Random Sequence

Scenario 22 (excerpt 1)

Life at the Bon-Zai Corporation, a manufacturer of autopsy trollies, was dull as dust, but young Trevor and slightly older Colin tried to make the best of it. "Who wants to say they work for a company that makes wheelies for stiffs?" said Trevor, as he and Colin sat in the lunch-break room eating their "stress nachos" -- the takeout they treated themselves to every Wednesday after their weekly meeting with the vice presidents of Procurement, Shirley and Constance -- or the "bitch pistols" as Trevor called them. "What's the alternative in this economy?" Colin replied. "Live on the streets? Sell drugs or firecrackers? Be a fireball gangsta?"

This was a conversation they repeated, with slight variations, several times a week. "Let's get out of here and go for a walk," suggested Colin, "Air! Air I need. I'm suffocating. I'm bored out of my gourd." "I need to stop by the doodad lavatory and make some gay pork first," Trevor said. Colin often didn't know what Trevor, who considered himself a poet, was talking about, but he got the drift. "I'll meet you by the mystery elevators," he said.

The ancient elevators in the Bon-Zai Building tended to stop on random floors, which Colin and Trevor found either annoying or amusing, depending on their mood. On this day, on their way to street level, the elevator stopped on the fourth floor, which contained the Records Department, for no apparent reason. The two wrinkled records librarians looked up from their desks and stared at them through the open doors. "Library dickwads," Trevor snickered as the doors creaked closed.

Outside, the two men wandered through the local park, where an old woman was selling used books from a folding table. "More boredom," Trevor said as they picked through her wares. The books were mostly bibles and Christian tracts, or "faith pounders" as Trevor christened them, but Colin's eye was drawn to a battered tome with the title Crossbow Memoirs. The book gave off an odor, not at all unpleasant, as Colin flipped its dusty pages. "I might buy this for the smell alone," he said. "Ah, seduction vapors," said Trevor.

After scanning a few pages, Colin realized it was a novel about two medieval serfs who had found a crossbow near the dead body of a knight in a forest. They realized they could use it to shoot game. Flipping along further in the book, Colin saw that the serfs, equipped with the crossbow, had left their feudal lord to embark on a quest...for something. The Fisher King? The Holy Grail? Just their own freedom? It wasn't clear.

Colin gave the woman a dollar and tucked the book under his arm. "It's time to go back," Trevor sighed. "Maybe not," said Colin.