Fable of The Geeks

By Paul Shannon

Lamar Morgan craves success in his new position with Gentry Ltd, triumph over the crippling power of infinity, enough frozen pizza to get through the week and a happier mother than the one he’s getting on the phone lately. But Lamar decides that honour can only be achieved by making the most brazen statement he can, which leads Buster Matheson into his orbit.

Once a top news photographer, Buster was in love, until his male equipment started letting him down. While on the path to change, with his work being continually hi-jacked by the Chief Reporter, Buster is driven to recompense because of Lamar. Pitted against the significant wealth of Gentry and the powerful reach of the city’s major news organisation, only one will survive.

Shockingly familiar and by turns comic and tragic, Fable of The Geeks shows how one man can make a difference, even if it’s just to himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Shannon
• Release date: Apr 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9780473258108

Paul Shannon

Father of two and partner of one living in Auckland, New Zealand.Paul likes to write about people's problems. It's what, besides his family, keeps him alive.

Book preview

1

Collision

HE WOKE. PAIN SQUINTED AT the back of his head and a local area of his nose with a tunneling gnawing stab. As he rolled slightly he left a small thick crimson puddle. He undid his eyes, like zippers they peeled back to see DEATH hoving into view. Outlined with roses and thorns, it was set on a gunmetal grey clasp with the words BEFORE DISHONOUR. His focus gripped the belt buckle framed by the bangs of a brunette.

He leaned and pushed himself up, the pain attacked his frontal lobe. He felt pitiless and stupid.

‘You?’ she said.

‘I?’ said Lamar. ‘I must have hit a pole or something.’

She was a mass of hair in striped long-sleeved top under black T-shirt, the figure encased in jeans and boots. He forgot about the blood seeping out of his head ringed by the monotony of centre-stage nose pain, he even forgot who he was. He reached for a name but none came and the city ran in a blur all around him. La – mar … It came from out of nowhere. He didn’t find it easy with his tongue stuck in the corner of his mouth like an embarrassed fourteen-year-old.

She pointed at the pole helpfully and Lamar answered her facetiously, forgetting his manners again and she looked at him like she wanted to knock him over herself but she softened to the fool on the pavement in front of her and framed his head in her hands and imparted her knowledge on head injuries in a broad southern people’s accent that Lamar thought tremendously unique and was given pause again himself as he remembered the jet, in silver and black, like a silent and measured missile flying past the towers on the western ridge. Flew seemed a bit strong – it sneaked through the canyon between the buildings, cutting a path by stealth.

He mopped the blood matting on the back of his head with his tie and she stood up stretching herself before him, pulling her eyes wide to remind him he’d live and inquiring if he thought he could walk.

Lamar nodded because he didn’t know what else to do and then he asked who she was. She flashed her face back and Lamar copped a few frames of hair commercial as she mouthed ‘Terri … Terri Columbine’ and disappeared, sucked inside the glass-fronted hotel. Her sympathy to Lamar now only felt an inference. Columbine? Didn’t they make stockings?

He blew his nose. A blood-chunk landed on his pants leg. He rubbed at it. She thought he was an idiot wandering dazed. She didn’t know he was going to be a buyer for Gentry Ltd. He’d be every inch the modern corporate animal. Wouldn’t he?

2

Celebration

HE WATCHED HER COME AS she did because he loved to watch her come. She flew in beside him and grabbed him with a nipple pinch and a bracing lick of her tongue explaining how she’d just helped some helpless fool back on his feet after he smacked squarely into a bus stop sign.

Buster listened with embarrassment as Terri recounted her Samaritan escapade and went on looking across the road at this guy, a comic property with his great mop of hair and his odd bearing as he shuffled out of view. She was only being curious he was sure. There wasn’t anything else to it although for the life of him he couldn’t remember what he was doing here.

But Terri knew what she was doing and she led him across to the mirrored bank of lifts gleaming as if firelit in the low slanting sun and waited dangling a key in her hand that she tapped against her thigh while she hummed Only The Lonely.

They buzzed up sixteen floors and walked the entire length of the corridor in its subdued golden tones hung with faux Regency lamps that barely illuminated the passage at all. He wasn’t sure what he should do but he could let Terri lead him, she could take him wherever she wanted.

