Lance Ash: April 2023

Notebook One

Tales of Clark Seville When He Was a Bear by Lance Ash

Innuendo Deer, the Boring Beer

Old Braindasher was led into the room by a young man wearing a navy blue blazer with an elaborate crest over the right hand breast pocket. The young man treated the older one with great care, as if the latter would fall and hurt himself or wander away absentmindedly, should he be left unattended for a moment. As he was guided into a chair at the front of the room, Braindasher smiled and waved at the half-dozen people gathered before him. He waved with one hand; the other held a tall can of beer.

Ray, one of the three men and three women seated in a half-circle only a few feet from the old man’s chair, noted with sour contempt that Braindasher’s choice of beverage was Innuendo Deer, a watery concoction whose label was far more interesting and complex than the product it signified. Ray folded his arms across his chest, sure that nothing of value would be forthcoming.

As the young man in the blazer backed away, making sure that his charge would not fall to his death from the chair, Braindasher smiled at him and nodded, pulling back the tab on his can at the same time. The “fiss” sound of escaping gas was accompanied by a tiny amount of foam. Braindashed looked at his audience and raised an eyebrow. He took a sip of the beer and then placed the can on the floor next to his chair. He made a sound of satisfaction and crossed one leg over the other, ankle on thigh, with far more agility than his earlier attendant’s solicitousness would seem to merit.

“Now,” he addressed the people gathered around him, “Who here knows what we’re here for?” His voice was soft, but deep, like a clean-shaven Santa Claus working as an old-fashioned barber.

One of the women raised her hand. Her name was Kate.

“Yes?” Braindasher encouraged her as he reached down to take up his can again.

“We’re here to hear the story of Clark Seville,” she said.

“When he was a bear,” Braindasher added with a belch.

Beer Fraught with Disprofit

But it was a soft belch. Braindasher excused himself without ceremony, emphasis, or any attempt to be “cute.” He put the can back down and looked up at the ceiling.

“Clark Seville,” he pronounced after a deep breath, exhaling far more than the words required, “Began life as a bear, or bear-like creature, to be precise. He looked like a bear.” The old man brought his eyes down and examined each face before him in turn. “However, his bipedalism, his intelligence, his power of speech, these things marked him out as far more than just a bear.”

One of the men in the group, Bruce by name, raised his hand. Braindasher acknowledged the interruption merely by the intense focus of his gaze at Bruce.

“When do we get a break?” Bruce asked.

“After two hours,” Braindasher answered with the peremptory concision of a supervisor of long standing, which he was.

“May we go to the restroom?” Alice, sitting slightly forward in a red dress trimmed with white, asked without bothering to raise her hand.

Braindasher inhaled.

“I would prefer you held such necessities until the designated break time,” he made it known.

“But, regulations–” Evan, last of the three men, began to object.

“The Suggestible Trapezoid,” Braindasher cut him off, pronouncing the name of the agency to which they each were contractually bound, “Is not subject to any of the standard regulations.” He seemed to cut himself off at this point, loath to say more. In fact, he wanted to add, “And you should know that by now,” but also wanted to believe it unnecessary to do so.

Lavatory Fixed Rate Reported by Outer Louder

In the interest of starting things off on a friendly note, however, Braindasher decided to allow a looser interpretation of the rules. Having established that his narrative would be about the early career of that legendary agent, Clark Seville, and would consist of a series of tales such as one might hear around a campfire, he decided to allow a ten-minute break during which everyone could avail himself or herself of the facilities, perhaps even obtain a drink from the concession alcove down the hall, before continuing with the first of the tales proper.

“But,” he made certain everyone understood, “You must stay in the room for the entirety of each tale, the beginning and ending of which, I admit, may be somewhat vaguely understood or subjectively determined.”

“Did you see the beer he was drinking?” Ray asked Evan with incredulity as they washed their hands before the mirror in the mens’ room.

“No, what about it?” Evan wondered, slinging the drops off his hands and turning to the paper towel dispenser.

“Innuendo Deer?” Ray gasped, the corners of his mouth turned down like the covers on a guest bed.

“Be careful,” advised the third man, Bruce, over his shoulder as he stood at the urinal, “We’re always under observation.”

“In here?” Ray started to demand, before quickly realizing the truth of Bruce’s words. He raised his eyebrows at Evan with resignation and exited the restroom. The latter passed on the eyebrows thing to Bruce before following Ray out the door.

Bruce did not bother washing his hands.

In the women’s restroom, Julia, the last to be named of the three women in the group, informed Kate and Alice that she had a bottle of whiskey in her bag if they wanted any.

That’s Taking Second-Guessing to the Third Degree

Back in the classroom (for that is what it was), the group of six again took their seats and found that Braindasher had somehow acquired an additional two cans of the same brand of beer. They sat on the floor beside him. He had also drawn up his chair closer to theirs, so that they truly sat in a circle now, the campfire suggested earlier easily imagined in its midst. Braindasher was now leaning forward with his hands on his knees. He had taken off his tie. He wore short sleeves and an unflattering pair of trousers. His head was bald, fringed with unkempt white hair. Heavy eyeglasses weighed down a nose much abused by the sun over the years.

He smiled at everyone as they all settled in.

“Are you ready for the first tale?” he asked. He didn’t expect an answer and only got a nod from Alice by way of acknowledgement of his question.

“OK,” he smiled one last time before seeming to look far away, far within himself, far into the campfire that one could see faintly reflected in his thick lenses.

“This first tale is traditionally the one told first, as it deals with Seville’s recruitment.” He paused a long time before starting. The room seemed to grow darker. The only sound to be heard was a vibration, probably from the air vents. Kate kept her eyes fixed on Braindasher, but with her right hand made a covert gesture to Julia. She would take up that offer now. Julia furtively passed the bottle to her. Nobody saw. Nobody could see much at all besides the old man’s eyes behind glass and his teeth as he opened his mouth to speak.

“Clark Seville…” Braindasher intoned, “... stepped out of his cave one morning in spring…”

Time for Big Desk Endower

Clark Seville had, by accident, apparently, received a notice of an employment offer meant for someone else. It was in his mailbox. An entire winter’s worth of mail filled the box, so Seville didn’t bother sorting through every piece as he gathered it to see if everything was for him. No, he took the armful of letters, flyers, magazines, and small parcels back to his cave for perusal, after taking a good sniff at the spring air, of course. Not being an actual bear, he didn’t have quite the same nose, but he could still smell exceptionally well. For instance, he could tell that someone down in the valley was baking cookies. Seville took another sniff. Almond cookies, if he wasn’t mistaken.

Seville’s eyesight, on the other hand, was far better than that of a true bear. He put this eyesight to good use as he looked through the mail. It didn’t take long to discover the strange missive from a certain Dr. Patience.

“Your unique qualities may be just what we’re looking for,” the letter read. Further down, Seville read the words, “contractual employment” and “professional agent.” He was intrigued. It seemed he was being offered the chance to apply for a job as a man of action. He wondered if the fact that his name wasn’t “Locutius Collins” would matter. He didn’t bother to worry about whether his being, for most purposes, a bear, would affect his chances.

“Take this letter to the big desk in the office on the third floor of the Lorenz Building in Bughead CIty,” he was instructed.

Looking at himself in the mirror, Seville decided to do just that. What his motivations were, he couldn’t exactly pinpoint. Had he always felt he was meant for something more? Destined for greatness? It was hard to say.

Seville glanced through the rest of the mail. It was a good thing he had ordered a pair of sneakers. He put them on and tied the laces with his hand prosthetics.

Enshrined these Basic Principles from Childhood

As Clark Seville stepped into the Lorenz Building, he was dressed in loose-fitting pants, as muted a pattern of Hawaiian shirt as he could find, an old bucket hat, and those new sneakers. He took the stairs up to the third floor, passing no one on the way and having seen no one about at all. There was only one door on the third floor. Evidently this was “the office.” He paused only a moment at the door. The question of whether to knock was answered by a voice from the other side.

“Come in,” the voice urged.

Seville opened the door and looked within before stepping forward. He saw that, indeed, this was an office and, yes, there was a big desk. Behind this desk sat a pleasant-looking fellow. He smiled at Seville and beckoned him inside with a wave.

“Did you bring the letter?” he asked.

“I did,” Seville replied after taking a deep breath and putting his foot over the threshold. His prosthetic paw adapters were surprisingly nimble. They withdrew the letter from his shirt pocket without damaging it at all. Any hesitancy or doubts about the situation or his role in it were, if present at all, well hidden. Seville only displayed a calm confidence, as if he had stepped up to this desk as a matter of routine a hundred times before. There was, however, no informality or unearned familiarity. He already showed exactly the professionalism that would be required of him later.

The fellow behind the desk took the letter and glanced at it.

“Is your name Locutius Collins?” he asked, looking up at the tall bear in the hat.

“No,” Seville corrected him. “It’s Clark Seville.”

The man raised his eyebrows once and reached for a pen. He marked through “Locutius Collins” and wrote in “Clark Seville.”

“Is ‘Clark’ spelled with an ‘e?’” he asked.

“No,” Seville decided on the spot.

Childhood Sleeper’s Charity Chicken

“Any questions before we begin?” the man behind the desk, who had introduced himself as Brian Rashid, wondered. Seville now sat on the opposite side of the desk with his hat in his lap.

“No,” he replied as honestly as he could.

“Well, I have a few preliminary questions for you,” Rashid responded. “First, are you ready to spend the rest of today going through some basic application paperwork and answering some initial questions that will determine whether you are qualified to proceed with further recruitment screening?”

“Yes,” Seville answered.

“Good.” Rashid nodded, looking down at the surface of the desk and tapping his outstretched palms on the same a few times. He inhaled sharply as he looked back at Seville. “Will you follow me, please?”

Seville stood and found that he towered over the other person, now also on his feet. Rashid led the new applicant through a door in the wall behind the desk.

“Dr. Patience,” Rashid called as he shut the door behind Seville and himself. “A new applicant.”

“A new recruit,” judged Dr. Patience, for that must have been who this was, this tall man (as tall as Seville, even) emerging from behind stacks of old printers and monitors. Seville immediate determined him to be a man of formidable intellect and will. “Yes, a new recruit.” Dr. Patience walked with his hands deep in the pockets of his long coat. He walked closer, directly facing Seville, only inches away, and examined the latter’s eyes.

“A bear,” he determined. Before Seville could offer a slightly different categorization, Dr. Patience added with a smile, “A bear-like creature.”

Whether or not Seville took offense at being labeled a “creature,” could not be readily perceived, for his demeanor remained unchanged. Yes, he was a cool one, this Clark Seville. Dr. Patience knew something was special about him already.

Chicken Frosting Harvested Once a Week, at Least

Old Braindasher opened another beer.

“Who’s drinking whiskey?” he asked just before taking a drink himself. No one answered. He smiled with half his mouth.

“It’s alright. I don’t mind.”

Still Julia and Kate said nothing.

Braindasher placed the can on the floor next to the suddenly large group of cans, both empty and unopened, and partially consumed.

“After the chicken frosting is harvested,” he resumed, “It undergoes a cleansing process known as regtibdiagabration.”

Ray turned with open incredulity to Evan, sitting to his left.

“What chicken frosting?” he demanded, having gotten no return look from his neighbor.

Braindasher looked from Ray to each of the others.

“Just making sure you’re paying attention,” he informed them, keeping his eyes moving from face to face.

“So Clark Seville joined the Suggestible Trapezoid after a series of tests,” Alice concluded, evidently eager to move things along.

“Don’t be in such a rush, Miss Clegg,” Braindasher snapped, displaying, for the first time, reservoirs of resolution unsuspected in such a nice, kindly old man. “The telling of the tales is half the…” he wanted to say “fun,” but that wouldn’t make sense, given that the other half of the reason for his narration, understood as the tales themselves as told-things, was… he had lost what he was going to say. “...reason we’re here.” He snatched up his unfinished beer.

“And the other half of that reason,” he decided to continue, “Is the valuable lessons to be learned within the tales. Or stories, if you prefer.”

“Sir, life itself is a story,” Bruce enthused solemnly, leaning forward, hands clasped together between his open legs.

“Kiss-ass,” thought Ray.

Least Billiard a Gonad

“The next test that Dr. Patience subjected Clark Seville to,” Braindasher began anew, “If we consider Seville’s receiving of the letter as a test–the first test–in itself, was the Game of Pocket Pool.” The old man looked meaningfully at the three women. Of the three, only Julia frowned in distaste.

“Take this pool cue,” Dr. Patience directed Seville, “And move your left testicle to the other side of your scrotum.”

Seville grasped the cue from Patience’s outstretched hand. He looked at it dubiously for a moment.

“By ‘the other side of your scrotum,’” he questioned, “Do you mean the other side from the one in which my left testicle normally resides?”

Dr. Patience frowned and raised his eyebrows. Obviously he was not allowed to say anything else in the way of directions. This was a test, after all.

Seville hefted the cue in his right hand before shifting it to his left. He was considering… had now considered, and, glancing at the test-giver, smiled as much as a bear like he could smile.

He fed the cue into the left front pocket of his trousers. To Dr. Patience’s amazement, the entirety of the cue disappeared. Where it went is not recorded, but the fact of Seville’s failure to pass the test is somewhere in the agency’s files.

“Because he didn’t realize the lack of a necessary correlation between the two instructions?” Kate posited.

“Exactly,” Braindasher replied with a smile. He pointed at Kate as he did so.

“Why didn’t he just lie?” Ray wondered aloud. “Nobody would know the truth of the state of his scrotum’s interior.”

