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Loam-colored powder swirled under the spoon, spiraling into the steaming water. A few stirs further. I tapped the spoon on the edge of the newly colloidal cup of perfectly-wretched instant coffee. I took a moment to meditate upon this, one of life's more disappointing miracles, while waiting for my eggs to congeal. The sunlight was slowly rolling into the kitchen like a gang of car-vandalizing skinheads. I usually don't view the sunrise in such negative terms, but then again, I hardly ever see it. I'd like to think that it was the simple fact that I hadn't yet been to sleep that made me so distrustful of this dawn in particular, but I know better. I've been in the game long enough to recognize a premonition of impending doom when one rolls over me like an unpleasant bedmate. And that was what this was. A premonition. Not a bedmate. I hadn't been to bed yet, remember?
I took a sip of the coffee just as the phone rang. The combination of the eldritch-bitterness on my tongue with my absolute shock that the phone service hadn't yet been disconnected caused me to leap straight up, simultaneously introducting my skull at a too-high velocity with the top of the breakfast nook and overturning the table in such a manner as to collect its contents--coffee, eggs, and heaps of unpaid bills and advertising circulars--in my lap. I swore as foully as I knew how, and hopped painfully toward where I last remembered seeing the phone, clawing all the while at the mass of scalding sweepstakes entries that were yolk-adhered to my pajama bottoms.
The phone was less difficult to find than I would have worried, had I not been to busy trying to remember whether one put steak or butter on first degree burns to worry about anything much at all. I probably wouldn't have even bothered to look for it at all if I hadn't been howling like a terrified bunny and leaping like a spastic acrobat. I often find that intense activity can lead to a an almost-Taoist state of doing only that which keeps one in the flow of things--especially intense activities which prevent one from taking a few minutes to think better. My hand plunged almost unbidden into a snakepit of unwashed socks, surfacing clenched tightly around the black plastic handset of the telephone.
Whenever a person living in the modern world picks up a telephone receiver, it is second nature to complete the gesture by bringing it to the ear. Ring, grab, ear. Just like that. I have wished so many times that those synapses making up that chain of stimulus and response were devoted to more useful takses, like snaring rabbits, or weaving baskets from porcupine quills. I'd much rather be wearing nothing more than a loincloth and a Bud-Light T-shirt and shooting frogs with a blowgun that to ever have to take a phone call like the one I took that morning.
But I took it.
"Hello?"
"It's me. Martin."
"Martin? Did we meet at the bar last night? Look, Martin--"
"No we didn't meet at the bar. You know damned well who this is. And it wouldn't matter if you didn't. It's about the Book."
"The book."
"No, the Book. Big 'B.'"
"Oh, yes yes. That book. I mean 'Book,' of course."
"Central has it." I hadn't quite caught on yet, but somewhere in the lizard-brain, this combination of words was stirring. I was, however, still quite uncertain how I knew this Martin character.
"Did I meet you at that terrible Oh Dolly last season?"
"You idiot! This is no time for Broadway! Central has the Book!" And then he hung up.
The burn on my leg had subsided to a dull knify hammering, and slowly, the realization came shouldering its way through the battlefield of gin-slain brain cells. Central had the book. That meant that I was back in. |
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