She had tried to, many times, but Buster always pleaded the volatility of work, the need to be available as he didn’t know when he may be needed, to capture the shot that would catapult him out of his rut and deliver him. Buster was so often able to capture that agony of reality with his subject that few others managed and yet he hadn't attained greatness. Why was that?

She led him to the north-western corner suite, the walls of its ample lounge honeyed milk and decaled gold.

She sat on the velvet chaise, the champagne in a plumply iced silver bucket in front of her, testing the bottle to see how cold the neck was. She motioned him to do the honours, to snap the lid of the Veuve, because he remembered they were celebrating his doctor’s appointment and Terri, who never knew when to stop spending money, it ran like water between her hands, wanted him so very very badly.

3

First Day

GENTRY LTD LOOMED ABOVE HIM, it occupied so much sky with its white columns and smoked glass façade it made Lamar quiver. He stood back and the building seemed to bend in the sunlight with suited workers passing in their droves, in packs chatting, flinging bags around, wandering in and out, hyenas, wolves, deer, sheep and one or two Unicorns, their splendid new season coats shining amid the general grimness of the rest of the herd. He sharpened his eyes further on the auto doors, the gateway through which he’d have to pass, at the giant pudding-faced security guard commanding his blond mahogany altar.

As Lamar got closer he saw this man sprawled as much by his stature as his position, his skin pitted with volcanic cones and ridge lines around his eyes covered with cheap supermarket magnifiers.

‘Now, who are you here to see?’ he boomed.

‘Ah Helen Odetski, I’m ah new today.’

He shook his head. The room seemed to tremble.

‘New eh? OK start again … I’m Joe and what would your name be?’

‘Lamar.’

‘Oh Lamarrr did you say?’

‘That’s right I said Lamar … Lamar Morgan.’

Joe looked him up and down. He glanced back to his clipboard and curtly asked for ID. Lamar peeled his license out of his wallet and thrust it up at him.

‘So what’d you do to your conker? Missus scone you with her handbag?’

Joe leaned back, the chair creaked and bent under his weight. Lamar would have sneered if he felt tough enough.

‘I walked into a sign, right in the middle of the footpath.’

Joe laughed and the halogen’s hung overhead shook like wobbly jelly.

‘How could you walk into a sign?’

‘I was distracted.’

Joe grimaced and nodded as he stowed his clipboard. He told him he’d be getting a temporary badge. Lamar quizzed him back on why that was and Joe explained you had to be in the building to get a badge. He peeled the backing off the double-sided Day Visitor Pass, with the word EXPIRED faintly present on a diagonal grid across the badge’s surface.

The elevator rushed him up the seven floors and he felt the pressure again in his nose. How bad did that look when it was still coming?

He walked along a row, the IS teams bunnied up four to each booth spreading along and repeated at least six more times until they reached an alcove at the other end that wrapped back behind the stairwell with a sign printed in giant Dymo that read PROCUREMENT.

A woman in a yellow turtleneck with maroon slacks and red sleeveless cardigan waved at him like he was a friend she hadn’t sighted in eons. Lamar looked behind himself, hopeful there was someone else, but she kept beckoning to him. She introduced herself as Helen, the Team Leader. She was unreservedly brusque and plain. Her dark straw hair shaped in the bob of a German war helmet. A collision of odours came off her too, sharp wisps of competing fragrance that disturbed him until he was able to lodge these arrays where they didn’t bother him, while Helen burbled on about admin-type stuff until she got to what he was going to do.

‘Now we’ve got some great projects for you to get your teeth into Lamar, and the first is sourcing some chairs for the executive.’

Chairs? Was that it? She pointed to a seat in front of a dormant PC and handed him a laminated A4 sheet. He took the laminate from her, cluttered as it was, with pictures culled from a Windows Clip Art library.

The half a desk he’d been appointed to backed onto the thoroughfare in front of the EXIT. They barely had room to seat him. He slumped in the rutted chair and read where the toilets were, what was expected meeting behaviour-wise (leaving or turning off your cellphone and not interjecting or speaking over other colleagues) with further little tidbits like the importance of punctuality.

