7-28-05                                        MORE FOR LES 

The hitch had come undone in the earlier may lay.  The line flapped about with the jib in the coursing gale as Les grappled with it.  He had absolutely no idea what he was doing.

“What the hell’re you doing?!” Charlene screeched at him from her frog squat within the battered schooners partially swamped hold, “Have you any idea what the hell you’re doing!?”  It was rhetorical. Charlene expected nothing from Les.  “Tie it!  Just tie it and get in here!”  His welfare wasn’t really her concern.  He was just the only one left.  If Les got swept overboard, she’d be all alone, and she didn’t fancy the notion of floating around the north Atlantic on a disabled craft all by herself.

 

“Get in here you nit!”

 

The heavy canvas sails rolling flap wriggled Les around the deck like a rag doll on a string until, by chance, surely, he was hurled across and hooked by a starboard cleat.  His stiff, frozen fingers haphazardly knitted the line through and around the cleat as another wave slapped sharply up against the hull, pitching his small frame along the mahogany deck.

 

Now was the harder part.

 

For life’s a pitch black nightmare of a thing when you think about it at it’s nuts and bolts level, which Les did, often – too much, said his wife, Maureen, who was not along for the ride.

 

“A self aware creature,” Les would often think, “mindful of it’s own future annihilation, without rhyme or reason to put to the whole wretched experience; without any clear purpose; no point; no trajectory or philosophy of significance by which an agreeable context might be arrived at; a context in which such a creature might feel justified in all the wakening and sleeping and shitting and eating involved. 

 

“Christ.” He’d think, “No wonder people’re so nuts, kneeling down and looking up for something more promising than mere terrestrial subsistence.”

 

But mere terrestrial subsistence is all Les could hope for, all he could petition the courts for, all he would ever get. 

 

Some four decades previous, Lester Charlston had been was born profoundly afflicted with a deep and abiding certainty that somewhere, everywhere, pretty much anywhere, there were others – many who he would almost certainly never, ever meet – who enjoyed life in a manner well past his understanding, much less his reach.  This certainty was made worse by the objective fact that he was absolutely right; for Les was a social class bottom runger who was virtually destined to become a convict, after all, and as a consequence would be entitled to nothing but his bread, space and daily commute.

 

It was the rest of society who were such others who had so much more than Les.  Expertly adulterated beyond anything his puny mind, his puny body could challenge, these citizens in good standing had way more fun than Les could even imagine. 

 

Thanks to the universal administration of synthetic pharmacologic/nurologic booster protocols, citizens  I.Q.’s were made so artificially deep, Les would have drowned if he ever even attempted to engage any of them in any kind of  significant discussion; a pan-physiological steroid regimen built citizens bodies into a kind of fat free muscular slate that could easily batter Les to a pulpy red if such impossible discussion were ever to turn to physical conflict, which it very well could – for there were no more prisons, guards, bars or protracted incarcerations for the rebel/criminal set in the new America; just simple, universal inferiority of mind and body sufficed to stave off the criminals destructive antics.

 

This new paradigmatic shift of social order had been forged through the withholding from convicted persons all the bio-chemical enhancers in nation wide use, rendering the law abiding citizenry near supermen, comparatively, to the convicted, inferior, unadulterated human frailty which was so clearly evident in Les.  Citizen’s lives ran longer, stronger and better than his and they always would…for he was a convict and they were not.

 

Whether Les were a murderer, a rapist or a mere progenerator of internet fraud (which he was), he would be a banished personage, forever left out of the great, synthetic, evolutionary leap taken by the law abiding free citizens of the new America.  Les moved in common spaces with these same citizens who would be holding him in check through a kind of benign abuse for the rest of his life; for once convicted, one became a lifetime member in this new underclass of easily exploited reprobates. 

 

That’s why it was such a unique situation for Les, a convicted plebe, to find himself trapped in a kind of life or death situation with his bosses glamorous, beautiful, bio-genetically perfected wife, Charlene, but that’s exactly where he was: standing in knee deep salt water below the deck of what had been a spectacularly well appointed, multi-gazillion dollar yacht before pirates laid it to waste and killed Charlene’s fourth husband, Philip, along with an assortment of friends and family.

 

“Philip was a titan among men!” Charlene lashed out at him, coming forward, full flush, warm and from out of absolutely nowhere, “You plebe!  You couldn’t've matched him in any endeavor.  No matter how trivial or complex, he would have always bested you.  He would never have let this happen.”

 

“Yes,” admitted Les.  Facing the truth had become a habit with him in recent days – particularly focusing on his inadequacy in virtually every conceivable regard when compared with Charlene’s now deceased, shark bait husband -”but he’s dead and I’m alive and that gives me an edge he doesn’t have regarding our getting out of here and avoiding a terrible disaster neither of us wants”.

 

Les flopped backward into a swamped captain’s chair to punctuate his burgeoning rebellion against Charlene’s “assumed superiority”, as he called it, despite the fact that it was true, by and large, that she was his physical and intellectual superior.  She was the product of the full-on citizen chemical protocols: she was lean, strong, sharp and smart as a whip; she could have taken Les apart eight ways from Sunday, physically and intellectually, but she was scared.  Plain and simple.

 

She’d never been on her own before and hadn’t a clue how well she’d fare without some reliable, or – considering Les’ computer programmers physique – even marginally unreliable back up in the form of another persons presence.  Charlene Quintock-Taylor never took chances in life and Charlene Quintock-Taylor wasn’t about to start experimenting in that direction when her very survival was at stake. 

