This was written by a man named Thomas "Wanderer" Wilde, who decided to fuck with the mind of his Creative Writing teacher, who, as Wilde put it: "does not appear to actually enjoy "creative" writing."
Or to elaborate:
And so, without further ado:Thoma Wilde wrote:She fangirls out when you give her a story about a college girl attempting to pay her bills as a stripper, or a stupid teenager's last thoughts as he lies dying, but if you make the mistake of including anything more flamboyant than something that could've happened to you last week, she labels it "genre fiction" and lambasts it, even if she can't come up with a criticism that isn't obviously invalid. (A guy I know in the class turned in a story about a man confronting his grandfather, who molested him, on his grandfather's deathbed. She made up all this crap about how "no one talks like that" and requested that my buddy explore the main character's sexuality--this last, in a story that has virtually nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with helplessness and anger.)
That link, naturally, isn't real.Wanderer wrote:Working Life
"This isn't a story.
"It's not about anything.
"Read it if you like."
-- Grant Morrison, "And We're All Policemen"
Monday, June 3rd, 2002:
"...and so, Mr. Ramsey, what brings you to us?" the man in the suit says. The nameplate on his desk says he's "MR. TARPHIEL." The man says to call him Jack.
"My rent, mostly," Keith says, cracking a cockeyed grin. It's not funny, he knows that and this guy knows that, but he grins anyway. Keith's playing the interview game. "I'm pretty near broke, so unless I get a job quickly, I'm out on the street come the first of July."
"Yes, but we are typically something of a last resort," Tarphiel says. "You must have gleaned that from the ad."
UNEMPLOYABLE? ANTISOCIAL? BLACKLISTED?
You're in luck!
At Bellweather and Crowe, we specialize
in finding the permanently jobless
fulfilling, uplifting jobs, whether part-time,
full-time, or with an eye towards their
eventual careers!
phone 630-555-1234
fax 630-555-4321
J.Jenks Office Building, suite 5
Hinsdale, IL 60521
www.bellweather-crowe.com
"Well, yes," Keith admits, "I did, but I have a... hard time keeping jobs."
"So you mentioned in this questionnaire," Tarphiel says, and taps a piece of paper on his desk. "What do you believe is keeping you from holding onto gainful employment?"
Keith thinks about it for a few moments, and finally says, "Well, I'm not very good at thinking before I speak, and I have poor impulse control--"
"Hello," Keith said, a week before, "welcome to McDonald's! Meat is murder. Can I take your order, please?"
"Um... a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?"
"Oh, it's not really cheese. Also, were you aware of the sheer variety of chemicals and antibiotics pumped into American beef cattle? I could provide you with a short list if you like." Keith holds up a printout from McSpotlight.com and points to a highlighted section with a pen.
"I'd ask if you want fries with this," Keith called after the customer, who by now was hightailing it out the door, "but you don't want to hear about those."
"--and I don't really like being told what to do, or having my intelligence insulted--"
"So basically," the manager of the grocery store said, "we want you to be a team player. We're all a big happy family here, so if someone needs a hand, we're going to want you to pitch in. Working at Kramer's means being willing to go outside your box from time to time."
"I've been talking to other employees of this store, and they said that what you mean by that," Keith said, "is that I'm to do what I was hired to do, plus whatever else a passing manager feels I need to be doing, plus a couple of other people's jobs, without a word of complaint. Essentially, you want me to do six people's jobs for minimum wage, so I'll either always be in a hurry or I'll always be a couple of hours late getting out of here, and you want me to smile while I do it."
"...I'm afraid I don't follow," the manager says.
"I didn't figure you would," Keith says, and leaves the store.
"--and I tend to scare co-workers."
"You know," Keith said once, while he was flipping burgers in a bar and grill, "I could blow this entire place up using only a bucket of water, that microwave, and this can of spray starch."
He assumed the dead silence behind him was because his co-workers were listening intently.