All around him the IS ‘experts’ occupied, at their screens. He really needed a screen. Without a screen you were nothing. You had no protection. Nothing to fight with, no armory or tools. Couldn’t even pretend to be productive. Helen suddenly appeared at the end of the desk and offered him a tie. Lamar took it, this tie with Bart Simpson emitting a train of yellow vomit.

‘You want me to wear this?’

‘Oh yes, please do.’

He tied it standing in the middle of the alcove and turned over the next page on the laminate. Paisley Ties are not permissible.

At around 12 Lamar left his cage and sauntered along the yellow corridor, hoping for some acknowledgment, even if it was for the joke tie that Helen Odetski had saddled him with. He called the lift. It arrived instantly, the doors slid to reveal a brunette in fashionable but demure corporate wear, clutching her purse in front of her.

Lamar grinned and nodded casually to stand behind her. He evoked another smile. He could look at a woman like this and forget himself. When it was his mother’s doing – setting him up with the young teachers she took an interest in, all he felt was his blushing prize self. He couldn’t have them sprung on him, not like that. She never got it. She kept producing them as if they fell out of the sky, clouding his weekends with tepid minglings that never went anywhere.

He waited for her to leave and followed out past Joe, beyond the wall of Gentry to step in the city again only to be cut off by and snared in the flesh by a grey-shawled vagrant. His face like a pock-marked roll of crackling, with lank mouse-dun hair hanging around his ears, as gnarled as a lock forward, his orbit that of a low-moving stink-shield. He asked for change with his toothless blackened gums strung with dried saliva, his neck dishwater grey. He cupped his hand to him with months of dirt etched into every line. Lamar palmed him a dollar.

‘Aoooh yeah thanks a lot there eh.’

The tramp eyed the coin and suddenly turned and went and Lamar was left with an unsettling twinge of kinship, some thread they shared that he couldn’t quite nail.

He went back upstairs and after he'd jettisoned his jacket, which seemed to emit hobo odour, he stood with Helen, feeling strangely linked to her, as the two men entered the room. One was a tall and greying reptile with a sad, knowing face. The other was shorter, a bursting bunny type, loaded on artificial energy.

Helen threw her arms around in the expansive welcoming gestures of the herd mother and performed the mandatory introductions of Bob Cinder and Terry Braithwaite to the new procurement exec Lamar Morgan.

Terry Braithwaite shoved his hand out like he was a dog offering him a lick of his paw. Braithwaite tried to make a joke out of his name and Cinder then rose up, unfolded his lanky frame with an effort that looked like it was about to nail him.

‘Looks like Terry has forgotten his manners. Welcome Lamar. First meeting?’

Lamar nodded yes with an irritated glance at Braithwaite sitting side-on in his chair, his knee spastic with energy drink tremble.

‘Take a bit of a knock there didya?’ asked Braithwaite, pointing at his nose.

Lamar squirmed. Maybe he should say he copped it in a fight.

‘The wind caught the door just as I was grabbing the water bottle in my parka and DOOF!’

'Oh your water bottle eh?' said Braithwaite.

'Yeah, my water bottle.'

‘I had wondered, just that bruise. You don’t know whether it’s coming or going do you?’ said Bob Cinder.

‘Oh I think it’s going definitely,’ said Lamar.

‘When’d you do it?’ asked Cinder.

‘Yesterday afternoon.’

‘It’s coming boy.’

‘Oh it’s coming all right.’

Cinder caught the drift. He steered them back to the jargon-laden discussion of earlier and Lamar shook his head. He wasn’t that familiar with the business yet.

‘Come and see us when you want to contract this out,' said Cinder. 'Terry will help you sort the paperwork. Everything else goes to the steering committee.’

‘Oh yeah, steering committee,’ said Lamar, ‘I’ve heard of that.’

Both men stood and Helen collected up her sheaf of notes.

‘You look about done for the day,’ said Cinder as he straightened his pants.

Lamar looked at him. Tired he knew but he didn’t think it was that obvious.

Cinder pointed at the temporary badge over his shirt pocket. It read EXPIRED in bright pink ink, like the worst kind of Day-Glo badge.

