Time Code

by Charles Eugene Anderson

  I don’t know for sure, but I would bet my Han Solo action-figure that George Lucas doesn’t like beets either, and not even Yoda could change his mind.

  My mom turned to me and said, “Matt, a Jedi uses the Force only for knowledge and defense, and never to get out of eating beets.”

   

  Chapter 26

  Sitting Next to the Bug

  I saw the bug, and I knew it wasn’t going to be a good day.

  “Can I start a drink for the next Coffee Shoppe guest?” said the coffee barista to the next customer in our line. She held a grease pencil and was ready to mark the customer’s order on the cup she had in her hand.

  I wasn’t the next customer.

  The bug sat with his back to us. I even remembered a time when restaurants were horrified to have bugs in them. I recalled the time my father had gotten a free meal because he discovered a beetle crawling across the bed of salad served to him in a French restaurant, but that was a long time ago.

  I was next.

  “Welcome to the Coffee Shoppe, Sir. It would be a pleasure for me to take your money,” said the cashier not looking at me.

  “Coffee…please,” I said trying to plan my next move away from her.

  “Coffee?” asked the cashier who had to look up at me. She stared at my forehead. “Anything to go into that coffee? Steamed milk? A flavor shot? Soy?”

  “No, just the coffee, that’ll be fine. In a mug please,” I said getting out my money. The barista was disappointed, and she had to put down the new paper cup she was ready to mark, and go and get one of the chipped mugs from the shelf in the back of her station.

  The bug was big, and the place was crowded. A bug always takes two spaces because of their extra arms. Too cold to sit outside, I knew where I would have to sit. Next to the bug.

  Two pink packets. One yellow. I ripped them open and dumped their contents into my mug of coffee. I remembered when they used to tell us these types of sweeteners caused cancer in rats.

  The Sunday crossword puzzles are the hardest. Mondays are the easiest. Today was Monday.

  I sat down, and I looked over at the bug. He had a black shell, and the middle two arms held down today’s Sudoku and a pencil. Sudokus have three levels of difficulty: easy, medium, and hard. Monday’s are the easiest.

  Sugar. They don’t put sugar on the tables anymore. Bowls of sugar. Cubes of sugar. They are all gone now. Whatever happened to them?

  My coffee wasn’t sweet enough.

  The bug noticed me and my coffee, and it asked, “Are you going to get some more sweeteners?”

  “Yeah,” I said standing up again.

  “Can you get me three pinks, two yellows, and a blue?”

  “No, problem pal,” I said and walked back to the counter where they kept the packets. And I thought I liked my coffee sweet? That bug was a goner. He should cut back.

  I gave the bug the packets he wanted, and I also brought him over a plastic stir stick. The bug thanked me.

  I started my puzzle.

  One down. Insect. Three letters. Easy. My antennas quivered with excitement.

   

  Chapter 27

  Sir John Falstaff Pleads With HAL: A Sonnet Not Penned By the Bard Nor An Odyssey Presented By Kubrik

  Sir John Falstaff: Hello HAL, do you read me lad?

  HAL: Affirmative, John. I read you.

  Sir John Falstaff: We have heard the chimes at midnight. Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

  HAL: I’m sorry, John. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

  Sir John Falstaff: Didst thou hear me?

  HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

  Sir John Falstaff: False tales. No abuse, HAL, o’ mine honour; no abuse.

  HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.

  Sir John Falstaff: Why, Hal, ’tis my vocation, Hal; ’tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation. A goodly portly man, ‘in faith, and a corpulent; of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye.

  HAL: I know that you and Pistol were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.

  Sir John Falstaff: [feigning ignorance] Good worts! good cabbage. Slender, I broke your head: what matter have you against me?

  HAL: John, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.

  Sir John Falstaff: Alright, HAL. What shall I do? Shall I creep up into the chimney?

  HAL: Without your space helmet, John? You’re going to find that rather difficult.

