CHAPTER 1 – Amateur radio presenter… master debater.
Set for another immeasurably long radio show was the ‘Born Son of The Infinitesimal Spirit’. Wounds healing [knitting back together]; there was little fear inside him. So little that a breeze might lift it, but in the studio all is stale.
So the ‘Born Son of the Infinitesimal Spirit’ (that is Jensen)… Jensen sits watching the record player’s needle scratch its way to sound waves. It took most of his god-damned energy and concentration to ensure the needle kept up with the grooves. All the while the red 'on air' sign buzzes and threatens flies like it could do blue zaps and the 'femme fatal' it would take to call them over.
Regardless… he walks into the small kitchenette while the music gears up for a death rattle.
The thing that upset him more than heartache... was that he was trying to steady himself and couldn’t shake the ambition to tumble. He was heart-broken. Broken hearted. Oh was he broken hearted! And that led to a melting of feet and jellied bone at the kneecaps. The pictogram went… He(in two)art.
Bella Cope was the chica with the talons. Long, red, varnished and razor sharp. She'd upped sticks and had a bundle tied to one end of them, off down the long road to elsewhere without so much as a 'see you later alligator'.
With a too-strong coffee, Jensen staggers back as the needle reaches the end of the known world of spinning vinyl. Now he's got to take calls.
“You're on the air, I swear...”
The Born Riser from The Born Again Fire (that being Cup) – the boy whose family was born again and again and again – graces the airwaves and the station with the nonsensical. Cup's called-in to Jensen, who is doing the ‘see you later’ slot on public radio. Cup's on line 3. “Hello caller. You're on the air, I swear...”
Cup says he's tired of listening to dehydration. The unfresh, old and dusty vocals of long-retired geriatrics. Voices and joints crackling. He wants some younger singers; or, if not, then at least some younger recordings.
Jensen ignores him and asks a question of his own instead.
“So, in theory, to be able to construct electronic computers in the foreseeable, and from this stage onwards, we would need to ensure that to build is to ‘birth’ and to upgrade ‘to grow’?”
Cup can't answer. He loses the will and puts the phone down. He’s thinking in the melody of the last song, the one he wanted to rail against.
Suddenly there is a ringing from the receiver he's just dropped. So he picks it up again and there he is in the Rochester Booth talking to a lump of plastic. He takes a seat and listens as he's told things he's told he's meant to hear.
The Rochester Booth is one place that works in bundled time, you walk in to the diner, walk past the New York Booth and you enter a time loop where it's 1955 and you lose the will to escape until you've settled the bill and stagger homewards.
“The officials are shot! The remains are being put through weathered processors to remove the information they possessed and grind them into puppy chow. And, my god, we've learnt that the so-called high-K material, which is the only export of The Tribulation Kingdom, it's missing! Our work is urgent. Our work is as much a struggle as climbing a hill only to find that actually you need to be on another, slightly higher one.”
Cup is as confused as you, but that is what he heard being shouted at him down the line. It wasn’t a tin can next to his ear, he couldn’t find out who it was talking by following the wire, or tugging once or twice to hear a yelp a few yards away, so he asked.
“Who is this?!”
“My name is Dr Kronkard. I am responsible for The Wirral Department. For all of its contracts and ensuring that 10-centimetre-tall, erect, dog-mess is cleared before the arrival.”
“What arrival?”
“THE arrival.” *Click* And the voice is gone.
Standing (but only just) Cup makes his way to settle the bill. Three more hours and he's meant to be in work. Cup is hammered and needs coffee more than he needs his car keys, but he can't form the words to ask for one from the waitress, let alone see through the haze of beer suds. And anyway, he can feel his keys in his pocket without looking.
Jensen gets back to the microphone after another break during a Wanda Jackson track. Three more hours and he's off-air at last.
CHAPTER 2 – Answer the god-damned phone!
[Later that same day the born son of the infinitesimal spirit watches a preacher being grilled on a question and answers show.]
From the TV: "Today, ‘ers’ and featured ‘erms’, are not fledgling terms. They are fully developed evasions from questions. I will that you would speak Sir Preacher!”
From the preacher's throat: a swallow.
From Jensen's phone: ringing.
Jensen takes the stick of celery out of his mouth. He contemplates not answering it. He decides that he'll leave it to chance. If it rings again he will answer.
From Jensen's phone: ringing.
Jensen stretches to unhook the phone from the receiver. “Hello?”