 

By way of contrast, Les was dealing here with a trickier set of circumstances than those dull ones he’d come to expect and rely on as a digestible form of reality since his conviction some twenty years previous.  Normally, Les worked in the snail-mailroom of one of the New Americas preeminent  giganticorps. 

 

Giganticorps were invented round about two thousand twenty eight and followed the same line of reasoning that dictated the circa nineteen eighties need to invent the notion of supermodels – the reasoning: size matters.  In the former, bigger was determined as better;  the latter was adjudged with a contrary view of girth as virtue.  So, instead of genetic freaks with eating disorders and nicotine addictions, giganticorps distinguished themselves by gorging; quickly hollowing out entire industries using simultaneous hostile takeovers in a manner that, in the words of a leading social critic of the time, “laid bare the vaunted hypocrisy of open market economics.”

 

“The avaricious among us” the judge had said at Les’ sentencing, “will suffer in fear among us.  As we had endured their headlong recklessness, so too will they suffer the tender mercies of their mental and physical betters.”

 

The judge was a bit of a grandstander.

 

Never mind that Les was non-violent, that he’d hurt no one with his crime – he was a high school student at the time, bullied, dismissed, outcast and isolated.  But the high minded state of crime and punishment in the new America was simple: no excuses – and it played out in predictable form in Les’ regard.

 

Of course the new America had its roots in the old America, which had been spawned by the old Europe of centuries previous.

 

Back then, back in the old country, purges and putsches and other devices of the ubiquitous ethnocentric cleanser type were in wide use.  The aim: repeatedly fucking over their poor in aid of giving their ruling classes yet another glorifying leg up the social ladder.  The problem: inadvertently, they came to dump the refuse from their part of the human experiment on an unsuspecting continent.

 

It isn’t surprising how pissed they became on seeing their barbarian subclasses turning the tables on them in the global power game.  Nobody wants someone they knew as a janitor to turn into a project director.  The concept of social mobility may be an enchanting notion, but, “in fact, it would begin an erosion of the world order into odious meritocracy,” according to a different leading social critic of the time, “and nobody really wants that level of radical social realignment – not even the under classes”.

 

So ships became available, steerage purchasable and out from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and much of the rest of Europe they came, generations of used and abused peasants and under classers, immigrants who flocked from where they weren’t wanted to where they were sorely needed – if not for their skills, which were plentiful by any standard, then at least for their physical presence – since the first few boat loads which landed in the new world a couple century’s previous had so wantonly depopulated the indigenous peoples, new workers, consumers and victims were in alarmingly short supply.

 

So Les’ ancestors, like most present day convicts, came by way of a nauseating journey from the bottom of a place of stratified social abuse to a place which held the promise of an eventual graduation from abused to abuser – the only other way to go, apparently – a place where random chance crossed with bloodless cunning might in time make a pauper to the right of the Atlantic ocean a prince to the left.

 

It was cheap irony, then, that Les and Charlene were at the moment lost floating somewhere in the middle of that big, deep, erratic blue space.  Les had been in the legally mandated indentured employ of Charlene’s new husband, Phillip, before a pirate skewered the man with a harpoon.  The trip had been called on the occasion of Phillip’s wedding to Charlene, which came off without a hitch and had been turning out quite a taut little upper crusty social affair before the may-lay blew it all the shit.

 

So Charlene wasn’t making their present difficulties any better by refusing to remove the wedding dress.

 

“We’re eventually gonna have’t swim for it y’know” Les assured her, “and that thing’s gonna prove cumbersome.  Even though I know you could probably swim the English Channel without breaking a sweat, no sense handicapping yourself to that degree.  I’ll keep up.”

 

“It” she responded, in a snit, “what ‘it’?”

 

“What?”

 

“We’re going to have to swim for it, you said, so I said what it?  We’re adrift.  There’s no rudder.  No main mast.  My fingers are pruning from all this damned water” she said, slapping at the hip deep pond that surrounded her in what used to be a billiard room.  “What it exactly, do you expect we’ll be swimming for?”

 

Les, who pushed for optimism instinctively but seldom felt any, hadn’t worked out the specifics of this: trapped on a disabled vessel, drifting like a cork.  He assumed swimming would factor in somewhere along the line – but that was Les, the mannered optimist.  He still figured they were going to survive their ordeal.  Charlene thought nearly certainly that they would not.

 

“We’re in the middle of a god forsaken nightmare” she snapped “Whatever happens, live or die, I’m going formal.” 

 

She yanked her soaked train around her hips and flopped into the captain’s mates chair across form Les.  She eyed him with some frustration.  He eyed her right back.

 

“You think you’re better than me, don’t you?” Les blurted.

 

“What?”

 

“You do.  You think you’re superior to me in virtually every way, don’t you.”

 

“Measurably so. ” Charlene was nodding, blandly.

 

“You think you’re smarter…”

 

“Certainly.”

 

“Stronger.”

 

“Without a doubt.”

 

“And simply, beyond any argument to the contrary, you feel that your very life is worth more than mine.”

 

“Worth?  I wouldn’t go that far.”

 

“Why not?” he shrugged, “Why go all coy now?  You elitist.”

 

“How dare you!” She was stung, for the accusation was an affront to an essential (though toothless) aspect of Charlene’s idiom.

 

“I don’t have any particular distaste for the masses,” she intoned, as if by rote, “I understand their predicament.”

