Meursault flipped the channels up and down, giving way to an intoxicating mess of the occasional infomercial drowned out in a sea of blaring static. Not much of interest was on the air at 3:30 am, nor had there been for the past three hours or so. However, numerous weight loss ads and an Oreck Vacuum cleaner commercial ago, something caught Meursault’s eye. It was a timeshare ad, though unlike many of such advertisements Meursault and his jolly friend Proudhon saw frequently while wasting their early morning hours gazing blankly at the television. This particular commercial was perhaps a bit unlike the rest of the boring and superficial infomercials, as it demanded Meursault’s due consideration, and caused him to raise an eye from his drunken, 3am disgrace. It advertised a time-share opportunity in a newly developed housing bank in west Israel. Housing had been overabundant for undisclosed reasons in Israel’s West Bank area and was currently selling for extremely low, low prices-- as was indicated by the advertisement. Even in his miserable, drunken state, Meursault knew he would have been a fool to pass up this one-time opportunity, also as indicated in the advertisement, and that if he escape America to start new life in Israel with Proudhon, he could surely escape his many creditors, as finally indicated by the advertisement. Although Meursault was certain Proudhon would be as interested about the Stolen piece of Palestinian land as he was, he decided not to awaken the piss-drunk Proudhon at that hour, for he had a rally to go to the next morning and needed his sleep. Throughout the past several months, Proudhon had been associating himself with a series of extreme-left syndicalist organisations, or “dumbass-clubs” as Meursault knew them. He claims to have been the one to set fire to the police car during the Toronto, 2010 G20 demonstrations. Either there was big money to be made in social destitute, or Meursault had invested in another pyramid scheme, for despite being recently jobless and credit less, he still managed to provide an income steady enough to keep him and Proudhon alive. And no, they weren’t gay....
They always wondered why it was I can endure a job so horrible and tedious, put in long and hard hours, yet remain completely unstressed or unphased by the work load. “You seem so happy, so laid-back, what’s your secret?” I’ll let you in on my little secret here. Every morning before work, I crush up two extra strength Demerol tablets and mix them into my coffee. They’re not quite enough to get me totally incapacitated, but more than enough to make all those work-time Asteroid games that much more amazing. The caffeine ensures I stay focused as well as happy and the pills maintain an observable crescendo effect throughout the day. Feel free to use this one for yourself. I like to share my saviness.
Proudhon woke Meursault with a phone call at noon the next day from prison. Earlier that day, he had among others, been taken into custody by Lowell Riot Police after the demonstration he had attended went violent and he kicked a police dog in the jaw. The protest, which had been against the perceived injustices encountered by the city’s workers union, would make the third page of the Boston Globe, with a picture taken of Proudhon dawning his oversized black and red anarcho sweater shamefully being led into a police truck beneath a title “From Constructive Dissent to Social Disgrace”. Meursault felt this incident with such frustration, for the money he would have used in order to plan a lavish migration to Israel was now being put forth to bail his idiotic friend out of prison, and Proudhon, who was understandably upset by the whole state of affairs, had his reputation tarnished, his character besmirched. The dog Proudhon kicked had to be put down. Evidently, the cost for the surgery to fix it’s jaw fracture was more than enough the Lowell Police Department were willing to dip into their donut fund.
Proudhon starred shamefully up at Meursault from his cell, cuffed and beaten. The area in which Proudhon was being held was relatively small, the walls were slathered with graffiti and the air smelled of almonds and paint-thinner. There were a few other inmates in there with him, despite the cramped space. The pigs had tased and beaten him profusely following his arrest. Meursault handed over two thousand dollars bail to the officers and they let his friend free.
“Your anarchy sweater smells like shit dude, you need to take a shower when we get home.”
“It’s probably you, you idiot, sitting around drunk all day without a job or any friends!”
“Shut up! You realize I just spend the last two thousand dollars bailing your ass out of jail, you could express a bit of humility.”
When I was younger, after my parents had gone, I moved in with my grandmother in her small, one bedroom-apartment on the industrial outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts. Needless to say, there wasn’t too much to do there, but I managed to find ways to keep myself busy. So far from urbanization, there was no shortage of open fields and industrial sectors which provided for long walks and childhood exploration. One thing she told me that I’m likely never to forget was to always take the time and pick up pennies I saw lying on the road. They were good luck apparently? Nothing more than superstition, I’ll never know why to this day, I still do this, but I do.
