Any Coincidence Is

Any Coincidence Is

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Title: Any Coincidence Is
Author: Daniel Callahan
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COINCIDENCE IS ***

Any Coincidence Is (or, The Day Julia & Cecil the Cat Faced a Fate
Worse Than Death) v9.1 (December 2002)
A novel by Daniel Callahan
Copyright (c) 1994-2002 Daniel Callahan This work is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0 or send a letter to
Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California
94305, USA.

"I used to do a turn in the army. I was really mad back then... [a] loony!
I'd never have any music to introduce me, which was a big deal.
Unheard of. I'd hop out on to the stage. It used to take ages. Hop, hop,
hop. As I got nearer to the microphone, they'd hear this doddery voice
going 'Do do do... do do do.' When I'd eventually make it to the
microphone I'd stop and say, 'I must be a great disappointment to you
all.' That's it. There's no joke. It's totally irrational. A lot of people don't
get it. Still don't." - Spike Milligan
"What will be is. Is is." - James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

1. The Dim Bulb "If you guys don't listen to me, we're going to end up
in that box again!" - Davy to the other Monkees, Head
The young man (boy, really) played with his fingers in the garish light
cast from the lone bulb in the concrete bunker. He scratched at an
imaginary itch on his right hand (just below his thumb) to take his mind
off the man in the lab coat who sat across from him at the beaten,

scarred, wood table. It didn't work. And whoever this man in the lab
coat was, he was insistent about paperwork. He had three inches
clipped onto a weathered clipboard which he flipped through with
precision.
"Can I offer you a glass of water?" asked the boy's captor in a calm,
sensitive tenor.
The boy, Kurt, continued to scratch the imaginary itch, which had leapt
magically from his right hand to the left. Eventually the falseness of the
itch would be deduced, and the lab coated man would disappear out of
the cell and return with... God knows what. He had seen torture
hundreds-if not thousands-of times on TV, and he was glumly certain
that there would be no commercial breaks for him.
"Can I offer you a glass of water?" The question was repeated without
urgency, like a forgetful waiter. The itch now leaped with the dexterity
of a trained flea onto the boy's leg, and the dutiful fingers followed.
He watched as the man in the lab coat, without name tag or company
insignia, studied his stack of papers attached to the clipboard. Several
yellow forms near the top half inch were labeled 27B. The man
frowned and wrote a note on the top page. "Note: Find out who isn't
duplicating 27B in Pink."
"I'm sorry," he said, "I wasn't listening. Was that a yes or no to the
water?"
Kurt remained in his chair, almost motionless, except for the
itching-and-scratching routine. It had leapt again, this time onto his
scalp, and the twitching fingers followed. He wondered how long he
could keep this up without drawing blood.
"I'll just write down 'no answer' in your file," the Lab Coat Man
muttered, shuffling his way through the stack of paper, skipping the
yellows and pinks to find a blue. Finding the relevant box on a 43F, he
made a small