Life in a Thrashing Machine | Page 6

with me about anything, on your mind. I remember that I chewed Karl Sanders' ear, many-a-time, back in my younger days."
Vlad stood up from the bench, slapped a dollar on the counter top and looked Henry right in the eye.
"Don't you agree?" Henry asked his friend.
Henry nodded as he took the dollar and punched up a sale, on the computerised cash register and then fingered Vlad's change out of the coinage compartment.
Vlad was ready to leave for home but when he was handed the change he stopped Henry from giving it to him.
"Hang-on to that for me, will you, Henry? That's so I can make sure that I'll have some money, on hand, when I come back here the next time."
"See you later, eh." Vlad said goodbye and Henry echoed him with his so long, as he watched him rise-up on the escalator, and out of sight.
Vlad still heard that infernal polka music coming over the public address.
He couldn't understand how anyone could listen to that wretched music all day. He even felt fortunate, he wasn't working in this mall. That music would eventually drive him crazy. The least that the mall could do, he thought, was play Strauss, if they truly wanted to have polka music. Yet, for some strange and inexplicable reason, everybody turned into a German, for about two weeks, every October and that was regardless if they were German.
Vlad disliked prejudice and moreso the bias side of it. He detested the thought that someone was automatically better than another person just because of the virtue of his heritage, religion, sex or of petty and picky details like hair and eye colour. He remembered watching some people on television giving their opinions about a line-up of men; of different sizes, shapes and colours. These people were asked to choose two of the men that they thought were genii.
The program was a psychology show, and in that particular segment, the line-up of seven men contained the two genii. Twenty pickers, mostly made up of women, formed the panel that was to point-out these two men.
The men were tall, short, fat, skinny; some were bald, while some were hippie-like, and a few of them were most like perfect masculine specimens. Most of the women chose the man that was tall, blond and blue-eyed, and looked as if he were raised on a beach by a converted bluestocking.
The rest all pretty-well agreed that the short, chubby man, with the spectacles and the receding hairline was the other genius.
The results were obviously different, so Vlad remembered. The two genii were, in fact, a couple of men that weren't even chosen. They were unremarkable in their appearance. One was an ectomorphic, middle-aged man of average height, with a red afro. The other was a slim young man with shoulder-length dark hair, piercing dark eyes and bad posture.
Those two that were chosen, however, both had the lowest intelligence within the group.
The blond hunk was a night-club bouncer with a vocabulary that was, more than not, made up of only four words: "what", "yah", "really", and on many occasions . . . "fuck" that was used in the form of a conjunction, while he spoke.
Respectively, the short chubby guy was a postal worker, which for some reason didn't necessitate further explanation.
This world was strange. Vlad knew that but he never really wanted to admit it to himself. He had realised, very early in his life, that it wasn't enough for an individual to try to make it on brains and ability. There were only a few people, scattered throughout the world, that refused to judge a person just on his, or her, appearance.
Vlad learned long ago that life was unfair to those who refused to live it without deceit. Generally, being a good man in a world that praised the opposite-those ruthless and stern-he felt as if he were a cancer virus that was being consumed by the monger-like people of the world, serving as the antibodies against his presence. Outside, the weather didn't change very much since the time that he came into the mall.
Sometimes, during this time of year, the weather changed very quickly. He had hoped that the brief half-hour that he had spent at The Coffee Bar, would see the quelling of the wind and cold, but it wasn't really much different. Vlad usually walked down to the transit terminal on Duke Street when he was ready to go home from the city's core, but the weather convinced him to wait for the mainline bus that stopped just outside the mall.
He soon got on the bus, dropped his sixty cents in the fare box and stood by the rear exit door until someone got off at the next stop and he fixed himself in their place.
The bus engine grunted as