“This isn’t really a forum for debating the contents of these tales,” Braindasher admonished.

“Yeah, dummy,” Evan whispered to Ray. He grinned, but those secretly observing the group noted everything.

Gonad Touching Gonad in a Spray of Allergen Effluvia

“Would you be willing to pose as a homosexual in the service of the agency?” Dr. Patience asked Clark Seville.

“Pose?” Seville countered. “How do you know I’m not actually a homosexual?”

Patience nodded appreciatively.

“Do you find Gore Vidal’s stance that the word ‘homosexual’ is, properly speaking, an adjective and not a noun, valid? That is, that the word is properly applied to a sex act and not the individual performing it?”

“Hmm,” Seville mused. He and Patience now sat on chairs facing each other in a small room devoid of any furniture other than those chairs. “‘Valid’ is an anagram of ‘Vidal.’”

“Do you find meaning in that anagramity?”

“If one subscribes to such subjectively determined synchronicity.”

Dr. Patience nodded again, this time somewhat distractedly. He rose from his chair and removed a small atomizer from a pocket in his coat.

“Now, try not to react unduly,” he instructed. He pumped the atomizer and thereby released a fine mist directly onto Seville’s snout. Despite his best efforts, Seville had no choice but to sneeze. His sneeze was overwhelming. He didn’t even have the chance to cover his mouth. His eyes closed involuntarily and for far longer than even such a powerful sneeze would merit. Black depths of unconsciousness took him. When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in the same room, but this time the only piece of furniture was a large bed. Seville and Dr. Patience were nestled close under a thin sheet, both totally unclothed.

Patience smiled at the bear beside him.

“You were wonderful,” he told Seville.

Nonplussed for only a moment, the latter replied, “I usually am” and began looking for his hat.

Tadpoles?

Clark Seville was introduced to Sven Symptom, his new supervisor.

“You understand that you’re still on probation,” Symptom advised as the two shook hands.

“Yes sir,” Seville acknowledged.

“Testing and training continue,” Symptom, an older man with a face like a fallen birthday cake, added, “Sometimes at the same time.”

Seville followed Symptom out onto a balcony overlooking a small swamp within one of the courtyards inside the Suggestible Trapezoid building.

“Now, below us you see an artificial swamp,” Symptom directed. “Your assignment is to fill this jar with swamp water containing as many tadpoles as you can.” Symptom lifted a screw-top lidded jar from a table beside him and handed it to the new recruit, which is what Seville now considered himself, although he had received no definite word to that effect.

Clark Seville examined the jar. He decided it must have originally been used to store pickled eggs.

“How do I get down to the artificial swamp?” he asked.

“That is for you to figure out,” Symptom told him, not unkindly. He tapped the metal lid on the jar. “Don’t break it,” he encouraged Seville.

After a moment’s consideration, Seville laid aside his hat and climbed atop the railing around the balcony. The leap he made from the railing down into the unknown depths of the murky water below quickly became legendary among the offices and hallways of the building. Even as Symptom was shouting an admonition not to jump, Seville was falling feet first some fifty feet down, the jar secure under one arm. The supervisor threw himself against the railing, his fallen birthday cake face agape in horror and amazement, just in time to see his new recruit disappear into waters full of probable tadpoles and phony alligators.

Pumpkin the Penguin

Clark Seville clambered out of a drainage pipe on the wooded hill behind the Suggestible Trapezoid building. He held a jar teeming with life under one arm and the head of a robotic alligator under the other. Having spent the last three hours working his way out of the underground pipes, his orientation was off. He raised his nose to the sky. The scent of fish. Would it lead him back to the building or further afield? He allowed himself to be led by olfactory particles on the wind. Down the hill he lumbered.

Ten minutes later he came upon a small cottage made of stone. Looking back the way he had come, Seville could now see the parapets of the agency’s headquarters. He would have to turn around. Before he could do so, however, the front door of the cottage opened and out stepped a penguin.

“Hello,” greeted the penguin. He was chewing on a fish.

“Hello,” responded Clark Seville.

“Nice alligator you’ve got there,” the penguin remarked.

It took a moment for Seville to process the penguin’s words. The sight (and the smell) of the fish was most attractive. Suddenly shaking off his hungry thoughts, the bear jostled the mechanical head in the crook of his arms.

“Yes,” he admitted, examining his prize. “You should have seen the rest of him. A fine catch, but… not edible.”

“I’ll trade you,” the penguin offered.

“The gator’s head?” questioned Seville. “For what?”

“A fish dinner?” the penguin tempted the bear. He threw the head and denuded spine of the fish he had been gnawing on over his shoulder.

Seville’s mouth watered. He began to speak, but then remembered the other item he carried. He looked into the green fluid in the jar. A hundred pollywogs cavorted within. “How about a ride up to the building instead?” He jerked his head towards the walled structure above.

Hot Disability Cockerel

One day in early summer Clark Seville was sent on his first overnight assignment. He was paired with another agent, Henry Bustle.

“Henry’s already started his modification,” Sven Symptom told Seville. “He was born a bird.”

Seville turned slowly, almost hesitantly, towards the figure seated to his left. Henry Bustle was mostly human-looking, except for the five o’clock shadow that covered most of his exposed skin, the result of keeping his feathers diligently shaved down. Also, he had a ring of scar tissue around his nose and mouth. This was where his beak had presumably been. The two agent’s eyes met. Seville nodded.

“Good to be working with you,” Henry told Seville with as little use of his lips as possible. He simply opened his mouth and emitted the words.

Seville nodded again.

“Now,” Symptom drew their attention back to himself, “You’re going to be trailing and observing this man.” He withdrew a black and white photograph the size of a large cereal box from a case on his desk and passed it across. Seville moved closer to Henry. He could smell the latter’s bodily aroma and the toiletries used to blunt its puissance. He smelled like an old wooden barrel with dusty traces of grain at the bottom.

“Who is he?” Bustle asked. Seville noted the way his tongue bobbed up into view like a very short man at the wheel of a dump truck.

“His name is Odem Sauna. Here’s the details of his current whereabouts.” Symptom passed them the rest of the folder’s contents. “Follow him, observe his daily habits, make note of his social contacts. Report by phone to this office every day until you receive further instructions. An easy job.” Symptom ended with a smile.

Out in the hall Bustle looked Seville up and down. “We’ve got to get you a better tailor,” he almost quacked.

Cockerel Ducking His Visible Aura

Now attired in slacks, sport jacket, and somber four-in-hand, Clark Seville accompanied Henry Bustle to the apartment building wherein Odem Sauna made his residence.

“Got enough room in the shoulders?” Bustle asked for the second time. The first had been as Seville turned about within the three-paneled mirror at the haberdasher’s. Now that the two sat in the agency car waiting for their quarry’s appearance, Bustle thought to double-check.

“I think so,” Seville replied, rolling his shoulders up and down.

Bustle absently turned his gaze back to the windows of the apartment on the third floor. “Good,” he said to Seville. Together they sat in silence for some time, looking now at Sauna’s windows, now at the entry to the building, now to the occasional vehicle pulling into the spaces before the same.

“This is the third–” Bustle began to speak, out of boredom or restlessness, Seville could not be sure, but was cut off by the bear, who had seen something in one of those windows overhead.

“Look!” Seville barked.

“My god!” Bustle gasped as he threw himself to one side, his head landing on Seville’s left thigh.

“What is it?” Seville demanded, casting about for something, anything, to fight with. The agency had issued neither one of them a weapon.

“It’s an auroscope,” hissed Bustle.

Seville saw a long cylinder poking out from between the drapes in the window. He didn’t know what to do.

“No,” Bustle warned him, “Don’t move. You’re safe. I’m the one that has to hide.”

“What does it do?” Seville wondered.

“It registers auras as a pinkish glow. Being a bird, I am uniquely vulnerable to such detection. I don’t know if you know the old saying, ‘Ain’t too proud to beg, ‘cause I was born from an egg.’”

An Aura of Kinetic Illustration

“OK,” Seville informed Bustle, “You can look now; the auroscope has been retracted.”

The bird-man raised his eyes above the level of the dashboard. He exhaled forcefully.

“We’d better move the car,” he decided. As he put the car in reverse and looked over his shoulder behind them, he observed, “Most likely it was Sauna using the scope, but we can’t discount that it might have been an accomplice.”

“What would he have seen if he had spotted you?” Seville asked.

“I’m not entirely sure,” Bustle speculated. He parked behind a tall, square-cut hedge between the apartment building’s property and that of an old-fashioned service station. “The briefing I got on the use of such devices leads me to believe it would be a unique border of animated cartoon characters around my body.”

“Cartoons?” Seville had heard of them, but never seen any.

“Yes.”

Bustle mused.

“Imagine,” he chuckled once, “Cartoons that no one has ever seen, not even by me, and I’m the one who’s generating them.”

“Is that because you’re a bird?” Seville asked delicately. Not delicately enough, apparently, for Bustle flashed his eyes as he answered.

“I’m in the process of becoming a man,” he insisted. “I am a man.”

Seville merely nodded in acknowledgement. He looked past Bustle at the approaching attendant. Bustle turned to him.

“You guys can’t park here,” he said as Bustle rolled down the window. “Not unless you’re customers.”

Legend has it that Clark Seville bamboozled the man wearing the star by asking what his favorite cartoon was. Although the attendant is supposed to have answered, “The Herculoids,” I have it on the highest authority that such an exchange did not occur.

The Illustrations of the Bell-Bottoms Benefited from the Anecdote

Bruce recalled that the cartoon characters moving about in Henry Bustle’s aura were collectively known as Bazoom and Ingrid and Company. Although most of the group’s adventures were generally nautical in theme, the bell-bottomed trousers that each of the characters wore did not find their origin in the attire of sailors, but rather in the early 1970’s milieu from which they were spawned.

“Too bad none of Bazoom and Ingrid’s hijinx have been preserved for our enjoyment,” Bruce lamented to his fellows seated with him at the table in the courtyard. Half of Braindasher’s audience sat at one table, the other half at another. Somehow, each tableful thought it was the better, the more exclusive of the two.

“Their boat was called the Bear Fuss,” Evan threw in,

“That’s curious, don’t you think?” Julia, the third person at this table, asked. Her question (or comment, really) was ignored.

“Well,” Bruce demurred, “It was really more of a ship.”

“How do you figure?”

“Well, because the word ‘boat’ implies a strictly water-going conveyance, but the craft on Bazoom and Ingrid could also travel on land, if needed.”

“So it was a magic hippie van,” Julia interjected with a smile, again to the relative indifference of her tablemates.

“Yeah,” Evan admitted, “But it was so clearly a boat; that is to say, a small craft like a tugboat or a fishing boat. Note the word ‘boat’ in each description.”

Bruce shoved the last bite of his hotdog into his mouth.

At the other table, the discussion turned to the cheap food that had been provided for their lunch.

“I think tomorrow I’ll bring my lunch,” Ray groused.

Alice gaped at him.

“You don’t think we’ll have to sit through this tomorrow too, do you?” she demanded. Her hotdog sat untouched.

Ray looked to the table behind him for confirmation.

Anecdote Cauliflower Keep the Same Logo

It was against Clark Seville’s inclinations, as well as his suspicions about the demands of the job, to complain about his growing hunger. However, it was the case that, as the hours went by, he was, indeed, getting hungrier. Thus it was with slightly more animation and lack of poise than he would have liked to display that he agreed to Bustle’s suggestion that they get something to eat.

“You go first,” Bustle told Seville. He pointed at a diner on the other side of the street. “See that place? They have some of the best hot dogs in town. Why don’t you go over there since it’s so close. Here.” He handed Seville a twenty dollar bill. “Get me two dogs, an order of fries and a Coke, and get yourself whatever you want.” He paused and saw Seville examining the money. “You don’t have any money, do you?”

“No,” Seville answered, his mouth flattening into a line like a dead man’s EKG.

“Here,” Bustle fished out another twenty. “Get whatever you want. Hey,” he added as Seville opened the door. “Don’t let them give you any guff about your… appearance.” Bustle passed his hand over his own face, up and down.

“I won’t,” Seville almost smiled. Almost.

In truth, Seville had been debating various responses should there be some question or objection regarding his bear-like nature. As he opened the diner’s front door and stepped inside he still didn’t have a definite plan.

“This is a to-go order,” he told the waitress behind the counter.

“OK,” she affirmed. Her pen and pad were ready.

Two men seated at the counter drew each other’s attention to the newcomer. They were not as subtle about it as they could have been.

“...and a big helping of creamed cauliflower,” Seville pointedly decided, staring at the two men. This time he did smile.

Logo Singular Cracking Noises, Feet in the Thin Glass

Clark Seville nearly dropped the two paper bags of food the waitress had handed him. As he had turned to leave the diner, in walked Odem Sauna, accompanied by a woman in her late twenties. The two were talking as they entered. Something about lawns and awnings, Seville was later to report. The bear-like fellow quickly turned back to the waitress.

“I forgot to tip you,” he said loudly, hoping that by making an out-of-character distraction and keeping his back to Sauna and friend that he could avoid being seen and possibly recognized.

The waitress looked at Seville in puzzlement. She glanced at the receipt at the top of a pile punctured by a spindle older than the diner itself, possibly.

“No, you did,” she assured him.

Seville maneuvered around using an estimation of where Sauna was at. “Oh! OK!” he laughed and spoke in a high, silly voice. Feeling himself now somewhat in the clear, he turned and left.

Henry Bustle was standing only a yard to the left of the door as he stepped out.