Meursault sat down, still being somewhat drunk from the morning and eyed several travel brochures scattered on his desk. Israel almost beckoned him, teasing him perhaps. He knew that between his enormous debt and Proudhon’s now defeated honour, there existed only the one solution. Proudhon strolled into the room; still wet from his shower that drips of water dotted his trail across the carpet. He eyed the travel brochures Meursault had ordered on the desk.
“You can’t actually be considering that idiotic commercial you saw? I think that all this whiskey is starting to drown your brain neurons.”
Meursault leaned further back in his chair and lit up a cigarette.
“What do you have keeping you in America? You have nothing for you in this country. You cannot deny that it is far cheaper, safer, and smells less putrid in any other country in the world. Do you not want a change of scenery?”
Just then, an overwhelming feeling of shame overcame Proudhon as he gazed around their ravaged, nicotine-stained apartment. The amount of 40 oz. bottles littering the ground outnumbered the shades of colour in that room. A few cigarette ashes floated around in an pool of water that had dripped of his towel atop an empty, crumpled Ruffles bag on the floor. 7 years: It’s how long it had been since Proudhon was able to hold down a real job. He looked up at the cracked and stained ceiling. Proudhon contemplated what had just happened, the roar of the riot, the barking dogs, the police and the rubber bullets they shot at his abdomen. He thought about how he was broke and unemployed and he thought about how his mother would react when she discovered her son was a politically defiant dog-beater. Him and Meursault had struck the under most depths of social hierarchy, and besides basic cable and a barely usable dial-up internet connection, they had few possessions in America for which they would stay. Meursault was almost done his smoke; he flicked it in Proudhon’s direction. The two of them booked a travel agent that night.
As he regularly felt during points in his life that demanded any sort of radical change, Proudhon felt slightly unnerved. Meursault was sure to slip a pill of something in his coffee the morning of the meeting to calm him down. As plainly as the presumably genuine college degree that hung in her lobby indicated, they were in the hands of professionals. The travel agent was relatively tall, slender, plain looking women in her mid-40s, whom neither of the two could have possibly said anything more about. Her office was of a dull shade of grey, with drab decor and a few maps and flags pinned up about the room. Meursault did much of the talking during the meeting while his counterpart starred at his hands and hallucinated for the most part. You see, Meursault hadn’t planned to get the best deal he could, nor a mediocre, or even satisfactory one, he just desperately needed one: a flight for two to the holy land based on whatever money he could fiend off his friends. The travel agent starred confused for a few moments when he pulled out a few crumpled twenty dollar bills from his back pocket and slid them onto her desk.
Just get me the hell out of here, I don’t fucking care how.
She picked up the phone after a few moments, maybe to call security, perhaps the lunatic asylum; instead she did what some might consider a terrible gesture of kindness, and others, given the circumstances in which it happened, a terrible mistake. Over the next few minutes she made a series of phone calls; airplane companies, travel agencies, immigration agencies, lawyers, pilots, sailors, mercenaries and elite human traffickers, everyone she knew could possibly fly two people to Israel for $42.16. Others might have found it more bizarre, is the fact she actually came up with someone. They were a group of four people who claimed to be members of the militant-Christian missionary force, one of the ever growing number of sects of post-modernist Christianity. For some unapparent reason, Protestant and Anglican churches denied all association with their particular practise of Christianity and refused to acknowledge it canon to the Christian faith, but they were planning to show off to the local bishops, with whom they shared an ongoing rivalry, by organising what they claimed would be the brutalist, most hardcore religious pilgrimage of all history. They demanded a sign-up fee of $50 which would fly them in the hull of a cargo plane into undisclosed location in East Africa, and then another 15$ for a train-ride that would take them through Africa, through Egypt to Jordan, where Meursault and his friend would depart into Israel and start their new life. The whole trip, which would never have been considered by any sane individual, would take about 2 weeks. The Travel agent sighed. Meursault, excitedly, looked over to Proudhon, who was busy examining the thread count in the office pillows.
Sometimes I think that this whole ‘smoking is bad for you’ card has been played to death already. Tobacco has been smoked by humans for hundreds of years; it can’t possibly be as bad as the media makes it out to be. I know a good handful of people who have been smoking for their entire lives, yet appeal totally unscathed from it. I mean, look at a country like Japan. Statistically, 45 percent of the population in Japan smokes, yet they have the highest life expectancy of any country in the world, figure that.
