The Bricks of the Tower

The day passed and Larry Coburg went through the motions. Finding himself in his car at the end of the day, he rushed home in order to be alone. As he drove he noticed the natural world passing him as he went; mountains, hills, paths of dirt and stone, rivers and lakes, animals going to and fro, some living, some living only to be devoured by some more fortunate form of life. He wondered why when man kills man it is barbaric, when animal kills animal it is majestic. Because we’re assumed to be the higher form of life, is that it? Larry dismissed this as nonsensical thinking.
Choude Gabs Inc. was in his head, they wanted him to, preferred him to, think only of how he could help further the company. But when the sole duty of your line of work encompasses the pushing of a button and the destruction of defenseless paper, the search for meaning in that line of duty is strained at best and forced if existent at all.
Larry sighed. How stupid, he thought. What pointless and meaningless self indulgent thought he allowed to swim behind his eyes. Why should he bother with all this? So easily he could drive off the edge of this nearby cliff and put an abrupt stop sign on the road of his life’s progression. But why do that? What if anything would that solve? Living equals nothing just as nothing equals death. Rash action or not, calm or crazed, it all came to the same conclusion.
Rubbing his forehead Larry found that he was sweating profusely. Oh well, he thought, nothing a stiff cold drink won’t cure. He continued driving for a time while watching the early evening sun bounce off his windshield. Having driven down this road both ways, to and from work, so many times Larry did his best to not focus so much on the drive itself. If he did, he reasoned to himself, the monotony of it and the utter silence (his car radio having long since broken due to a case of foot in the subwoofer) would drive him mad.
At last, Larry arrived at his home. A studio apartment in a modest neighborhood of studio apartments and rental houses where artists could commit suicide for what they perceived as some greater cause. To Larry it was all the same. He just wanted to drink. And of course to mull over the few irregularities of the day; Cindy had talked to him, not only talked to him but interjected herself in his plans to meet with Horace at the Moon Dust bar for some jazz.
Had he heard her right? Was this actually happening or was this some kind of perverse still life that a cruel painter was crafting for a masochistic picture of meaningless action? Thinking too much again, Larry thought, catching himself again.
Parking his car in his car port, Larry opened and in turn closed the door. His gaze wandering, his eyes came to rest on a few children who were running through the streets of the early night. There are no adults, this occurred to him. But he didn’t call out. Even after the kids disappeared around the corner of a building and some odd popping noises echoed across the concrete and glass of the city horizon, Larry still reasoned everything to be okay, or at least okay beyond the borders of his perception and acknowledgment.
Guns, he thought to himself in a wandering fashion. Just pistols and maybe a shotgun or two, too far from the children, he rationalized, but close enough to get inside and shut off the lights.
Doing just that Larry slammed the door behind him and let the consequences of that movement reverberate throughout the structure of the house. A window nearby rattled, some flowers shifted in a vase ever so slightly, and a number of pens rolled and fell off a nearby desk and clattered on the tile floor.
Loosening his tie, Larry turned on and turned off the lights in the house as he walked, making his way towards the kitchen. After dropping his briefcase which really only contained a stack of papers to destroy with his home incinerator and a wallet with enough to cash to warrant a pick pocket to call him an idiot after robbing him, Larry opened his old fashioned refrigerator and with something akin to real joy, pulled out a six pack of inter-collected beers of both domestic and international variety.
Turning the rest of his lights off, Larry sat in the dark on his chair and began sipping a beer. A disturbance than, Larry felt a lump beneath his seat. Shifting this way and that, he reached his hand under and pulled out a .357 snub nose. Looking at it with a muted interest, Larry suddenly imagined that he had a whole audience around him, watching and waiting with such an air of expectation and anticipation. Just a moment, he thought to himself, taking another swig of brew, I’ll start the show in a minute.
Rotating the bottle in his hand, Larry found the location of the distiller of the brand. Not on this planet. A planet called “Retro-Con”. What an odd name, Larry wondered to himself if that was what the planet was really called or just what we Earthlings labeled it as.
Larry didn’t want to disappoint a non-existent audience, and so, he put the barrel of the gun between his teeth. And he held there for a time. After removing it, he found the taste of the gun was on his tongue. Washing that away with another pint or so of alcohol, Larry found the new flavor, a mix of gun powder and hops and whiskey, to be quite interesting. Death and bad behavior at a party, he thought with a smirk.
Then, wanting to see if he could get a rise out of some planet he knew nothing about, wanting to see if they could intercept a message from a lowly paper Burner on Earth, Larry pointed the gun up and fired six shots.
His watch suddenly going off with all manner of beeps and clicks, Larry quickly found he was late for the jazz night at the Moon Dust bar.

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