 

Les was unimpressed.

 

“Listen, elitist: Nothing but nothing instills distaste for the masses as being born and forced by circumstance to live among them,” he assured her. “You see the truth from that vantage; a beast eyed view of the simple, wasteful, foolish creatures we are - all of us -is most disheartening, but it is as factual as the nose on anybody’s face…even that perfect, surgically sculpted dot you’ve got in the center of yours.”

 

Les knew what he was blathering about.  At eighteen years of age, his remarkable skill with computers combined with a spotless police record to render him eligible to transcend “the shit hole social order” to which he would often claim (at inopportune moments) to have been “randomly, regrettably born”.  For all his clean nose living and computer science brilliance, Les was entitled to the first of a multi-fold process whose end would have rendered him more like a Zeus than the pasty ape descendent he was today.

 

The chemical enhancers Les was to have received would have been plugged into him in the form of a set of tiny, subcutaneous patches inserted under local anesthetic and devoid of appreciable side effects.  As a nuvo-protocitizen, the process of evolving up and coming of age in the new America was as bio-chemical as it was a philosophic, symbolic, ritualistic accidence to a state of recognized maturity within the tribe, town, city, nation state or corporate oligarchy (pick your poison) from which one sprung.   

 

Proto-citizens were given a gradient of physical and mental boosters in concert with their age; the nuro-pharmacology and steroids routinely began slowly at first and then ever more rapidly the daily milligrams and drug consistency would rise to “saturation point,” where it would hold steady from early adulthood through deep old age.

 

HARD, COLD FACT #1: All of natures gifts were temporary in the low grade neighborhoods of the new America, before booze and nicotine took the lesser qualities sooner and the greater later to create a wheezing stagger of a being that multiplied instinctively, ad-nauseum to form innumerable, desperate, ad hoc communities that studded the landscape of the new America; but the bedeviled young bloods of any given moment within any given community were always temporarily stronger within their plebe set and since natural aggression  can only be vented in just so many ways, necessity (that invention mother) drove the strong of a given community to routinely prey on the weak among them, those within easy reach. To be sure, they would have had scant luck finding anything even vaguely resembling weak or bulliable out in the real world, among the citizens.

 

Over time, Les’ upgrade would have got him some sweet pay back against former tormentors. But the assorted sprains and breaks, scrapes, cuts and such aside, it was to be so rich, the revenge Les would have been able to reap with his new, chemically improved self.  To posses with ease all the social privileges every one of those cretin us fellow plebes would have dearly wanted but could never ever have.  This kind of ice cold revenge was an intoxicating prospect to Les’ adolescent mind set at the time.

 

By age eighteen, most neighborhood-ites had broken in, beat up or otherwise violated some law that ended in a criminal conviction and lifetime exclusion from the society-wide chemical enhancement that Les was on the verge of receiving – designer pharmaceuticals were to boost Les’ cerebral functioning beyond trade school pre-requisites into the doctoral thesis range while his physical strength and endurance were to be enhanced light years beyond the asthmatic drunken figures and temporarily taut young bloods populating the place of his boyhood abuse. 

 

“He thinks who the hell he is” was the usual Brooklyn-eese slight Les would hear whispered as he passed by a clotch of the neighborhood ooh-ahh squad.  Loosely translated, what was being suggested by these ubiquitous hang-abouts involved a kind of unwarranted arrogance on Les’ part, which wasn’t a completely incorrect assessment of his ego.  This slight would usually whip an already conflicted Les into greater anxiety over his true place in the social order, so who can say if he jumped or was pushed into violating an arcane internet law and deep sixing his future?

 

Since early childhood, Les had shown himself an A-1 brilliant deviser of complex geometric matrix generators – a skill so confounding intricate, it would sometimes be likened to the mad hatter world of chaos theory and made old school pc programming seem a spastic mental exercise – so he shouldn’t have got caught hacking into and irradiating some data from a secure uplink for the justice department concerning the arrest and conviction particulars of a girl in the neighborhood named Pepsi, who had ‘captured my god damned soul’, as he’d put it at the time of committing the transgression.

 

He shouldn’t have got caught, but he did.  Who can say why?  Certainly not Les. Certainly not he, for he had asked that same question of himself for the last few decades and the best response he could come up with figured somewhere around 20% uninspired rationalization and 80% shoulder shrug.

 

Thanks specifically to Les’ pubescent contribution to the design of the operating system for the nations central geometric matrix generator, in the time it took to finish the gesture that momentarily linked his personal home computers hard drive to a couple of official, factoid laden, supposedly secure files, his crime had been detected and without even being physically shackled and paraded into court, Les was informed that the incontrovertible evidence and attendant facts had been submitted, mulled and rendered sufficient for conviction and with that – in that flash of time – a digital permafrost was cast over Les’ chemical upgrade and entire future forever.

 

“Yes, but what’s in store for me now?” Les wondered aloud to Charlene, who was seated at the prow.  The storm having subsided and the sun having replaced it, he and she sunbathed on deck of the drifting craft.  By now she had abandoned the train and tiara but kept on the scoop neck bustier and slip.

 

“I mean, you’re set: A citizen with a mansion, an upper east side penthouse and a huge ass inheritance.” Les said, stopping to consider the ramshackle wreck the schooner had been turned to and added “less one big ass yacht, I suppose.  But me.  What’m I gonna do now.  My employers gone.  Instead of rendering us invisible to the electronic triangulation of high seas pirates, my nautical cloaking system seems to have actually…alerted them to our presence and lead them to us…there’s just no way that’s going to look good on a resume.  I mean, clearly, when we lost your husband, I lost my job, too, so, what’s my crummy life got in store for me now?”

