Any Coincidence Is

Any Coincidence Is

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Title: Any Coincidence Is
Author: Daniel Callahan
Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6526] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on December 25, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, ANY 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 'X,' flipped to the front of the pile, and looked back at the boy. He had stopped scratching his scalp and pushing his strawberry-blond hair even more out of place, leaving