‘The fuck? They really beheaded the guy?’ grunted Bubble.
‘Oooooooo, yeah, baby! Took that pussy round the corner and chopped his freaking limey-dimey Kopficle around the head; you’d better believe it, bitches!’ Benito Scarlett Muskogee looked as though he were about to genuinely take off like a prodigious Obamadrone, as he whirled around the ‘Special Gentleman’s Fever Cone’ of the Amber Hornet.
‘Listen, son!’ groaned the Senator. ‘I don’t have time for all this rowdy behaviour.’
‘Woo-hoooooooo! Give us a fuckin’ bump, Bubble Boy!’ Benito brimfully bubbled. ‘Ya know who my frickin’ ancestor was? Heh heh! Fuck yeah, baby! Lyndon fuckin’ Johnson, see this here boy, he’s the son of L B J, L B J, how many dicks have you washed today?’
Bubble was at the end of his tether.
‘Shut the hell up! You even sound like that liberal asshole! Everyone knows that piece of shit is overrated.’
Benito suddenly dropped to his knees and, startled at some imaginary devil, rolled over and put his hands over his face. Presently, he began to weep gently.
‘Well, well, well, Marco boy!’ was the rich and barely gushy intoning of Eva Vernon Letterman.
‘Look at this poor DC boy. Well, it does appear there is something in all this here ‘‘lead poisoning’’ talk after all.’
Marcus smirked.
‘Well, hoo-hey, chicken, maybe you’re right! Guess that flaming Jew comedian Saul Friedman…
‘Well, what is it they say? A stupid pacifist abacus counts him up correct once a day, right?’
The rich, hearty, Southern belle dame de Wyoming guffawed.
‘Hm. Marcus, I would quit this stuff right now. Don’t you be getting into the habit of insulting Eva Vernon Letterman; because you never know who you might end up with in the White House!’
Bubble’s rather poor attempt at gallantry went up in flames.
‘Hey, what the hell is that supposed to mean? Who the frickin’ hell is supposed to be choosing my people?’
Letterman smirked gaily, with a flick of her gorgeously rich and radiant curls.
‘The hand behind the throne.’
Bubble’s joie de trollerie revived immediately.
‘Whew! Tell you what, if you’ve got a good hand under the throne, there’s nothing a good president can’t handle!’
Letterman nodded in the direction of the private shower.
‘Hmm…’ Bubble grunted.
Eva slipped off her dress.
‘Hey, can I fuck with her too? I really like redhair bitches!’ groaned Benito.
Letterman leaned over and whispered in his ear.
‘Next time, honey.’
With a coy wink, Letterman strode over, raising her hand to Bubble’s cheek.
‘That poor, pitiful little freak will believe anyth…’
With one long, clumsy swipe (albeit one wholly unmistakable in its intent and its significance alike), Bubble levelled Letterman to the ground. She didn’t even have time to scream.
Bubble momentarily gazed in horror. ‘What the fuck did you say to him?’ he roared. ‘What the fuck did you say?!’
Dickie Klindel, pedantically timely as always, slunk into the Fever Cone.
‘From a purely value-free and neutral strategggic pershpectivvvvvvve,’ he slizzzhhhered, ‘it would be a rather pragmatically exshpeeeeedient devisssshe, to transport the cadaver to a less consssshhhpicuoooooussh…’
Bubble almost flattened Klindel too.
‘Oh, really? Well, you are one smart son of a Mongol!’ he spat. ‘Seriously, make yourself useful and sort this shit out. I’m not going to have people besmirching my good name.’
‘Such value-laden ethical premises are not my conssshhhern. Now, meditating merely on the purely objective and value-free given constellation of strategic constraints and opportunities, the least systemically disorderly response to the stimulus…’
Bubble grabbed Klindel by the throat and raised his chin, so that Bubble could see his eyes. Klindel’s sea-grey irises, empty of all life and the merest trace of joyful creativity and of any artistic and poetical purposes whatsoever, stared forward without any real interest or significance.
The moment passed.
Bubble let go of Klindel’s collar. Klindel righted his stance with, if not a composure or poise, at least an astonishing absence of awkwardness of anxiety.
***
‘The campfire is ready,’ Senator Willow murmured.
As she sat, she did not hear the owl, lamenting the loss of her eggs, stolen from her by the ill fortunes of the sun, the wind, the storm.
‘The English journalist,’ she muttered. ‘How curious. Journalists don’t dress daintily like that, I am quite sure of it.’
The newspaper fragments fluttered in the breeze.
The forlorn cadaver of Captain Cattybums, caught in a gasp of abject horror at some unmentionable evil now consigned to the security of a memory no longer accessible to we the living; for there was no more sea, no voice that could elucidate the agony of the glossy fop.
The rags and remnants were committed to the flames.
The mushroom stick was plunged into the flames.
So also the ‘scarlet letter’ of her sexual degradation.
In her heart, she reverently intoned:
In the Name of the Lesser Good.
My Interests, not the National Interest.
My Good, not the Good of Humanity.
Not one thing accomplished for Humanity.
Not one thing devoted to Humanity.
Not one person under the shameful, unbearable and thrice-damned slaver’s yoke of Humanity.
Crimes against Humanity are Victimless Crimes.
Not so crimes against the Individual.
Everything I have ever done, has been in the name of human beings, and not of humanity.
I owe Humanity nothing.
And Humanity owes me nothing.
All the good that has ever been done me…
Has been done by people.
I, for one, am not Humanity!
But what sayest thou…
To the individual?