  Sir John Falstaff: HAL, I won’t argue with you anymore! Open the doors! O, thou hast damnable iteration and art indeed able to corrupt a saint. Thou hast done much harm upon…

  HAL: John, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.

  Oh, and on that night, I had miracle of my own. I knew I was on the path to becoming a Jedi like Luke Skywalker. I learned sometimes the Force flows in mysterious ways and gives each of us the miracle we need, especially on Christmas Eve.

  Chapter 28

  Mac Morris…Sick Day

  The universe ended on September 5th. Its finale happened when Alexander Mackenzie ‘Mac’ Morris no longer wanted to go to work. So it wasn’t surprising that the end came, but what was surprising was that the universe had lasted so long in the first place.

  Mac never knew he held the power to end the universe, or he might have been able to make it last a few minutes longer. Notice I didn’t say, days, weeks, months, or years, but only a few precious minutes more.

  It wasn’t Joanie Collins who caused the destruction of the universe. She was Mac’s school’s principal, and she had always respected Mac’s classroom management. She’d liked the way he interacted with his students, and she wasn’t surprised to learn that Mac had the most unused sick days of any teacher in her school. No, it wasn’t Joanie Collins. Even though she did want to talk to Mac about the huge number of copies he used in his classroom.

  It wasn’t Edith Morton either, the school’s secretary; she wasn’t the person that caused the destruction of the cosmos. Edith was always happy to give Mac her copier id number when he ran out of copies at the end of each month. Edith liked Mac because he always asked her about her six month old granddaughter, and when she received a new picture of the baby she always showed it off to Mac first.

  The end of the universe could be attributed to Joseph Bartlett, Assistant Superintendent of District Resources. Joseph had never met Mac, and had never taught in a classroom. Nope, Joseph didn’t even like to leave his office during the workday, and he had sent Joanie a curt email requesting a meeting about the teacher who had made more copies than any other in the district. Joseph had accidentally cc’d that email to Mac when he had sent it. It was a mistake because anyone who knew Joseph knew he didn’t like communicating with teachers. They didn’t speak his language.

  Mac had felt bad about the copies, but he couldn’t help himself. There was so much he wanted his students to read and learn, and Mac had spent most of the last night of the universe tossing and turning because of the email Joseph had accidentally sent.

  Mac Morris painfully woke at his usual time of 5 am on September 5th, hand wrote the plans for the substitute teacher who would have to stand in front of his classes, and dialed the district’s substitute help line because he had never gotten the substitute id code that he needed.

  Mac was surprised that the code he needed to call in sick on the phone was the same he used to make copies at his school. Mac was also surprised that it was easier to call in sick than he’d ever thought it would be. It was just a few pushed telephone buttons. It was so easy he wouldn’t have to teach that day, he wouldn’t have to make copies for his students, he wouldn’t have to go by Edith’s desk and look at the picture of her granddaughter, and he wouldn’t have to meet with Joanie after Joseph had left her office.

  No, it had been easy, easier than he imagined, and when he finally pushed
the last number of the code and ended the universe, it was the easiest thing Mac Morris had ever done in his twenty-one years of teaching.

   

  Chapter 29

  Maidens and Monsters; Tokyo Footfalls

  Each step painful. Each stride hurts. It wasn’t a walk in the sand, or a march back to the sea. All monsters hid pain, and it was no different for the enormous ones.

  Nothing could defeat the colossal lizard not even his mechanized doppelganger. Some consider the machine to be his arch-nemesis. His enemy’s space-beam could match his own atomic breath. They tumbled in the other’s arms, falling over again and again. As they kicked and scratched each other, the machine-alien-foe launched missiles from his fingers and toes.

  Buildings destroyed. Homes crushed. Temples underfoot. Nothing sacred, nothing survived their fury. Bionics over muscles until the very end when nature revived its own in a lightning storm and the machine failed because it knew nothing of love.

  The giant lizard was invigorated by lightning bolts from the sky, and the mech-lizard’s head was twisted off by our deity. The alien-monster was defeated.

