Part One:
REVELATIONS
CHAPTER 1
Things couldn’t get much worse, but Harvey was going to give it a
shot anyway.
What Futterman needed now, what every cell in his wrecked
body desperately cried out for was one tall, stiff cocktail. No mixer,
no glass, no time to break the ice. This was a problem he knew could
be easily solved, and like an errant teenager with his first prostitute,
the inevitability of impending union drove him nearly into a frenzy.
He entered the house through the side door and headed straight
for the kitchen cupboard. Finding his friend, his only true friend in
times of crisis, the lonely scientist reached out for a warm embrace.
“Black label Johhny,” he sighed, “You know how to make those
peacock feathers plume again.” He tore the cap off, sucking at the
neck until it was half empty. That he regarded the bottle as half
empty had nothing to do with pessimism: like all vessels, he knew it
was going to get emptier before it got full again. Maybe more than he
had deserved, Harvey had suffered.
“Good Lord,” he cried. “What have I done to deserve this? What
could have been the justification for this enormous boil on the ass of
my life?”
Chalk one up to a monolithic, godless boredom. Chalk one up to
Pandora and her heavyweight box. Chalk one up to his own
monstrous ego. He was almost out of chalk. He took one more violent
pull from the murky bottle, and collapsed on the fading linoleum,
amid spots of ketchup and tufts of his refugee hair. When he awoke
three hours later to find himself dying, he cracked a smile for the first
time in weeks.
But that would not be his fate. For Harvey, death would not come
H O L Y S H I T !
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