Chapter 11
Koksun snapped out of his daydream as he realized a smile was on his lips. It was to his utmost relief that anything could bring a trace of happiness to his afflicted mind—even if paradoxically it was the memory of a small test he had passed and set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to what at this moment seemed like a gloomy prison cell with a pile of enticing poison placed right under his very nose.
But regardless, the happiness of the memory pierced through his gloomy pessimism like a sword through tough armor, and once wedged there it refused to fade simply because of it pertaining to an event that was indirectly responsible for his current situation.
He had had his body pushed to the limit many times, and always it had recovered. And he had been pushed mentally too, but never by a mind-altering substance, at least nothing like this. But the still-present happiness from the memory assured him that just as the physical body recovers from overexertion with adequate rest so too would his mind from the foul substance he had partaken of too liberally, albeit not by choice.
He wondered again if a whiff would help or just make things worse. They couldn’t get much worse, a voice told him.
He inched towards the pile of pungent green dust as cautiously as a man who fears heights approaches the edge of an immense precipice, afraid that if he got too close all hope would be lost and he would be unable to prevent himself from inhaling as much as his nose could in a single sniff.
R-r-r-r-r-r-r-i-p
Koksun had read that smell was the most powerful of the senses and that in a matter of moments the memories it could trigger at the subconscious level were equivalent to hours of conscious recollection. He had never before had an experience that so thoroughly proved the theory, in spite of his centuries of life.
As best he could recall, he had drifted off into his reverie when Donive had entered the kitchen and begun removing some items from a basket. The particular item inside the basket that had caught Koksun’s attention was now in Donive’s hand and was torn open.
Donive was reading the back of the bag containing the substance. She went over to the cupboard, grabbed a small measuring spoon, and headed towards the bag.
In a flash, Koksun sprang forward through the air with a vicious “MEOWW!” and grabbed the bag at the top, careful not to ingest any of the substance. He then began pulling it outside quickly, while Donive stared in disbelief at the erstwhile passive, lazy feline that had suddenly turned into a brazen bandit. Incidentally, “Bandit” was the name had Donive had chosen based upon the mask-like appearance of white around his face, interrupting his otherwise all-black, shiny coat.
“Bandit!” she cried angrily. “BAD CAT!!”
Koksun was out the door and onto the grass. He made it ten feet before he heard the pitter-patter of Donive’s feet closing in rapidly. He pivoted around with the fury of a bobcat just as Donive, who was squatting down in front of him, prepared to reclaim the spices she intended to use for that evening’s stew.
Koksun’s aggressive response took her entirely off guard. She leaped back in horror at the devil she had once so warmly welcomed into her home.
She prepared to verbally chastise him but was at a loss for words at what she saw next. Koksun seemed to rival a rain cloud as he suddenly began showering what appeared to be every square inch of Donive’s precious spices. He then performed other acts which need not be recounted in order to ensure no attempt was made by anyone in the household to touch the spices, not even Mervin, the Great Dane.
Koksun knew he was in danger of losing his home or possibly even his life for what he had just done, so he eyed Donive closely to see what her intentions were. He suspected that one word from her, and Mervin might no longer be so friendly but rather a roaring lion who would consume him like an appetizer.
“Come here, kitty,” Donive coaxed.
Koksun looked at her carefully, his human intelligence examining her body language, and his feline smell searching for signs of aggression. Taken together, the conclusion was that Donive was righteously furious but not planning to whack Koksun over the head.
Koksun lowered himself to the ground and gave a timid meow, which he hoped would arouse sympathy. He was not disappointed.
“I’m not mad at you, kitty. I just need to know why peed and pooped on my spices.”
“Meow!” Koksun responded assertively, hoping to communicate There’s a reason!
He looked at her directly in the eyes, hoping she could see he had not gone crazy. She saw more intelligence in there than even Koksun might have guessed, and her female intuition did not take long to tell her that her cat was reacting instinctively and sensed something foul in what she was about to consume. Something she could not.
Chapter 12
Senator Hutherton was more than a little nervous this morning. He was practically quivering. He had this anxiety-fuelled energy to thank for his first Orgone-free morning since he could not even remember when.
Many people suspected a vote would take place today. After all, the debates had gone on for weeks now. Was Orgone really a poison? Or did it only become so in excess? And, in that case, why not ban alcohol? That last argument had not really gotten much traction. No one could remember the last time a group of excrement-covered alkies had taken the city’s plushest shopping district by storm searching for alcohol.
He had not slept a wink last night. Not because he had tossed and turned all night. No, he was nowhere near his bed. He had in fact been about to retire to bed when suddenly like a rogue wave a great fear came upon him. What if the legislation were passed but without the exemption for gentlemen?!
So far, there had only been one senator to suggest such a vile trick. It was Senator Megders. His full name was Senator Edward Megders, but privately Hutherton referred to him as Squirrelly Eddie. He was a four-eyed, overly serious moralizing type—a rare breed in the Seleganian senate. At any randomly selected liberal arts college, two or three dozen could be found in a matter of minutes, Hutherton had no doubt, debating with their philosophy professors over the precise definition of justice.
