Dispatches From The Odd Fellow's Department

After breaking into his old office, Jackie went immediately for the top left hand drawer. He felt the underside of the table top about five inches back. After negotiating Todd’s relatively large forearm precariously through the desk drawer, he retrieved an envelope. After deftly wielding a letter-opener, he took out the envelope’s contents.

Jackie and Todd awoke with a start. As Jackie arrested control of the body, he put a fresh set of clothes on and walked out into the Doctor’s kitchen.

The doctor and Carol were already awake, and finishing off their breakfasts. Jackie poured himself a shot of rye in a clean tumbler, threw it back and sat down at the table, placing the bottle and his glass down in front of him. As he reached for the table lighter, he spoke.

“It’s me, Jackie. I gave Todd the day off.”

Asshole.

“So what’s your master plan?”

“We were thinking that because Todd’s not known around campus, you could go into your office at the university and get the lockbox, and we could bring it back here. Just for a start.”

Jackie poured another shot and downed it.

“I guess that’s as good an idea for a start than any I’ve got.”

It’s a bit early to be drunk, don’t you think? 

“What the hell did you do to me?!” Jackie exclaimed. In lieu of his own face, the features he had recognized as his own all his life, his brother Todd’s face stared back at him in the mirror.

“Well, it’s a complicated answer, Jackie.”

Jackie and Todd’s body jerked violently for a moment. Speaking in an exaggeratedly lower tone of voice, Todd effectively commandeered his body back from his late brother and said, “It’s pretty simple, actually. Basically, they took your brain, pulled out the bits that controlled your higher level of thinking, strapped them on to mine and blasted us with beta rays until you and I could both control my body. Think of it as a present for all those birthdays I missed.”

I guess that makes sense, Jackie thought

“Yes, it’s something we,” Klaussheimer said in an odd way, “were working on in case of, as you might say, an emergency.”

“All the steam was from the last step, Jackie,” Carol added, “when we had to— um— irradiate you and Todd. The heat in the chamber had to be balanced out with dry ice so the body wouldn’t— um—- burn.”

“And before you ask, it was my idea, pal. I wanted to know how had the gall to kill my only brother. When Klaussheimer suggested it, we figured that two heads would be better than one. We don’t look anything alike, so we can ask the right questions to the right people and figure out what happened.”

Jackie winced as he downed the glass of rye in one go.

“Well god-damn! Doc, what does it matter if somebody killed me? I’m alive now, aren’t I?”

“Perhaps, Herr Davidson, you should look in a mirror.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jackie, you’d better—” Carol started, before tears began to well up in her eyes. “There’s— a… powder room on the right.”

“Darling, it really can’t be that bad.” Jackie entered Klaussheimer’s powder room, and flicked on a light switch only to see his younger brother, Todd, staring back at him, just as he heard Todd’s voice echo through his brain:

“Suprise, Jackie. Looks like we’re in this together now.”

The trio stood in Klaussheimer’s kitchen, sipping coffee. Jackie had been issued a white terrycloth robe for modesty’s sake, and Carol began to explain the situtation.

“You see Jack, you’re supposed to be dead.”

“Correction, Carol. He is dead.”

“Well that’s just preposterous, doc, I can’t be dead. I’m standing right here in front of you. I think Carol’s explanation is much more plausible.”

“Not necessarily, Herr Davidson. Tell me, what is the last thing you remember before you stepped out of that chamber in my lab?”

“Well, I suppose I remember leaving the library yesterday at about nine o’clock. And that’s about it.”

Carol reached over to a stack of papers and photos, and handed them to Jackie. “Jackie, honey, that was almost a month ago. You never came home that night.”

“I guess I stand corrected, doctor. You’re right. I must be dead,” Jackie said, flipping through the stack of police reports and black and white crime scene photos of his own mangled corpse. “Who would do such a thing?”

Klaussheimer poured four fingers of Canadian Club into a Collins Glass, and slid it over to Jackie. 

“We were hoping you could tell us.”

A figure emerged from the steam holding his head.

“God. Damnit! I need a drink!”

Doctor Klaussheimer threw his arms in the air and shouted “I have brought your husband back from the dead!”

“Impossible!” Carol nearly fell over in disbelief. “Jackie, is that really you?”

“Of course! Now why am I standing in this laboratory, without a stitch of clothing on, and with a headache that feels like I’ve been up drinking for days?”

The chamber opened with a hiss and a slow whine, and a figure emerged from the steam, which reminded her of the canister of liquid nitrogen her dermatologist used  to remove a wart from her foot earlier that year. 

“Doctor, what have you done?”

Think of it as a lego set.

You have the baseplate. That’s like your body. No one can help you with this. This is what you have to build on. You can’t make Rock Island Refuge without it. This particular baseplate is 2552px4 — An important thing to realize is that all of these lego sets are kept meticulously catalogued, like they have their own genes and hereditary connotations, and your job is to either build the set to spec, or put aside your instructions and do other things with all of this set.

But you have all of these pieces, probably in a rubbermaid container, that you can put together in whatever order on this baseplate, which you can expand ad infinitum. That’s the great thing about lego: each set you buy supplies you with new pieces and minifigs, ready to create, oh, say, a time-warp at a moment’s notice.

Install your handy, newly built Futuron time-gate, using pieces you harvest from your other sets… all of those pieces which are classified and numbered in some database, and from an sheer part-based perspective, the instructions dictate that you are going to make some kind of ship. Or, like I said, you can ignore the instructions and make something else space-y that would explain that your pirate fort is now a hot vacation destination for dudes in space-suits. But the fact of the matter is that all of a sudden you have guys from the future romping around in your pirate fort.

So you have this quickly-getting-out-of-hand situation, where parrots were getting blasted a half hour ago, the tourists were mugged and tortured in the shark pit, Red-beard went back through the time-gate and came back with a stockpile of laser swords and blasters so that when the French Armada shows up with cannons, they’ll be no match for the hapless time-tourists’ stolen weapons. Things were going so well, too!

This is the problem with something like lego. You have these rules you can follow, Good Orderly Directions for making space-walkers, monorails, the crappy city sets, pirates, Forestmen, Wolf Pack, and so on, that don’t have to cross over. Just build the sets, put it on a shelf, and leave it alone. Maybe consider a career in Engineering or Aerospace or Architecture.

But the potential exists for something completely different. Something unique. A great utopia. A terrible dystopia. The parts are all in your rubbermaid container. What can you build?

Dealing

“Hello?”

“Hi Redd?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Tom, Karen’s friend?”

“Oh hey. What’s up?”

“I was wondering if I could swing by.”

“I’m out running around… but try me back in a couple hours?”

“Yeah no problem. Talk to you later.”

—

“Hello?”

“Hi Redd?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Tom, Karen’s friend?”

“Oh hey. What’s up?”

“I was wondering if I could swing by.”

“I’m out running around… but try me back in a couple hours?”

“Yeah no problem. Talk to you later.”

“Hello?”

“Hi Redd?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Tom, Karen’s friend?”

“Oh hey. What’s up?”

“I was wondering if I could swing by.”

“I’m out running around… but try me back in a couple hours?”

“You know, every time I call, you’re always out and you always ask me to try back in a couple hours.”

“Really? Weird.”

“Alright. Talk to you later.”

—