“Ah good, you’re up! Dr Kronkard here. I have a question.” (there is a pause) “Ok, so… if the quantum can be made smaller, as we have already largely disproved, then can we assume that anything can be accomplished?”
“I think that birds answer that question.”
“How so?”
“I could never be a bird. That could never be accomplished; some things don’t want to be!”
“Quite right, my boy. And your point?” The Dr asks.
“We are proving the existence of the infinitesimal spirit here! I would answer that we have no business changing the size of atoms and it is stupid to imagine that anything is possible because some things want to remain impossible… it is THEIR desire! Things have to be allowed to happen if they want to… without us willing them into fruition, equation, being or formula. The chance of the ultimate possibility cannot be disproved, you have to take a step back from your examinations and figure that its a game of alchemy, at the end of the day.”
“I see. I made a new acquaintance last night. One 'Cup Shonee', he was a caller who couldn't answer the question.”
“I remember.”
“Good good, well I want you to meet with him. And next time, answer the god-damned phone!” *Click* And the Dr is gone.
Jensen wonders why the Dr wanted to ask that about atoms and if he’ll manage to make them smaller. He wonders who 'Cup Shonee' is.
CHAPTER 3 – The book of Job
Monday 10:45am: Cup is awake and shaking, jesuit is he shaking! He couldn’t shave for all his shaking.
Not apologetic of his night drinking he stumbles into work. His tie is slack around his neck in a big loop. He looks like he might hang himself with it. Still might, if his headache gets worse. His week plays out as follows…
Monday to Friday are soul crushing defeats marred with petty disagreements about work quotas and last year's projections. The nights are sweaty and don't end until the scotch bottle is empty.
Saturday and Sunday prove to be days full of milk and honey moments, each.
This week started badly, in other words with Monday.
But Friday is when he was fired. They got one more week of filing from the 'car-crash Cup' before they canned him. Good on them. Heaven help them find anything where it ought to be though.
Fired for drinking away his morning hours and thinking he can still collect a pay slip. Fired because they know he moonlights as rent boy for truckers. Picking up guys at the diner.
The Rochester Booth acting as his office and the drinks the waitress serves him are 'twink courage'. Someone must have noticed the cum stains on his suit trousers.
Monday has come again and he has just applied for a job on the radio… figures he can play better music than Jensen Miller any day of the week. And if able, all week!
CHAPTER 4 – Push for Rushmore and Rudell.
Regardless…
Jensen is flattered that the Dr still chooses to call him. It must be total infatuation, he thinks, at least in short term. Jensen is a quart through his dad’s port. Soon he’ll be on to Mother’s Ruin, GIN [even saying it brings his cheeks and ears to a reunion.] I'll have a g[r]in please.
Jensen could be named after a car. The 'Jensen Interceptor', made by British Steel, back in the day. Except his daddy never heard of no auto-mobiles and no steel companies, neither. Instead it was a mistake, but lord knows what the aim had been.
Jensen is brazen and soppy stern… rowdy only when asked politely. Jensen is wide blue eyes and a mop of greasy, ruddy brown hair. Jensen is unshaven.
“Why for this red light?” He says to himself.
“I'm on the air.” Cup answered.
“No man is 'on the air' before me, it's the way it is. We play static before I show up!”
“Not true now. Not true no longer.” Cup replied.
Seeing he was already defeated and knowing that his objective was Cup's friendship, Jensen let it go. Though he'd have slit a man's gut for less, had he half-a-mind and no instruction.
Jensen is asleep in the armchair. Jensen’s dreams are running behind his eyelids.
Cup plays records, regardless. He is thinking about drink. Cup has little regard for anything less.
CHAPTER 6 – Am I missing a chapter?
Cup's family history is lovely. His mother’s life rests on a prescription slip. His father, an IBM manager, a success story. Jensen ate the page that had the last chapter on it. They call Jensen 'brimful of uselessness' and he sometimes deserves it. But gone are the pages of Cup's history, along with the story of how the two men, after hardships unnumbered became brothers.
CHAPTER 7 – ‘Flawless’, even the birthmarks!
“Let me be clear! Clear as a VS1 diamond! Very slightly included, but more or less flawless. Let me be clear with you old man!” Jensen says to Cup. “Let me be clear! Your Father has divorced your Mother and married a 15 year old girl from Abergaveny. She has a lazy eye and a birthmark on her shin.”
