The crate is encrusted with angry stickers; the bits of original labelling that MacGuffin can read say “Ap it r in.” Its presence in his office is an engineered marvel, given that its bulk is a good two feet wider than the door in any direction. Its footprint is also larger than the available floorspace when his desk is in place, which is perhaps why someone has thoughtfully moved said desk onto the window-washer’s platform creaking back and forth outside.
“Beagle,” he says, “have I won or lost some sort of contest?”
His secretary, with utter absorption, files his nails.
MacGuffin finds himself, that day, using his paperweights for their intended purpose.
“Think you’re pretty funny, don’t you, MacGuffin?” asks a large man, sliding into his office.
“No,” says MacGuffin.
The large man leans out and grasps at the desk. MacGuffin uses a painter’s pole to push his platform just out of reach. At length, the large man gives up.
“Next time, MacGuffin,” he says, a little red-faced, and leaves.
On the way out he bumps into the next threatening large man, and they spend an awkward but entertaining minute trying to get through the door at the same time.
MacGuffin climbs back in at 5:05, slides around the crate, exchanges a scowl with Beagle and takes the 170 home. He prepares a supper (sausage and hominy), views a brief pornographic video followed by a series of sitcoms from the previous decade, and falls asleep with a cat on his feet. He wakes up the next morning and screams because the crate’s in his bedroom.
While his heart rate jerks back to normal, he examines it: it’s garnered one new sticker, emblazoned “Prev. Rr. [TFT Fwd.] 55.”
In his hasty exit, he hits the beautiful but deadly woman in the face.
“What is that thing, anyway?” asks MacGuffin’s subway seatmate, as he careens miserably through the tunnel with the enormous crate wedged against him.
“The stuff nightmares are made of,” says MacGuffin. Ape, with Tangerine rocks itself over to better compress his toe.
“How much you want for it?”
MacGuffin lights up. “A dollar.”
“Would you take,” says his seatmate with cunning, “eighty cents?”
MacGuffin returns from lunch to find it back in his office, of course. Beagle’s mouth is mightily pursed.
“Why won’t you keep it?” he asks.
“It doesn’t work,” says his former seatmate, hand extended for his money back.
They’ve eliminated guage bosons, neutrinos, tauons and five flavors of quark, but the scientists working at the Innocence Project feel that this only strengthens their case.
“Our detractors brandish Occam’s Razor,” Velena types into the latest press release, “but the rigor of our science should prove that we are not multiplying entities—we are subtracting them, and thereby coming closer to the truth.”
They discard top quarks later that afternoon. No matter. The men and women of the Innocence Project are set to isolate the particle emitted by childhood’s decay, and they believe they can do it.
They really, really do.
Salman is playing chess with the Addict, and losing.
“I don’t see you as part of myself anymore,” he says. “I’ve attained a certain distance. I can analyze the way you acted–”
“We acted,” says the Addict.
Salman trades rook for bishop. “And the most embarrassing thing to see is how simple your motivations were. Anyone asks why I did anything–fear? No. Sex? No. Long-term strategy? No. Fix?”
“Yep!” says the Addict.
“It’s such a relief,” says Salman, checked, “to be a little more complex these days.”
The Addict reveals a lazy smile. “Oh yes,” he says. “You are.”
Nothing about the dream is whimsical or gentle; certainly nothing about it is what one would call dreamy. Roul flickers from place to place, architectures from childhood with celebrities and dead uncles imposed on them.
It’s not a lucid dream, but it goes on for so long that at length Raoul assembles his moments of self-awareness into a slow and turbid stream of thought.
He remembers the diagnosis, the treatments. He remembers his lungs failing.
So this is the afterlife: a dream from which there is no waking. No gentleness, no whimsy, no sulfur, no choir.
Raoul hopes to forget.
“Your rows are all over the place,” Spencer informs her. “Did you get the seeds mixed up or something?”
“I never really understood why people wanted everything in rows anyway,” says Jessica.
“Well, it’s easier to weed, for one thing,” says Spencer. “Plus it’s easier to be consistent with pesticides.”
“I’m just using cayenne and coffee grounds.”
“Have it your way,” he shrugs. “It’s all on your head when you try to figure out what’s ready to harvest.”
Jessica just smiles and watches the rune garden grow, the slowest spell she’s ever cast: cabbage and sunflowers spelling out Ansuz, Raidho, Thorn.
As a sophomore, Danielle found herself entranced by a cadre of older students: neither bright Christian Athletes nor defiant flannel survivalists, but kids who laughed and did what they wanted and kept the bullshit at bay.
Startlingly, they noticed. Danielle found herself anointed a member of Forster’s aristocracy. She didn’t undergo some metamorphosis, but she learned from their kindness, and grew.
Now she’s a senior (oh, so much older) and, contemplating an interesting sophomore, she wonders at their surety. Was it real? Will she ever find her own? Or is growing up just a chase for your betters that never ends?
“You can’t remember your son’s name?” says Lilac.
“No!” says Debbie. “It’s great.”
“You need to go to the doctor.”
“You need to understand. I’ve been wanting this for so long, Lil. I burn dinner all the time, I can never find my car in the parking lot–I keep losing track of the year. I love it when that happens.”
“There are treatments, Debbie!” Lilac is trying to maintain eye contact; it feels like that must be important.
“I don’t want them,” says Debbie, and in her great dark pupils is the exhilaration, the need for a world without regrets.