving of ribs. The young man is described as shorter than Takeshi, with a runny nose and bright eyes made almost psychedelic by pepper and mustard. He introduces himself as Ortho Bob Dulang, a hitchhiker—and, as it turns out, a Thanatoid. The discrepancy between his slight, disheveled appearance and the extravagant meal makes his entrance deliberately earthy rather than solemn.

DL has apparently invited Ortho Bob to help himself to the ribs. Takeshi reads her affable smile as entirely false, making the meal an instance of her teasing him as well as the stranger’s unexpected introduction. Ortho Bob, however, takes the food seriously: Thanatoids rarely get delicacies like these, he explains, because food is not usually a priority in their world. His gusto is a pointed exception to the subdued existence he describes, and the meal gives the explanation an immediate, comic counterexample.

Explaining the Thanatoid Condition

When Takeshi asks who Thanatoids are, Ortho Bob offers a definition that is suggestive rather than complete: they have a Thanatoid personality, and the word means being like death, but different. The narrative expands the explanation through the wider conditions of Thanatoid life. They live in settlements of their own, in improvised houses or prefabricated dwellings furnished with few appliances, decorations, or personal possessions. The sparse interiors suggest a population that sees little point in arranging a settled, fully inhabited life.

Thanatoids spend part of every waking hour watching television while waiting to gather what they need from the living. Their limited emotional expression is not simply a habit of passivity: the account connects it to the historical and karmic rules governing their condition. They give expression chiefly to feelings that can help them move toward being fully dead, and resentment is the most common obstacle in that process. Their desire for vengeance thus sits at the intersection of emotion and metaphysical delay. Ortho Bob’s arrival turns that general account into a case Takeshi and DL may have to address.

A Claim Against the Living

Ortho Bob recognizes that DL has inflicted the Vibrating Palm on Takeshi. Takeshi begins to withdraw from the subject, but recalls that he himself had recently discussed the technique at length with a fellow traveler. A Thanatoid, the narrative notes, is especially willing—even eager—to listen to such an account. Ortho Bob watches Takeshi and DL with an expectant, hopeful expression, a response that makes his interest in their situation seem less like casual curiosity than an opening to press his own case.

He soon returns, in poor condition after a night whose discomfort is legible in his unsteady arrival. He says that he suffered multiple injuries in Vietnam, yet carefully excludes death from the list of harms he recounts—perhaps from superstition. His grievance is substantial, but ordinary channels offer no relief. He does not want money as compensation; he asks for revenge. When Takeshi advises him to seek money because it would be easier, Ortho Bob supplies about half a dozen names. Takeshi has already investigated them, but the exchange does not establish that any retaliation has taken place. Ortho Bob’s insistence instead defines the unresolved problem he brings to the pair.

Place in the Karmic-Repair Story

Ortho Bob is headed for a Thanatoid village at the confluence of Shade Creek and Seventh River in Vineland County. He offers to arrange lodging if Takeshi and DL drive him there. The offer gives their encounter a practical destination and a possible way forward: the village belongs to the world Ortho Bob has been describing, while the ride would bring the living pair into closer contact with it.

His request also exposes the difficulty facing Takeshi’s karmic-repair work. Takeshi explains that traditional Karmic Correction can take centuries because it proceeds at the pace of birth and death. Modern methods accelerate the process through karmic mortgages, modeled on financial futures, but do so by removing death as the driving force. Against that larger system, Ortho Bob is not merely a comic passenger with a list of enemies. He embodies the backlog that the system is meant to address: accumulated injury, a demand for redress, and a condition in which neither ordinary compensation nor the natural passage toward death has resolved the account. The evidence leaves his case open, but his presence makes that unresolved balance concrete.