Seville opened his mouth to speak, but was intercepted by Bustle.

“I saw,” the latter said.

“Here’s your hot dogs,” Seville presented the food sourly.

“Thanks.”

The diner’s famous sign, moved from the establishment’s original location five years before, featured a straw-hat-wearing farmer. He used to wink every five seconds with what some felt was unnecessary lasciviousness. Of course, there was some debate as to whether, unnecessary or not, this winking actually fell into the category of the lascivious. As the bird and the bear headed to their car to consume their oddly disparate lunches, Bustle glanced up at the sign and recalled the time when, as a youth, he had thrown a stone through a similar sign with an accuracy that had surprised him. But that was long ago, thought Bustle. Bert’s Egg Emporium had never reopened after the subsequent fire.

Reasoned the Stunt Puffer

The young woman in Odem Sauna’s company has been variously identified as Elaine Stockwell, Barbara Conferall, and Nucinda Malaguise, among many others. No one, it seems, can say with certainty who she was, nor what was her exact relationship with Sauna. About ten years ago an office was established specifically for dealing with so-called “loose ends” in the Clark Seville saga. The office’s responsibilities included research into such matters as Seville’s origins (his species, family education, supposed brother Arnold, and so forth) and fairly unimportant side issues like this young woman. When the office was eventually closed, ostensibly due to budget constraints, the established consensus was that Diner Woman (as she became known) was some girl that Sauna was friends with.

“Perhaps even sexually involved with,” concluded the Stunt Puffer, and not without reason, as he sat down and turned things back over to Old Braindasher.

“Thank you,” Braindasher smiled and nodded. “You didn’t have to stand.” He looked to his audience of six. “And that,” he told them, “Is just one example of the secondary lore surrounding Clark Seville. Should you decide to pursue a deeper understanding of the man and his story, you’ll be swamped with such speculations and ephemeral questions.”

Did the Stunt Puffer look hurt at this insinuation of triviality? It is hard to say, for the Stunt Puffer was a fish-like creature dressed in an elaborate protective garment. His gurgles and gargles had been automatically translated into speech by the mouthpiece mounted on the helmet he wore. Some of the six people in the audience wondered whose voice they had actually heard and why it had been chosen, but a few recognized it as that of actor John Forsythe.

“Still,” Bruce countered later upon being told the answer, “Why not go with someone more current? More relevant?”

“Relevant?” snorted Ray. “To whom?”

Puffer Out in Devious Mad its Eggs and Safe

During an informal, “after-hours” discussion, in which only four of the audience (or class, if you prefer) were participants, the talk turned to this Stunt Puffer and the possible details of his role in the agency.

“I wish Braindasher was here,” Julia observed, looking towards the door.

“Why?” Bruce demanded with disgust.

“The whole point of this… gathering,” Evan fumbled for the right word, “Is to go beyond what Braindasher himself can offer.”

“It’s a study group,” Alice corrected him.

“The whole point,” Bruce jumped on the last of Alice’s words, “Is to prove that we really care about this crap. ‘Look at us; we’re putting in overtime because we’re so enthusiastic!’” He exhaled heavily.

“There’s the door,” Alice indicated with a jerk of her head. “If you don’t want to be here, just go.”

Before any resolution to this little conflict could be conjured up, Julia cleared her throat and raised her voice.

“So, if this Stunt Puffer was a fish or fish-like… person, it seems that the Suggestible Trapezoid makes widespread use of such… what do we say? Not animals, surely?”

Evan waited an appropriate amount of time in the ensuing interval before adding what he felt was an important point.

“As I’ve tried to make known to everyone several times now, we must assume that we’re under observation at all times.”

“Even when we wee-wee?” Bruce wanted to bray sarcastically, but thought better of it.

“So there is a measure of truth to Bruce’s point about this hopefully earning us some brownie points with the directorship,” continued Evan.

Bruce felt a little better now.

“I…” he hesitantly brought out, “I heard the Stunt Puffer was actually a woman,” he finished to a roomful of laughter.

Safe Wealth Cream is a Passive Lotion

After three days of following Sauna around town, Bustle and Seville had established, not only a fairly accurate and reliable understanding of their subject’s movements and habits, but also the beginnings of a friendly rapport with each other. As they sat in the car, sharing a bag of peanuts, outside the Quality Gravity Salon, one of Sauna’s regular stops, Bustle suggested something.

“We know he’s going to be in here for another hour,” Bustle noted.

Seville turned down the corners of his mouth in acknowledgement. He was enjoying the taste of the peanuts. They were roasted. Bustle had had to show him what to do with the shells.

“Why don’t we go back to his apartment and ransack it?” Bustle continued. “Who knows what we might find?”

Seville considered.

“Is that within the parameters of our assignment?” he asked.

“It’s stretching it a bit,” admitted Bustle, “But we are obliged to gather as much data as we can.”

Seville dusted his hand-paws.

“Look,” Bustle further argued, “We haven’t been charged with keeping him in sight at all times, 24-hours-a-day.”

“True,” Seville nodded.

Twenty minutes later they were riding in the elevator of Sauna’s apartment building.

“Don’t worry about the guy downstairs,” Bustle assured Seville. “He won’t suffer any long-term effects.”

Seville shrugged. Even if they had killed the building superintendent, he wouldn’t have objected.

In Sauna’s apartment, Seville looked through the kitchen and bathroom while Bustle rifled through Sauna’s desk, pocketing what he thought he could get away with. The man-bear opened a bottle next to the bathtub curiously. He sniffed at the contents. Was this shampoo? His fumbling with the top accidentally laid bare the wad of cash hidden inside.

Lotion Netting Fragments

“Look what I found,” Clark Seville directed Henry Bustle’s attention to the bottle with the secret compartment and its contents.

Bustle was just tucking a nice old lighter into his pocket when Seville surprised him. He threw a glance over his shoulder at Seville.

“Jesus, you scared the shit out of me!” he hissed. Turning and stepping closer, he inspected the cash. “Good work, Seville,” he praised the bear, whom he had taken to calling by his last name. He raised his eyebrows and looked up at his colleague. He seemed to be considering something.

“You want to split it?” he asked with as much casual, but suggestive, innocence as was possible given the situation.

Seville nearly gaped. He truly did not know how to respond. Taking a worldly viewpoint that he didn’t actually feel, understand, or deserve to express, given his experience, he limited himself to questioning if such theft wouldn’t make their visit evident to Odem Sauna.

Bustle took a deep breath.

“Seville,” he spoke with preparatory pedantry, “You’re not under any… illusions… that our employers are ‘the good guys,’ are you?”

The bear considered, or seemed to anyway.

“Is this shampoo?” he asked, holding out the bottle for Bustle to smell.

“No, it’s lotion,” Bustle explained after a quick investigation.

Down in the parking lot, Odem Sauna and his companion pulled into a spot well-accustomed to the Zoo Truck 47 that Sauna drove. What conversational exchange took place in the vehicle before the two exited is not precisely known. The poet Whalk, who wrote an epic about the war between the Suggestible Trapezoid and Poser Enumerations, an organization as devoted to the thwarting of the former’s goals as the former was to the thwarting of its, had Sauna and the woman engage in a brief debate over the question of the rightness of their association.

Fragments to Anchor, But None to Answer For

Seville accepted none of the money he had found. Bustle kept it all. Pockets bulging with papers and small objects, the latter was taking a look at the auroscope on its tripod against the drapes when the sound of the keys in the apartment door was heard. Bustle and Seville looked at each other.

“Back!” Bustle mouthed frantically, motioning.

Seville stepped soundlessly, surefootedly, backwards into the shadows.

Bustle dropped to the floor and crouched behind a sofa.

“...I don’t want to get a tattoo,” the woman was saying as the door swung open. Odem Sauna was chuckling at these words. He started to say something about conservatism as he locked the door behind himself, but suddenly stopped.

“What is it?” one could hear the woman say.

Bustle could see nothing. He was preparing to move whichever way proved necessary. He heard the rustle of clothes, the tread of feet, gulps and gasps, half-vocalized words. After a particularly solid thump, he risked a peek around the side of the sofa. Clark Seville’s snout and glistening black eyes were directly in front of him.

“Time to go,” Seville growled low. “Now.”

Bustle got to his feet, helped by one of the bear’s prosthetically converted paws around his upper arm.

“What–” he started to ask, but found the answer only a step or two away. Sauna and his friend lay in a heap a few feet to the right of the doorway. Their bodies were twisted and folded in a way that afforded no description other than that of the dead.

Now it was Bustle’s turn to master unwarranted indignation, outgrown naivete, and just general surprise.

“Well…” he sighed.

“We’re not the good guys,” Seville reminded him.

Bustle didn’t have the time just then to mention that they weren’t the bad guys either.

Aforementioned Theater Greats

Sven Symptom looked from Clark Seville to Henry Bustle and back several times. The movements of his head and eyes had no correlation to which of the two agents (and that is how we will refer to them, regardless of their actual status) was speaking. Finally, after Bustle had mentioned the pile of documents and items spread before Symptom for perhaps the eighth time, and on this mention had gestured heavily towards them, his finger even brushing the leather-bound journal, Symptom halted the flow of explanations and peripheral detail.

“Stop, please,” the older man, whom we will now imagine as looking like a much more serious and potentially dangerous Andy Rooney, commanded. “Out of everything you’ve told me, the point that truly stands out is that you have killed the subject of your surveillance.” He looked once again at each agent in turn, this time his eyes wide, like some owl in one’s imaginings. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes, sir,” Seville agreed. His voice was as deep as a mountain lake and as resonant as dynamite heard from the valley below. “As I have already indicated, I am alone responsible for the deaths.”

“Yes, you have already indicated that fact,” Symptom cut him off. He opened the journal included among the items taken from Sauna’s apartment. He flipped through several pages, drawing the journal closer to him as he did.

“Did you take anything from the woman’s body?” he asked, looking at Bustle.

“There was nothing to take,” Bustle explained. “Nothing in her pockets, no purse.”

Symptom nodded. “There was a time when a woman carried a purse as a matter of course,” he said with a sigh. “A different time.”

“My grandmother always called hers her ‘pocket book,’” Seville intoned, staring at the front of Symptom’s desk, as if talking to himself.

Symptom and Bustle looked at each other. What passed between them during that moment could not have been reproduced by a Bogart or a Booth.

The Theater Reopened with Backing from the Court of Graves

“The next assignment that Clark Seville was given–” Old Braindasher began, only to be interrupted by Kate.

“Wait a minute,” the young lady, whose blonde hair was held back by a white band bearing a pattern of tiny daisies, stopped him. She laughed briefly in apology for her presumption. “How did Clark Seville get out of trouble for killing the man and woman when he wasn’t supposed to?”

Braindasher smiled.

“I don’t know,” he confessed indifferently. He looked at Kate as if to ask if she had any further questions. Of course, she did, but seemed not to know quite how to formulate them, or to get them all out.

“Well… I mean, isn’t that important?” She finally submitted a query.

The old man’s brow wrinkled in contemplation.

“Within the context of these tales; that is to say, these tales, these tales told as I tell them, as they are told to you,” he spread his arms out, “Here and now, it is not important how each one is resolved as we,” he brought his hands to his chest, indicating his inner being, “Would need to see them resolved. In real life,” he added, almost in mockery of the term.

“So this isn’t history,” Ray suggested.

Old Braindasher took another long swallow of his déclassé libation.

“Don’t let anyone in upper management,” he advised in a voice he hadn’t yet used with these people, “Should you actually ever meet anyone in upper management–hear you say that.” He paused. “The Tales are as much a part of the official history of The Suggestible Trapezoid as… The Theater Reversed,” he rolled his hand, “Or The Annals of the Court of Graves, or… The Noah’s Ark of Nasty,” he chuckled.

“What are all of those?” wondered Julia.

“I think he just made them up,” thought Bruce.

Backing into the Horses from the Bus Balloon

It had been decided that perhaps Henry Bustle had been too strong an influence on an agent so recently recruited as Clark Seville. Thus, when sent out on his next assignment, Seville was sent out alone.

“Count the horses in the valley, Seville,” were Sven Symptom’s instructions. “Count the horses and report back.”

It seemed an easy enough task, Seville considered. The valley was in the midst of the Peace and Patience Hills, not far away. He would get there by hot air balloon, thereby inaugurating the well-known association between Clark Seville and that charmingly antiquated mode of travel.

“But I know nothing of balloons,” Seville pointed out.

“Don’t worry,” the armorer, Mr. Frisk, begged, hands up. “This is a bus balloon. It’s a sort of hybrid.” His hands waggled in equivocation.

Two days later, Seville was floating down into the valley. He did not know the name of the valley, or even if it had one. About the size of an aircraft carrier and, oddly, roughly the same shape, the valley was home to a herd of horses trapped there many years before. Seville experienced a giddy excitement, dare we even say a happiness, that was both extremely rare for him and, as such, a source of potential embarrassment, as he spotted the horses. He realized with a double-awareness that he was feeling this delight and that he was glad that no one was there to see him feel so.

His mission, however, remained uppermost in his mind. He began to enumerate the animals, tallying them up with a clicker he held in his white, plastic hand.

The horses shied at the floating bus overhead. A few broke away from the main group and ran for a stand of trees. Seville first decided to follow them, but then changed his mind. He put the bus in reverse and, as you can guess from the title of this piece (tale?) backed into several of the horses, killing them. He was closer to the ground than he thought, you see.