Such men usually proceeded to vent their vexatious, argumentative tendencies as lawyers. The worst became judges, and the worst of the worst made it all the way to the Supreme Court. Although Squirrelly Eddie was a lawyer, he had also managed to get himself elected to the senate, and while Hutherton couldn’t hate him for lack of pedigree—Eddie was no “in-betweener,” and in fact his pedigree might have even been a notch or two above Hutherton’s, albeit small notches!—hate him he did.
Although Hutherton had his share of open enemies in the senate and those he loathed but succeeded in having a collegial relationship with for strategic reasons, these men all belonged in the senate. Personality differences accounted for some of the hostility, and having rival businesses bankrolling their votes accounted for even more of it, but there was a certain respect there because Hutherton knew they were worthy of being senators because of their pedigree, aptitude, and . . . practicality.
But Squirrelly Eddie was a different case altogether. Hutherton saw him as a man who had enrolled as a theology major, wandered by accident into a business class, and instead of excusing himself and hightailing it off to some lecture on the afterlife had decided he would do all the business students a favor by staying there and interrupting their progress with nettlesome comments and questions.
Squirrelly’s wealthy family had generously bankrolled his campaign sufficiently to get him started, and to Hutherton’s immense displeasure Squirrelly somehow seemed to strike a chord with the rabble of this country—who, for now at least, had the appalling right to vote—and after a few sermon-like speeches on the corruption inside the senate, he had developed quite a following. He had beaten his opponent—a longtime incumbent and a man Hutherton thoroughly admired—handily and earned Hutherton’s contempt and that of a great many other senators.
Although Hutherton believed most of the senators would get on board with the legislat
ion and that their speeches offered mere token resistance in order to pretend to be principled, he immediately spotted trouble the moment Squirrelly took the stage. His small, delicate-looking spectacles; his tiny nose; his effeminate small curls of black hair; and his overly serious face were like a custom-made picture of everything Hutherton could hate in a man.
“Senators,” Squirrelly had begun, “I want to let you know that frankly I’m a bit outraged. Not one of our number has yet had the courage or the moral fortitude to look at the real issue here—making one set of rules for the gentry and another for the rest. If this substance is so bad as Senator Hutherton states” (and at that moment he had looked directly at Hutherton with a scornful glance that did not in the slightest escape Hutherton’s meticulous attention) “then why don’t we ban it for everyone? I mean the idea that if you’re a gentleman you can consume this poison, but if you’re two falons short of being a ‘gentleman’ or two acres short of being a ‘gentleman,’” he said, adding large quotation marks with his fingers raised high in the air and his pretentious eyebrows raised even higher, “then you should go to prison for taking the substance many of you are putting up your noses every night is absurd!”
To Hutherton’s intense annoyance, Squirrelly had then marched right back to his seat in a huff. Squirrelly had the annoying habit of getting his point across and then ending his speech at the apex of its strength, whereas other senators tended to dilute the strength of their arguments by belaboring the point.
Hutherton had immediately stood and waited to be recognized and then marched to the front of the senate himself.
“Esteemed senators, you will forgive Senator Megders. You see, in philosophy, resolution is discouraged, as infinite debate is the ultimate objective.” A light chuckle ensued. “By pointing to the preposterous scenario of a person being two falons short of gentleman status or two acres short of the same, he attempts to arouse your sympathy and deceive you into thinking this is a real scenario that needs addressing. Senators, the line drawn for gentlemen was—I’m sure you would all agree—placed mercifully low. If you are two falons short of that, well, then I say it is too likely you do not have sufficient resources at your disposal for the law to, in good conscience, bestow upon you full license to risk your body with this particularly heinous vice. No, my good senators, no civilized society would tolerate such risks. We’ve already seen the consequences that occur when riffraff are beholden to this substance. By criminalizing its use for such ranks of society, we will kindly protect them from ever becoming addicted in the first place.
“And, to address Senator Megders’ hypothetical scenario head-on, let me say that surely any man just two falons short of gentry status can, if he indeed possesses the ‘moral fortitude’—if I may borrow a term of Senator Megders—necessary to handle such a potent substance, obtain the requisite two falons needed to arrive at gentry status. Or, if” (and at this moment, only by pinching his right index finger hard enough to cut the skin did he manage to suppress the giggle that almost escaped his lips when he realized he had come an inch from saying “Squirrelly” in front of the whole senate) “Senator Megders really feels so sorry for these downtrodden imaginary individuals, perhaps he himself will gift them the two falons that they need to sniff Smokeless Green to their hearts’ content!”
And at this moment, the senate erupted into applause and uproarious laughter. Squirrelly’s face had turned redder than a fox’s tail, and as he and Hutherton exchanged eye contact, both knew they were now mortal enemies.
