‘You see, my previous assistant was the type of fellow who was adjacently smart,’ mumbled Dr Bertram Everbridge in a distracted gesture to the otherwise empty air around him. Turning with a lockstep of militant precision, the crazed scientist began to pace along his favourite walking rut all the while rambling about old bits of memory interlaced with random equations. Shards of molten slag jumped into the air and incandescently began to pool around the fire escape, as the frenzy of Dr Bertram’s laser cutter continued to disintegrate the bench where he left it energised.
‘Yes, they had spent time at every school within the city, you see,’ he continued, ‘it is a curious statistic that a person would be able to achieve both the widest availability of learning and the virtue of being banned from an entire nation’s public libraries; what dedicated indolence!’
Pausing to stare at a section of wall that should not contain a window, Bertram ignored the recompilation of matter within his lab and forged onward to a sub-tangent.
‘Now what to do about the quantum disentanglement array?’ He shouted before Marching into a cupboard and closing the door behind him.
Cupboard screaming breaks were well known within the scientific community but the sheer vitriol that was only partially muffled by the plywood door, led itself to the ramping up of the laser cutter and the blushing of the laboratory mop.
‘Ah, my wipey-face Dave, my oldest thing on a stick!’
Jail had been kind to Bertram—in spite of what the judge had hoped–he had plenty of time to think, there were a great deal of bricks to count, and it was much safer to be locked up in solitary confinement when compared to the radioactive fallout outside that was “legally” breathable.
His experiments where controversial, he’d be the first to admit that, but Bertram was adamant that madness should not always equal evil, so of course he was happy to sit his jail term, and of course he was happy to let whatever mould growing in his lab have enough time to form a monarchy; such was the burden of scientific advancement.
After much thumb twiddling and zero convictable maladies, it was to be that Bertram was allowed good behaviour, his lawyer–a typically soulless paragon of evasive law–had proven efficient enough to repeal a banana and was awarded damages for what was a slap the wrist. In two hours, Dr. Bertram Everbridge was a free man again and was allowed to leave what should have been a long trial of dramatic accusations and damning evidence.
Free in under a day, the jury were left disappointed, and the media had nothing to cover; the layer’s final remarks of, ‘Well I’ve got nothing else to say,’ speaking of how mundane real life can often happen to be.
‘I have recently decided to change my internals so that they’re streamlined, re-organised them if you will…’
Striding from the cupboard, mop in hand, Bertram continued to speak to his empty lab and expected it to take notes.
‘With all the good thinking that I’ve managed to achieve in prison, I have decided that a good deal of time should next be spent achieving the inverse. Not thinking! Senseless dawdling among the gardens of distraction, as it were. I see that a bit of common man thinking-lessness should do me good, what say you wipey-face?’ He gesticulated toward the mop, who, as an inanimate object, did little to further the conversation.
‘Wise as always, my string headed friend, you’ve got that gift of knowing what not to say and when to avoid saying it!’
Now burrowing itself downward into the earth’s crust, the laser cutter made short work of a sewer pipe and several important looking optical fibres.
Life had been kind to the laser cutter, it had been on charge for several years, the blip of the room’s scientific equipment had become less and less like an evacuation siren over the last month, and above all, it was now off on an adventure.
The laser cutter had always wanted to travel, the desire to roam almost seemed to be wired into its circuitry, and it had often dreamed about being washed up upon a tropical bench or even just being artfully left upon a coffee table, that was life for an instrument: just once chance to be a table lamp for a bit, it would wish, give it one week spent as a toaster.
Placing Dave down and striding into the wall where his balcony had once been, it was at this moment that Dr. Bertram Everbridge had noticed the large cave-in that had occurred in his absence, the result of an experiment reaching the water table, he believed.
Stopping and looking at his laboratory with a rare moment of clarity, the Doctor became onset by all too much logic all at once.
‘By the atoms that comprise me,’ he spat, ‘I’ve eloquently achieved nothing…’
And even with the bit of time that lingers alongside the metaphysical sink of existence, some genius will still manage fall down the plug hole.
This turning of events shall come to be part of a great deal many more moments with little to no consequence, and when lined together it may be this one that is the littlest of them all.
For time can be wasted but never recycled.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
J. McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 