“Yes.” Says Cup.
“And this happened recently?
“Yes.” Says Cup.
“The birthmark, old man – it is the shape of a ‘Cup’!”
“Yes.”
“You say that a lot… The shape of a ‘Cup’ MAN!!!! Imagine!!!!”
“Indeed, it makes me think that the girl from Abergaveny might well have been meant for me. It means my father is a casualty of my destiny.”
Cup’s parents have finally [and formally] divorced. His mother thought the events were demonic. His father gained a distaste for God after spending an hour rimming a girl young enough to be his daughter. Apparently she tastes better. They are, undoubtedly, in love.
*Click* And we'll move on.
CHAPTER 8 – Mother’s Ruin.
Cup's mother is a wonderful women. Or she 'was'… before the frown pills took over motor function and made her shake uncontrollably; small price to pay for sanity, allegedly.
CHAPTER 9 – Retardation.
The Dr now addresses both men simultaneously over speaker-phone.
“We're delighted with your progress as Adventure Agents. You are both up for promotion; provided, of course, you recover the high-K material.”
“We're up for it.” Jensen replies, while Cup just smiles and nods.
*Click* and the Dr is gone.
“Where do we look?” Cup asks.
“There's a nunnery that we can check out. They're high-K addicts, every one of them. They ship it in via the black market. It is cheaper to get it from rural sources, rather than by prescription. The prescription stuff is stronger, but the rural stuff has lower overheads due to the workforce being the poorest farmers in Tribulation. Nuns don't have much money, not a sterling to shake between them.”
“What do they do with it?”
“They put it where they can't put a penis. Then it gets to fizzing away like an Alka-Seltzer. It's meant to be quite a rush.”
“So why does the good Dr want the stuff back so bad?”
“This is prescription K, man. The stuff is worth shrapnel, any fucker would empty is pockets to get his hands on some of it. The Dr is a business man, he knows the value of the darker pharmaceuticals. And I'll bet the Dr isn't above a bit of fizz, now and again.”
CHAPTER 10 – Seek not salvation, it's not on the menu.
Dark is a sky without a sun in it. Darker still with the moon behind a cloud. So was the sky for the brothers Jensen and Cup as they close in on the high-K bandits.
A group of Dr Kronkard's rivals had been the culprits. They'd sought a means to de-thrown the King of Chemicals.
“Set those wrists at sky-level, you fuckers!” Cup yelled, breaking down the distance between him and the thieves.
“Well said Cup, well said. Now the all of you, get down on the ground and don't try for your 15 minutes.”
Three toy chests full of high-K were retrieved. None more is suspected to be in circulation.
The council published their report after a month of further investigation.
“After a month, the high-K investigation and debriefing of the high-K-related detainees has been exhausted. As the matter now stands, the high-K investigation has gone as far as is feasible. It is the recommendation of this council that Cup Shonee and Jensen Miller gain their honours and are released from their duty to the organisation.”
Cup and Jensen are free to return to their disk-jockey ways. Both are relieved.
CHAPTER 11 – Real life.
“She seeks to pin me to her wall, or chalk me on her chalkboard as some strange feral child, rather than a real boy… ‘wooden’ she called me! and I’m an experiment to her – nothing more than a sunglasses wearing, ass-pinching, ‘hey’-shouting senior specimen.”
Jensen has been carrying on like this for the last three track changes.
“Sometimes we have to play to our strengths. Remember that the mystery of booze isn’t that it gets you drink, but that it burns!” Cup says.
“Good point…”
*Click* And the next track is put on.
Our Jensen is now in a shirt, paint-spattered and white with jeans and no shoes. His name is Sunshine for this day alone.
Jensen Miller no more, at least for today.
Sunshine is kept together by staples, loud background music, and vodka.
“It don’t matter where you bury me. I’ll be home, I’ll be free. It don’t matter where I lay. All my tears be washed away.” He sings as he [at last] makes a success of his walk to the kitchenette. So, being sober enough to get there, he takes a bottle of Vodka out of the freezer drawer and caps it for a slug. He brings the bottle back for Cup.
“Sunshine, where's the Dean Maverick tracks?”
“Maverick's under 'Coo-coo-cool', good brother.” Sunshine says, hiding his burning resentment.