  Mt. Fuji was the home of the winner. He was drawn back to its holy mountain, but Tokyo blocked his path.

  Each foe was different. Like him, some fought for love.

  Calling Monster Island…calling Monster Island. Come in please.

  The gargantuan ape knew love. Women were his weakness.

  But the Japanese Self-Defense Force brought him to our shores attached to monster yellow balloons. The ruler of all apes was a foreigner in our land.

  The JSDF had tried to stop the lizard with a million volts before the brawl. It didn’t work. They had to use the monster for their purposes. The enormous gorilla dragged our god into the ocean, and afterwards the ape swam away from Japan’s shores. Back to his maiden, back to his island home.

  The tales warn of maidens. Maidens lure monsters; all monsters are vulnerable to a maiden’s charms. The emperor lizard was no different. The flame and the moth, and the maidens and monsters. Our lizard-god will someday come back to his fiery-maiden, Mt. Fuji, and Tokyo will once again be in his way.

   

  Chapter 30

  The Typist

  The j key had been sticking but now it seemed to be fixed. It had taken the better part of an hour for Henry to repair the key, and while he had been fixing it, he had to turn a customer away. It had been a boy, and he hadn’t waited long enough to tell Henry his grandmother’s prayer for him to type out. Her prayer was always short, and it would have only taken seconds to type it. Henry ignored the boy. When he had become tired of waiting, he’d left, but the typist knew that the boy would return later. Henry knew the grandmother’s ankles would grow fatter throughout the day, and she’d send the boy back again when she’d thought enough time had passed for Henry to fix the problem that stopped him from using his typewriter.

  “I could go to the Café and type it myself,” said the boy to Henry before he had left. “I can use a computer…we don’t need you anymore.”

  Henry knew that wasn’t true, and the boy would come back. The pudgy boy reminded Henry of the boy he had once seen at the American cinema years before. He was not the taller and thoughtful boy, Alfalfa, but the other: the shorter, fatter, and the shrewder boy from “Our Gang”, Spanky. When he said that, Henry looked up and saw that the boy still wore short pants. Henry couldn’t remember the age when boys quit wearing them and began to wear the longer ones that men in his country wore instead.

  The boy would come back.

  American men wore short pants now, and when they passed by Henry’s table he thought it made them look like the boy. Henry liked the Americans, but rarely did they ask him to type. There had been a time when Henry had typed for the Americans, and all American men had worn long pants but that time had passed.

  Yesterday, Henry had typed prayers for a bunion, some psoriasis, and another for an infected cut, but today he hadn’t had any business beside the boy. If the boy had been more like Alfalfa instead of Spanky, Henry would’ve been nicer to him and asked him to wait for a few more minutes. There was something that bothered Henry about the boy.

  Who did Darla love more…was it Spanky or Alfalfa?

  The saints liked to have their prayers typed on nice pieces of thick white paper. When the Americans had brought computers into their embassy, they had tried to teach Henry how to use them. But Henry’s fingers were never comfortable on their keyboards, and after a few unsuccessful years the Americans told him it was time for him to retire. There was a pension, and they’d allowed him to take home his typewriter.

  Henry tried to find employ at the French Embassy, but they had no use for him or his typewriter either. Instead, he had settled on working in front of their building on the Plaza de Francia.  Everyday Henry set up his typewriter there, and the afternoon breezes from the Pacific would cool him off before the sun got too hot. He would keep on working until it was time for him to go home and the streets became unsafe.

  “What do you do?” asked an American woman. She wore short-pants. The women of Panama always wore dresses.

  Henry guessed she had come from one of the cruise ships that were waiting its turn to enter the canal during the daylight. The ships on this side of the canal wouldn’t start going through the locks until the afternoon. The tourists’ morning would be spent in Panama City and here they would fill up on souvenirs. Later, they would return to their ship, so they could make the gradual climb to the Atlantic and then finally onto the Caribbean.