Balloonbus and His Neighbor Shared a Subscription to the Reefer

“Now,” Braindasher quickly continued, “It was a peculiar attribute of this particular balloonbus and, who knows, perhaps all of them, that it was self-aware–”

“Mr. Braindasher,” Alice cut in like a scalpel at exactly the correct gap between the old man’s words and words-to-be.

“Oh, just Braindasher will do,” he smiled encouragingly.

“Um,” Alice fumbled with the notion of actually dropping the formal address, “You mentioned the word ‘piece,’ as if that tale was a kind of written work. Um… I’m just wondering to what extent these ‘tales’ are…” she fumbled again, this time with the daring thought she had formulated.

“Are you in some way the ‘author’ of these discrete units of narrative?” Evan dared to ask.

“Or are you in some way reading them?” Bruce jumped in to postulate before the idea was lost.

Braindasher’s eyes were wide. What a perceptive group this was. But, just how perception would they prove to be? He smiled.

“For now,” he urged calmingly, “Just listen.”

Back in the hangar which served as a dormitory for all the balloonbuses and triplanetrains in thrall to the Suggestible Trapezoid, our balloonbus occupied berth #12. The adjacent berth was where an older model subballoon awaited either one last journey or the inevitable decommissioning. The two flying machines had become familiar with each other over the years, to the point that they now together enjoyed a type of gaseous periodical called the Reefer.

“No quotation marks or italics necessary?” Clark Seville questioned a maintenance worker back at Loft Central after handing in his equine tabulation.

The man in the grease-smeared coveralls turned from the horse-shaped dents in the gondola before him and stared at the bear.

“I don’t like to read,” he said.

Such Subscribers Are Often Noodleragged

There had been several attempts to sell gaseous periodicals directly to customers in a more-or-less traditional manner; at newsstands, bookstores, etc. However, with the decline and disappearance of those types of venues, the only route remaining to getting the various titles into the hands of their “readers” was subscription by mail. Of course, specialized equipment was needed, but those interested in serialized breathable experiences were generally possessed of the means to afford the tanks, masks, hoses, and pumps.

Unfortunately, habitual readers of gaseous works were subject to becoming “noodleragged,” a condition in which the brain is first overwhelmed by sensory plenitude, and then befogged by the residue of continual and regular exposure. One former reader, a sentient balloon, whose internal capacity for gaseous intake was, obviously, enormous, described being noodleragged as like being dragged through the woods after enduring miles of whitewater river.

“The rush of images and text forced through the mind with every inhalation can be exhilarating at first,” he remembered, “But soon one loses the ability to distinguish one page from the next. Stories lose their narrative drive and commercial illustrations become as important as celebrity portraits or fine art.” Luckily, this balloonbus was correctly diagnosed and serviced with the proper attention by qualified people.

Actual people were rarely to be found among the readership of the most popular gaseous publications; The Reefer, mentioned earlier; Robot Identity; The Lure of the Buffet; Obscurity; and Apple Head, among others. This is because, although the appeal of novelty is a powerful one (appeal), most humans lack both the lung capacity to appreciate all that such periodicals have to offer, as well as the focus of mind needed to keep track of where they are in any given issue during the course of multiple “visits.”

Moons Forgotten this National Literature

Both Lucky Whale, the balloonbus operated by Clark Seville, and Ape Clipper, his neighbor and fellow Reefer reader, were removed from their hangar home shortly thereafter and disassembled; the former because his injuries were too great to be repaired within budgetary constraints; the latter because he was long past his operational life and it was determined that the loss of his friend would be too much to bear.

“Speaking of bear,” Dr. France, Supreme Director (in theory) of the Suggestible Trapezoid, addressed himself to Sven Symptom, “What do you think about sending this Clark Seville character to the moon to deal with our little problem there?”

Symptom, enjoying one of Dr. France’s faux cigars in the Supreme Director’s office, nearly choked in surprise.

“Well,” he gasped, “I don’t think much of it at all. His record so far has been distinctly hit-and-miss. In what capacity were you thinking of sending him? Surely not as a primary or even secondary assassin?”

Dr. France, a kindly old grandfather type, shook his head.

“No, no. I was thinking more as an observer. Why not send Bustle with him?”

“Bustle?”

“Yes,” Dr. France emphasized, “Give the two of them another chance. As a team. Speaking of team,” he smiled, leaning forward, clasping his big, old hands on the desktop. “It would be a shame to allow that gaseous subscription to go to waste.”

Symptom considered.

“You have the hose extensions here in your office,” he pointed out.

“Yes,” Dr. France said again, this time with boyish suggestion.

The issue the two men consumed together contained both highly intellectual poetry and several erotic pictorials.

The World of Letters Printing Progress We Tell Stories Well

Before heading home to whatever traditional dwelling he maintained, Old Braindasher stopped by an out-of-the-way suite of offices at the end of a darkened hallway. He kissed the back of Diana’s hand at her desk at the entrance and then proceeded into the office of the Supreme Director.

The days of Dr. France were long gone; the current director was Pepsi Brown, a man of about forty whom Braindasher found in conference with two other men. Such was Braindasher’s standing within the agency that he could intrude without reprimand. It was, however, a few moments before Brown or the other two men paid more acknowledgement to the older man’s entry than a glance.

“That might have been true twenty–thirty years ago,” Brown continued, “But the Trapezoid has always been, at least in part,” here he looked especially at one of the two others, “About subjective espionage.”

The two others, well-known to Braindasher, but not friends of his, exchanged looks. Before either could make any response, Pepsi Brown turned to Braindasher.

“Braindasher,” he hailed the old fellow. “Heading home for the day? How’s the narrative going?”

The old man came nearer. He leaned on Brown’s desk with his knuckles.

“It’s going well,” he informed the Supreme Director. “I think this is the best group we’ve had in a long time. In fact, that’s why I stopped by; This is such a good group–perceptive, doubtful–that I wondered if we might change things up a little.”

“How so?”

“Well, I thought I might implement a more speculative bent–you remember I spoke to you about it once before.”

Brown held up his hand.

“You’re the Teller of Tales,” he smiled, “You do what you think is best.”

Stories Only Narrated in Turns

“Now,” Braindasher addressed his little group, “This journey, this mission or assignment that took Clark Seville and Henry Bustle to the moon; does anyone have any ideas about it?”

The faces of the six people under the old man’s tutelage showed nothing but uncertainty and confusion. Was he asking them what they might have already heard about this tale?

“Meaning what?” Alice wanted clarification.

Braindasher tipped the last drops of beer from his can into his throat before answering.

“Meaning,” he said, “What do you think?”

“We haven’t heard the story yet,” Bruce explained.

“Do you have to hear the story to have an opinion?” Braindasher probed. “Is the moon inhabited? Is it habitable?”

The six stumbled over the correct or appropriate answer.

“I…” Evan began.

“Yes?”

“I’ve heard that, in some way, ‘the moon’ refers to two different objects.” Evan glanced at the others to see if any of them had also heard this.

“Go on,” Braindasher urged as he opened another beer.

“Well, there’s the moon,” Evan waved his hand up in the air, “And then there’s the moon that exists as some sort of,” he dropped his voice, “Secret project, I guess.”

“I’ve heard that too,” Ray added.

Evan threw him a look of surprise.

Braindasher paused in the lifting of his can. He waited.

“Clark Seville visited the moon a number of times in his capacity as an agent of the Suggestible Trapezoid,” Ray made his preamble. “The moon, or secret project, was an earth colony whose appearance was that of a charming European city. It was reached by way of transit capsule.” He looked at Braindasher to see if he should continue.

Only Omnibusey Has the Cleansing Totem You Need to Stay Afloat

“Clark Seville had never before travelled by transit capsule,” Ray continued.

Henry Bustle had to show Seville how to sit in the capsule that would take him to the moon.

“Hold on to the bar,” Bustle told the bear. He smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “Want a snort?” he offered Seville a nip at the pint flask he carried.

“No thanks, I’ll be fine,” Seville answered.

Bustle nodded.

“Yeah, I know you will.”

The journey lasted only seconds. When the bell rang and the exit light came on, Seville stepped out of the capsule and saw Bustle doing the same a half-dozen paces away. Looking up at the “sky,” the bear noted immense artificial clouds being drawn across the underside of the dome in which the moon city lay.

“Smell that air,” Bustle enthused. “It’s like a hot bath in a stranger’s house. Soap you’d never use.”

Seville turned about and took in more aromas than just soap. Someone was brewing strong coffee. Someone else was slicing onions. The platform on which the two agents stood was dotted with ten of the transit capsules. A handful of other people were either leaving the moon or arriving.

“Come on,” Bustle said to Seville. “I know a place where we can establish a base of operations.”

“How many times have you been to the moon?” Seville asked as they walked down into a shady avenue lined with handsome old houses.

“Twice before. The first time wasn’t so bad. Just a little day trip. But the second…” Bustle shook his head as if savoring a hard, salty pretzel. “Lot of blood. A lot of blood.” He brightened suddenly, reaching inside his shirt collar. “Got this medallion on that trip.” It was a silver disc on a chain around his neck. It bore the image of an axe.

Gaining an Awareness of the Uses to Which the Method May Be Put

Julia took up the telling next.

Henry led Seville to a basement apartment in an ancient brownstone townhouse. He had exchanged a few words, probably coded phrases, with a white-haired woman on the landing before she had handed him the keys.

“Is she one of us?” Seville asked as the two agents stepped inside the apartment and Henry turned on the light.

“She doesn’t know what she is,” Henry informed the bear. “You take that room.” He pointed at one of the nearly empty rooms containing nothing more than something that must objectively be labeled a bed. As Seville laid his single case on the thin mattress he heard Henry continue to speak.

“I left a couple of things here last time.”

Seville walked in on his colleague prying boards away from the back of a linen closet.

“Here,” Henry announced. He reached inside the hole and withdrew a cloth bag. Laying it on the floor between him and Seville, he opened it and revealed its secrets. Two automatic pistols, a long metal tube with buttons and slides along its length, and a cone about the size of a can of deodorant were the things Seville saw inside.

“This,” Henry told Seville as he took the cone and stood up, “Is a descroter, otherwise known as a paralyzer cone.” He handed the object to the bear. “You squeeze it very slightly with pressure as much around the entirety of its circumference as you can while sort of willing it to work.”

“‘Willing it to work?’” Seville repeated incredulously.

“Yes,” Henry affirmed. “Its working range is about eight or nine feet. It sends out a paralysis wave that renders the target both paralyzed and unconscious for about… oh, fifteen or twenty minutes, depending on size, weight, and so forth.”

Seville nearly chuckled.

“What about me?” he asked.

Henry looked up at the bear and wondered the same thing.

Tennessee Arbor Industrial

After some hesitation, Kate agreed to narrate.

The street on which Seville’s and Bustle’s apartment was located was lined with trees provided by a company called Tennessee Arbor Industrial. This company had underbid all competitors for the government contract; the only “profit” the company seemed to gain through the arrangement was a townhouse of its own for use by the company’s president, Dan Dolphin. This dwelling was just across the street from the one in whose basement the Trapezoid agents were now making plans.

“Ah, trees,” Dolphin enthused with a sighing vocalization. He was standing in the bay window looking out on Goosevenue Street, the chintz curtains scratching his cheek and nostril as he peered through the gap between them. “People need them–we sell them.” He turned with a smile back to Cal Caribou, his guest for the week.

“And not just sell them,” Caribou reminded his old friend. “But install them, prune them, grow them, remove and exchange them when arboreal fashions shift. Sorry for getting that all out of order,” he added as he raised a glass of sherry to the hole beneath his overflowing moustache.

“Yes. Yes,” Dolphin agreed. He crossed the seriously Victorian room to a painting of a tree that hung on the wall to Caribou’s right. As he stared up and down the lovingly painted bole, from the roots to the crown, he again wondered at the good fortune that had diverted him from his original, youthful scheme of becoming an orthodontist. Oh, Rebecca, he thought, at least you were good for something.

“Now,” Caribou drew his attention, “What about this business you want taken care of?”

The other man continued to look at his painting, but his focus moved from the tree in the center to a few daubs of color in the distant undergrowth that might have equally suggested an approaching party of hunters or maybe better loggers, given the context. But it might just as well have been a whim on the part of the artist.

Arbor Larder Labor Ardor

Seville’s and Bustle’s assignment, according to Alice, was to discover who had been passing information about the Suggestible Trapezoid’s moon operations to Dan Dolphin, the notorious tree baron.

“Discover and terminate,” Bustle clarified.

Seville nodded. He had been practicing using the descroter on random people he encountered in the alley behind the nearby grocery store. He found it fascinating that from the user’s perspective the paralysis wave was visible. A rippling band of black and white that flowed out from the wide end of the cone to embrace its target, the wave dissipated in tiny, popping stars, leaving a senseless body on the ground whose pockets were then easily rifled through. Bustle was teaching Seville the importance of souvenirs.

“So what’s our first move?” the bear-like agent asked.

“Well, technically, moving into this apartment was the first move,” Bustle replied. He explained, “Dan Dolphin lives right across the street. But we won’t worry about him right now. We need to take a look at his tree warehouse in Moon City Three.”

Dressing in the uniforms of two of the warehouse’s employees that they had paralyzed and then locked in the trunk of a rented car, Bustle and Seville were able to get as far as the elm room before being challenged.

“Don’t you just love this job?” an older man with a red bandanna about his throat asked them.

“I certainly do,” Seville replied with a serious demeanor and a look at Bustle for confirmation.

Bustle agreed.

“I think it’s the benefits I like the most,” he stated.

“The feel of the bark,” Seville suggested.

“I meant more the health insurance,” Bustle retorted.

The older man’s eyes narrowed.

