Chapter 1: As Karma Would Have It --What this universe needs is a trap door! Stepping up his pace, Olney Garkle gives a real-time forearm jerk to his inner yes-man. As the phantom sycophant scampers to a corner of Olney's mind, a businessman walking by interprets the stranger's sign as an insult meant for him. Already surly from a board meeting with bungling associates, the businessman in turn nearly drops a doddering old woman with his projection of anger. The old woman reels in despair; upon waking this morning she found her naughty little tabby dead from old age at the foot of her bed. In an instant, her tidy and cheerful life had become one of emptiness and the certainty of her own impending mortality. Now, returning from the corner store with a cinnamon roll for a distracted late breakfast, she perceives the businessman's anger as a judgment to which there is no appeal. His loathing forces the decision she has been fighting all morning. She returns to her pensioner's bed-sitter and turns on the gas. Moments after she dies, another old woman knocks on her door, hoping to borrow a cup of sugar and stay for a chat. Fearing she hasn't been heard, the woman opens the door and, with her characteristic "yoo hoo," peeks inside. The smell of gas alarms her as she looks around. There, lying on the couch, with the cat in her arms, is the only sympathetic person she has met in years. Before she can reach the dead woman, the gas fumes overcome her at the precise moment the realization of what has happened gives her a fatal heart attack. An old man walking down the hall rushes in when he hears her fall to the floor. After so many years without purpose, his sudden feeling of heroic urgency vanishes when the lit cigarette in his trembling hand ignites the gas. The explosion rocks the building, and before the fire is finally brought under control, eighteen seniors will have perished. Sad to say, the effects of Olney Garkle's influence upon a cursing and whimpering world are of no concern to him just now. He's rushing to the Moon Food Cafe for a much needed cuppa, the hells of other people be damned. To help him in the forced march from his last job interview, he's been whistling a hard driving ostinato from Prokofiev's Buffoon. His rapid pace nearly becomes a run as he approaches the busy intersection of Ninth and J. It's the longest traffic light in town and he just might resort to mayhem if it turns red before he gets there. As the light changes from green to amber, the coned, hard ridges of his lips blister the air with one of the ballet's steel-like percussive figures. The light changes to red as he reaches the curb: if a whistler's lips could kill, Olney Garkle would be a mass murderer. As karma would have it, he's one of the mass unemployed. He jeers at the traffic zipping past. Puny, bumperless cars are fighting it out with hoon-captained pickups and massive bull-barred four wheel drives, all of them gunning their way to God-knows-where for the Lord-knows-what-reason. He waits. A chiliad of gnat dynasties slips by ... the light is still red. Olney's patience finally snaps, as it always does when he's waited too many seconds for people, and especially things, to get out of his way. Cursing dramatically, he lunges into the traffic with jigs-up defiance. He's half hoping to be run over and swiftly made ready for the next life, even if it has to be in the same old bevy of galaxies. During the crossover, he takes the opportunity to return in kind the one-finger salutes from behind a dozen windscreens. Only his eyes belie the emergency session being held within. For Olney's are the jittery eyeballs of a man whose Coin of Fortune--flipped at birth to the call of heads it's revelation, tails it's desolation--is about to hit the asphalt. Despite the nail-biting odds of fate's impending decree, Olney's life is spared and the opposite shore is won. Turning up noisy J street and leaving it at Eighth, his rancour abates a bit as he approaches the cafe, though not enough to worry his body's tension-in-tenure. It scoffs at the idea of serene detachment ever becoming its ouster. Whistling forcefully now, as if in agreement, Olney belts out one of the ballet's relentless motor rhythms so dear to his heart as he opens the door. He greets the customers with the episode's savage, glittering climax. No one looks up. He steps to the counter, bowing his legs to straddle a red Naugahyde stool. It's the only one still intact, the others ready to burst from deep fissures running in all directions. Lining the gashes on the seat next to him are countless layers of split masking tape. Like the vertical ruins of bygone civilisations, the uppermost strata have been devastated by time and tourism. The tourists here, he scans with a sneer, look like the heirs of an apocalypse, their furtive comings and goings having long since turned these grubby palimpsests into seismic gorges, each one ready to plummet all of existence down to oblivion. Olney pokes his finger into a gaping crevice of the "Rosetta" stool next to him, whipping it to a sluggish spin as if he were a bratty God hurling meteors into the moil to freeze at mid-chew the stamens in mastodon mouths. "Fuck 'em," says God. The stool screeches like the spaceship that whitened Elijah's hair. No one winces. §§§ Chapter 2: Another Day on Urantia |