 

“Well” Charlene postulated with a shrug, eyes still closed and bronzing, “I guess utter devastation and ruin would be in order; a catastrophe of disintegration enveloping all your life’s dreams in a matter of seconds; damnation of a sort seldom seen much less experienced by anybody so lowly and rough hewn from the get-go; people like you for instance, from a shallow order of peasantry. That,” she finished, finally, “I’ll bet that’s what’s likely in store for you now.  Something along those lines”

 

The fact was they were both right.  Charlene was set and Les was screwed.

 

The unscheduled pirate brouhaha had served Charlene’s true purposes nicely: setting her up (in ever greater splendor) for life.  This had been her intention from the get-go with Phillip, as it had been with her previous three hubbies, citizens all, aged and well and truly loaded to boot. 

 

Citizens married citizens as a rule (of law) and, as the citizen pool was ever shrinking and convicted pencil necked geeks like Les were gaining in number in the New America, a social symbiosis occurred where by an old money bags with congestive heart trouble contracted with a young hottie to form marriages of social and/or procreative convenience.  Charlene and Phillip had entered into one of a procreative nature and so its outcome, although a bloody mess, was not entirely out of line with the official plans for all concerned.

 

Charlene’s personal coffers had got their much needed refill and Phillip had managed to squeeze a couple hundred seventy two year old spermatozoa into Charlene with adequate force to penetrate one of her twenty six year old eggs – and so, a son and heir would be born, but some nine full months hence, as consummation had come neatly sandwich between nuptial conclusion and pirate invasion. 

 

In the final analysis, both citizens got what they’d bargained for, what they’d planned for – provided Charlene lived to successfully deliver the Quintok-Taylor heir.  But that’s the thing with plans…plans are often pretty cheap and are by no means fool proof.  Plans are like the padding that insulates ones true objectives from the rough and tumble of the real world.  Plans buy time to execute ones next move – ones real next move.

 

Several decades previous, at eighteen years of age, Lester Charlstons real next move involved a plan to get Pepsi off the convict rolls, on the citizenship protocol rolls and into his new, improved future life.  Les didn’t just want to hug, suck and fondle Pepsi…he wanted her to be his new, improved future wife, too.  Les was a forward thinker.  Always.

 

Pepsi, it should be admitted, a nimble, nubile sexual hell fire on wheels, was a good deal nutzier than she was by nature adventurous.  Her criminal conviction had come at age fifteen by way of trespass on the grounds of area 51, where she was picked up wandering in the middle of the New Mexico desert. 

 

Convinced she had been deposited in the Brooklyn neighborhood where she’d lived her entire life; dropped off, abandoned by “space aliens from the past.”  All Pepsi claimed to want at the time was to “re-establish communication” with the space aliens so she could return to “where the hell I god damn belong!”

 

Pepsi clearly had a number of things going on in her head of a scrambled nature that routinely made her both an ill-match for the pharmacologically enhanced of society and yet staggeringly, erotically fuckable on a regular cycle with the crem-de-la-crem of cool neighborhood young blood types.  Prior to the announcement of Les’ impending good fortune, she had scarcely noticed him beyond a few circumstantial encounters. 

 

She knew his name, he knew, and had used it on three occasions to date.  Les kept count.  The first time had happened the previous summer and was his favorite of the lot.  It had happened spontaneously, in wide public circumstances and involved a sexual innuendo that conspicuously rated Les in an affirmative context for the first time in his life.

 

“Whoo-hoo, Lester!” Pepsi had bellowed from among friends at the passing Les, “hot buns!”

 

She may have been a little drunk at the time.  She had hollered similar accolades at others that night, but still…

 

Kids from the neighborhood usually spent summer nights drinking at the point, which was a euphemistic appropriation of a phony-ass scenic ideal lifted from the ashes of the old America.  This Rockwellian allusion described what was in essence just a concrete slab that jutted out into an ocean inlet and sat atop a submerged shaft designed to vent overflow from the neighborhood sewage treatment plant.  It was the place for pubescent snogging in the hood due to its relative inaccessibility and the scattering of wrecked automobiles left about by the car-thief-joy-rider type that tended to predominate in the neighborhood. 

 

These dip shits who took such pride in their nominal skills at distinguishing a cars positive and negative electrical terminals would usually steal, cruise and then just slam their evenings pick-up into the concrete slab as a simple shock punctuation to bring to a close the evenings activities.  Sometimes, on a particularly high night, one of these jerks would torch the thing for a pyrotechnic finale to accompany all the pot, beer and acid consumed earlier whose effects were by then rapidly wearing out.

 

The remaining unexploded automotive wrecks left scattered about were plausible fuck huts for horny teens back in the day.  Dented, mangled, squeezed, smashed and accordionated, these cars were often still very well appointed (occasionally even with rich Corinthian leather).

 

The day before he would commit the crime that would trash his future forever, Lester Charleston was down at the point, behind the slab, in the back seat of a twisted automotive mess that had once been a reasonably serviceable Toyota something or other.  There, reclining on sun cracked vinyl seats, Les received his first blow job – sealing his fate forever.