‘Don’t worry, they never last the whole day.’

4

Apeirophobia

HE SAT, WAITING FOR HIS frozen pizza to cook, listening to the traffic roaring outside at the meeting place of Ti Rakau and Te Irirangi Drives. It was his name as usual. Kids at school mocked him with their wide-open way of saying ‘Oh Laammaaarrr’. Treated him like some kind of deranged toff. The taunting, the jibes became threats that became arse kickings which he eventually learned to meet with the cool hand of indifference. Trudy would meet them with careening bursts of sympathy and inquiry that Lamar tried to answer but couldn’t. He wouldn’t give her the ammunition to seek recompense from the parents of Will Duffy, Clayton Hadmore and Toby Drinkwater. As if their names weren’t wacko enough, they just wanted to maim and claw him to get back at themselves. That was obvious now from the standpoint of several years. In the time it would have taken him to get a medical degree, he was furnished with a deeper, more ongoing problem, chiefly his inability to grasp infinity.

In his own courtyard he sat trying to see an end to the sky and would only make himself dizzy. It robbed him blind that he couldn’t and yet, even though he knew it was impossible to expect, where did it stop? Why didn’t it stop? Because of light? Because nothing could travel faster than light. He knew that at least but still the question remained. How could it be finite and unbounded? To Lamar this presented a problem that would cause gut-trembling, head-spinning spasms of incorrigible frequency. He had sexual impulses but even these didn’t snap his nerves like the absolute fact that the universe did not end. That it goes on forever. That it could be without end.

As he couldn’t see how the world could end, his paradox doubled. It was ridiculous and yet to most other people it wasn’t. It was what made existence possible.

There was no plausible explanation for such a fiction. Could it be that it was a circle made entirely of gaseous elements to suspend it in nothing? Whenever he thought like this, his mind would race, eeching and screeching with a horrific din that burned him, for how hard it was for the intangible to be grasped.

He could feel them out there. For everyone that posted on Yahoo! Answers, there had to be twenty others who knew they wanted to do the same but couldn’t. For the life of them it wasn’t possible. Whether they were sitting going numb at the keyboard, or whether they had a computer at all, he didn’t know, but he suspected they were all just like him: They’d written themselves off.

Lamar, suffering from a deluge of information, his own and others, found that most of the so-called experts in the field, high-powered maths professors and physicists, agreed that yes the universe was unbounded and it was really nothing to get worked up about. Once you accepted that as the law governing our existence you could then seek to define ways to correlate infinity. Many were. He had hundreds of links to pages of critical thinking on the topic and queries he’d run, trying to find some insight that would make the knowing easier to take, easier just to accept.

He also found plenty of people who’d heard of the fear and were profiting from it.

The website for Change That’s Right Now proclaimed they would send trained practitioners because they know what’s going on inside your mind. They offered Timeline Therapy to rebuild past perceptions. God, thought Lamar.

Most nights, at about 10.30 he emerged in a fog, his head confused with conflicted frustrated thinking. If the Universe was really without end, wouldn’t there be other worlds that we can’t see? Didn’t there have to be? Was there a world we didn’t know? A world that was simply hidden?

From the endless browsing, clicking and pointing, he’d copped headaches and worse a minor case of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome that he exaggerated out of all proportion. In a paranoid moment that spanned an evening, he thought he’d have to attach a paintbrush to his nose and fork out for a 21" touchscreen. He could use it without arms. Gesture surf. He lay down, listening to the echoing rain on his high south wall and wondered why Trudy hadn’t rung.

5

Foreclosure

HE HAD TO ADMIT HE was shocked at himself now. The building head of steam hadn’t materialised and he knew now that he would forever remember the moment when he’d failed to perform with Terri.

He knew it was going to happen though, or suspected it anyway, after the prognosis from the doctor intimated at thyroid collapse. Here he’d been stacking on weight and getting slower – now at least he understood why. His hormone production had dwindled to near zero. There was nothing left and now that he knew it didn’t bother him – he had an explanation but that didn’t help Terri.

She came at him like a cat in heat, pinning him and instructing him to undo her belt, the one he’d discovered for her, biker chick that she was.