“Haven’t I seen you before?” he asked.

Bustle stayed Seville’s move for the descroter.

“Bears,” he laughed.

Labor, in all Seriousness, Demands that the Body in the Barrel Be Identified

Seville and Bustle, now using the names Bruce and Evan, threw themselves into the work at the tree warehouse with a diligence and industry that were met with nods of appreciation from both their supervisor, Barnwell, and old-timers like the red bandanna guy. They would have worked through their lunch break, seeing as how they didn’t know when that was, but were stopped by the sight of tools being downed around them and the easing of the stiff backs of their co-workers.

“What did you bring for lunch?” Evan asked Bruce with a mixture of sarcasm and sympathy.

“I guess it depends on how much money is in my pockets,” Bruce retorted sourly. The “feel of the bark” had outgrown its novelty and charm within the first two hours.

In the break room, while the other employees were opening battered lunch boxes and unrolling many-times-used paper sacks, Bruce and Evan examined the vending machines.

“Not much, is there?” Evan observed.

“I’ve got just enough for a candy bar,” Bruce determined as he bounced a prosthetic fist full of coins. “Want to split it?” he joked as best he could, when an alarm sounded throughout the building. The two agents joined everyone else tearing out of the room. They found Barnwell and a man in a tie standing by an open barrel, their faces grim.

“As you can guess by the title of this piece,” Evan told the others in Braindasher’s classroom, “There was a body in the barrel.”

Bruce nodded furiously at his partner’s words. He turned from Evan and faced everyone. “Seville asked Bustle, ‘That’s not one of the men we—’ but Bustle cut him off. ‘Now’s our chance,’ he said. ‘If we beat everyone back to the break room, maybe we can find some change under one of the machines.’”

“Or on top,” Evan added.

“I’m confused,” Kate announced. “Were they close enough to see into the barrel?”

Braindasher made a note in a small, homemade book.

All of this New Metal London

Later, after Clark Seville and Henry Bustle had shed their disguises and returned to their lair for a much-needed supper, they decided to explore the central part of Moon City #3.

“Otherwise known as New Metal London,” Bustle explained as they rode the bus downtown.

Seville’s gaze was on the increasingly large and “futuristic” buildings outside his window. He said nothing.

“Hey, don’t let it bother you,” Bustle interrupted Seville’s thoughts. “Some guy gets killed and whoever did it shoved him in a barrel. Happens all the time.”

The bear-man’s focus went to the window itself, the glass through which he stared.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Bustle continued, “But it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with our job here. I mean, it probably does, at least tangentially, but it’s nothing we have to worry about right now.”

The bus slowed and stopped.

“This is it,” the former bird announced. He got to his feet and, followed by a more-than-usually taciturn Clark Seville, exited.

“They were just building all of this last time I was here,” Bustle said, as much to himself as his partner. All around them were the gaudy, noisy, and psychically insistent temples of adult pleasure that lunar tourists had come to expect from exposure to a thousand films and television programs.

“Originally only Moon City #1 had this kind of decadence,” Bustle narrated as he prodded and nearly dragged Seville towards the Iron Maiden Aerodrome. “But there was just too much money up for grabs to let the opportunity pass by.”

As they entered, Bustle was handed a drink by one of the many employees dressed as Eddie, Iron Maiden’s mascot, in one of his many forms. Seville, also offered a complimentary libation, waved it away with menacing dismissal and repressed violence.

New Findings Cast Doubt on the Question of Ruth Buzzi or Gilda Radner

As the evening wore on and Henry Bustle got more and more intoxicated, the frustration in Clark Seville’s bear brain began to grow. Despite Bustle’s insistence that each visit to another brand-specific wunderpalast was all part of the “experience” and another opportunity for expanding their knowledge of the environs, Seville suspected his comrade of taking advantage of the situation.

“Oh my god,” Bustle slurred, “What’s that?” They had exited the Metallica Megamuseum and now stood, literally, where the sidewalk ends. A vast space of gray mud stretched before them; a construction site illuminated by a dozen floodlights on scaffolding.

“I think it would be best if we returned to our base of operations for the evening,” Seville suggested with a mighty attempt at calm.

Bustle stepped off the sidewalk and peered closely at the trenches and holes. He lifted the yellow-and-black striped tape demarcating the site over his head and passed within. Seville followed, but snapped the tape apart.

“You know,” Bustle speculated over his shoulder, “I think this is the new Seventies Fun Park, or whatever they call it. Some kind of more family-friend–” his words were cut off as he fell into darkness.

Seville strode forward and looked down at Bustle.

“Are you alright?” he asked of the man in the hole.

“Seville,” Bustle moaned, “Stay away from the booze.”

“I intend to.”

“If you ever pick up the bottle,” Bustle warned as he got to his feet, “You’ll never put it back down.”

“What’s that?” Seville pointed to something beneath Bustle’s foot. He joined him in the hole with one step.

“My god, it’s a hand!” Bustle started to shout, but found Seville’s own plastic one over his mouth.

“Two bodies in one day,” Seville observed.

“You know who has the contract to put trees in here, don’t you?” Bustle mused.

Doubt Blockage Pathogens Wrong Inside

“Could someone be trying to frame Tennessee Arbor Industrial?” Seville wondered back at the apartment.

Bustle, fresh out of the shower, and surprisingly speedily recovered from his drunkenness, dropped onto his half of the sofa. He laid back his head and stared at the ceiling.

“I would prefer to believe the opposite;” he sighed, “That they are responsible. Maybe the dead men were union organizers, I don’t know.”

Seville turned his gaze to the cold, empty fireplace. He opened his mouth several times to speak, but each time decided that what he wanted to say or ask or suggest was superfluous, obvious, or stupid.

“Do you…” he finally began.

“Yes?” Bustle urged him.

“Do you think we’ll find more? More dead men?”

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Bustle laughed. He leaned towards Seville and slapped the filthy cushion between them. “In fact, we’ll probably kill a few ourselves!”

Each agent fell into a deep sleep in his room while the lunar city continued to function, to entertain, to pulse with new growth. Across the street, Dan Dolphin greeted the sunrise holding a cup of tea (three teabags, boiling water.) He stared out his parlor window at the handsome pair of gingkos that framed the sides of the stairs of the townhouse opposite. He thought about his terrarium in his boyhood room. There had been a tiny plastic house with a smiling face painted in one of the upstairs windows. He had always thought of that face as his own.

Having judged his tea sufficiently cooled, he downed the contents of the cup in one go and turned away from the window. It amused him to consider that no one would take his old friend Caribou for a stone killer.

“But that’s what he is,” he said to the little face in his mind. “Even now he is on his way to do another killing for me. Funny.” He smiled.

Inside Lumber Copyright

Anthony and Gabrielle Cartone were rightly proud of their home on the moon. They had achieved in their early thirties what many couples could only hope to achieve after a lifetime of work, worry, self-denial, and saving. A modest two-story house with a quarter of an acre of back yard, their home was worth the equivalent of a mansion on earth. Anthony had partly managed to afford the place by doing much of the work himself, particularly the landscaping. On this beautiful morning while Gabrielle was out running errands, Anthony was making the greatest mistake of his life by planting a sapling he had ordered from Union Apple Tunneling, a fierce and hated rival of Tennessee Arbor Industrial. As he put his foot to the shovel, Cal Caribou was watching. Caribou drew on a pair of gloves and wondered where he would dispose of the body.

The last two men he had killed had also purchased trees from companies that were not Tennessee Arbor Industrial. Although a master of efficient murder, Caribou was not as adept at dealing with the aftermath of his work. That business of the body in the barrel had not gone well. Fortunately, he had known Dan Dolphin for nearly fifty years. Termination– in whatever sense of the word one preferred– for his clumsiness in this regard, was not about to be visited upon him.

He would just have to do better.

Hopefully, the body he’d dumped at the construction site would soon be covered over with cement. Caribou emerged from the rose bushes behind Anthony Cartone like a ghost wearing a walrus moustache. His victim saw nothing, heard nothing, only vaguely felt his shovel being taken from him. None of the neighbors, almost all of them elderly retirees, saw the deed. Even those two legendary men of action, Henry Bustle and Clark Seville, had not seen. They had made the decision to follow Dan Dolphin that morning instead of his guest. As they kept watch on Dolphin, Caribou was rolling Anthony up in a heavy rug.

Copyright Paid for in its Own Time by Investment Season

Clark Seville and Henry Bustle followed Dan Dolphin around the city for six tedious hours. Their observations yielded nothing but a profound understanding of a businessman’s routine.

“Perhaps if I had a better grasp of what the Suggestible Trapezoid’s operations are here on the moon, I might be in a better position to contribute something of value,” Seville posited as he and Bustle followed Dolphin back to Goosevenue Street.

Bustle agreed. The time had come.

“Every powerful entity must necessarily have its counterbalance,” Bustle lectured as they entered their lair, “The Suggestible Trapezoid understands and acknowledges this universal principle, even as we struggle with all our might against our ‘counterbalance.’ This opposing organization is Poser Enumerations.” He said the words quite matter-of-factly, as if discussing a brand of candy from his childhood. His eyes, however, seemed to travel across distances fraught with disturbance.

“And if that seems like overly flowery and yet vague language,” Old Braindasher suddenly interrupted his own take on the narrative, “Well, you’ll just have to trust me. Sometimes one word is as good as another,” he muttered as he leaned down for another beer, but found none.

“Was Odem Sauna an agent of Poser Enumerations?” Alice asked.

Momentarily nonplussed by his lack of beer, Braindasher did not reply. However, he quickly recovered and directed himself to Alice’s question.

“At this point,” he answered with a smirk, “We don’t know.”

Back on the moon events were moving with a rapidity that would confuse a new recruit to the Suggestible Trapezoid. Clark Seville fell asleep in his hollow little room with the untroubled mind of a bear-like being, but awoke to the shocking discovery that he was awakening to a shocking discovery. Upon seeing his friend and colleague Henry Bustle lying in the living room floor dead, Clark Seville had taken his first true step on the path to his eventual transformation into a man.

Investments in Momentary Thought Retainment Belligerency Cut the Cord

There was a cuckoo clock in Sven Symptom’s office. His uncle had given it to Symptom’s mother after returning from two years of army service in Germany. Somehow–Symptom wasn’t clear on the details–the clock had been smashed before he was born. As a child he remembered only the pieces in a large box in the basement. After his mother’s death, Symptom had been shocked to find the box among her possessions. He had thought the whole mess had been long ago discarded. He had forgotten about it.

Now it hung on the wall in his office, fully restored by experts. As Symptom and Seville sat on opposite sides of the desk, neither speaking, at least one of the two awaited the striking of the hour and the appearance of the tiny wooden bird from behind its door at the top of the clock. It seemed to at least one of them that the striking of the hour was taking forever to occur.

Finally, Symptom threw down the papers he held and rose from his seat.

“Come on,” he invited Seville just as the cuckoo clock did its thing.

“I want the assignment,” the bear announced as he and Symptom took their places on the moonlit balcony.

Symptom stared at the ever-full moon.

“Do you say this from a desire for revenge?” he asked.

“I do.” The bear was calm. His voice was even.

Symptom nodded. He turned to look at Seville.

“As things stand, your record with the Suggestible Trapezoid is decidedly… sketchy. You–”

“I will avenge Henry Bustle whether I do it under the aegis of the organization or not,” Seville let the older man know.

Symptom sighed.

“You… did nothing on the moon to forward that desire. Nothing of substance or value,” he added. They had already gone over all this a half-dozen times. Hence, Seville did not now reply.

Symptom half-smiled.

“Show me what you can do,” he encouraged Seville. “All that I ask is that you get them all.”

Thoughts Appear on the Halo Market Pendulous Like the Sheep’s Head

Although not officially qualified to begin the transformation process, Seville was granted permission to receive human hands. Dr. France himself, encouraged by Symptom’s passionate recommendation, had issued the orders, overriding those on the Advisory Board who only saw the raw data, the plain facts of Seville’s failings.

“First we’ll get rid of these,” a technician with the Suggestible Trapezoid’s medical laboratories informed Seville. The latter was sitting in a far-too-small reclining bench; the former was indicating the white plastic paw adapters at the ends of Seville’s forearms. “If you can just relax your mental grip…”

“It might take me a minute,” Seville replied. “I haven’t had these off in five years.”

“Five years?” The technician glanced at the bucket operator standing nearby. It didn’t seem possible. This was one bear who had really wanted to be a man, it seemed.

The smell was brutal. Even Seville’s claws, hidden for so long under the prosthetics, had developed whitish spots. What was left of the fur on the paws was matted and damp, the home to at least one variety of fungus.

“Where did you get these?” asked the bucket operator as he examined the paw adapters.

Clark Seville flexed his paws. They were stiff and painful. He rubbed them against each other.

“My father,” he grunted. “He had me fitted for them. Just before he died.”

Again the two men glanced at each other.

“Put your paws in the bucket,” the operator of the same told Seville.

“I’ll get the transfer matter ready,” the technician told them, leaving the room

“What’s the first thing you’re going to do with your new hands?” the operator asked with a smiling face.

“Wrap them around somebody’s neck,” the bear swore.

Appear Structured in the Very Young and the Very Colorful Downtown

Clark Seville had shaved his face. With a large hat on his head and his human hands at the ends of his coat sleeves, he could pass for a brutish deformity. He stood against the wall next to the entrance to Uncle Shelby’s Attic, one of the new safe-for-families entertainment houses in Moon City Three. Seville watched the tourists passing before him. Some entered the building, some moved on to more appealing venues down the street. More than one child stared at the strange, hulking man.