"I mean, really," he said, and used the spatula to point at the gas grill's pilot light. "If you put that out, with the bucket of water, this place would start filling up with gas. Then, you put the spray can in the microwave, set it for a few minutes, and run like hell. By the time the microwave explodes, there'll be enough gas in the air that the explosion'll ignite it, which in turn would catch the gas main under the floor, so this place'd go up like a..."
His supervisor unsteadily cleared his throat.
"...I'm fired, aren't I?"
His supervisor nodded.
Tarphiel takes this in without changing his facial expression. He's leaning back in the chair with his hands steepled. He's also wearing dark glasses indoors, so he mustn't be able to see a damn thing, but it also means that Keith can't see his eyes.
"How," Tarphiel asks, "do you manage to get new jobs, if you depart the old ones so... memorably?"
"I find that the key is forging your references," Keith says.
"I see."
"But the point is, as you said, I need a job, and I saw your ad."
"Yes. Hmm," Tarphiel says, carefully enunciating the "hmm," and shuffles some paper. "What, Mr. Ramsey, do you look for in a job?"
Keith has to think about this one. "Well, good pay, naturally. That's key. But also, I'd like to be able to use my brain, as opposed to doing the same thing over and over. Creativity's nice, developing new skills is nice... and variety, too. If I could find a job that'd basically be different things every day, it'd be choice."
"Excellent."
"...huh?"
"I believe, Mr. Ramsey," the man says, and stands up, "that we may have something for you. Can you come back tomorrow? Around eight AM?"
"Yeah! ...yeah, I believe that can be arranged. Sure."
They shake on it, and Keith goes happily on his way.
Tuesday, June 4th, 2002:
Keith walks into the employment office at 8:01 am, chewing caffeinated Japanese gum and thinking strange, preverbal early-morning thoughts.
No one's there, but there's a manila folder on the desk where Tarphiel was sitting yesterday, with his name on it. Inside the folder, Keith finds a frequent-flyer airline card; an airline ticket to Rochester, New Jersey; a Yahoo! Groups road map; a voucher for a Hertz rental with full insurance coverage; and a note, written in elegant calligraphic longhand.
Mr. Ramsey,
The details of your job are as follows.
Come to work every morning at eight o'clock. Whether I'm there or not, there will be instructions for you on my desk, along with whatever tools or papers you might need to accomplish the day's tasks. Your starting pay is ten dollars an hour, and you may go home whenever your current job is done.
Oh, and there's no dental. Sorry.
Sincerely,
J. Tarphiel
Four hours later, Keith gets to the destination from the Yahoo! map, an elementary school, right as the school is letting the kids out for lunch. From behind the wheel of his rented Toyota Celica, he takes a good look around, but all he sees is a flood tide of preteens. His dad used to call children this young "minikids."
He's starting to think that he's come a couple of hundred miles for no reason when he catches sight of a car down the street, behind him. The car's swerving around unsteadily, and going way too fast. Even if the driver looked at all like he was going to heed the STOP sign the crossing guard has up, he won't be able to stop in time unless he has the best brakes ever, and as he's driving a late-eighties Oldsmobile, that seems unlikely.
Keith's an imaginative guy. He has a sudden vivid image of this guy plowing into the neat crowd of children standing at the curb, which, courtesy of his inner Wes Craven, is in gut-spilling Technicolor, and does the only thing he can think of. His car's running. Keith shifts it into neutral, guns it, wrenches the wheel to the side, and shifts into drive. The result is a headsplitting screech, the smell of burning rubber, and a neat donut-and-a-half. The back end of Keith's car slams into the oncoming driver with a sound that's more felt than heard, a grinding metal shriek that Keith experiences as a coppery vibration in his back teeth. Tnext thing Keith's aware of is a paramedic shining a light into his left eye, the irritation-pain of a loose filling, and a cop telling him about the "brave, brave, stupid thing" he's done.
"No dental," Keith says aloud. "Fuck."
"What?" the paramedic says.
"Never mind."