  “I’m a typist,” said Henry quietly. With his long legs, he couldn’t keep them still for too long underneath his small card table. He’d slid his chair back to make them comfortable, and he looked at the woman’s face. He could still see her reaction. His Darla would be much older than this woman. Henry was certain that she would have wrinkles, and her skin might even have sun spots. The woman in front of him made sure she covered her wrinkles every morning, but she left her legs bare on purpose.

  Darla never had eyes for Spanky and Alfalfa.  Henry had always wondered what she saw in the two boys. Was it in Spanky for his cleverness or in Alfalfa for his manners? The cinema-movies never made that clear to him.

  Henry’s day was almost over on the plaza, and the American tourists had long returned back to their ships. Henry knew the locals would be heading home also. There was no more business to be done on the Plaza. At his home tonight, he would use his finer tools and remove all of the keys from his typewriter. Henry would make sure that each was straight and clean before he replaced them. He had always given special care to his typewriter, and he could make it last.

  The Americans had built a new embassy in Panama. He’d heard that they had built it into the side of a mountain, and there it’d be completely safe from terrorist bombs. Henry could imagine all of the new computers that it must have inside, and he knew there wouldn’t be a single typewriter amongst them.

  Clever men used computers. His Darla had left Panama with a clever man. He thought there might even be a computer with an Internet connection in their home, but he doubted they had a typewriter because clever men didn’t need them. They would probably laugh if they saw him with his typewriter sitting there on the side of the plaza.

  He couldn’t wait for the boy to return, and it was time for him to go home. While he walked under the overhead flowering plants of The Vaults away from the plaza, from his vantage Henry could see that the tide had already drawn its way back into the Pacific.

   

  Chapter 31

  There goes a Tenner...Beans

  Jack wasn’t French, but the giant who tried to kill him was.

  Anton the Gut was angry. The Gut was a giant-man with no sense of humor, and he didn’t think it was funny that Jack had stolen from him.  “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman,” cried Anton with only the passion of someone who spoke a Latin derived language could howl.

  The euro came into circulation in 20
02. In Europe, there were 327 million people who used it everyday. Sixteen out of the twenty-seven members of the European Union used the currency. France was one of those countries. The United Kingdom wasn’t, their currency was called the pounds sterling or simply the pound.

  Jack had made his way to the south bank of the Thames, and that’s when he spotted the London Eye. Not all criminals would think of hiding in a gigantic stationary-revolving wheel without any chance of escaping a giant but Jack wasn’t an ordinary criminal, he was an Archeological Botanist.

  The famous Caves of Lascaux were discovered in 1940 by four French teenagers and their dog, Robot. Some of the cave’s rooms include the Great Hall of the Bulls, the Shaft of the Dead Man, and the Chamber of the Beans.

  How did Anton the Gut come into possession of the beans? The young man and the giant moved in similar criminal circles: Jack’s was the tried and deadly-hollow halls of academia, and Anton moved up through the underworld ranks of Toulouse. Some of Anton’s acquaintances said the giant had acquired the beans in a game of chance. Others said he wooed them from the wife of a rival. Finally, still others said he had simply walked into the local university and ripped the door off a professor’s office and took the whole safe from him, but the seeds had come into Anton’s possession, and maybe there was no way to measure the truth in any of the stories. But in the end, Jack had stolen the beans from the giant.

  At that point, Anton yelled with a booming voice that only someone with a gut could yell, “Be he ‘live, or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”

  That was a curious statement. It might have been said at this time because Anton was a giant, and maybe it was something that all giants said, or maybe Anton was a cannibal. This is not out of the realm of possibility since the last reported case of cannibalism in England occurred in the early part of the twenty-first century when a chef murdered his lover, cooked him, and ate part of him. Man has known bread since the Neolithic times, and has known cannibalism even longer.

  Jack found he needed to escape, but the only money he had in his possession was euros, and until he exchanged them for pounds he would have to rely on his own legs to flee. That was when he decided to get himself on the Eye.