 

A blow job hadn’t been Les’ plan that day.  In fact, Les hadn’t really known what a blow job was at the time – straight man-on-top-get-it-over-with-quick was Lester Charlston’s full understanding of the whole social/sexual transaction that was to “solidify the establishment of a reliable outlet” for the whole “pesky sex drive” that annoyed him as much as he enjoyed “its eye blinking moment of full evaporation”  Truth be told, Les was a pretty cloistered intellect, after all, and could be a kind of poser, elocution-wise.

 

So when Pepsi started suckling his cock with a warm, silky draw, his ignorance of what exactly she was doing to him immediately spurred the notion that all her bullshit about alien abduction and whatever else might not have been such bullshit after all.  But whatever it’s source: benign terrestrial kink or extra terrestrial abomination, this epiglottic undulation immediately felt like nothing Les had ever felt before and he was absolutely, positively not going to stop it.  Not on a bet.  Not on his or anyone else’s sweet life.  No sir.  

 

He had absolutely no idea what was going on or that he could be so utterly terrified and mind bendingly pleased at the same time, but he was determined to see where it would all lead.  In the process, what had always been his primary nemesis – his brain, his grey matter – had sloshed into a kind of calm, humming pudding while the ripple of Pepsi’s lips wobbled around him in such soft, warm, liquid pulses, pulling him so distinctly and in such shape shifting ways, all he could think was ‘I have got me one fantastic freak”.

 

At the start, Les seemed only able to manage inhaling, which came in deep, rhythmic lung gulp fulls synced to Pepsi’s metronomic slippage up and down his almost painfully erect penis.  When his diaphragm finally forced him to exhale, it was in a freaked, stuttered manner he hoped wouldn’t interrupt Pepsi’s flow, but he was in a real panic.  He didn’t know what to do.  He knew what was becoming ever more imminent and he could think of nothing short of a tap on the shoulder to warn Pepsi to get out of its way. Given her seeming proficiency, he rightly assumed that she too knew what was imminent and yet she seemed entirely unconcerned as a tight little wad of Les’ evolutionary reason for being crept ever closer to lift off right in her mouth. 

 

Les went “oh – oh – oh” to her, which was the best ad-hoc pre-ejaculation warning he could come up with at the moment and still she was apparently unconcerned and kept on happily bobbing. 

 

“umm…ummm…ummmm…” she muttered in seeming happy response, thereby freaking Les even more and getting him back thinking on space aliens just as that irreversible boarder crossing occurred and a rapid exchange spluttered between Les and Pepsi.

 

Les couldn’t get over that there was gulping involved.  He could feel Pepsi’s body pulling, swallowing hard, repeatedly, drawing deeply on him and from him; meanwhile, the multiple, mind numbingly rapturous jolts on Les’ end sent quantum concussions ricocheting through depths of his tissue that only fainting pain during contact sports had previously reached. 

 

Suspended in this fleeting, alternate universe of absolute symmetrical balance, Les decided unequivocally to do something incredibly, foolishly risky on Pepsi’s behalf.

 

As cheap puns go (and this’ bargain basement stuff), Les was blown away by Pepsi at the time and was even more perplexed by the notion of interacting with her when she regained a vertical posture moments later. 

 

Questions.  Questions.  For instance: a kiss.  Mandatory?

 

“Whys the world so screwed up?  I’ll tell you why,” Les asserted at Charlene, who at the moment was lounging on an inflatable raft, drifting down the center of what had been the yachts forward lounge. “Because you have to play with everybody else on the school yard and everybody on the school yard has got to play with you.  From the geeks who make things to the bullies who break things, everyone plays at eternal odds with their converse and since breakings so much easier to accomplish than making, people like me are always going to be working at a deficit.  We’re working a system that by its nature loses ground since the simplicity of stopping something will always be a more passionately pursued objective than the complexity of starting something.  Stopping needs no imagination at all – plenty of time for the indulgence of passions.”

 

He said passions with little quote marks in the air.  Alot of people who feel screwed by life use little quote marks in their bitter lambasting of all that is craven and cruel and unfair in the world.  This was one of Les’ problems.  Some people can turn bitter experience into wisdom that transcends the loss and delivers the afflicted to a higher plateau of consciousness and life, but Les went his own way on this point (which was his want as it was his curse to be so peevishly unique).  Instead of rising above, rather Les wallowed in his misfortunes, bemoaning the transparent lack of fair treatment in a country that for nearly two hundred and ninety six years had “played pretend it was a beacon of liberty…or a roulette wheel…or an endless expanse of strip-minable wilderness or whatever floats a given boat.”

 

At the moment, though, the given boat Les and Charlene were floating on was in a persistent state of decline.  It had been taking on water for nearly two days and was sinking slowly.  It was inevitable that it would soon cease to be a viable platform for Les and Charlene to carry on doing nothing to save themselves.  The small outboard dingy hanging aft of the swamped Jacuzzi was the next logical step.

 

“Not on a bet,” Charlene asserted.

 

“Yeah, well pretty soon that little aluminum dingy with the wind-em-up-n-watch-em-go motor is gonna to be the only thing left floating from this tub,” Les countered, “and I don’t know about you, but I am gonna to be on it when this thing goes down, cause I don’t care to go the way of…”  Les halted, the long conditioned convict instinct choking back a brash statement.

 

“Go ahead.  Say it, you coward.  Just try to compare your ultimate fate to my husbands.”  Charlene was absolute and unconvincing in her disdain.