After more than an hour in place, Seville spotted what he had been waiting for. Two men in scuffed white coveralls bearing the stylized tree symbol of Tennessee Arbor Industrial entered the Attic, each carrying a bonsai in a ceramic urn. Seville pushed his hat back on his head and followed. His hands clutched once or twice as they swung by his sides.

“Ah, the final, crowning touch!” the general manager hailed the two workmen as they approached his perch in the middle of a floor full of sister auctions, whale dinners, and toothy alligators and their dentists, all of them beneath a giant shoe flying about the ceiling. Seville busied himself with a revolving rack of postcards while the manager raved over the miniature trees.

“Oh, by the way,” he suddenly lowered his voice. “While you’re here, can you take a look at the Giving Tree? It’s been giving us a little trouble.” He raised his eyebrows humorously, but frowned.

“Sure–” one of the two men started to say, but was cut off by his comrade.

“I don’t think so,” the second man demurred. “That tree wasn’t purchased from or installed by TAI. We’d have to get a special work order from way up to do anything with it.”

“Oh, come on, fellows,” implored the manager. “I mean, it’s not a real tree.”

“Where is this tree?” Seville broke in. He bared his teeth at the two workmen by way of apology.

Little Cat Car Revealed

Seville entered an immense, darkened room. In the middle of the room, the focus of a ring of spotlights high overhead, was a raised area meant to simulate a peninsula, as it was surrounded by a shallow moat that stretched into the darkness at the back of the room. On this peninsula loomed a tall, smooth-bored tree. The Giving Tree.

A half-dozen children and adults stood at the edge of the moat looking up at the tree. A general feeling of confusion and boredom was palpable, visible, among them. What was this exhibit supposed to do? Led by their children, the adults drifted out of the room to be replaced by another small group.

Seville’s eyes went over the tree once; he was more interested in the heap of earth in which it was rooted. Without bothering to see if he was observed, he stepped into the moat and waded across to the peninsula. The water came up to his waist.

“Mama, that man!” one little girl voiced everyone’s surprise.

“He must work here,” someone else said.

Clark Seville stepped up onto the shore and placed his hands on the tree. He seemed to be getting a sense of its placement. Jerking his hat away, he began putting all his weight, all of his strength, against the tree.

“Get back!” he roared at the tourists below. Scarcely a grunt and a heave later, the tree began toppling forward. The tree’s roots, never seen or mentioned in the original story, were thrown into the light as the tree fell. Seville was covered in the dirt flung up by the uprooting. He ignored the shouts from the people running out of and those of the venue staff now pouring into the room.

The general manager was there, mouth agape, ready to send his teenage army into battle against the bear-man, when he saw Seville, digging through the soil, remove a foreign object.

“Here’s your problem!” Seville announced, holding aloft some kind of child’s toy vehicle.

“Well, thank you,” the manager gulped.

Car and Cat Each on the Rocket Sled Remains

Although the car was a presumably sentient being in the form of a wheeled cat, its driver was the (also presumably) sentient and anthropomorphic cat upon whom it was based. I tell you that these two beings were presumably sentient because one can never quite be sure of another’s sentience. Everyone around you may be nothing more than some kind of animal or automaton. You yourself may be some kind of deluded automaton whose own sense of self is but a trick or only a fraction of the awareness that some theoretically greater being may possess. However, for the purposes herein presented, we may confidently presume the self-awareness of these two, the cat and his car, atop the remains of the rocket sled. Why? Because love has been defined (by whom I don’t know) as the acknowledgement that another being exists in the same way that we do. And we know that we, on some level, exist, and we love this cat and this car.

“What happened to the rocket sled?” Frisco Fingers, the cat, asked of the car, whom he referred to as Edwino, although, like someone outside of our little circle, he couldn’t be entirely sure that the car was really “alive.”

“What do I have to do to get you to believe that I’m a conscious being?” Edwino (we might as well call him that too) demanded, and not for the first time.

Frisco Fingers sighed.

“It looks like something heavy landed on it,” he observed.

“If I say I’m a sentient being, then you must take my word for it,” the car continued, struggling to turn his “face” around to look at the cat.

“Edwino,” Frisco Fingers sighed again, “You’re a toy based on me. How can I take your ‘sentience’ as anything more than an act? A programmed act?”

“Well, you’re nothing but a cartoon representation of an anthropomorphic cat!” Edwino countered.

Many desperate children screamed out the rocket sled’s name.

Rocket’s Dead Cylinder Yo-Yo, You Have My Respect

Clark Seville tossed the officially licensed Frisco Fingers toy aside and looked again into the hole. What he saw made him visibly upset. The general manager, having taken off his socks and shoes in preparation for crossing the moat, wondered at the big beast’s reaction.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“Get these people out of here!” ordered Seville. He flung out his arm in an arc, sweeping everything away. With an effort he mastered himself and took off his big coat and put it down in the hole. He stood up with something wrapped in the coat and stepped down from the little hillock with one stride. His booted foot sent water everywhere.

“What is it?” the manager repeated as Seville neared his side.

Before answering, Seville looked about. The two TAI employees were standing in the entryway.

“Get these people out of here,” Seville ordered again, this time softer, but no less commanding. He watched as the two men shrank from his gaze and disappeared.

The manager announced that the exhibit was closed and had his boys usher everyone out of the room.

“Now will you tell me what’s going on?” he insisted.

Without shifting his gaze from the entryway, Seville lowered his bundle and allowed the manager to see the tuft of hair at one end.

“It’s a child,” the manager realized.

“A little boy,” Seville qualified. “The same little boy that you had ceremoniously plant the tree.”

“I? W-well,” the other man stammered. “He threw the last shovelful of dirt on the tree. It was just a ceremony, as you say. The actual work was done by a team of men from… What’s this about?”

“It’s about a corporation determined to protect its proprietary rights,” Seville decided. “Someone must pay. For every instance, someone must pay.”

Consciousness Evaporated Oviparously

Without Henry Bustle’s contacts and familiarity with the moon cities, Seville had to make do with a rented storage unit for his accommodations. As he prepared a sleeping area for himself inside the egg-like structure, he reflected on Bustle’s oviparous origins. They hadn’t discussed such things much. Seville wondered if Bustle had remembered the day he pecked his way out of the shell.

Although his mind was awhirl with a half-dozen ideas for what to do next, and his being throbbed anew for vengeance, Seville used an ancient bear hibernation trick to calm himself and enter sleep. He watched each breath as he lay down in the darkness, naming each one with some word from the meadows, woods, and caves he had known in the past. Thistle… pinecone… milkweed… frost… carrion…

Outside the storage unit Cal Caribou set up his equipment. He had tracked Seville all day. Too bad about the boy’s body. How had the big fellow known? Well, maybe next time the property developers would go with a certified speedtree from TAI rather than some animatronic monstrosity. Caribou fussed with the hoses and suction cups in an almost prissy manner. He hadn’t used the dry ice of death method in a long time and needed to get it right. Finally he twisted the knob that sent the gas imbalance through the wall of the unit.

The artificial sun was just coming up when Caribou decided to check on his victim. He tried not to think about what to do with body, but the looming chore oppressed him. This would be a difficult one, indeed. Big guy. Put him in a transfer capsule and send him somewhere… odd? Caribou used a wireless backhoe to tear open the hatch on the unit. Yes, there he was, lifeless as a toppled tree. No, that wasn’t quite true. Such a tree could maintain some semblance of life; photosynthetic activity and so forth, for some time after being felled, especially if enough root mass remained in the soil. Caribou took a look at Seville. What a strange looking man.

A Fact-Dissolving Loophole

Perhaps it was the smell of hot plastic that awoke Clark Seville. If so, it must have been particularly penetrating and irritating, for the combination of his ursine self-hypnosis and the dry double ice pumped into his environment had sent him into a deep, death-like state. Maybe it was the rumble and rattle of the transfer capsule as it passed through the ether that disturbed his grizzly dreams. Regardless, Seville did awake, and not a moment too soon (shouldn’t that be late?), for the capsule was about to deposit him in a rather nasty swamp owned by Tennessee Arbor Industrial.

Still somewhat groggy and confused, and in a bit of a panic, Seville lashed out wildly, throwing himself against the door of the capsule. Ordinarily, once the transfer process has begun, powerful ethereal forces surround the capsule, making opening the door and exiting impossible. But, a combination of Seville’s titanic, fear-heightened strength and the fact that the capsule’s sister unit in the swamp had not been maintained properly or, indeed, even used in years, allowed just such a near-miraculous egress.

Clark Seville, however, did not find himself out of the woods yet. He burst out of the capsule only to stumble into a starless void where his feet and lower legs were obscured by a black fog and a distant mountain range silhouettes surrounded his head, all just out of reach somehow.

Instantly regaining control of himself and with no time for embarrassment or recriminations over his display of panic, Seville set about trying to return to the transfer capsule.

“But you will not find it,” a voice behind the mountains told him.

“Henry?” Seville, asked, answered.

“Yes,” the bird replied. He hopped atop a peak and snapped his beak. “But not as you remember me.”

“Henry… Bustle,” Seville suddenly slammed his new fist into his new palm. “I’m here to avenge you.”

Nuclear Ambient Depths

“There isn’t much time,” Bustle advised. “Follow me and hurry.” He gestured with a wing at the other side of the silhouette.

With an effort somewhat akin to the releasing of his mental grip on his prosthetic hands, Clark Seville clambered up the nothingness and fell over the top into an alternate swamp. Here he was confronted by a crocodile that walked on two legs and wore a hat.

“You killed my brother,” the crocodile accused.

Seville sighed. I think it was probably the first time he had sighed in his life. Hard to believe, I know, but it was most certainly the first time he had sighed with such weariness, contempt, and incredulity.

“I haven’t got time for this,” Seville muttered, more to himself than the crocodile facing him. Then, just as he was suddenly realizing that he and his accuser appeared to be underwater, the brother, apparently, of the mechanical crocodile he had disassembled many pages ago, attacked him. The crocodile’s hat remained in place during the subsequent fight, not that Seville noticed this until after he had torn the crocodile’s head off. As he held the head in his hands and casually removed the hat to put on his own head, he heard the voice of Henry Bustle from far away.

“Remember,” Bustled whispered. “Remember what you did before…”

Seville looked about, confused.

“Henry?” he called, but there was no answer.

He looked into the mouth of the crocodile.

There was no little penguin.

There was, however, a little beaver.

“Need a crocodile head?” Seville asked him.

“No,” the beaver replied. “Now, if you had an alligator head…” he suggested with a smile.

“What’s the difference?” Seville demanded with more exasperation that he preferred to reveal.

“Well, an alligator–” the beaver began.

“Never mind!” Seville snapped. “Do you know how I get out of here?”

“Sure,” the little beaver man assured him.

Pertaining Penultimate Snapshot of Rifle and Beard

Ronnie and Donnie had spent the night in the swamp. They had killed several things, but found no satisfaction or pride in these killings.

“We still haven’t got a gator,” Ronnie complained, and not for the first time that day.

“Or a croc,” Donnie added, and not the for the first time, as we shall see when Ronnie replied,

“I keep telling you there aren’t any crocs in this part of the world.”

“Then we need to go where there are,” Donnie insisted. This was pure fantasy, as neither was destined to travel beyond the borders of the state of his birth.

“Hist,” Ronnie suddenly demanded, throwing up a hand aged by more sunshine than his twenty-three years would seem to warrant.

Donnie searched out his companion’s eyes to see where he should direct his own gaze. He then turned to the clump of swamp quince from behind which came the sound of movement. Donnie heard it too; something big. Like Ronnie, he readied his rifle. Their actions were practiced. They crept apart, flanking whatever it was in order to catch in a crossfire. The sound of movement continued, now accompanied by a strange, man-like growling. Ronnie nodded at Donnie. This was it. Premature visions of something stuffed and mounted came to them both. Suddenly the sounds ceased. Ronnie and Donnie moved closer. Something passed through the water between them. Ronnie was the first to react. He turned, keeping his rifle before him. From beneath the dark water a human hand emerged, holding what looked like a cone of some sort. Sparks and concentric bands of black and white burst from the cone’s open end as Clark Seville rose from the water, sweeping the paralysis wave from side to side. Donnie did manage to fire, but his shot only made a hole in Seville’s long, dripping coat. Both men fell. Seville then stripped their bodies of arms and souvenirs before slitting their throats with Ronnie’s hunting knife.

Insight is the Builder

“Well,” Brent began as he took the old man’s seat. He was repelled by the warmth left behind on the chair, but no one could tell from his face. “My name is Brent. I’m in the apprentice program here. What are you guys discussing?”

“Tales of Clark Seville When He Was a Bear,” Ray answered.

“Oh,” Brent acknowledged this with the same intonation one does the uninteresting contents of another’s lunch.

“Did you have to go through all this?” Alice asked.

“No,” Brent shook his head. “As an apprentice, we go through a different set of criteria altogether.” He looked around the room for a moment. As no one had anything to say, he added, “No, we studied the works of Toadsgoboad, in which Clark Seville appears as a character.”

“Was Clark Seville a real person?” Kate asked.

Brent pursed his lips.

“Don’t know.”

“Do you like working for the Suggestible Trapezoid?” Evan asked.

“Yeah, it’s alright.”

Brent suddenly sat up straighter.

“I’ve got an idea; let’s go around the room and say a little about ourselves, what we expect to get out of our employment here at the Trap and so forth,” he enthused.

“We’re under observation, aren’t we?” Bruce accused.