Yet nonetheless, just last night Hutherton began to worry about the possibility of Squirrelly somehow managing to get some senators to condition their vote upon removal of the exemption. He was, after all, a well-connected man via his family, and although privately they probably loathed Squirrelly just as much as Hutherton did—and for the same reasons—family pride might trump that hatred and cause them to pull some strings behind the scenes in order to make sure their son did not lose face, as this could cause the family to lose face.
The thought of this at about 9 p.m. last night had put Hutherton into a cold sweat. He had rushed from store to store, hoping to amass a stockpile of Smokeless Green that could last a decade. He had brought ten servants and pulled a wagon behind his coach, ready to store as much as he could. But almost all the stores were closed, and furthermore Smokeless Green had already been starting to become more difficult to come by.
The negative press had almost worked too well, and a lot of shop owners were deciding they didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Many, in fact, had even put large signs on the outside of their stores saying:
NO Smokeless Green Here!
Hutherton had then gone to the gentlemen’s club, sure he would come in contact with Ambassador Rochten, who always had the answers to everything. But no Ambassador Rochten. The once always-available ambassador had become as elusive as the end of a rainbow. Hutherton had been there until the wee hours of the morning but to no avail.
By the time he got home that morning he was in a panic. Sure, he had at least a month’s supply at home—or did he? After all, his daily dose was getting a little bigger week by week. Maybe he only had about three weeks left. That thought nearly sent him to the grave with a heart attack. He had grasped the side of the stair rail and nearly fallen down the grand staircase.
He had then proceeded to sit limply on the stairs against the wall. He growled at his servants when they approached him, “Leave me be!” He sat there the rest of the morning until it was time to leave to go to the senate. He knew the final vote would be today. He was now praying his zeal to keep the in-betweeners in line would not now render him a criminal for the use of something he could now not even fathom living without.
Like a bully approaching the headmaster’s office and feeling suddenly small, Hutherton got into his carriage and to his unpleased astonishment suddenly found himself checking his pockets for what could soon be contraband in the republic of Selegania, almost fearing that at any moment his carriage would be stopped by some stern-faced contraband officer checking every square inch of the carriage for signs of the contraband and perhaps all the while barely restraining a savage, snarling beast of a dog with rivers of saliva flowing out of each side of its mouth.
It would have done little good to inform our poor Senator Hutherton that one of the most common side effects from abrupt withdrawal—and, yes, even twelve hours of non-use could be classified as such—from Smokeless Green after regular usage was paranoia. Just as it would do little good to inform a man with a smoldering burn on his arm from a hot poker the reason for his pain. Furthermore, if anyone had tried to inform Hutherton of this fact, he would have quickly been seen as a conspirator himself and only increased Hutherton’s paranoia.
But in the truly ambitious, there is a part of the brain that is not easily extinguished by competing emotions, and in spite of the delusional fears currently racing through Hutherton’s mind, he still had a goal in mind, which was to see to it that the in-betweeners not have legal access to this substance.
Upon arrival at the senate chambers, like a professional actor who can don the expression and bearing of his character regardless of his true emotions inside, Hutherton quickly resumed his normal persona of cold, cocky arrogance as he exited the coach. And perhaps not entirely unlike the experience of other actors, Hutherton found to his immense relief that upon donning this facade he quickly felt his inner self begin to meld with the exterior, and his anxiety subsided somewhat.
Nonetheless, his heart pounded as did his feet, which were at this moment pounding against the many steps composing a rather picturesque set of stairs leading up to the senate.
Once inside, he redoubled his outer facade, increasing the arrogant expression on his face. He took his seat and waited for the president to call the senate to order.
“All rise!”
At this point—and Hutherton, as did most of the senators, dreaded this morning ritual—repeated a rather lengthy pledge
of allegiance to the republic and constitution of Selegania, words that, while beautiful and noble, reflected none of the sentiments in most of the senators’ hearts. “This is claptrap for schoolchildren!” Hutherton often told his colleagues and received agreeable nods.
Hutherton looked over at Senator Megders with hatred in his eyes and saw that Squirrelly had a resolute, almost militant, expression on his face as if he were about to go to war with anyone that he caught botching a phrase of the solemn oath being repeated. Hutherton had no doubt in his mind that if there was anyone in the room naïve enough to believe what was being stated it was Squirrelly without a doubt.
Once this odious task had been completed, the president queried: “Does a senior senator have a motion?” (“Senior senators” comprised the twenty senators with the most experience.)
“Yes,” said Senator Landers. “I do. A motion for a vote on cloture on the Smokeless Green bill. We’ve been debating this issue for weeks now like a bunch of old maids. I’d say it’s yea or nay time!”
This brought forth a chuckle and a light round of applause . . . and only a halfhearted whack or two by the president with his gavel against the sounding block calling the senate to order, as he too had had just about enough of the Smokeless Green debate. One more speech from Senator Megders, he had told himself, and he would resign.
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