An old man sits at a dusty, fly-speckled table made of some sort of blatantly prehistoric wood, bottle in hand, mind in the bottle. His hair is a wavy-washy mane of white shrubbery turned grey by lack of showering. The clutter of the antique shop surrounding him camouflages his body nicely, turning it into another of the obscure, half-cracked shapes that infest his surroundings. Every single item in the entire building is broken, including the small pocket-watch he is examining.
The little hand is stuck on half-past ‘almost-time,’ and is thusly stuck on a very small and high-pitched whining chime. It has been stuck there for over one hundred thousand years.
“Fuck it all,” says the old man, much too loudly, and gets up. A coat that looks like it was formerly a mangy bear is donned, and approximately sixty-three different small and oddly shaped items that were crammed into its pockets spill out all over the place and fly underneath the various tables in the building, never to be seen again.
The old man sighs in a way that cuts like a curse and leaves on his beaten bicycle. He stops three times in the first mile to patch holes in his tires.
This is a different table, a streamlined table, a modern table. An ergonomic table. A table that has been designed five times over to optimize educational throughput and dynamically engage the learning capabilities of its students. The chair hurts your back, and the young woman sitting at the table has solved this problem by dissolving her backbone and turning her entire body into one big, perfect, utterly graceless slouch. It’s breathtaking.
Class has been over for five hours, but the air still reeks of desperately infinite dullness. If you took a good long breath and held it – forever – you might glimpse the platonic ideal of tedium.
The clock ticks once every second-and-one-five-hundredth. The last one was noteworthy, and a signal. So the young woman draws herself to her feet in a sort of sustained shrug, drags herself outside of the deadened space, and trudges down the street, battered sneakers leading the way, eyes leaden.
Sneezes. So many sneezes. One two threefourfixevenightine blurring over and under each other into a number beyond numbers. It’s a wonder the old woman can keep her brains in her head the way she’s rattled by them, though the hiccups seem to be stabilizing her. A shake of her head and a last, titanic eruption and she’s free from the grasp of the hay fever and back to scratching the bumpy red skin on her forearms and cursing.
“Pollen,” she mumbles. “Damned pollen. Always the pollen. Must be dandelions or something or other.” A cough, a snort, and she’s nearly blinded by the rheumy gunk in her eyes: scrubbing and more swearing is her answer.
The alarm clock goes off and a migraine thunders down upon her forebrain from the top of her spine, a herd of angry and spiky thoughts that almost blot out the timepiece’s message: better get going.
“Shit,” she says. And sneezes. And after putting a few dozen boxes of tissues into her purse she and her motorcycle are off and away down the highway, both of them hacking fit to burst.
The site of meeting is a run-down old stretch of road somewhere on earth, dusty and dirty and an insult to pavement.
“We’re here?” asks the old man
“We’re here,” agrees the old woman.
The young woman musters the bare minimum of a shrug.
“We can’t be here,” says the old man. “It’s missing. Lost again? AGAIN?”
“It’s always lost,” says the old woman. “That’s how it WORKS.” She winced. “Don’t start this again, you know how it makes my hemorrhoids-”
“I don’t need to know that.”
“Then hush up and get going. We’re wasting daylight. You ready, Borry?”
The young woman looks up. “It’s Boredom,” she says. “You know that.”
“Good. Let’s get trit-trotting then.”
And so the three set out, arm in arm, side by side, one trudging, one peddling, one motoring: all at the same pace, all in the same place, across the world. Roads and roads pass by underneath them, mountains turn into footholds, clouds swim across their eyes. Larger than mountains and less substantial than a puff of breath.
“This is stupid,” says the old man.
Boredom rolls her eyes extremely slowly at this, and down in the world underfoot a five-year-old spends three hours watching a spider spin a web on his bedroom wall.
“What’s stupid about it?” challenges the old woman. “It’s good, clean work, and it’s all going just fine. We’ve got an important job to do, and once it’s done it’s done.”
“We could be bigger. We should be in the book.”
“Oh pshaw, you always want to be in the book. What’s so great about being in the book, eh? Three of the ones in the book don’t even get names, and one of them people never even remember!”
“More’n we’ve got,” says the old man. He frowns down below, and an English professor grading a paper smacks his face into his palm so hard he nearly breaks his nose. “The pale horse, death. You remember that ‘cause it’s in the book. Who remembers ‘irritation, on a bicycle?”
“There’s more to life than being memorable,” says the old woman. “We’re every bit as important.” She scratches a mosquito bite, and far away a farmer stubs his toe and lets fly with some of the worst profanity ever voiced.