Wednesday, June 5th, 2002:
Keith, looking dapper in a priest's collar and vestments, presides over the weddings of thirty-three same-gender couples on the steps of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. Under ordinary circumstances, Fred Phelps, the preacher of said church, would object strenuously, possibly with a loaded shotgun. That's why Keith tasered him unconscious and locked him in the linen closet.
On the way out the door, at the end of the day, Keith hops onto the www.godhatesfags.com webserver and changes the index.html page so it's now a mirror to the lesbian, gay, and bisexual erotica archives at nifty.org.
Hi-ho.
Thursday, June 6th, 2002:
Keith, who still has a job, somehow, pays a visit to a short little white dude living in a one-room walkup in San Francisco, in the Haight. Keith knocks on the guy's door, lets himself in, sits down on the couch, and explains exactly what will happen to the guy if he finishes the song he's working on, right then. Keith knows this, because it was in the envelope that morning. The guy looks up from his writing tablet, a gray-newsprint child-ruled pad that's meant for kindergarteners, and listens.
The song will become a runaway smash, Keith says, and will lead to a single blissful moment in late 2003 where this guy, whose name is Francisco Dellamora but who goes by Frank Dennings, will be visiting an old buddy at the University of Chicago. He'll walk by one of the dorms and hear this song, his song, playing from a couple of dozen open windows at once, a rhythmic cacaphony, a sonic contradiction, composed of Frank's voice and Frank's guitar. It's the kind of thing that every musician lives for.
On the other hand, Keith explains, the song will lead to levels of fame and fortune that, when attained that quickly, invariably destroy those who possess them. The song will lead to Frank dying penniless in an apartment in Amsterdam, a junkie who used to be somebody, in June of 2007.
If he doesn't finish the song, then Frank will meet a pretty girl in two weeks when he's forced to move back to his hometown, and will lead an uneventful life there with her, teaching music at the elementary school, raising three children, and dying in his sleep at the age of eighty-five.
Keith finishes this story, and the beer Frank gave him, and says, "Think about it." He gets up and lets himself out.
As he closes the door to Frank's squalid little apartment, Keith thinks he hears the sound of tearing paper. But he's not sure.
Friday, June 7th, 2002:
Janey's thirteen years old, and her mother's dead.
Her father remarried three months ago, two months after the funeral, to a woman fifteen years younger who wanted to be Janey's best friend. When Janey made it very clear that she was not this woman's friend, Janey wound up here: St. Benedict's School For Girls, outside Hartford.
Here is where the daughters of the idle rich go so they are not underfoot. They wear blue blazers, plaid skirts, and knee socks, and are taught upstanding Christian values. There's a certain duality of information at St. Benedict's, that isn't lost on most of its students; the only people around who actually espouse all of the Christian values that St. Benedict's teaches is a nun with a face like a battle axe and an utter lack of anything that bears a remote resemblance to something that might be considered a distant relative of what could be mistaken for a sense of humor. This is undesirable. Most students seek to rebel.
At St. Benedict's, Janey is the Poor Girl, the one without the cell 'phone and the boyfriend and the furtively smoked French cigarettes and the stories of her summer spent somewhere a thousand miles to the south with obsequious South Americans who serve drinks that sort of taste like shampoo. She is the Poor Girl, and the only friends she can find are so desperate for someone, anyone, to talk to (the Fat Girl, the Smart Girl, the Girl From A Currently Untrendy Minority, et al, ad infinitum) that they drive Janey out of the room with the force of their desperation.
All of this is in Keith's note. At St. Benedict's, Keith's technically supposed to be a part-time gardener, but St. Benedict's has people for that already. He's on his own, and no one says anything to him, so he does more or less whatever he feels like, which usually amounts to playing in the dirt. It's like being two years old again, but this time, he's allowed to touch the weedwhacker.
He's been there for a couple of hours when a quiet voice behind him says, "Excuse me?"
Keith turns around and sees Janey.
"I don't suppose I could--I mean, I--well, what I'm saying is--"
Keith lets her finish.
