6

The blue wrapping, which V picked up from the table at Uncle Tom’s Cabin before Sally the Waitress brought the meal ordered by Lex yet after he was taken away, contained no chewing gum.

Only back home, V got it what his friend texted about by quick winks and flailing desperately his eyelashes when being detained. The message transmitted by some unknown code (yet, no doubt, not that of Morse) concerned the chewing gum, which Lex had so awkwardly dropped on the table, and it was not there. Instead, the wrinkled wrapping covered a piece of thin cardboard cut like a make-believe bar of a chewing gum and thelittle lamina of a memory card, side by side.

Tunar (*the basic File Manager on Debian/Ubuntu systems) disclosed two files present in the card of 2TB storage capacity:

1) eff_thoughts_008.txt file, and

2) a folder left Untitled.

(Technically speaking, any folder within a system is just another file for containing any quantity of files and folders.)

The Untitled folder contained thousands audio files, all of them in Vorbis format.

V clicked a couple of them, one after the other, at random, whichever happened under the courser's hoofs. Thru the mask mesh in both speakers streamed out the same impersonal flat drawl of artificial reader, unnaturally distanced and sexless voice-over.

V didn’t bother to tweak the pitch or tempo in the robotic diction, neither choose he another dialect from the long list of options leaving all as is. Moreover that the haphazard pieces did not sound like a cohesive narration. Neither was there any traceable intent to introduce the source of fragments not caring a beam who’d broken them up – a man? a woman? a youth? a snotty kid?

Yeah, at times there sure happened telling cues. For instance, a brutal macho would hardly complain of a too tight bra sillily donned when leaving for the office in the morning.

(*Or could he after all, that macho? There are machos and machos, you know… more and more diversified. In the times of heated struggle for self-awareness of your hidden “it” and realization of “its” deepest instincts you’d better not too hastily grab any assumption coming you way. The bitch may turn scorching hot. We don’t need blisters, burns and stuff, right? Nor conflicts with militant activists for tolerance are welcome.

Anyway, the weirdest prankster, life, can beat any sitcom with both hands tied and the brutal mudak of macho might have had his reasons for putting a bra on first thing in the morning.

Not to mention the strange feeling that visited V more and more often of his belonging to a sexual minority of who way back were called “straight males” but whose share in the overall number of those usable for sex dwindled hopelessly, globally, like the melting glaciers in the Alps, not to mention the tearful situation about Antarctica icebergs.

Damn priests! They triggered off the uncontrollable avalanche of the horrendous chain reaction by their ardent pulling for the missionary position in intercourse. God Almighty (so the clerics) approved just that one and only – the missionary position, for fuck’s sake! Whatever else modification to the “piston – cylinder” shebang was a devilish ploy, another of the serpent’s apples in Eden.

Of course, folks got unhealthy interested in the topic: hey! how many are them positions? Huh? And who gets more high at sex: from under or on top?

Way back, in the bucolically innocent days, folks just didn’t give an eff about hows-and-whys in the matter, morals were way robuster and simpler – whoever whomever wherever grabbed there they fucked them, on the spot, and the following morning no one gave a fuck in which position, namely, and what was the angle, geometrically, no time for trifles – harness your horse to the cart, gird yourself with the ax and – off with you! to the forest after the firewood. But now, thanks to the the clergy who brought it up, we are in this here deep shit. And I still haven’t even once mentioned pedophilia, have I? Fuck!

With a sad sigh, V clicked eff_thoughts_008.txt…

The endless stream of poorly punctuated lines, and words of innovative coinage often newly coined expressions, and incongruences with the time-honored spelling. Looks like Lex had a good reason to call it a log, hardly if at all processed. To recon the text a transcript of the audio files from the back-to-back Untitled folder, in the same 2 TB card, stood well to reason. However, without a deeper submersion it was hard to decide which one in their tandem flagged off the notorious hen-egg dilemma.

At any rate, the stuff didn’t look a super text ready to make V a glamorous lighting house aloft the choppy sway in the ocean of pulp fiction. The fragments resembled mumbling to oneself in the manner of Leo Bloom responding to one or another hallmark or happening in the process of his indefinite aimless wanderings during the long-long day of June 16 1904.

Yes, it did look like a transcript of scattered thought, yet of how many thinkers? Were they interconnected? In any way? In what way? If, yes, of course. And who thought what? Who namely?

While reading, you felt at times like being carried off upon a kinda thought-floe, before you slopped over smack bang into another fragment, yes, everything turned different – the subject, the mood, the vocabulary.

Common to them all though was some elusive sincerity, and lack of coherent description of actions in progress. And their terse offhandedness in conveying the details, and absence of smooth logical flow which called for filling the picture yourself. Say, instead of “my interlocutor plunged into a lengthy exposition of his current plans and expectations…” there sooner would stand“will the shithead shut up? Ever?”

V resented the untimeliness of Lex’ pinch. So he was arrested ? Ha! But what else? By all the canons of genre. And too sadistically by that. Took Lex away from the not devoured dinner!

Contrary to his stock of common sense, V slightly touched the number marked “lex” in his phone. Simply out of habit. Just in case...

The mellow female voice once again explained it to him that the subscriber was out of reach. The proposal of the conference to the answering machine in Lex’ den after the following “peee”, V ruled out making no comment.

He switched his PC off and one whole minute watched the black monitor with hisnot seeing stare. Then he left the throne to cross the room over, to the catty-corner.

From the drawer in the desk (downmost to the right) V extracted and put onto the desktop a small flat box looking like a compass case. He unclasped it and pinched out a tiny SIM card which substituted the one in his phone.

Now he had another subscriber identity and the number unknown to anyone. Just in case...