– 2 –

Later.

Mr. Jenkins of America opens the office refrigerator. This proves to be a mistake! He is drawn into a terrible pain dimension.

What a bad Mr. Jenkins! That wasn’t what ought to have happened to him at all.

Mr. Higgins acts almost as unwisely. But this time, the departure is observed! Ms. Cloud sees him. She lifts her hand to her mouth in horror.

Then she goes and she fetches the janitor, Jeremiah Clean.

“We have a situation,” she tells him.

She drags him away from his contemplation of the smooth clean floor of their Zen garden. She drags him past the Mondrian he has scrubbed down to a single sheet of red. The server room door slams before they walk past it; the techies know better than to ever let Jeremiah Clean look in.

They hurry through the halls.

“Perhaps,” says Jeremiah Clean, as they wait for an elevator, “we would not have ‘situations,’ if something could be done about Mr. Evans.”

“He’s not the problem here,” says Ms. Cloud.

“Where he walks,” says Jeremiah Clean, “the walls start bleeding. It is very untidy. I believe he has damned most of our company’s HR.”

“I’m not defending Mr. Evans!” she says.

They go up. They hurry through more halls. They are rapidly approaching the refrigerator.

“I’m just saying,” she says, “that the problem is Monday’s sushi, today.”

“This is Tuesday,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Perhaps,” he says, “you mean to say ‘the problem is that which once was Monday’s sushi, but is Tuesday’s sushi, on this modern day, instead.’”

“Sometimes I think,” Ms. Cloud says, “that you are overly particular.”

He frowns.

“But in this case,” she says. “It may be just what this company needs. Listen, Jeremiah. It shouldn’t have gone bad. Not this fast. Not this soon. It was supposed to be tuna, you see. Safe, ordinary tuna. Good old tuna! But I think it was not tuna. I think it was made from a Tuna Horror. Do you understand me? A Tuna Horror. The ‘devil of the sea.’”

Jeremiah has stopped moving. He is laughing. She has to wait him out. He is laughing. “‘Overly particular,’” he says.

She waves it off.

He looks back up at her, and his eyes are clear and bright. “Tuna or devil,” he says, in calmness, “it is all the same to me.”

There is a rising tide of chaos across the world; the incidents are become ever more outré; but not in America.

In America, there is the Patriot Missile; and the Lion of the Dominion; and the living spirit of Uncle Sam, and they defend it — but most importantly of all, there is Jeremiah Clean.

He disposes of the sushi beast, and it does not devour him, because his heart is pure.

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