"--I used to have a garden, and I really liked to work in it, and I don't have it anymore, so I was wondering if I could help out?"
Keith smiles, shrugs, and hands her a pair of gloves.
Monday, June 10th, 2002:
For reasons that will remain unclear until the day he dies, Keith is told to stand on a corner at 51st and Broadway in New York City, wearing a penguin suit that completely hides his face. Periodically, he breaks into a dance that, restrained by roughly fifty pounds of foam and padding, looks less like the madcap frenzy he's going for and more like a sort of funky waddle. As he gets down with his bad self, passersby throw loose change into the open bill of the penguin suit.
The change, at the end of the day, adds up to about seventeen bucks. Keith spends most of it on dinner at a deli in Brooklyn, pastrami on light rye with mustard with a big bowl of matzoh ball soup, and the rest goes into a Space Invaders cabinet in the back room of a bodega in Spanish Harlem. This has nothing to do with his job. Space Invaders is simply cool.
Tuesday, June 11th, 2002:
Tarphiel's actually there this morning, sipping strong coffee from a really small cup and looking out his office window.
"You still work here," Keith says. "I'd wondered."
"I have a lot of job security," Tarphiel says. "You've been doing good work so far."
"I was sure you'd fire me," Keith says. "I wrecked a car."
"You stopped a drunk driver," Tarphiel says, and sips the coffee. "Wrecked car or not, I'd have to be a complete bastard to fire you over that. I'm not."
"That's a relief," Keith says, and sits down. "Hey, there's no envelope."
"No, actually, I just wanted to talk to you. When we're done, you can go home if you like." Tarphiel sits down in his chair and refills the cup from a thermos. "We've been tracking your work, and so far, you've done well for yourself. We were wondering if you'd be interested in a raise, in exchange for a little bit more variety in your work."
"I can handle a raise, I think," Keith says, "and variety's good. What I'm curious about is the point of all this."
"Oh?" Tarphiel says, over the rim of his cup.
"Yeah. I mean, the variety's great. Top notch. It's just... there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to any of this. The guy in San Francisco one day, then the prom, and then Janey... there's no overlying theme here, man. I don't see what I'm accomplishing, aside from the obvious."
"You're worried about what point all of this has?"
"Yeah."
"I'll tell you what," Tarphiel says. "We'll give you the raise, and mix up the job a little more. If you're still here at the end of the month, Mr. Ramsey, we'll talk more about 'points.' Do we have a deal?"
"Sure," Keith says. "Deal."
Wednesday, June 12th--Friday, June 14th, 2002:
On Thursday afternoon, Keith starts a food fight in the cafeteria of the Capitol Building, which has nothing whatsoever to do with why he was there, but it was fun. Keith reasons that, if a man is presented with an opportunity to throw an entire coconut-cream pie at Strom Thurmond, then that man is obligated to seize that opportunity.
Then, Friday morning, he picks up a six-pound artifact of the Tang Dynasty called the Jade Wombat at a small curio shop. Ninjas--real ninjas! for a second, Keith doesn't know whether to run for his life or be a total fanboy--proceed to chase him around the city for an hour and a half.
For most of these five days, though, he's at St. Benedict's. The biggest problem Keith faces here is that he's not actually a professional landscaper. He spends most of his time on the campus covering things with dirt, digging holes, watering flowers that he's pretty sure don't need water, and trimming an art-deco hedge to look like Birgitte Bardot. He's accompanied for much of this by Janey, and if Janey knows that he doesn't know what he's doing, she remains silent on the topic. She's probably too distracted by her own deal, what with the social ostracization and all, but Keith prefers to think of it as her chalking it up to his loveable eccentricity.
They talk a lot, though. Keith talks about music he likes--Cream, Led Zeppelin, the Yardbirds, Morphine, Sonic Youth, Tool, Coil--and why Janey should listen to it as opposed to boy bands. Janey defends said bands as best she can, until Keith notes that she seems to listen to them because they are cute, which she has no response to. Janey's conversation is more notable by how often she begins talking about something, like her favorite movie (Pretty in Pink), but then stops in midsentence and changes the subject. Usually, it's because she mentions her mother.