“Oh speak for your own damned self,” snarls Irritation. “I never signed up for this. Look at us! We can’t even all get together on time! It’s our big showing, our big chance, our big show-off, and we’ve got three riders. Three! And one of them’s walking! What kind of amateur-hour crap is that?”
“I’m here,” says a fourth voice.
It’s hard on the ears, but then again its owner is hard on the eyes in the most true sense of the words. Difficult to even put a sex to that face, because it looks like everybody. It stands astride a unicycle, poorly balanced.
“Hey,” says Boredom.
“Hi,” says the fourth voice. “Are we doing something still? I got lost.”
Irritation rubs his forehead. He feels old, older than usual. “You are everywhere any human has ever been. Ever. You were already with us from the start. And you got lost.”
“Well, maybe I sort of forgot,” says Stupidity, a bit defensively. “It’s not like I wrote it down or anything. ‘Meet Discomfort, Irritation, and Boredom at four o’clock for a big hoedown-“
“The RIDE,” hisses Irritation, through clenched and creaking teeth. In a city, a tuba player in a cramped apartment complex practices until 5 AM.
“-yeah, a ridedown. Anyways, it’s not like I had it written down or anything. I knew I’d remember.”
“You forgot.”
“Oh. Well, yeah. I got lost, that’s all.”
Somewhere in between the words, a man driving an old truck tries to drink hot coffee with two fingers and steer with the other three, and fails.
“I want out,” says Irritation. “Seriously.”
“Well leave,” snaps Discomfort. “Nobody’s stopping you.” Somewhere, a traffic jam stretches out a five mile journey to six hours.
“Out of this job, not out of you lot. We could be big if we just changed careers. We could do a band or something. Anything but this!”
“Music,” says Boredom.
“Yeah!”
“Music,” she repeats, roiling the word around in her mouth to see how it feels.
“You up for it?”
“Nah,” she sighs. A long and dreary rain sets over a camping trip for the entire weekend, cooping fifteen people in their tents.
“You’re outvoted, Irritation” says Discomfort smugly. “Two to one.”
“Boredom won’t agree with anything you say and Stupidity’ll side with both of us at once,” snaps Irritation. “Two-to-two.”
“Tutu?” asks Stupidity. “We could dance!”
“Shut up,” its friends encourage it.
“Well, I liked it,” it mumbles. And somewhere, somehow, a ‘quality excellence in motivation and employee strategizing team’ is formed.
“Look, it doesn’t have to be music. We could….I don’t know, form a moving company. Write a bestselling screenplay. Do anything other than this.”
“You’re planning to retrain Stupidity? Poor dear can barely handle what it’s doing now.”
“I’m doing what now?” asks Stupidity, picking its nose. It flicks it away, and somewhere, somehow, a child decides to throw a rock at a bee’s nest, just to see what’ll happen.
“Besides, we only have to do it once. I say we should stay along and stick with this; we’re already nearly done for good.”
“Once is too much. I say we should drop it,” says Irritation. Mothers scold their children.
“No, we should stay,” says Discomfort. Feet step on nettles.
“Drop!” Jehovah’s Witnesses on the doorstep.
“Stay!” Thousands awaken with dried-out mouths and splitting headaches.
“Uhh..” says Boredom.
“What?”
“Yes, what!?”
“Where are we?”
The four riders-sort-of look around. They’re on a dirty, run-down road. Who knows where.
“Lost,” says Irritation. “Again.”
“Your own darn fault,” says Discomfort. “You always start that argument.”
“No, no, no – shut up. We can do this. Where have we been? Africa? Europe? We did Eastern Europe at least, didn’t we? How about Indonesia?”
“The one with the lemurs?” asks Stupidity.
“No. Fuck off. Christ, did we hit North America?”
“I’m certain we skipped Canada,” says Discomfort. “I’d remember the trees.”
“We saw loads of trees.”
“Yes, but that was Kamchatka. I’m certain of it.”
Boredom yawns.
“Christ’s nuts on a fruitcake,” says Irritation, and slumps in defeat. “Damnit. Damnit damnit damnit.”
“Chin up now,” says Discomfort. “We’ll get it done tomorrow. You’ll see.”
Irritation’s already pedalling away, but is polite enough to give a single-digit response over his shoulder.
“Fiddlesticks,” says Discomfort. “Well then, no shame in another go. Again. Same time tomorrow, you two?”
Boredom has already sat down on a rock, and is busy examining a bug. “Sure. Whatever.”
“I’ll come,” says Stupidity. “If I don’t get lost.”
“Then it’s settled. If at ninety-five millionth you don’t succeed, try, try again.”