 

“Sorry.  No offense, but I’m not ending up wending my way through a sharks digestive system, thank you very much.”

 

“That’s a horrible thing to say!”  Charlene was pissed, not hurt.

 

“It was a horrible thing to happen.  My saying it’s at least marginally better than the event itself.  So relax.  And start gathering supplies.  Times short.”

 

“Not until you apologize for maligning my husband’s memory, Plebe.”

 

“I stated facts, Elitist.  I didn’t malign anything.”  He leaned back with the smug aire of someone about to drop a bomb, “like, for instance: your husband of, what?  A couple hours, maybe?  He was kind of a…a prick.”  Les shrugged at this.  “Another fact.  Now, you wanna survive?”  Les pointed at the dingy, “Cause that’s the only way left.”

 

Les had spent decades running the snail mailroom, deep within the bowels of a giganticorporations New York skyscraper until Phillip – this particular giganticorps CEO– inveighed upon his low level employees previous computer skills to design and outfit the company’s new yacht with a computer platform for an anti-radar system.  Les’ new job was an above the line promotion that a convict wasn’t entitled to in the new America and was, arguably, an illegal maneuver that Philip would never have had to answer for, even if he hadn’t been skewered by the pirate (once a citizen, always a citizen).

 

Philip simply showed up one day sitting next to Les on a park bench where many a convicted plebe took lunch.  Philip had put his proposition this way: “listen, it’s come to my attention you’re a computer wiz.  I’ve got a job for you.  Do it well and I won’t have to knock your brains out.”

 

It was a compelling argument.

 

“You have the skills,” Philip asserted, “things don’t just blink into existence for no purpose at all…and your purpose is to serve me.”

 

Les didn’t agree and said so with characteristic certitude.

 

“There are a great many things that serve no purpose at all” Les argued.

 

“Name one,” Philip shot back, peaked by this plebs’s unexpected, brazen response.

 

Les looked around, pointed to a rock lying on the ground.

 

“That” he said.

 

“What…?”

 

“There.  That rock.”

 

Philip stooped and picked up the rock.  He bounced it off his upper arm.

 

“What?  This?”  Philip tossed the rock around. “Why this can be used as a …paperweight, a…a doorstop, a weapon, an exercise aid…”

 

“Yes. Yes.” Les agreed, “But what’s its intended purpose?”

 

“Intended?”

 

“Yeah.  What’s its purpose?  What’s it supposed to be for?” Les stressed his point, hazarding with cheeky intent “It can’t have just blinked into existence for no purpose at all.”

 

“Oh.  I see.”  Philip was smug. “It has to have come into existence for an expressed purpose then.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“In order to have meaning.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“So there can’t be any firsts in your universe.”

 

“Firsts?  What’s that supposed to mean, firsts?”

 

“Well,” Philip shrugged in a folksy way that was way below his pay grade, “in order for a thing to have a purpose before it exists, there first has to exist something else that is in need, that can conceive the purpose; and then everything else’s got to follow that first thing through the door into existence…and therefore serve that first thing endlessly forever; so it’s something like a God, maybe…a first.” Philip smiled wryly, pleased with himself, “but then, I don’t believe in God.”

 

“Oh yes you do.”  Les seemed unduly absolute in this.

 

Philip directed him sternly, “Don’t get smart.”

 

“Smarter than you?  I shouldn’t dare try.”  Les conceded, “But you do believe in God.  That’s a given.  Otherwise you’d comfortably entertain the idea of something just blinking into existence without a need, without a reason, purpose or direction, without a call for it to do so. You need God because God supplies the work order, the call.  Without God, blinking into existence would be the name of the game.  But then you say you don’t believe in blinking and you don’t believe in God, so…” Les shrugged, “are you supposed to be my God?”

 

Philip frowned.  He hadn’t expected this to be remotely difficult, much less this difficult.  He thought the difference in social rank and the incongruity of his simply showing up in a plebe place would have struck a cord with Les, would have honored this poor wretch into doing his bidding without a question, but Les was coming away far cagier than most convict types.  Les, for all his faults, wasn’t easy and this fact was becoming rapidly clear to Philip.

 

“I’m offering you an opportunity to give a more pleasant shape to your life.” Philip advised, shaking the rock, for emphasis, “Don’t screw with me and I won’t have to knock you into the middle of next week.”

 

Philip lobbed the stone a short distance away, pointed at where it landed, “and that’s what that’s purpose is: to lay there and be a rock until someone bright enough like me comes along and figures something better to do with it.”

 

Why anyone does whatever anyone does is beyond anyone’s guess, but still…

 

“But still…still, why did you do it?  Just why?”  Pepsi had feigned surprise a couple of decades previous when Les told her of his brand new criminal conviction and subsequent future-scuttling on her behalf, even though she already knew. 

 

The entire neighborhood knew in short order whenever something bad happened to one of their own.  Les’ conviction and all the relevant particulars would riot through the entire neighborhood grape vine in a gossipy cackle fest within hours of the public issuance of his official conviction notice.  Gossip was a favored past time in the neighborhood, the closest approximation of community concern such a gaggle of reprobates might evince.

 

“Why would you do such a…such a totally…insanely illogical thing?”

 

Les wasn’t in the mood for it.  “Oh Jesus, Pep, if life’s supposed to be logical, than I’m fucked.  I don’t know why.  Why?  Why’s the sky blue?  I just did it.  I don’t know why.  Circumstances were leaning in a certain direction and I just went that way…”

 

“What’s that even mean?”  She was at a genuine loss.  “And why’s my criminal record any of your concern?”

