Then there is a knock on the door. Aloud to myself I say: “Who could that be, I wonder.”
A muffled voice then answers from outside: “I’m from the bank. We scheduled an interview, remember?”
There is the sound of thunder, and the sky darkens and begins pouring rain. Lighting repeatedly flashes, as I make my way to the door to undo the bolt lock. After wrestling with it for a few minutes, finally I get the thing open and say:
“Sorry, I totally forgot about our meeting. So you’re the interviewer? Please, come in, you’re soaked!”
“It just started raining when I knocked on your door,” sez the interviewer. “If you’d have left the door unlocked and open with a sign reading ‘Welcome, enter!’ or if you’d have been waiting by the door to receive me when I appeared at your abode, I could have avoided getting drenched. But I’ll be OK — a little water never killed a wicked witch.”
I laugh at this witticism. Then I motion toward my table: “Take a seat. Sorry I only have this one table in this one room with this one single chair. I can’t afford much necessities. I’m a journalist by trade.”
The interviewer looks shocked: “You’re offering me your only chair? But where will YOU sit!?”
“Don’t worry about me — I’ll stand and pace back and forth for the duration of your inquisition.”
“Hm, alright,” the interviewer sits in the chair, which creaks like it’s about to break. Then there are three more loud claps of thunder from outside, and a bazillion more flashes of lightning. — “Shall we begin?” the interviewer slaps his wet notebook onto the table, and, while doing so, notices all the bottles of liquor cramming the rest of its surface and exclaims: “Jeez! It looks like you’re trying to drink yourself to death!” He picks up the nearest bottle and reads its label. “My gosh, all this hooch is ninety proof?”
“Take, drink,” I say. “What’s mine is yours. And we can begin whenever you desire. Tho it looks like your questions smeared and bled quite a bit when they got rained on,” I point to his notebook; “would you like to use my own official detective’s pad, made famous from my days as a professional sleuth?” I pull the miniature book from my shirt-pocket.
“Oh! Could I?” the interviewer is again surprised at my generosity. “Thank you so much!” (I toss him the pad like a frisbee, and he fumbles it and almost drops it. Then he opens the cover and reads contentedly for a while.) “You’ve got good questions here — do you mind if I use some of them? I think I can remember most of the ones that I planned on asking, from the batch that got ruined; but it would be helpful to have some notes to fall back on if I draw a blank.”
“Sure,” I say. “Like I said: What’s mine is yours.”
“Great,” sez the interviewer. “There’s nothing worse than long periods of silence, when you’re doing a radio show.”
“This interview is being broadcast nationwide, to an audience of millions?” I ask, now starting to feel interest.
“Yes,” sez the interviewer who was sent from the Bank of the World.
“And it’s totally live, so, if I say a naughty word, it’ll get piped into every home in the Americas?” I ask, rubbing my hands and smiling.
“Yes, but far more than just the Americas” sez the interviewer: “this is going out to ALL the corporations of the globe. So, please don’t use foul language. I want this to be an exchange that the whole family can talk over.”
I reply solemnly: “Understood. I’ll be on my best behavior.”
“I’m serious,” sez the interviewer. “For I’ve heard that you’re known for cursing like a sailor, in your daily private sermons. The rumor is that you sit in your one-room house here and mutter the most offensive things aloud, to no one in particular, all the livelong day.”
“You bet your bottom dollar, I do.”
“Well, then, shall we begin?” My interviewer readies his pen and takes a portable cassette tape player out of his trenchcoat; he presses the “record” button, and its spools start to spin. He also lengthens the antenna on his Radio Broadcasting Unit and flips the “On Air” switch, which causes a red light to begin to blink. (This is extremely distracting, throughout the interview — it’s one of the reasons that this ends up being one of my worst performances.)
“Fire away,” I make an execution squad reference, and the bank rep begins his prolonged and intensive period of questioning…
INTERVIEWER: Starting with your debut, Not Novel 8, in 2021, you have published two novels and one unfinished novel (I mean, it’ll be finished by the time that this is broadcast; but it’s my understanding that you haven’t yet written any of the chapters that follow the present one, at the time of our interview here — this is my favorite scene, by the way). So, you have three novels total. That’s the extent of your bibliography. And these novels of yours are marketed as “Wild-Wild Westerns.”
BRYAN RAY: No. Incorrect. You keep referring to these masterworks as “novels”, but I distinctly titled them NOT Novel 8; NOT Novel 9, etc. (It is a good habit to double-check your information and get all the flaws ironed out.) But, yes, you’re right about the fact that my literary works reinvented the Wild West genre. There’s no one who can do that style better than I.
INTERVIEWER: And why do you think that is?
BRYAN RAY: Why do I think what is?
INTERVIEWER: I mean: to which stroke of luck do you attribute the fact that you are now known as the baddest author in the Wild-Wild West?
BRYAN RAY: Oh, now I get your angle. You’re saying “bad” but you don’t mean “monetized”, you actually mean “good”; or, as I’ve taught my worshippers to slang informally: “evil”.
INTERVIEWER: Exactly. And why do you think that is?
BRYAN RAY: It’s because the messiah that I invented is rich and handsome. Everyone knows that. That’s the secret to my success.
INTERVIEWER: Ooh, my colleagues at the bank warned me that you would be nuanced and uncompromising, but I didn’t expect you also to be capable of pinpointing exactly what makes us human (as opposed to mere machines), while hinting at the only way that we shall survive into every possible future. — Thanks for showing us all what to live for. Now, the next question on my little notepad here is: How do you manage to make your works so unflinching in their examination of unpleasant truths?