"I think your rabbit is really beginning to take shape," Janey says, on Friday afternoon.
"Rabbit?" Keith says. "It's Birgitte Bardot." He points at the hedge for emphasis.
"Who?"
"She was kind of like the beta version of Marilyn Monroe."
"Who?"
"What?" Keith tosses his shears at the dirt, where they stick blade-first. "You don't know who Marilyn Monroe is."
"No, I'm sorry. I don't."
"That's it. We're going to a video store. I'm gonna finish my sculpture, and we're gonna go to a video store, and I'm teaching you who Monroe was, and the Marx Brothers, and Bogart, and Cary Grant. And Hitchcock! You need to see Hitchcock! You must be educated!"
"Aw, come on. I don't wanna watch a bunch of old movies..."
"They're your cultural legacy. If you keep whining, I'll quiz you on Monday."
"No, really. I used to watch old movies with--" And Janey shuts up.
Keith realizes he's lecturing, and decides to stop. "Janey?" She doesn't respond. Keith goes down on the balls of his feet, so he's looking her in the eyes. "Janey, I've noticed."
"You noticed what?"
"Every time we talk about anything older than last week, you manage to think of your mom somehow and you shut up." Keith sits down, and asks a question he knows the answer to. "What happened to her?"
"She died," Janey says. "Cancer. About five and a half months ago."
"You were really close."
"Yeah," Janey says, and she's on the verge of tears.
"I used to be like that with my dad," Keith said. "See, my dad took about every film elective they had in college, and he kinda tried to pass that on to me. So, you know... Hitchcock."
"What happened to him?"
"Heart attack," Keith says. It's the truth. "He always drank too much, and he smoked a pack a day, minimum, every day I knew him. We used to fight about that a lot, until I told him that I wouldn't talk to him again until he'd been through rehab. He made the appointment, and he had the first meeting of an AA group circled in his day planner, but he died at his house. The doctors said it would've been instant; he would've felt like he'd been punched in the chest, and then--" Keith snaps his fingers.
"My mom..." Janey visibly thinks about it for a minute. "She got sick, then she got better, then she got really sick, then a little better. Then she died."
"You watered that down so I'd understand that, didn't you?"
"Yeah." Janey doesn't smile. "...how long did you miss your dad for?"
"It's weird," Keith says. Neither of them are looking at each other, but instead, out across the campus grounds. "I didn't, really. Not for a long time. It was more like he was an old teacher who'd retired, or someone who'd given me a lot of gifts. I thought about him every day, but I didn't miss him. Then, you know what happened?"
"No." She always says that.
"It was about a year later, I think. I had this weird dream, that I was at my mom's house, and my dad was supposed to get there at any minute to pick me up, and I was rushing around the house trying to get everything done before he got there and I left. But then, in the dream, I stopped for a second, and stopped whatever it was I was doing, and thought to myself, 'Hey, wait. Dad's dead.' And I woke up, and I realized that I did miss him. He probably caused me more grief than anyone I've ever known, but I missed the hell out of him."
Janey doesn't answer, and Keith has to look at her to know she's crying. He doesn't touch her, although he wants to; a crying thirteen-year-old girl screams hug me with a voice like thunder.
"I guess the trick," Keith says finally, quietly, "is getting up the nerve to finally say goodbye."
He feels as though he's suddenly become an intruder. He leaves Janey underneath the hedge, which really does look more like a rabbit than a woman, and walks away.
Monday, June 17th, 2002:
"Okay! All of you! Stop that right now!" Keith yells, kicking a brown-robed cultist down the stairs.
All of the people in the room below him actually do stop. The head cultist pauses with his knife held over his head double-handed; the naked virgin bound to the altar stops screaming; the cultists around her stop chanting; whatever the hell is at the bottom of the large dark circular pit in the center of the room stops gnashing its no-doubt-massive-and-sharp-and-pointy teeth.