 

It took Les less than a half a minute to spill his now scuttled master plan for joint citizenship and the eventual solemnizing of his relationship with Pepsi.  It was an unburdening of sorts, but Pepsi was clearly pissed. She had no idea that Les had such designs on her beyond the blow job.  As far as Pepsi was concerned, the blow job was just an overture, a kind of pre-interview with a future citizen, not a first date with a future husband.

 

At the time, Pepsi had been a post waste injunction intern at the local sewerage treatment plant and she desperately wanted out.  Les’ impending citizen upgrade combined with his undeniable love jones for her seemed a good leverage combo for networking her way to something less industrial and more humane in the way of employment.  This opportunity was clearly no longer operative, which was kind of devastating for her.

 

“Well, you may not know why you did what you did, but you’d better give it a name all the same, cause it’s gonna be with you a long, long time.  Give it a fucking name, Les,” she advised, “for convenience sake…”

 

Curiously enough, the way it played out, it was Pepsi who would eventually become the convenience, and Les just had to give her his name to seal the deal. So the love of his loins, Pepsi, had become Les Charlston’s bride six weeks after his life altering conviction.  She would soon after lose her colorful moniker and go by her Christian name, Maureen, to be battered by gravity over the intervening years into something unfuckable and unemployable. 

 

As a rationalized accommodation to his lot, Les had convinced himself that ‘the forced decrepitude of middle age becomes her’, though it clearly didn’t.  Maureen or Les, Les or Maureen, it seemed that decay was the inescapable way their lives were to unfold and fade.

 

So it was counter intuitive to have ever thought it possible that Les might come to face imminent demise sitting bobbing in the stern of a twelve foot dingy with a full fledged citizen perched on its prow, glowering at him as the yacht sank some yards away, dropping out of sight in synchronized motion with that evenings sunset.

 

Provisions were low and prospects were still fewer now that the big boat was gone.  If push were to come to shove, once the packages of self-microwaving mac&cheeze were gone, Les knew Charlene could easily eat him before he managed to conk her on the head to eat her, so the trail of successive failure his life had been could easily come to its

pathetic de-no-ma with a privileged trust funder gnawing on his thigh bone after pounding the life out of him. 

 

Up to this point, despite all the regrets, all the self recrimination at having blown a straight shot at a stellar life, there was always something liberating about failure for Les, no matter how ego crushing the experience.  Moving through the previous failure could and often did make the continuing push easier, driving him to run day to day on something other than simple ambition, something like impulse, something like predilection or obsession or some other aspect of life that’s got a good gush of blood running through it most of the time. 

 

Something other than the bland passions of common motive drove Les’ dreary life up to this point, despite its conspicuous failings and failures.  Only the potential of actually being physically consumed by a citizen after having spent so long a time enduring their oppression was in his estimation beyond the pale. 

 

For reasons he couldn’t quite grasp, he was preoccupied by the notion that he wasn’t at all sure which side his father’s opinion would have fallen on on this point.  His father was so cringingly accepting of the squalor of his own life, he might well have argued that his sons being cannibalized by one from the upper strata was an honorable quid pro quo arrangement.  Les’ ancestors sent their sons to comparable fates on behalf of the plutocratic over classes during the nations many wars, so what’s the diff?  The plebeian honor to life sustaining flesh ratio could easily auger good results in the twisted estimation of so deeply steeped a plebe as his dad.

 

So things were bleak, so to speak, in that dingy on the waves.  When cannibalism makes the list of plausible scenarios in ones near future, fretfulness becomes the inescapable tone, a pre-pall heralding disaster, which was funny, given Les’ last will and testament, which read in part:

 

 

Upon my death, I whish to be interred as follows: my physical self is to be ground up into a fine paste, spread on three thousand Ritz crackers, wrapped in wax paper and lowered into the earth…

 

As an explanation was in order, one followed:

 

In death, I see no reason to go on denying reality as I had in life, so why play pretend this barbaric ritual of body disposal is anything other than the maggot and worm smorgasbord it is?

 

In light of Les’ predicament, his executor, Maureen, the former Ms. Pepsi would not be bound to follow through on so elaborate a ritual.  Besides, the slim-to-none chances that his or Charlene’s desiccated bodies would eventually be recovered floating somewhere on the rolling high seas would inevitably turn Les’ last wish into the dopy final fantasy of an ill spent life.

 

HARD COLD FACT #2: The twenty four multi-phase, opti-tasked, nosey parker satellites arrayed in a ring around the planet in constant equidistant geosynchronous orbit to create a (GPS) global positioning system so absolutist in it’s obsessive/compulsive design matrix that the latitude and longitude of virtually any point on the surface of the earth could be easily charted photographed, targeted or humanitarianly aided – to within a few mere feet of an area of interest which was exactly the problem: there was no reason anyone would have to be interested in seeking a couple of refugees left over from a double super secret boating expedition, for while Les’ inventions attempt to cloak the lost craft from electronic detection came to failure, it did succeed elsewhere, unexpectedly: it fouled a craven business deal whose ultimate outcome would have resulted in a large pile of anonymous dead people.

 

Phillip wasn’t simply getting married and setting up a legally legitimate heir to his accumulated power but was simultaneously on a covert mission to treble that power.

