THE MONKEYSHINES CASE, ENTRY 9
I convinced Randy to angle the windowshade slats just so as I stood and looked out the window contemplatively, horizontally shadowed up and down like a boss, hands clasped behind my back as I ruminated over how to get him to take a picture for our brochure without sounding too needy, but his heavy sigh intimated what I already knew in my heart: brochures were a waste of time and paper, and there were already countless photos of me looking magnificent floating around the office, distracting client and consultant alike with their respective captures of acute professionalism and handsome gravitas.
Randy said no, as though the previous had been said out loud instead of being securely fastened to the inside of my head like gauze soaked with the blood of a self-congratulatory wound, and continued with a god in what I could only assume was the result of a general frustration and not aimed at me and my daydreamy, rugged good looks. Confirming my suspicions, Randy grabbed me by the collar and shook his fist at me—as one does when confronted with mind-shattering beauty—reminding me to focus on the task at hand, with words that weren’t exactly that pleasant, because the von Bang hovercraft had surfaced and appeared to then be heading directly towards us.
Countess von Bang. The name pinballed around my head in a cacophonous circuit of peripheral recognition and dread, with nothing but the perhaps hyperbolic image of a leather-clad shark emerging from that xeno-craft of air-cushioning malice as a temper to the encroaching anxiety.
Bang. Countess von Bang. In an instant, I flew to my desk, rifling through it like a meth-soaked bon vivant armed with the psychotic conviction that, if the good life was indeed to be found, it would without question be found in one of my desk drawers. As papers and assorted trinkets were jettisoned from their hiding places in a whirlwind of frantic determination, my only thoughts were of righting disastrous wrongs and investing in some type of organizational system that didn’t rely so heavily on finding patterns in my own institutionalized chaos.
But then I found it, seizing it like the deed to a contested house: my crossword puzzle.
It wasn’t meats and mang; it was beats and bang, which is what I was going to do to Ms. Countess von if I got my hands on her.
Well, no—yikes. I was more going for a clever play on words than something actually violent or anything related to a lascivious reading of her unfortunate moniker, but just like the decrepit bus Randy takes to work, when the attempt at forcing forward momentum backfires, one can only hope it’s just a bang of smoke and not fire.
I sunk into the sludge of my overwrought metaphor helplessly as the unearthly sounds of the approaching hovercraft permeated the building, rattling both the furniture and, evidently, any sense of self-preservation Randy had left, as the war-cry he let slip while charging out of the door into the rapidly advancing maw of foreign aggression was nothing short of terrifyingly empowering.
Dumber than buying a car full of bees, but just as impressive . . . and almost as impressive as the speed with which he returned, blown back through the door as he was by the undercarriage of the hovercraft then poised to submerge the entirety of the office under its bulk. I looked at Randy as the sunshine disappeared, all discombobulation and severe bodily trauma wrapped into a lattice of limbs and torn clothes around what was left of my desk, and vowed then that whatever Countess von Bang had up her sleeve, I would counter with all the sleeves we had at our disposal, which was, like, four.
And just like that, I calmed. The math checked out: if this came down to sleeves, Randy and I had this in the bag.