‘There are only pockets of honour in the world,’ said Buster. ‘Few places where people are free to do what they want to do and afford to live their life with honour: small republics, mountain outposts, places far from the temptations of the world.’

Terri eyed him strangely. He felt he had to elaborate.

‘The only countries that came close are the Scandinavians, particularly the Swedes, who are good at living with integrity. Anywhere else is a shambles.’

When he undid the belt DEATH peeled away and she slid off her jeans and wrapped herself into him, clutching the back of his head with the inside of her knees, pulling him into her and he liked it, more for the fact that she was loving it herself and then when she pulled down and unzipped him all she felt reminded her a wizened slug, captive in his pants.

‘What is it Buster? Don’t you want me anymore?’

‘Yeah god course I do, I just don’t think I’m capable.’

‘What?!’ was spat out of her mouth, both an exclamation and expletive.

Buster made her sit down beside him while he told her what he’d been told by his earnest and terribly fit GP Glenn Oldham. They could give him drugs for it he’d been told but he wasn’t sure he wanted them.

Terri suggested Viagra or any one of those pills the mailbox spammers tried to get you to buy. That only made Buster cringe. He didn’t want to drop a tab to get a hard-on. If it didn’t happen, it didn’t happen. Terri reacted badly to this, accusing him of being selfish and only thinking of himself. This didn’t make sense to Buster and Terri had a minor brain explosion which Buster was able to quell by suggesting he’d find something he could use. As they downed more champagne to cope with this preamble, they both fell into one another and slept without any qualm at all.

In the morning Buster woke to find the bed empty and no sign nothing, no note to explain her absence. She would sever him now, cut herself away from their together life. He could rustle her up if he needed to. Would she be game then? She was gone if he didn’t and here he was opening his eyes to a robust Polynesian woman with her cleaning kit.

She murmured awkward apologies, profusely stating how she’d been told the room must be vacant as the guest had already signed out and who did he think he was lying there at 11:30 on a Tuesday morning. She at least gave Buster the grace of ten minutes to have a shower.

It took him at least five to even get his legs over the side of the bed and another five before he could move after examining the ignominy he’d covered himself in the night before. The heated rasp of the cleaner echoed on the door as he crossed to the bathroom his body feeling like it had been split open and put back together incorrectly – everything was there but the sensations were jumbled and garbled, their coded movements regressed.

When he finally made it downstairs he felt himself running hot and cold, his body not seeming to know which temperature to settle on. Seeing patrons and public filing in to the house restaurant made him irrepressibly hungry and he decided to head around the corner to a kebab place he knew.

He ordered a mixed lamb and chicken and took it sitting down at a table half-in and half-out of the front door, his feet catching the wind that tingled and marched all the way up his spine to explode inside his brain like mercuried bubbles might in a cannon.

All he could do now was take the pictures.

6

Ungood Advice

JOE THE GUARD SAT LIKE a fat toad behind his throne and watched him click through the door suggesting with his sneery tone he was surprised to see him back to which all Lamar could do was nod until Joe reminded him he needed another temporary pass.

Lamar fell silent. It wasn’t as if he didn’t want to talk, he just couldn’t find the words. He pointed at the badge passed around the neck of one of the IS staff he’d noticed yesterday. His tie too looked like someone had thrown up on it.

Joe reminded him he should have been sent an appointment to be ID’d and issued with a card later today.

‘What? Emailed? I just hope I’ve got email.’

‘What?’ scoffed Joe. ‘Everyone’s got email.’

As he neared his workstation he smelled stale pizza and saw the Tech guy Adrian poking around still. Been at it all night! Lamar looked at him for signs of sleep. He looked exactly as he did the day before, right down to the can of V.

In his dismissive and low-key way Adrian flicked his beady fringe and screwed up his nose like a pouting schoolgirl and asked him if his name was Lane.

‘Lamar actually.’

Adrian scoffed scuzzing his hand on his pant leg explaining and deflecting all at once how he had to install this patch but it kept looping, looping infinitely.

‘It won’t take.’

Lamar’s heart skipped. Infinitely! He had to find strength. He had