 

The giganticorp of which Phillip was CEO was in the institutionalized habit of engaging in a form of business that sundry anti-globalization types might term treason.  Before random chance and vagaries of the world sent a band of pirates as a putative interdiction force to cock it up, Phillips electronically invisible yacht was to drop a buoy at a specific longitude and latitude for retrieval later by agents of a sovereign state belligerent to the interests of the new America but an absolute financial boon to Phillip and particular gigantgicorp.

 

Within the hollowed out buoy was a case which held one small sphere called a McGuffin Deresinator.  It was a newly designed ordinance developed by Phillips giganticorp under a department of defense contract.

 

When used properly, following all the accompanying manufacturers literature, the McGuffin Deresinator was a very convenient means of killing people, which made it extremely valuable.

 

‘Free market economics’ was Phillip’s rational for selling so much danger to any and all comers.  The new America wasn’t the only country in need of new, clean-kill technology.

 

“The footprint of globalization demands international parity” he would have argued if he was caught, which Les’ invention was intended to prevent.

 

But the best laid plans in this case just lead to some pirate sacking and schooner sinking, which was exactly where the McGuffin went, down with the ship and deeper and deeper, subjected to an ever increasing pressure until it was eventually swallowed into an imploding nothingness, deresinating itself rather than all the living tissue within some wide, suddenly depopulated area.  So some good can come of even the most catastrophic personal fuck-ups, of which this was Phillips last and worse by far.

 

Charlene was still in the bustier, but all the rest of her gown went down with the ship.  She evinced the most distinct, foul mood Les had seen in her since their first meeting at embarkation several days previous.

 

“We’ll make some kind of land,” he suggested, ill advisedly.  Les’ inability to deduce exactly when discursion was the better part of valor with the fairer sex had caused him some considerable distress in life, so adding “barring any unforeseen circumstances” was just gravy over a shit turd casserole to Charlene’s rattled nerves.

 

“Unforeseen circumstances…” she hissed, her weight rolling forward, pre-pounce.

 

“Yeah.” Les responded, blandly eyeing a tiny speck in the sky that flitted toward them from a distance.

 

“The whole fucking world is an unforeseen circumstance,” Charlene screeched.  “Life’s an unforeseen circumstance, you Plebe!”

 

“Well, the way I see it, we have a choice of two directions,” Les countered, “where that birds flying toward or flying from…”

 

Les’ rational wasn’t entirely unsound.  “That gulls range isn’t the breath of an entire ocean, that’s for damn sure.”  Of course a seagull can always float when it gets tired, but…

 

“I don’t know what’s more pathetic,” Charlene castigated him, “our totally fucked situation here or you acting like you know what the hell you’re talking about.”

 

“I don’t know that I’m right.  I only know that this course of action makes the most sense given the conditions with which we’re dealing.  Nobody knows they’re right.  Knowledge is just full confidence in opinion.  I’m just honest enough to admit that, yes, I have full confidence, but no, Elitist, my ego isn’t sufficiently immense to label that knowledge, certainty or any other definite in a world of stark contrasts and doubt.”

 

It’s hard to qualify the human impulse that drives behavior that is in clear conflict with ones best interests, but Charlene sprung on Les in a blind rage all the same, capsizing the boat in the process and scattering all the self microwavable mac&cheese into the sea for ultimate fish consummation.  It took her a good couple of milliseconds of ice cold North Atlantic sea seepage around her hips and up over nipples to recognize her mistake and burble a faint ‘help’ at Les before slipping beneath the surface.

 

Les, an avid proponent of survival at any hysterical cost, dove after her reflexively.  Grabbing blindly through what was rapidly coming to resemble a kind of black, metallic ink, Les caught hold of something solid enough to approximate Charlene and, with hands which had been desensitized by the icy water into barely wiggleable mitts, he gripped her crackingly, reversed direction, lifted and kicked with all his might – which wasn’t much to speak of – and did, in fact, manage to drive them both back to the surface where there was a barely discernable separation between the stuff they’d just been immersed in and the skis black and ever blackening canopy, which was devoid of stars, a fact that could herald only one thing: unpleasant weather ahead.

 

Charlene was nearly unconscious through much of this, or else at least she claimed no memory of it after washing up on the island in a tangled heap of seaweed a few days later.

 

It wasn’t the kind of island that a multi-phase, opti-tasked nosey parker satellite might notice and none ever did or ever would.  This wasn’t an uncharted island of the Gilligan or Robbie Caruso type where there were regions of jungle, hill and beach or any other assumed bits of paradisiac stagecraft.  This was a sandy protuberance so tiny, what might be construed as its other side was in easy sight from whatever spot one might decide was this side.  So from Charlene’s vantage point on this side, she immediately noticed a comparable tangled heap resembling Les lying on the beach on the other side.

 

HARD COLD FACT #3:  Much, much later and purely by chance, a freighter out of Halifax got blown off course by an imperfect storm and happened upon what the captains log described as “a squiggle of a land mass,” adding “and I use the term ‘mass’ advisedly.”

 

The “liver shaped quarter mile of volcanic rock and sand” was said to support eight shrubby trees, uncountable denuded fish skeletons and hollowed out coconut husks surrounding “two grubby people and one small grubby child” who, as described, seemed fully and completely feral beyond a few grunted syllables laid out phonetically by the captain in his journal as sounding thusly: 

 

 

                                 “ILL-EET-US” and “PLEE-HEE-EBB”

 

 

 

 

 

 

CJC August 1, 2005