"I just had to do something really depressing on Friday, and it fucked up the whole weekend! I am really looking for the chance to do something horrible to all of you!" Keith points an air-cooled .45-caliber belt-fed machine gun (its name is Bethany) at the head cultist, who drops the knife and wets himself. "Now untie the naked chick and go up those stairs!"
The cultists' dark ritual is being held in a room deep below a large, Victorian-style mansion outside Providence, Rhode Island. The mansion, thankfully, provides ample room for all of them to sit down and write "I will not summon Things From Beyond" five hundred times. It's amazing what one can get a man to do, even a man who happens to be a crazed evil cultist, when one points a big gun at his head.
Tuesday, June 18th, 2002:
Aside from the bit with the dinosaur rodeo, it's a fairly uneventful day.
Wednesday, June 19th, 2002:
Keith is responsible for the transmission of a special signal across the global telecommunications network. This signal is instantly downloaded into every PDA and cellular 'phone in the hemisphere, and causes these devices, when turned on in a movie theater while the film's showing, to explode in a manner not unlike that of a fragmentation grenade. Hi-ho.
Thursday, June 20th, 2002:
"Out of pure curiosity," Keith asks Tarphiel, "is all this goofy crap I've been doing some kind of direct, opposite reaction to that talk I had with Janey last week?"
Tarphiel simply smiles, and hands Keith his envelope.
In Nobody, Arizona, a drunken man wearing overalls, and nothing else, is suddenly beamed up onto the starship of the malevolent alien race that are known to conspiracy theorists as Grays. These creatures, small portly creatures which quite resemble the bug-eyed shovel-headed aliens of popular culture, prepared to insert an anal probe into the drunk's exposed rectum.
Suddenly, their teleportation system activated without their consent, and Keith appeared aboard their starship, armed with an air taser in each hand.
The Grays, all six of them, woke up in a sleazy hotel in Las Vegas, three days later, dressed in studded-leather "gimp suits" and handcuffed to the bed.
Friday, June 21st, 2002:
At the opening ceremonies of an anime convention in Houston, Texas, Keith is in attendance, dressed like Himura Kenshin, the eponymous protagonist of the popular anime series "Ruroni Kenshin." This entitles him to carry a long wooden sword. While at the convention, Keith applies this sword liberally to the heads of any Caucasian he catches dropping cutesy little Japanese words (i.e. "kawaii" or "gomen"), into English sentences. He throws out his shoulder two hours in, and has to go home early.
Monday, June 24th--Tuesday, June 25th, 2002:
On Tarphiel's desk, Keith finds two wicker baskets and a ticket to the 10:30 Concorde flight to Kuala Lumpur. In one basket, there's a wriggling mass of gray-and-white kittens, who attempt to play with anything that enters their field of vision; in the other, six neat stacks of warm buttered toast and a spool of twine.
During his time in Malaysia, Keith takes in some local culture, but he spends most of it sitting atop the Petromas Towers, the tallest buildings in the world. He ties the toast to the kittens, buttered side up, and throws them, one by one, off the roof.
The kittens, invariably, simply refuse to fall.
The Flying Kittens of Kuala Lumpur become something of a popular tourist attraction, and go on to be responsible for more physicists' migraines than any other group or object in explored reality. In related news, the pigeon population in the city drops markedly.
Wednesday, June 26th, 2002:
Courtesy of the tachyon accumulator in Bellweather and Crowe's basement, Keith finds himself in the middle of the Library of Alexandria, in the fourth century AD, right as it's being put to the torch.
It'd be difficult enough to do what he's there to do, gather an armload of scrolls and get back to his arrival point for transport back to 2002, because he's in a big stone building that's collapsing; it can't be burned, naturally, but the massive wooden support beams that hold up parts of the ceiling and the two hundred thousand rolls of parchment stacked around him can, so there's some distress.
