He awakened slowly to the distant sound of a throbbing bassline somewhere far below. Other sounds entered the spectrum. A faucet dripping nearby, the buzzing of an insect, and the heavy footfalls of an ant crossing the floor.

He groaned and lifted his head slightly to assess the situation. When the situation had been fully assessed, he collapsed backwards with a whimper and began to cry like a frightened child. After a while, he pulled himself together and thought things through. Sure, his fingers seemed to have been been brutally torn off, the stubs dripping with blood, the palms covered in sandwich fixins, and sure, he was wearing nothing but shorts and a slightly loosened girdle, which, while it flattered his figure, hardly bolstered his feelings of masculinity, but he had been in worse situations, surely, and had come through whole. Fingers could be reattached. Sandwich ingredients could be eaten. The girdle could be covered with a black Metallica t-shirt, thereby demonstrating his masculinity.

He rolled painfully over to his side and somehow managed to rise to his knees. Looking back, he now realized he had been lying on a blue fanny pack, its contents spilled all over the ground. At this moment, he realized he had no idea who he was and was very curious to find out. Gingerly, with the palms of his hands, he rifled through the spilled contents and turned up a driver's license which stated that his name was Salmon Frisby, born 1984. He wanted to find out more, but his fingers were bleeding all over the license and really making it hard to read. Annoyed, he fumbled around for some way to staunch the bleeding, scattering lettuce and drops of mustard as he impotently knocked over piles of junk and books and surgical gauze all over the room.

He realized at this point that it would be a long and frustrating journey just getting ready to leave the room, a journey filled with many long and uninteresting details.



Meanwhile, 10 year-old Sabrina Mooney was skipping along the sidewalk behind her mother as they returned from their annual trip to the supermarket. "Mommy?" she said. "Do you know what I want to be when I grow up? I want to be a bird. When I grow up, I'm going to be a bird."

"Not with your grades," said Mrs. Mooney.

"I'm going to be a bird, and I'm going to fly everywhere."

"I went through eight years of college," said Mrs. Mooney. "I have a Ph.D. in entomology. I went to Harvard for crissakes. And what am I? I'm a housewife. A goddam housewife. You'll be lucky to get a job as a wino."

"My teacher Mrs. Crisp says you can be anything you want as long as you believe in yourself. She says there aren't any limits. She says that if you just put your mind to it, you can be a teacher, or a president, or a policeman, or a..."

"Santa Claus doesn't exist," said Mrs. Mooney suddenly.

Sabrina was silent. Inside her was a turmoil so great it had no use for petty tears or protests, but was instead tearing her tender young believing heart apart, piece by little piece. The songs of her dreams faded to nothingness, and the light of her hopes went dark.

"Well, that shut her up," thought Mrs. Mooney.



Salmon Frisby staggered out the door of the old tenement, his fingers wrapped in gauze, his unnaturally shaped torso covered in a tattered aqua blue Spongebob sweatshirt. He still had no memory of who he was or how he had ended up in such a strange predicament, but he had a destination now, a name scrawled in Sharpie on the back of his arm. He licked a teaspoon of mayonnaise off his palms, for strength, and went out and hailed a cab.

"Take me to Seymour Butts," rasped Frisby as he leaned forward toward the cabbie.

The cabbie immediately began to giggle.

Frisby realized he was a foreigner and probably didn't understand English. "TAKE ME TO SEYMOUR BUTTS," he said slowly. "O" he added. He tried again. "TAKE-O ME-O TO-O SEYMOUR-O BUTTS-O," he said even more slowly. Meanwhile, the cabbie seemed to be having an uncontrollable paroxysm of laughter.

Frisby sighed, and idly pulled up his sleeve higher, revealing yet another name scrawled in Shrapie that he hadn't seen yet. "Ben Dover?" he asked cautiously. This time the cabbie seemed seriously about to asphyxiate.

Several hours later, the misunderstanding had been cleared up, and at the price of pulling up his sleeve so high that he eventually had to take off his shirt, Frisby now knew that neither Seymour Butts, nor Ben Dover, nor Al Coholic, nor Amanda Hugankiss, nor Hugh Jass, nor Pat McCrotch, nor Neil Down, nor Master Bates were, in fact, real people, and that the person he was looking for was probably named Eddie Guiterrez.

"Take me to Eddie Guiterrez, then," said Frisby.

"Sir, I can't just..."

"TAKE ME TO EDDIE GUITERREZ," repeated Frisby.

So the cabbie did.



In the offices of SpamSoft Corporation, Edward Kwan Guiterrez Jr. sat in his immaculate little corner of the castle, twiddling his fingers as he pondered his next move. Finally, he made a quick motion with the mouse, and after a breathless pause, cried in dismay. "Damn you, Freecell!" he wailed.

At just that moment, a dirty bedraggled man wearing a Spongebob sweatshirt and a pair of blood-spattered shorts burst in through his door. To say he was dirty was an understatement. He was covered in patches of soot and grime, his tangled brown hair wound in a greasy and complex fractal pattern about his head, and in fact seemed to contain a bird's nest. A little cliched, thought Eddie, but it got the point across. The man wore one shoe only, and his bare foot was so filthy and painful to the eyes, that Eddie turned his glance to the man's single shoe instead, and when that left him still queasy, his eyes flickered nervously all over the man and finally settled on the computer screen again.

"Can I help you?" said Eddie, with a big customer service smile, his eyes still focused on the display of his Freecell failure.

"Eddie Guiterrez?" rasped the man.

"Yes sir," said Eddie politely. "How can I help you?"

"I want you to explain this!" cried the man in fury, as he waved his stumpy fingers before Eddie. "What is the meaning of this?"

"Well, sir," said Eddie, looking carefully, "I'd say those were broccoli sprouts, and that there's Dijon mustard. I'm not sure about the red shreds. It could be tomato or red bell pepper..."

"Don't PLAY with me," snarled the man. "I want answers." He leaned forward threateningly and picked up Eddie by the collar.

"No! Don't touch me!" choked Eddie. "Germs... I can't... germs! Please... erk..." But it was too late. Eddie had contracted a lethal bacterial infection from contact with the filth on the man, and had slipped into a fatal coma.

"Oh, NO," sighed Frisby. He then ran off looking for some place to take a shower.

...

To be continued.