Meursault and Proudhon rendezvoused with the four missionaries early the next morning in a foggy airfield whose visibility no further than one could spit up. Their four figures stood like ghosts in the fog. As they came closer, they could make out they consisted two men and two women. The first one from the left, women named Анастасия-Гроздана was tall, well fit, with long reddish-brown hair and a leather jacket. A gold, oversized crucifix hung awkwardly around her neck and she spoke with a thick, barely decipherable accent. Next to her were two taller men, Michael and Randal, both wearing leather jackets with the church’s logo on them. One had his hands bandaged up; blood seeped through them and stained his sleeves. Michael, the other one, who was the church’s equivalent to a priest, had hands and arms enveloped in tattoos, untasteful ones at that, and his hair was dyed bright blue. The fourth was a small asian girl, certainly no older than 15, who wore large, horn-rimmed glasses and spoke not a word of discernable English. She carried around with her a giant plush anteater about half her size. Michael called out to Meursault through the fog.
“We won’t be able to take off until this fog clears up mate, but you might as well make yourself comfortable, we’ll be up in the air for a while.”
The Six introduced each other and made their way to the aircraft.
After my grandmother died, I was left all her money and apartment as her sole heir, the latter in which I still reside. I invested all her money in a business venture in “Pharmaceuticals”, which has to this day been met with moderate success. I can’t afford to keep it going for too much longer, so I’m planning one final, penultimate acquisition. He’s going to give 1 million dollars in cash for it. Neither her, nor I will ever have to work another dreaded day of our lives. The only trouble is getting it there...
Randal and Proudhon sat across from each other during the flight. As one would assume, a 10 hour commute in the hull of an overstuffed cargo plane barely holds up to luxury. And to make things worse, there was an intoxicating aroma of roses coming from somewhere in plane, the cargo perhaps. He looked up at Randal.
“How did you hurt your hands bro?”
Randal starred back and without saying anything, began to unwrap the bandages from his hands, grinning slightly in resignation the entire while. Most of the bandages were completely soaked in blood. They began to pile up on the ground, as Randal unwrapped layer after layer of bloody gauze from his hands. As he got down to the final layer of gauze, Proudhon almost choked in horror at what he saw. The smell of roses was intolerable at this point, as it was clear that it came from Randal’s wound. Анастасия-Гроздана leaned over to the two.
“He has stigmata. It’s a divinely inflicted mark of Christ’s chosen few; a hole in each hand and one in each foot.”
Randal spoke thusly:
“I woke up Easter morning three years ago and discovered these giants holes on my hands and feet. It doesn’t hurt, and you get used to the floral aroma after a little while. I’m going on this
Pilgrimage in hopes that my divine gift might help turn others to Christ.”
The six arrived in a small village in Algeria after the most uncomfortable plane ride claimed the last ten hours of their lives. The land was mostly desert with a few distant trees and buildings breaking up the consistency of the horizon. Night had fallen and the air was clear and cool. The train station was a 2-mile walk from there. Meursault and the Russian woman led the way with a leaden stride, Proudhon just behind him.
“You know, my grandfather used to live in Algiers.”
“Your grandfather was also a sociopathic murderer as I recall.”
They made the rest of the walk in silence.
The train was a three-car rust bucket, large and imposing, it was something nobody would ever guess would go three inches, let alone take them across Africa. Meursault sat with Proudhon up in the front row, while the Asian girl sat with Анастасия-Гроздана and the two men in the car behind them. The sweet smell of roses would have made a welcome alternative to the reek of urine and sweat on the train. It was overcrowded with the local flavour of peasants and merchants and freaks, thieves, and minstrels. People hung onto the outside of the train, off the windows and roof that reminded Proudhon of a mass of insects hurdling together. Meursault looked out the window, contemplating a good many things. He knew that his new life would be worth any amount of discomfort that anyone could endure. Landscapes whipped by them at an incredible speed. They made their way through miles of savannah, grassland, jungle, marsh, and urbanity. They watched antelope and lions graze off in the distance. The sun rose and set a good many times, but still the train kept going, deeper and deeper inland.
Proudhon kept busy by reading several books he had brought with him, rarely making conversation with the other passengers. After about a four day train ride, without notice, they made an abrupt stop. It was very early in the morning and the passengers, most of which were still asleep were thrown forward. One would notice it become extremely hot and humid. The air was so heavy that it almost hurt to breathe. Though their destination was heavily obscured by the darkness of night, Meursault and Proudhon could see they had arrived at a train station and the area was largely urban. There was a large sign just in front of the train which he barely found legible.
Welcome to Uganda, Population: pending
Proudhon looked in shock at Meursault who was just waking from his sleep. As a geographically-aware, pseudointellectual liberal, he knew that Uganda, which lay somewhere deep in heart of Africa, was located about two thousand miles of their charted cause. He began to hyperventilate and felt weak.
