‘The guy who predicted imminent food shortages because of the population growth? I don’t buy spooky prophecies. The history most optimistically proves that knife-edge balancing had become the mankind's specialty and from each and every next-day plague or plight we always safely leap into a deeper shit. So keep the boogeyman for your grand-kids as a night bed story and stuff.’

‘He proved it mathematically!’

‘At the turn of 20th century mathematicians proved that 50 years later life in all major cities of the world would come to a crunching halt because of no riddance to droppings of all the horse needed for intercity transportation. Smart eggheads! Your pessimistic Fellow of the Royal Society, from the world populated by less than 1 billion, omitted taking in consideration the human race inbred mechanisms of self-preservation like mass shootings at the kindergartens and campuses, ethnic cleansing, slaughterhouse world wars, extermination camps and other suicidal means to whet your appetite.’

‘It’s the art of spicing that makes a chef from a regular cowpoke cook. Don’t dump the whole sack into one meal.’

In a slow melancholic move reached 2ic for his jacket to angle a pinkish pack of chewing gum. He extracted one stick, unwrapped it and, ruminating musefully, dropped the pack into the breast pocket in his shirt. Then 2ic shed off his muse and meaningfully winked at V.

‘Oops! Excuse my manners! Here you are!’

He glibly took from the same pocket a separate stick of chewing gum and outstretched his arm with offering to V.

‘The story is…’

‘Alec Taylor Jr.?’ Sounded close by.

2ic dropped the proffered stick next to the salt shaker on the tabletop while staring intently at the two muscled up jocks in official wear.

‘It’s me,’ said he.

The badge of 3 block letters flashed in a hefty hand.

‘Will you follow us, sir?’

‘What the…’ started V emphatically when the second of the artificially tanned body-builders interrupted, ‘Keep to order in the public place, sir.’ His left armpit was obviously more developed than the right.

‘Don’t, V,’ said 2ic, grabbed his jacket from the seat and followed the men.

V mutely glared after the short convoy then frowned and lowered his gaze to the chewing gum stick in a blue wrapping, wrinkled and apparently tempered with.

’What makes us friends, V?’

’Laziness in 2 birds of feather, I suppose.’

’How that?’

’We both are too lazy to kick the habit of four years. Or five it is?’

’Numbers mean nothing.’

’Tell it to your taxman, beatnik. Though, yes, after a year on friendly terms, guys usually have called each other any name under the sun which circumstance reinforces the valuable relationship.’

’What’s friendship, anyway?’

’When boiled down properly, it’s being happy that you are not as miserable a dork as your sidekick. The inherent vice in even an ideal friend. Still, he acts the straight man at your bits in the theater which is the world.’

’Some stringent theater you act at, buddy.’ With a sweeping gesture 2ic indicated the bare walls around, within the cuboid room. The white paint imparted to the enclosed space a severely monastic air, if even with no crucifix or other symbols of any faith in sight.

He occupied a low comfy chair with wooden armrests of sheer varnish in random scrapes, 2ic did. The trajectory of the chaperone-like all-embracing movement ended on the bear can top set up on the floor conveniently at hand nearby the armchair’s right hind leg.

The face in his head, sank back to the rather fretted upholstery fabric, was turned to the only window in the room—neither blinds nor plant-pots on the sill, nor even a view—just the azure rectangle of empty cloudless sky from the 2ic’s angle.

The deck of the computer desk in the left corner from the window provided its surface to the made-in-China-assembled-in-Taiwan black tower of a PC coupled with a Philips monitor. Two streamlined black turrets of speakers guarded the flanks of screen with the wired keyboard-and-mouse, both also black. The big swivel chair (the only lush item in the monk cell) turned its back to the hibernating computer because V in the seat was facing 2ic.

With his right foot planted in the floor he moved the seat in slow weeny wiggles, hither and thither, short horizontal swings described languid arcs about half a radiant, there and back. V’s bent left leg put across his right knee provided its ankle as a kinda pad to place the bottom of a beer can clutched by his right hand. Yes, sure, the pad and bear, both consumed and not yet, were on the go, hither-thither, as well as the rest in the contraption (assemblage of organic and inorganic matter) except for the V’s right foot. Dead slow. To and fro.