“The ‘Trap?’” Julia repeated questioningly.

“Why don’t you go first?” Brent pointed at Ray.

Ray took some time gathering his thoughts. He had been slouching in his desk. Now he sat up and leaned forward.

“Um, I’m Ray. I come from Tuna Cellar. And… I just want a job where I get to ride around and follow people. It sounds like a fun way to spend the next thirty years.”

“OK,” Brent smiled, nodded, then moved to Ray’s neighbor, Kate. “You now.”

“My name is Kate. I’m from Oriental Beach. My father worked for the Suggestible Trapezoid until he lost his hand.”

The Builder’s Daughter Has a Helmet of Her Own

“The thing that amazes me is that nobody in the class asked who Toadsgoboad was,” Kate’s father Landau later mused.

“Well,” Brent’s father Martin drawled dismissively, “You have to take these reports with a grain of salt.”

“Are you saying my daughter is lying?” Landau, a tall man whose right hand was a genetically modified plant grafted onto his body, gestured at Martin with a cup of coffee.

“No more than I’m saying my son is lying,” Martin countered.

“I’m proud of my daughter,” Landau stated, relaxing again in his rocking chair. He and Martin each sat in a rocking chair on the porch of the old plantation house.

“I’m sure you are,” Martin told his new acquaintance. He wondered if the house had once been part of a real plantation or if it was merely built in a style reminiscent of such dwellings. Was it a good time to ask that very question of Landau? He thought of a better one.

“What department is she working in?”

“Quagmosis Possessive,” Landau replied. “Same as I was.”

“Is that where you lost your hand?”

“What do you know about that?”

Martin took a breath.

“I only know what Brent told me,” he explained.

“Then you don’t know much,” Landau complained, but not too harshly. He was too tired for anger. His smoldering resentment, however, taxed him hardly at all.

“Brent said that Kate said you lost-”

“The Trapezoid took my hand,” Landau interrupted. He seemed about to say more, but suddenly looked at Martin narrowly. “You never worked for the Trapezoid, did you?”

“No, Landau, my friend, as I explained to you earlier, I was general counsel to a multinational landscaping business.”

“Trees,” Landau summarized.

The other man’s gaze fell to Landau’s green hand.

Foreign Obvious Papers

“How long is Mr. Braindasher going to be gone?” Alice asked Brent.

Brent didn’t really know, but speculated that it wouldn’t be very long.

“So, who has an idea about where these tales of Clark Seville come from?” he asked everyone.

Evan raised his hands.

“They’re part of company records,” he answered. It was obvious, wasn’t it?

“Nope,” Brent bit his bottom lip as he looked for another taker.

“Folklore,” Kate suggested.

“Yeah, that’s the right direction,” Brent urged.

“Are you saying they’re tall tales?” Julia sounded indignant.

“No, I’m not saying that,” Brent smiled. Who hadn’t spoken yet? “You,” he pointed at Ray. “Got any ideas?”

“Fresh out,” admitted Ray, holding up his empty hands.

“You?” Brent pointed at Bruce.

“They… come from… France,” the latter joked.

“Damn, that’s close,” Brent enthused.

A knock at the door interrupted the fun.

“Excuse me,” the young man in the emblazoned blazer held up a finger. He went to the door and spoke with someone who couldn’t clearly be seen. The back and forth couldn’t quite be made out either, although more than one in the class later agreed they had heard the words, “But if they don’t finish it now, they’ll never finish it,” or something to that effect. Brent nodded and closed the door. He turned back to everyone.

“Where’s Braindasher?” Ray demanded.

“He won’t be coming back today,” Brent told him pointedly. “This class is on indefinite hiatus,” he continued. “Return to your dormitories and take the rest of the day off. Someone will tell you later where to report tomorrow.”

“So where do the tales of Clark Seville come from?” Evan begged as Brent checked the hall and slipped out.

Papers Matching the Anticipated Remittance Hog Any Gelatin of the Quarter

“And what a hog it was,” Willoughby concluded jokingly. He smiled at Dr. France as he neatened his stack of papers and sat down. Dr. France indulged Willoughby with an indifferent smile in return.

Turning to the others around the table, Dr. France, general director of the Suggestible Trapezoid, asked if there were any other matters that needed to be brought up before he ended the meeting.

Dr. Patience, who had sat unspeaking until now, raised a finger and caught Dr. France’s eye.

“Yes, Dr. Patience?” Dr. France responded.

“It’s about that correlation between table size and the drive for the development of artificial means of conducting meetings,” Dr. Patience announced his topic.

“Oh yes?” Dr. France’s eyes lit up. He had forgotten.

“Yes, I have here a study done by my assistant, Dr. Peace, on the matter,” he began passing copies of the study around the table to the other attendees, “And, well, the gist of it is this: the larger a meeting is; that is to say the greater the number of attendees at the meeting–and we do mean meeting, that is, as distinguished from, say, a convention or lecture, or so forth–the larger the size of the table needed for the attendees to sit at or around.” Here he used his index fingers to indicate the very situation that he and the others in the room now found themselves. “Such large tables as are often required are, ultimately, a waste of space. Solutions, such as tables with an increasingly large hole in the middle, have been tried and, while they may save on wood or other table-making materials, they are still guilty of space waste.”

Dr. France took advantage of Dr. Patience’s pause to ask, “And?”

“Well, quite simply, this is the motivation behind the drive to develop artificial means of conducting meetings,” Dr. Patience summarized. “The desire not to be so wasteful in terms of materials or space.”

“Who is this Dr. Peace he spoke of,” wondered Sven Symptom.

A Remittance Photographer Works in the Tugboat Suit

A full range of gummy sweeteners and moth compellants could be stored in the funnel pockets within the jacket, while all the customary photographer’s equipment found more than enough room in its outer ones. Dr. Peace, being something of a jokester, also enjoyed wearing a plenitude of colorful buttons and badges on the jacket. There was even an iron-on patch on the right hip pocket of his trousers bearing the legend, “The Concert Was Not Enjoyable,” along with a stylized image of Barbra Streisand. Checking himself in the floor-length mirror before heading out, Dr. Peace grinned crookedly.

“I’m ready for anything,” he thought.

Out on the street it was already eight o’clock, 1979. Just enough time, Dr. Peace assured himself, to document the debts that declination demanded. As he walked past the old barber shop he had once patronized, he took a couple of pictures to remind himself of how things used to be. What a charming, relaxing place it had been. His colleagues at the Suggestible Trapezoid might see him as the “young man” among them, but to his contemporaries in the larger world he was hopelessly out of step.

“You mean you don’t like the music?” he imagined someone asking him. In Dr. Peace’s mind of the look on the other person’s face was one of absolute bafflement, befuddlement, and disgust. He wanted to slap him.

Some minutes later Dr. Peace was watching the big freighters out in the harbor. He felt no need to use his camera. “Boats,” he thought, letting the word sink in or down or something.

“Look at the man in the tugboat suit,” a little boy called out. Dr. Peace turned and saw the boy pointing. He was with his parents. The father smiled at Dr. Peace and pulled his child, still staring and pointing, along.

Again, Dr. Peace saw no reason to take a picture. “Tugboat suit,” he thought. Why “tugboat suit?” He liked it though. If he hadn’t been afraid of disturbing his hair, he would have worn a hat.

Works Opprobrium Isn’t a Deterrent

After Dr. Peace returned to his small apartment atop the Wood Merchant Building, he set aside his photographic pursuits and took up the work he had been doing for Dr. Patience. He had already filled several wire-bound notebooks with testimonials, references, facts, and features pertaining to the assumed dichotomy between (and of) the real and the fake.

“What they’re going to do with all this, I don’t know,” Dr. Peace confessed. He glanced in the mirror. He was a young man still, able to talk to women without the slightest worry that they found him elderly and unappealing. Although nominally employed by the Suggestible Trapezoid, he was classified as a contractor and therefore not privy to the organization’s secrets, rituals, lore, or, indeed, its overarching mission.

“Still, it’s interesting, what I’m doing,” he added, looking around for a sock.

A knock at the door interrupted his search.

Answering the knock, he found Sven Symptom awaiting him.

“Mr. Symptom!” He was the last person he would have expected. He told himself that and yet there couldn’t possibly be an end to the number of people he couldn’t be expected to expect.

“Dr. Peace,” Symptom smiled. “May I come in for a word with you?”

“Sure,” the younger man agreed. He stood aside and allowed his visitor to squeeze past, down the narrow entryway and into the crowded work space at the heart of the apartment. Symptom kept going, however, as if intent on his goal. He went out on the tiny deck rimmed with plants that looked out over the streets and buildings below. Dr. Peace stood behind him, smiling. He, too, enjoyed the view from here.

“Dr. Peace,” Symptom addressed his host without turning to look at him. “What do you know about Clark Seville?”

The plants were green and lovely, standing in a miscellany of crockery.

Isn’t Jeff’s Load a Kindred?

“Seville,” Sven Symptom greeted the big bear standing in the doorway. “Come in.” He stood aside and allowed Clark Seville to enter his private residence. “Thank you for coming.”

“I didn’t know if it was a summons or a request,” Seville answered. “If the former, I didn’t know if I was still obliged to comply. If the latter, I didn’t know what would be the point.” He turned and faced Symptom. “I guess I’m here to find out.”

Symptom nodded.

“Have a seat,” he offered Seville, gesturing at a sofa against the wall of the small room.

After Seville had removed his coat and sat down, Symptom began moving to the liquor cart.

“You don’t drink, do you?” he suddenly remembered.

“No.”

“Then neither will I.” Symptom sat in a chair opposite Seville.

“Seville,” he began, “I asked you here because I believe there is still a future for you in the Suggestible Trapezoid. Still a place for you.”

“Does the Executive Committee, Dr. France and the rest, feel that way?” Seville countered.

Sven Symptom held back his reply.

“Do you still want revenge for Henry?” he asked instead.

Seville’s eyes flashed. They looked more human than ever before.

“Yes.”

Symptom nodded again.

“If I… offered you another chance, strictly off the record, you understand, would you take it?”

Seville thought about it.

“With what sort of qualifiers?” he asked.

“I want you to team up with one of our researchers, Dr. Peace. Jeff Peace.”

Seville thought he meant “piece.”

Jeff Says No to the Ongoing Distress

“I’ve already told Mr. Symptom no,” Dr. Peace told Clark Seville, “And now I’m telling you too.”

Seville glanced around the laboratory. Fluorescent lights gave the moss growing everywhere in shallow pans amid the equipment a strangely comforting look. He sighed as he turned back to Dr. Peace.

“I am reluctant to seek the vengeance I crave outside the aegis of the organization,” he said. “If ultimately I have to…” He said no more, not knowing exactly what path he would take. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his long coat. Dr. Peace was transcribing numbers from an indicator on the side of a tank to a clipboard. He was a young man, about thirty years old, with a short, full beard and glasses. The hair on his head was full and black, swept back to a tail that curved up against the collar of his lab coat.

“Vengeance,” muttered Dr. Peace dismissively.

“What is it you do here?” Seville asked. He opened a small refrigerator on top of the counter to his left. Inside he got a glimpse of a severed head before the door was shut by Dr. Peace.

“I don’t think you’re cleared to look in there,” the latter scolded, “Just as I’m sure you’re not cleared to know what we ‘do here.’”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Seville argued. “Symptom says you’re just an assistant and, well, I’m just a recruit, so–”

“Yes,” Dr. Peace interrupted the flow of nonsense, “And I want to move ahead one day. I’m not going to do that by getting killed working with a fuck-up like you!”

Clark Seville loomed over Dr. Peace. He stared down into the latter’s eyes.

“You’re not afraid of me, are you?” he wondered.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” the young man replied. He meant it.

Seville frowned in appreciation.

“In truth, I don’t know what use Symptom thinks you’ll be to me,” he sighed again as he looked into the darkness overhead.

Distress Looming Yogurt for Observing Dreck

So, after Clark Seville told Dr. Peace how much he liked moss, the two became slightly more friendly with each other.

“Have you ever heard the David Bowie instrumental, ‘Moss Garden?’” Dr. Peace asked him.

“No,” Seville replied. “I’m not really into music.”

“Interesting,” Dr. Peace replied.

“Perhaps you would prefer if we collaborated–” Seville attempted to return to the subject which he had come to discuss, but Dr. Peace cut him off.

“What about literature?” he asked.

“Books?” Seville questioned. “No, not really.”

“Films?”

“No.”

“Anything? Besides killing people, I mean.”

Seville closed his eyes.

“I… appreciate pictures,” he finally said.

“Paintings? Drawing? Photography?”

“Doesn’t matter. I just… like pictures.” It had been a struggle to get that word, “like” out of his mouth.

Dr. Peace put on a pair of glasses.

“Symptom was a little vague on the details. What’s your concept of our ‘collaboration?’” he asked.

Seville took a breath.

“I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary that you accompany me into the field,” he suggested.

“What do you have in mind?”

“The man I’m after is, most likely, back on earth. Your contribution would be research.”

“That’s what I’m best at.”

“So I hear.”

“What else do you like?” Dr. Peace wondered with a smile.

“I like to eat,” Clark Seville told him.

Yogurt Allowances in Color, in French

Clark Seville and Dr. Peace went to an intimate (intime) yogurt emporium to put the official seal on their association.

“You may call me ‘Jeff,’ if you’d prefer,” Dr. Peace told Seville as they took their seats amid the moss-festooned grotto at the heart of the establishment, known as Fauve Mousse.

A waitress handed Seville a laminated menu large enough to hide behind.