Sunshine hasn’t seen another human being, other than Cup, for two days. They are back to back DJ's now and it is all they can do to take the calls that have come flooding in. Talking to locals has its merits. There are gifts and promises of drinks for the resident heroes, the both of them. But Sunshine's beginning to miss the faces, the realness of people. Or he's started detesting the realness of Cup.
Looking down at his shin he notices, as if for the first time, a birthmark in the shape of a kettle.
CHAPTER 12 – Heartbeats are for milk and honey highway rides.
Slapping itself, wet, against the inside walls of his rib cage – Sunshine's blood-pumper is looking for escape. After staying up all night missing people, he got into his car. [Bottle of Vodka, as a passenger, propped up in the seat with a belt around it.] Cup sprawled out asleep where he lay and the radio station playing static, like back in the good old daze.
His eyes keep misting over, but he wants to get to the mall for a mocha.
He’s popping omega-3 in pill form and blinking away each ray of sunshine that makes it to his iris.
He is no longer Sunshine.
Jensen gets to the mall and goes to the café.
Taking his mug to the nearest empty table, Jensen has a mind for puzzles.
CHAPTER 13 – My favourite number.
Cup wakes up and notices the missing soul. Cup's a little heartbroken at the loss of him. He was heart-broken. Broken hearted. Oh was he broken hearted! The pictogram went… He(in two)art.
Picking up his Mini-disc player he goes for a jog along the lakeside.
His mobile phone purrs away in his pocket.
Cup takes the stick of celery out of his mouth and stretches his legs before taking the phone out from his pocket. “Hello Dr.” He says.
“It is time for the rewards, my boy!”
“Where do I need to be?”
“Carsonova. 30 minuets.”
“I’m already in Carsonova, where precisely do I need to stand?”
“At the business end of a street named New England Road.”
*Click* And Cup is gone.
CHAPTER 14 – The call for extra credit.
“You need to kill him, Jensen.”
“Dr, I'm not sure I understand you. You want me to kill Cup? Why and whatfore?” Jensen breathes heavily into his mobile.
Dr. Kronkard sucks a breath in, between his teeth, he might have been inhaling a drag from a cigarette. Or he might have an asshole stuffed full of high-K, who could tell?
“My boy, you have this last task to perform – if you do it well enough then there will be a reward for you. 72 sturgeon.”
“I'm listening.”
“By that I mean 72 prime sturgeon, which are each a positive whole sturgeon that have exactly two positive divisors, 1 and the sturgeon itself.”
“I'm in.”
“Good, go to the business end of New England Road, once there take your hands and wrap them around Cup's neck. Don't stop until his eyes go bloody and his heart stops in his chest. The aim is for limp and lifeless, with a hint of blue at the cheeks.”
CHAPTER 15 – New England Road.
With a celery stick poking out of his mouth Cup looks like a loiterer. One foot is sole-to-the-brick the other set-to-the-earth. He stands like he’s cool. [He is wearing his dirty black boots and an attitude.] In a bag at his side is a new vinyl that Jensen will like.
CHAPTER 16 – Across the street from the business end of New England Road.
While Jensen crosses the road with his mind on a single grim purpose, he neglects the traffic and is mowed down by a passing Caviar Lorry. The scoop is that the driver kept going. The story is that he is still out there, somewhere, still driving. That story’s lead character is a joy rider with blood on his bonnet.
Cup was the first at Jensen's side.
“Dear Jensen, my Sunshine. Please stay wide-awake for the time it takes for an ambulance to arrive!”
Not so much in response, but involuntarily, Jensen shits himself. Soon a tear is falling down his cheek. Soon another. Soon the sky starts crying too. And Cup. And every passer-by. All unknowingly crying over a man who would have murdered but a moment before. But even if they knew, sympathy isn't all or nothing. They'd still have felt at least 5% sorry for the crippled Jensen, lying in the arms of Cup.
Cup, who rocked Jensen gently. Cup, who sang to him. Cup, who sang old songs; rather than the new ones he'd have wanted to hear, if he were dying. Cup who heard the dying words of Jensen 'Sunshine' Miller.
“Prescription please.”
CHAPTER 17 – Another part of the full story. Gift and Gory.
Long after Jensen had been placed underground for safe-keeping, Dr Kronkard appeared at the radio station.
Cup had just switched over to static to give himself a time of reflection and he saw the tall figure enter the room.
“Dr Kronkard, I presume.”
“Indeed, and I come baring gifts, young man!” The Dr said, in a jovial tone. “72 prime sturgeon, for a job well done!”
fin.
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