When school
resumed, the countdown on Laurence's lifetime had fallen by three
more months, without anyone really deciding he needed an alert. Hints
and deniable suggestions were charitable contributions to any
possible realization that he was wasting his life away.
Now that
classes were in session again, Laurence derived income from work
study. There was no particular niche for history majors, so Laurence
found himself in general purpose landscaping, by default.
Amused
co-workers started playing the old Michael Jackson tune, “Beat It,”
when Laurence was on duty. If his boss found him lounging, he was
sure to goad him to “quit jacking off!” “That fertilizer bed
isn't going to fertilize itself!” he might bawl.
An older
black man, standing by, would sagely comment, “even a blind
squirrel finds a nut once in a while.”
To Laurence,
this was an unrelated comment. It did not follow that ferilizing a
flower bed would affect the hibernation preparations of the local
squirrel population.
As day's
became weeks, Laurence began to wonder if someone might be out to get
him. He knew that people talk, and he racked his brains, for any
offense he might have given, and to whom. Was a displeased professor
behind it? That could potentially account for all the failed
interviews.
In
Laurence's mind he needed someone in whom to confide, and Tyne seemed
a likely confederate. Over a tray of Tilapia in the cafeteria,
Laurence advanced the scenario of a conspiracy. After a few minutes
of backing and forthing, Tyne asked Laurence if he had seen the
movie, “Eyes Wide Shut.”
“Yes, I
have,” Laurence replied. “But it was too fantastical. There can't
actually be any real organization that would act that way.”
Just then,
Tyne saw Laurence's eye wander to the passing derriere of a high
school girl passing by. “She's not a virgin,” Tyne suggested
provocatively.
Laurence was
not immune, but attempted to remain inscrutable to Tyne, by ignoring
the verbalization. Despite the fact that he responded to the
combination of arrested development in himself, with putative
experience in the girl, he stayed “on message.”
“What
agenda would coherently drive a hedonistic cult like that?” he
queried.
Tyne viewed
this response dispassionately. Vice would serve him better, she
thought to herself. Aloud she bantered, “What about a Society of
Illuminati?”
“They
don't exist,” Laurence argued. “Even if they did, they would be
bound to be much more secret than that.”
Tyne didn't
care. “You may be right,” she finished non-committally. “They
couldn't all be paragons of virtue, though, to survive in the cut
throat world of conspiracy like that.”
Laurence
laughed. “Risk is cumulative, Tyne,” he replied. “That's why
crime doesn't pay.”
“I
disagree, Laurence,” Tyne retorted. “You couldn't catch a fish in
an aquarium.”
Without
another word, Tyne got up and left, leaving Laurence to bus the
table. “It's a dog eat dog world,” he thought, as he cast a final
glance at the high school hottie. He'd dream of her tonight.
When Tyne
got a chance to speak to the high school girl, she mercilessly
assaulted Laurence's reputation with her. “He's old enough to be
your father,” Tyne exaggerated. “Laurence is a Cretan and a
coward. Don't give him anything.” If cryptic, it certainly invoked
a sense of sisterhood.
Laurence was
jumping through all the right hoops, on the completely wrong obstacle
course. Like a computer program performing a calculation based on
faulty input data, he was flawlessly repeating the mistakes of people
he didn't know had made them. All that remained, was to see how far
he could go, without discovering that his belief in fair play was
operating on a pinball playing field.