This is complicated by the presence of what would appear to be a gang of half a dozen black-coated Germans with swastika armbands. Keith rounds the corner to the bookshelf he needs, thumbing frantically through his Ancient-Phoenician-to-English pocket dictionary, and sees them, going through his shelf.
"Nazis," Keith says.
One of them sees him and raises a Luger.
"I hate Nazis!" Keith says, and dives for cover.
They chase each other throughout most of the Library, which conveniently manages to stay standing for just long enough. The bag of scrolls changes hands three separate times, and Keith wrests an STG44 submachinegun from one of the Nazis and exchanges gunfire with 'em, and there's a weird couple of minutes where Keith and the head Nazi have to stop fistfighting long enough to save each other's asses about six separate times, and after all of the running and shooting and shouting and the collapse of part of the Library courtesy of a badly aimed Steil grenade, Keith gets away with the scrolls.
Thursday, June 27th, 2002:
Using an archeologist's brush, a dentist's drill, and an expensive brand of near-invisible epoxy, Keith carefully drills open a three-hundred-million-year-old coal seam in the side of Mount Kilimanjaro, places the scrolls from Alexandria inside, and seals the seam up again, creating an archeological mystery that'll confuse people for the next thousand years. Then he knocks off for lunch.
Friday, June 28th, 2002:
After he puts on a special helmet that was sitting on Tarphiel's desk, Keith discovers he's capable of moving objects by simply thinking about it. In Los Angeles that day, according to the newspaper, James Randi, noted celebrity debunker, is giving a public speech.
Keith puts two and two together and grins somewhat evilly.
"--and so," James Randi says, concluding his speech, "I have been forced to conclude that 'psychic forces' are nothing more than remnants of a more superstitious age. They are doomed to be filed away with the beasts and boogeymen, as outdated relics of a less rational time--"
James Randi rises into the air for no visible reason. He's then turned upside down, shaken until all the change falls out of his pockets, and tossed into a decorative fountain across the street.
Keith stows the helmet in a duffel bag, puts the bag over his shoulder, and goes to eat. He manages to keep from laughing until he's in the middle of dessert.
Monday, July 1st, 2002:
At the end of his workday, Keith pokes his head into Bellweather and Crowe's offices, and sees Tarphiel at his desk. Tarphiel looks up from some paperwork long enough to wave Keith into the office. "Any problems, Mr. Ramsey?"
"That depends. You know all that stuff about a werewolf bite being infectious?"
"Yes."
"Are they really?"
"No."
"Then I'm good."
"Glad to hear it." Tarphiel dots a last "i" and puts the paperwork away. "I see you're still an employee."
"Yeah. This kind of thing sort of grows on you. I would've appreciated some warning about the Nazis, though."
"We had no idea about them, to be honest," Tarphiel says. "You still acquitted yourself admirably."
"Yeah. I kicked ass, too." Keith sits down, mindful of his bandaged leg. "Remember that conversation we had?"
"About what the 'point' of your various tasks is."
"That one, yeah." Keith waits expectantly.
Tarphiel sighs. "How do you think of life, Mr. Ramsey?"
"I don't follow."
"Do you think of it as a generally orderly process, in which all unfolds as it possibly should? Or is it a chaotic, disorganized sprawl where any sort of reason or sense must be imposed upon it from without?"
"The former, I think," Keith says, after some thought.
"Most people would say that," Tarphiel says, and walks to the window of his office. "The truth, naturally, is somewhere between the two... but too much confusion leads to problems, and too much organization leads to boredom. Things are a lot stranger out there than people are willing to admit or believe, but there's a lot less random chance, too. Not everything happens for a reason; just enough of it does to keep people off-balance."
"So where do I fit in?" Keith asks.
"You have to screw with people's heads every so often, Mr. Ramsey," Tarphiel says. "That's it. That's all."
"Oh."
"See you tomorrow morning."
"Yeah."
I sent this to Spacebattles some time ago, but when I found it again, I thought that maybe some of you might get a kick out of it.