“I don’t know that I would prefer,” Seville replied.

“Why? Because it would mean I could call you ‘Clark?’” Dr. Peace teased.

“Everything here is yogurt?” Seville marveled as he scanned the menu.

“I’m sure they could put a dead chicken in it if you would prefer,” Dr. Peace suggested with a grin.

Seville slapped the menu down.

“What is with all of this teasing?” he demanded, but not too loudly; he respected the atmosphere.

Dr. Peace took off his glasses.

“I’m just seeing how far I can push you,” he said pleasantly. “If we’re going to work together, we must get the… pecking order straight.”

“Equals,” Seville insisted in response.

“Equals,” Dr. Peace agreed.

Seville resumed his perusal of the menu. He felt the presence of the waitress on the other side of the document.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

“I am,” Dr. Peace was amiable. “Blueberry Fondant Flotsam,” he told her.

“And for you?” the waitress turned to Seville, whom she assumed was either a furry or a lab experiment (she knew Dr. Peace worked in a lab because he always wore a lab coat when he came in.)

Seville glanced at Dr. Peace.

“Anything with a dead chicken in it?” he asked.

Glass Probate Doubly Scanned

“You’ll wear this on your wrist,” Dr. Peace had explained. “Good thing they didn’t take your human hands away as punishment,” he added as he strapped the device about Clark Seville’s wrist.

Seville had looked at Dr. Peace sharply.

“Oh yes, they’ve been known to do that,” Peace assured him.

Now Seville looked into the reflective surface of the device as he entered the old barn. His grandmother had owned a barn like this. Ancient, cavernous, dark except for strips and pinholes of light in the weathered siding. The screen on his wrist indicated that he must head into the furthest reaches of the barn, past the old truck partially covered with a buff canvas tarp, past where Grandfather had killed the snake with a pistol as it emerged from a basket, past the primitive Pepsi machine.

The device on Seville’s wrist flashed a yellow symbol.

The bear stopped moving. He looked around. He looked up. He scuffed away the strands of hay at his feet. Nothing.

There. A sound overhead. In the loft formed by planks laid crudely over the rafters. With no concern for stealth, Seville dragged the old Pepsi machine against one of the wooden poles that held up the roof and used it to clamber up into the loft. No telling if this ancient space could hold his weight. He made his way on hands and knees toward the tiny window in the distance. The symbol on his wrist flashed orange. He glanced at the screen again. Dr. Peace’s fingerprints were everywhere. As the planks beneath him began to crack and crumble, he scrambled forward breathlessly. It seemed the whole structure was collapsing. The sound he had heard, the one that had led him into the loft, had grown without his realizing it, so that now, as he reached the window, its buzzing, spluttering racket engulfed him. He would have jumped from the window into the blackberry thicket below, but he found himself swept along, up and out into a warm summer sky.

Worst Principle thus Raised within the Sleepy Scanner

At first Clark Seville was transfixed by the sight of the landscape below shrinking as he rose higher and higher, but then his eyes were drawn to the symbol on his wristband scanner device flashing red.

“What is that symbol?” he asked himself. “A hand?”

Words flowed across the screen beneath the symbol.

“Getting warmer.”

Clark Seville was in the gondola of a balloon, yet that of a balloon the like of which he had never seen. It was a flying machine, seemingly cobbled together from a thousand disparate sources. Flaps and rudders, wings and springs; all these contributed to his galloping, soaring flight. He looked back. The barn was hard to locate at first, but there it was, its sides fallen away, the roof spreadeagle among the treetops. This… ride he was now on must have been coiled within the barn, waiting for something, him, to release its energy.

Seville looked at the device on his wrist again. For the first time he noticed the band itself. It was an attractive adornment made of leather and silver. He had never worn jewelry. Did he look… sexy?

The screen was blank. Had he lost contact with Jeff, safe back among his moss in the hypnotic techno lab? He tapped the screen.

“Wait…” came the word.

Seville glanced about. He thought he could see the curve of the planet. Looking back he thought he caught the words, “NOW! JUMP NOW!” fading away.

Shaking off a rising panic of indecision, Seville climbed onto the edge of the gondola. He held onto the ropes and steeled himself for the next insanity. There. It was all true, all right, capital ‘A, capital ‘R.’ He bared his teeth and jumped, his long coat trailing behind him like a cape.

The Ancient Wall Once Held Our Sleeper

“And so,” Brent concluded, “That’s how Clark Seville landed on the other side of the wall that forms the barrier between the earth and the back side of the moon.” He had removed his blazer and now sat with the back of his chair facing the audience.

“What?!” Ray demanded. “This is crazy! You’re asking us to believe a bunch of… of tall tales?”

“Well…” Brent demurred. “That’s partially what the whole legend of Clark Seville is–”

“Excuse me,” Julia interrupted, “But what has this got to do with our jobs here? Is this a cult or something? We have to accept some kind of crazy mythology in order to be good employees?”

Brent glanced at his watch. He gave the doorknob a pointed look.

“Kids,” he began.

“Kids??” a few in the room expostulated.

“This is just a fun class, it’s all part of your orientation, it’s mandatory, so why no just go with it? I don’t even think you’ll have to pass a test or anything.”

Finally the door opened. A hand beckoned Brent out into the hall. The three men and three women heard whispering and then Brent saying something firmly in response. Brent came back in the room, grabbed his blazer, and urged everyone to “hang tight.” He then left.

The people left turned to each other and loudly discussed their treatment. Even those most worried about their assumed observation gave vent.

“This is bullshit,” Evan insisted. “I don’t think I want to work here anymore.”

“Will they let us leave?” Alice asked. “Now that we know the ‘secret?’” She held her fingers up to make air quotes, but quickly dropped them as gas filled the room and everybody fell asleep.

Sleeper’s Fancy Restaurant Woods

The device on Clark Seville’s wrist was showing an old John Wayne movie. Seville clapped his hand over it to keep it from distracting him. So, he thought, he had made mistakes in the past… and he’d probably make them again in the future. But the important thing is that he wasn’t making one now. And, he added as he got to his feet, even if it turned out he had made yet another mistake, the important thing, the really even more important thing, was to pretend that he hadn’t made a mistake, to play the part of the infallible hero, the one whose actions were directed on a moment-to-moment basis by some infallible inner sense.

But I probably should never tell anyone that, he thought as he made his way to the little house in the woods. He could see cars parked out front. This was the Penguin’s Place from earlier, wasn’t it? Moving through the unlighted periphery around the building, Seville could now see that it had become an establishment of some sort. A restaurant, it seemed. He moved closer.

His hat was long gone. His coat was a muddy, ragged mess. Several gashes to his face had healed, but were now furless, revealing pinkish purple skin beneath. As he crawled among the cars, he glanced at Dr. Peace’s gift one more time. The symbol, this time a circle in green, pulsed sedately. Thanks, Jeff.

Seville crouched beneath a window and slowly raised one eye above the sill. It was a restaurant and, yes, there was the penguin, now grown tall and stout and suited. The proprietor. He was talking and laughing with a seated couple, a man with an enormous moustache, and… not a woman exactly, but some sort of potted plant. What did Jeff have to say to this?

“The man’s name is Cal Caribou,” Dr. Peace, back at the lab, was bellowing into a microphone, but his words were translated into silly little pictures of hearts and pistols and frowny faces and piles of shit.

Barcelona Shaving Scene with Mira Sorvino

My father, when showing me how to shave (“teaching” would be an inappropriate word, given our relationship and my general attitude towards him,) told me never to shave “sideways.” I thought he meant never to move the razor itself sideways, as one would move a knife when cutting bread or something. I thought this was obvious and merely nodded in acknowledgement, as if to say, “of course, of course.”

Years later a friend of mine showed me a scene from the film Barcelona wherein the protagonist is in bed with two girls and is describing having shaved against the hair for many years before finding out that one is supposed to shave with the hair for better effect. He worried that if he had had a son before knowing this he would have passed on incorrect information.

Again, years passed and a situation arose in which I was shaving in front of my father. In order to clear the path over my lip, I drew the razor (one of those plastic, disposable ones) along in an arc, as if I was painting a rainbow in a single stroke. My father commented, “I don’t see how you can shave sideways.”

This showed me that what he had meant all along was not to move the razor from side to side while holding the razor perpendicular to the facial horizon, so to speak. He had wanted me to shave in several downwards movements while moving over the lip.

I immediately thought of the scene in the film and correlated it to the shaving history of my own life, and have done ever since, seeing in the whole thing the history of misunderstandings between fathers and sons. I still shave “sideways.”

Now, Mira Sorvino was in the scene with the protagonist in Barcelona. Who the other girl was I don’t know. Maybe she was the only girl, I don’t know. It’s been a long time. I just want to say that she did not deserve the Oscar for her performance in Mighty Aphrodite. The movie wasn’t that good itself and it was sub-par Woody Allen. The Academy only gave it to her as a show of support for Allen after the whole scandal with Mia and her wrath.

Shaving Balloon Academy

As Clark Seville burst into Mr. Penguin’s Little Place in the Woods without the slightest concern about his appearance or the needs for stealth or subtlety, he might have, had he any knowledge about such matters, remembered or been remembering the episode of Three’s Company in which Chrissy learns to shave a man by practicing on a balloon. I say this because, when Seville yanked Cal Caribou up from his seat by his necktie and held him suspended in the air so that his expensive shoes dangled and flailed about seeking life-saving purchase, he grabbed a carving knife from the table and began brutally hacking away at the moustache three or four inches away from the tip of his own bear-like snout.

Of course, several guests and employees or Big Penguin tried to intervene, but Seville’s monumental presence, as well as his booming, roaring voice, kept them at bay. It also helped that, once he had finished bloodily denuding Caribou’s upper lip of facial hair, Seville threatened any interfering on-lookers with the same knife.

“I thought I recognized you,” Seville growled into Cal Caribou’s eyes. “You’re the man who killed my partner. And, I think,” he added in what was to be one of the last losses of self-control he was to allow himself in his long and notorious career, “YOU’RE THE MAN WHO TRIED TO KILL ME!!”

He started to plunge the knife into Caribou’s throat, but, catching sight of his victim’s dinner companion, thought better of it and, instead, snatched the little tree from its pot and forced it, inch by inch, down that same throat. The expensive shoes dangled and flailed about more furiously, but, like the universe itself, eventually just stopped.

Clark Seville threw Caribou’s body down on the table to join the other dead meat. As he exited the restaurant he noted the mechanical alligator’s head mounted on the wall.

The Academy is Now Open in So Completely Forward a Manner

“Thanks, Brent,” Old Braindasher said softly to the young man walking beside him.

“You’re welcome,” Brent replied. He didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t think that what he had done deserved much praise or gratitude. Foolishly, perhaps, he added, “Just following orders.”

Braindasher glanced at the young man. He smiled.

“Admirable,” he noted. “But you should always question ‘orders,’ even if only to yourself.” Sometimes you had to keep your doubts to yourself, however, Braindasher thought. “That’s part of what this class is all about.” He pointed with his thumb back the way they had come.

“I don’t remember having to go through all… this,” Brent waved his hand in the same direction.

“You don’t?”

“Well, I remember ‘Tales of Clark Seville,’ but we didn’t learn it this way, did we?”

They had reached the end of the darkened hallway. Braindasher pushed open the door under the illuminated ‘EXIT’ sign. Afternoon sunshine overwhelmed them both for a moment. They stepped down into the barren courtyard. The playground equipment could be seen across the pavement about a hundred feet away.

“I knew Clark Seville,” Braindasher told Brent.

The latter said nothing. He already knew this and was a little sick of the subject.

“He really was all the things we say about him—and more.” Braindasher emphasized his last words strangely, by gliding his palm horizontally left to right, as if covering every possible topic.

“Yes, but weren’t there many other agents, really… great agents, that we don’t celebrate in such a grand, mythical manner?”

Brent and Braindasher crossed the pavement and walked onto the playground. Braindasher sat down on one of the tall swings and let Brent push him for a while.

Forward Sepia Breakfast

Back in the darkened hallway was a framed photograph. It hung between the fire extinguisher and the water fountain, but high enough on the wall that no one would brush it with their shoulder and also, that hardly anyone ever paid any attention to it. It wasn’t labeled in any way. No one but a few old-timers like Braindasher, also known as Brian Rashid, would be able to tell you who those people in the photograph were.

The photograph was relatively large, about twenty-four inches by sixteen, oriented landscape-wise. It showed a group of people seated around a table in some dining room somewhere. Evidently the people were eating breakfast. It was obvious; the food on the plates, the setting—it was breakfast-time. Everyone was turned to face the camera and, more or less, smiling. Everyone, that is, but for a very large man in a suit and tie. He was seated at the extreme right and stared straight ahead, so that his chiseled profile was on display, with its Eisenhower-era astronaut’s haircut and crow’s feet. He looked like a man who, if he indeed, ever smiled, would smile in either grim satisfaction with just one side of his face or in unmitigated delight at some personal, private thing that no one else would understand. He held a butter knife in one hand while the other, partially obscured by his left-hand neighbor’s elbow, was offset by a large chronometer of some kind about its wrist.

Across the table from the very large man was a smaller man with boyish features under a mop of black hair. He wore a full beard and glasses. Unlike the very large man, he smiled at the camera, mouth slightly open and teeth on view. He even held aloft a juice glass, whether in tribute to the act of being photographed or in readiness to drink is not known, even by those rare, dwindling few who were there that day, who sat at that table, who know the names of those in the picture, or who learned their names later, before it was too late.

Lance Ash

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Lampclouding #19

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