N.B. - Fabian Delecto

It started in a drugstore with a twitching bum.

We wondered if he was one of the four hundred and eighteen lunatics who’d
recently vanished from an experimental facility in Tampa, Florida. This man was
potentially valuable. Certain of us were asking how much we could get for him, from
them. Crawling on the pharmacy floor amidst his own puke and foam, the bum
commanded we give him the phone. He shouted as he uncontrollably convulsed, â
€œI come to tell you brethren that there are no angels and heaven is a zoo.
Chimpanzees are demigods! Man is inferior to the rhinoceros!�

His antics gave new madness to the meaning of rave. After that it started getting
ugly. Our pharmacist booked, a discouraging turn of events. And I do mean turn in
the literal sense. To us, who had never graduated high school, the pharmacist was
a great deal more than himself. We were known to circle round him, watching
awestruck while he stood for something else.

    At this point there was nothing left to do but start popping pills—for the stress,
Metzger said; for fun, in Giorgio’s opinion—the same reason chubby Glurph
was stuffing Fritos in his mouth. as We watched the bum crawl toward the phone,
dragging his paralyzed legs. His passage was so narrow-minded he was just
squeaking by in life. He shrieked denunciations arranged according to logics we
had not stayed in school long enough to learn.

“The dead! The graveyard! Corpse and cerements!�

Glurph threw popcorn. Giorgio breathed into a condom glued to his lips.

Lean tore out a page from the pharmacist’s decomposition notebook; he’d
seen him do it once. He ripped open a package of red-ink pens and BIC’ed the
ransom letter, asserting the red ink was the hobo’s blood and the splots of ink
represented violence well enough that authenticity was irrelevant. Dear Dictators, it
red, we have your grand experiment. We accept both credit cards and cash. A
crude solution, I admit, but it corrected the blankness well enough to suit our
purposes.

The bum had reached the phone. It rang so far off the hook you’d have to
gaffe it from the desk. “Dingleberry,� he said. “Radiance. Epiphany.�
He pointed in long, windshieldwiping arcs with his ramrod arm, raking the room like
a sermonless preacher ostending the damned.

“Does this look like the kind of place you’d disco dance?� we asked.

“Saw you all,� he said. “Bedroom posters for youth. We are not grown
up, you know?�

This letter, Lean wrote, is urgent. Believe us—we’ll teach this man division so
well he’ll rue the invention of numerals. We shall feed him nothing but pills.

“Jump in, the magma is fine!� cried the bum.

We looked at him as one.