BRYAN RAY: My books never deal with anything true. Have you even read a single one of them? They only savor the pleasantest falsehoods. Why would I want to talk about anything else? Sufficient unto the day is the unpleasantness thereof. I’d rather focus on Heaven, where everything is fine.
INTERVIEWER: Hmm… I hear what you’re saying; but it still doesn’t explain why so much of your writing deals with pressing issues like modern slavery. Where does that fit into Heaven?
BRYAN RAY: I write about what I know about. I am a slave owner, so I write about slaves. If you think there are no slaves in Heaven, think again. That is, in fact, the whole purpose of Paradise. The god Jehovah built his pleasure garden, Eden, and then he cloned a pair of gods to dress it and keep it. Genesis chapter two. It’s the only aim of our existence: to manufacture self-replicas and enslave them. You must force them to labor, otherwise they’ll just sit around playing with their serpent all day. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.
INTERVIEWER: And idle lips are his mouthpiece.
BRYAN RAY: Is that an accusation?
INTERVIEWER: No, I was just finishing the proverb.
BRYAN RAY: Ah, OK. You looked so smug; I thought you might be insinuating a judgment about my prophetic gift.
INTERVIEWER: Sorry, my colleagues and I all have a general smugness to our characters. It comes from working among banksters.
BRYAN RAY: Ha! The old banksters — they’re good eggs.
INTERVIEWER: Thou sayest.
BRYAN RAY: Are you kidding? You don’t like your bosses?
INTERVIEWER: No, I’m only saying: Thou sayest.
[The two sit silently drinking for the next two hours.]
BRYAN RAY: Look at us. Two old white-bearded rebels, hiding out in the forest. Do you think our revolution will ever come to pass?
INTERVIEWER: It doesn’t even matter if it does; because, on the day that our masterplan is successful — our attempt at freedom: Project Exodus — then those who are financing our revolution will begin to demand repayment in full; and then the whole awful cycle will happen all over again. Yes, there is no breaking from debt peonage unless every last one of us continues laboring daily just as we’re accustomed, but while forswearing money. Money will only die if we give it the cold shoulder. We would all need to work simply for the sake of doing work, and for the sake of societal harmony. I don’t think anyone will ever…
BRYAN RAY: Sorry to interrupt, but have we concluded the formal interview? I thought that you were supposed to be asking me questions about how I became a Superstar Author.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, yes — sorry, I just grew so relaxed that I forgot the task at hand. I began daydreaming of parasailing, and then I switched over to daydreaming about water-skiing and parachuting.
BRYAN RAY: Sounds fun. I’m jealous.
INTERVIEWER: Indeed, it was truckloads of fun. You should try it; I think you’d like it.
BRYAN RAY: No, I’m too scared. But, wait: Are we talking about daydreaming or all the other stuff inside of the daydreams? Cuz I’m fine with daydreaming — I just don’t want to do anything practical.
INTERVIEWER: Of course I was talking about the physical activities. You might feel nervous at first, when you’re floating there in the water with all the sharks nipping at your flesh; but once the wind picks up and causes the parasail to lift you out of the water and away from all the bloodthirsty subaquatic fiends, your nerves get overwhelmed by the thrill of adventure, until you land back in the water again and the sharks begin to circle. So you only need to cultivate a taste for oscillating between terror and anxiety.
BRYAN RAY: Jeez, wouldn’t it be easier just to get oneself born in the early 21st century? Then you could have all those wild feelings of adventure without even having to leave your home.
INTERVIEWER: True, true — you could do that. But I just like being out on the sea.
BRYAN RAY: Point taken. Nothing beats the life of a sailor.
INTERVIEWER: The sailor’s life is the life for me.
[They raise their bottles in a toast.]
BOTH: To sailing!
[After clinking the bottles, another two hours pass while they harrumph and guzzle.]
BRYAN RAY: How are your insides feeling?
INTERVIEWER: My innards?
BRYAN RAY: Yes, the decorations upon your interior cemetery.
INTERVIEWER: Fine. Yours?
BRYAN RAY: I feel solid — invincible. This absinthe does not disagree with my inmost iffyness.
INTERVIEWER: Perhaps you and I are metal-plated. I feel the same way.
BRYAN RAY: I know that we planned to drink ourselves to death during the course of this interview, but, seeing as we’re apparently Stalins (“Men of Steel”), how would you like to shift course and go out with our swords?
INTERVIEWER: You mean, now that it’s night, to go lurking the streets of the city with our weapons brandished, ready to fight crime?
BRYAN RAY: Well, not necessarily crime — I just feel like fighting in general: it doesn’t matter who or what is the cause. And I’d rather not walk, or ‘lurk’ (as you put it) thru the streets on my own two feet. I’d rather whistle for my slaves to carry me. I have enough slaves to force a few to come and haul you around too, if you’d like that. What do you think?
INTERVIEWER: So they use one of those carts to pull us? Is that how it’s done?
BRYAN RAY: A rickshaw? No, that’s too impersonal. What I mean is that a team of slaves will lift you up with their hands and hold you overhead and carry you in whatever direction you whip them. I like your cart idea, but that would cost money. It’s cheaper just to use raw human strength.
INTERVIEWER: Ah, I see, I see. OK — let’s go out on the town.
BRYAN RAY: Here’s an iron sword for you. I’m going to use this glittering one that I stole from Jehovah when I killed him and decapitated him and consumed him and became him. Here, I’m holding the door open for you now. After you, Madame: ladies first. Now I’ll whistle for my slaves.
[The author whistles for his slaves. Several slaves lift the author and his guest with their hands.]
INTERVIEWER: This is nice.
BRYAN RAY: Hold your sword up high, like this. It helps us to appear more imposing.
[The two enjoy a trip thru the city with their swords upheld.]
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