“Jesus Christ dude, we’re lost, I knew it! This was a bad idea! We’ll be stuck in this god-forgotten country for the rest our lives!”
Meursault slapped Proudhon out of his panic and the asian girl then reached over to slap him for taking the lord’s name in vain. Oddly enough, Meursault was barely in stress regarding their two thousand mile tangent. He just continued to stare out the window into the deep, black distance.
It was then, the silence of the night was broken by a thunderous explosion, and the shockwave shock everyone on the train awake. A bright ball of fire lit up the train as two more explosions followed. Panicked, many of those hanging on the outside of the train jumped from the roof and ran. Four heavily-armed men were now visible in the night. They were all armed with large automatic rifles and wore brightly coloured clothing. The passengers in the train began to panic en mass and flee out windows, doors, and rusted holes in the floor. The gunmen were members of one of the twenty-seven warring factions of the local Zambafusamafusoo tribe who had been engaged in a blood-feud with the neighbouring Yamadrdussazo and Zorazofasmozaso villages. The civil war, which had lasted the past twenty or so years, had put a bit of a dent in Ugandan tourist circulation. Negotiations with the tribal leaders to reach peace had been abandoned due to the absolute futility of task, as the governments had decided it would make the most logical solution to leave them to their own devices. Neither of the four hundred warring villages took too kindly to outsiders, and the missionaries knew if the soldiers captured the train hostage, their lives were not likely to be spared.
Just then, Meursault noticed the faint shine of a coin on the floor beneath were one of the train passengers had been standing. He reached over to pick the penny up, and almost simultaneously, a rocket-propelled grenade struck the side of the train Meursault had been seated and threw shattered glass all over the remaining passengers. Meursault, who was unscratched, would not have been as lucky had he remained seated. Proudhon, also unhurt, was in extreme panic, breathing heavily and covered in dust and debris. The asian girl clutched the plush anteater in terror. The six would have escaped too if the exit wasn’t already crammed with panicking fleers. The last thing either of them remembered was a devastating shockwave that rattling the entire train loose, and then, as according to the trend in every unimaginative literary climax, they all blacked out.
Proudhon came to beneath an intensely blinding, bright light. The room was otherwise empty, apart from a tall man in a dark suit standing over him. He identified himself as a detective of the Lowell police department. He offered Proudhon a cup of coffee with milk and a blanket, and then sat at the table beside him. He then began to ask Proudhon a few questions regarding his friend Meursault. Proudhon, who was still visibly shaken, was in no mood to be interrogated. He had a few cuts and scrapes on his face but was largely unhurt, but the trauma was crippling. The officer handed Proudhon some documents and photographs.
Proudhon had no prior knowledge of Operation Chocolate Expressway until the officer told him. He told him how Meursault had not planned to go to Israel at all, that he had hired a fake travel agent and had his friends pose as missionaries to smuggle drugs to African drug cartels. Confused, Proudhon began to look through the documents he had been shown. There were pictures of Meursault and the missionaries stuffing their luggage full of pill bottles. One of the photographs showed the girl’s plush anteater which had been ripped apart, stuffed entirely with Demerol tablets. Another showed Randal’s hands, with several pill bottles inserted into his wounds. and another with Анастасия-Гроздана and Meursault both in an embrace. The officer told them they were engaged to be married. After they planned to sell the pills, they were going to live out their lives in luxury together. Proudhon could not conceive of what he saw. He refused to acknowledge that his best and only friend could have lied and betrayed him so profusely. The police had tracked the party down using the scent from Proudhon’s anarcho sweater he had left behind in their Boston apartment, which left a distinct pungent scent of American cigarettes which police dogs were able to track all the way to Africa. Luckily, they had arrived just in time to save them from the tribal warlords and intercept their drug stash.
The phony travel agent and the missionaries were all apprehended and dealt with in the harsh Ugandan justice system, the details of which will be sparred for the sake of your stomach. Proudhon looked at one of the documents; it was an ID card that appeared to belong to the asian girl. The other documents revealed she was in fact one of the most-wanted drug smugglers in Southeast Asia. Proudhon slowly began to realize the absurdity of the whole situation, which he would have earlier, had Meursault not mixed borderline lethal doses of sedatives into all his food. What was I thinking? How could I have agreed to move to Israel? I’m not Jewish, I don’t speak Hebrew. Proudhon cupped his face in his hands and let the facts settle in. He then asked the officer what happened to his friend. The officer sighed. Meursault and his girlfriend apparently, had somehow escaped with a few pill bottles during the chaos of the whole ordeal, and were never seen by either of the characters again. He’s presumed to be living in luxury somewhere in the world. somewhere.
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