A Sound Downstairs

The Potato Bugs and a Sound Downstairs


As Golem’s thoughts drifted from his immaculate bank robbery to a seventeen-year–old girl he once had over at his place for three days who asked him to marry her so that she would not have to return to her parents’ house, he had a fleeting glimpse of reality and did not like what he saw. He saw a guy who had failed miserably; a guy who had started out in life with dishonestly gained income; a guy who had cheated by actually infecting the public’s information systems with viruses. A guy who made straight A’s in his first semester of high school, dreamed and had a goal. He remembered running around the track that year thinking he was going to ace school, and from there… somehow from there he’d gone a bit downhill. It was at that point that Golem started to switch off the sane part of his mind for good. Something told him that if he continued to think along those lines he would not have the will to carry out his original plan and it was the carrying out of that plan that would redeem him. If he faced himself, he would realize that he, too, was complicit in his fate, and thus shared in the guilt. He glanced around the basement office that he had set up in his home. There were no windows. He had a urinal, a sink, and a bunk bed so that he could almost live in here and work without interruption. He didn’t like distraction. Perhaps he felt safe surrounded by the four walls and buried beneath his house. He was bothered by two days of heavy drinking, but what bothered him more was the food poisoning that he had gotten from eating left over chicken soup that he left out on the counter the night before. He blamed the soup and not his action. He remembered a previous bout of food poisoning and how his intestines, after a week of constant diarrhea, felt as if someone had removed them, wrapped them tightly around a pipe, stretched them, and tied a knot to stop a leak for a few days, and then had politely replaced them back in his body. He walked upstairs to find some leftover antibiotic that he had taken for a fever several weeks earlier. He had a habit of not finishing his prescriptions. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and saw the early signs of graying around the ears. He was not happy with the halo of balding on the back of his head. He was almost forty years old and felt too old to fight another corporate battle.


Diary Entry:

I looked in the mirror that morning and saw no way around it. My actions were linked inextricably to myself. I cannot separate them from my personality. I feel sure that I will follow my own footsteps into deeper waters. I may have no say in the matter.



It was the potato bugs that made Golem squirm as he read the article on the internet version of the Bangkok post. The story in the paper described a group of people who were working in an unfinished subway tunnel in San Francisco when the nuclear device detonated above them. They thought the setting had saved them, but as the plot thickened realized that setting had other implications. Just a few hours after the sun-like flash that they could not see, something started burrowing in from the roof of the shored up area of the tunnel they worked in. Potato bugs preferred a moist, cool climate, and the ground above was hot and barren. The creatures were curvaceous. They showed a lot of leg; would never have adorned a steel lunchbox. Grotesque is too light and airy a word. Waxy and puffy fit them to a tee. They did not mix well with whatever it was that lubricated the human soul, enabling it to instinctively know beauty and horror. The things now became a steady rain and collected on the floor as if the tunnel were a giant communal bath. There were other kinds of bugs mixed in and most of them did not provide comfort, but it was the potato bug in abundance that drove most of them insane before dying. Just before their batteries went dead and darkness enclosed them in their tomb, they had one final view in dank, dim, musky light of fifty workers up to their knees in potato bugs. They had no potatoes to offer these bugs that could deliver a painful bite. The collective scream and it was as the lights went out, just one big scream, would have been heard on the surface if anything had still been there, which it had not. Four hours later they were up to their necks. They could clearly see the waxy rings of the abdomen and the crawly legs and mouth. Those who were not killed by their terror had an hour to go before they would be submerged in the mass of crawling, wriggling, and perennially walking potato bugs. They would have another problem— the bugs were tired, agitated, parched with thirst and ravishingly hungry. Having escaped from the heat on the surface they wanted something to eat before settling in for an orgy in the night. To make matters worse, for some biological reason, the bugs on the bottom were hungry first. They worked their way up. At some point these people would, had they been reading Golem’s tale, have understood his terror perfectly; might have known what made Golem L. Window— Golem L. Window or someone.


Golem took a break from writing his memoir and came back from the past to present time.


Golem turned his head from the mirror and looked down into the sink merely to avoid his own reflection. He had given this part of the story to an intern taking English 101 and the guy had turned it in to his teacher. He got a D and a reprimand to stick with prettier subjects. In very polite language the pith was: This is a sick story and you might be sick. Stick with sugars and spices and everything nice. Golem was determined to tell the story the way it had occurred and would not omit it. He had read that story in the aftermath. Something you will learn of much later. He felt much older than he had when he had awoken. But 87 is old. It was just that when he glanced up in his present mirror he didn’t see the Golem that the one in the diary had written of so many years earlier. But that had been before the final revelation — The moment in the hammock when God came to him and told him of a little plan he’d inserted into creation. The old man had a sense of humor, Golem gave him that, but that, that’s later. And the ants, they’d crawled all over him, tried to eat him alive he thought. But that couldn’t fit in Book One. It happened somewhere in time and was put in Book Two. The four and a half billion, well, that. That had to be near the end, and the way this story was filling time and pages, the end couldn’t come until the third and final revelation. People could find it in Book Three — the patient reader could. If people still could buy books by then. The credit situation was looking grim. A meteor could hit Earth by then. Anything could happen Golem reckoned, and Golem knew he’d better have some fun along the road, cuz some who didn’t woke up dead. Golem at this point didn’t know how it’d be to wake up dead, but he’d a story to finish and thoughts to think. He wanted to know what it was like to be dead. He wanted to live, of course, but he wanted to know why we were here, where we came from, and where in hell we were heading, and he’d felt a lot more comfortable about the last question before the eighties hit. Some, him included had said, it wasn’t ours to know what will be. What will be will be. But Golem thought the mystery was solvable and that we might be a little better off if we knew a little more about life… enjoyed it a little more for sure… took a little more responsibility for our own lives, for sure, but we might be better off if we had some idea of what it was like to be dead. Strange thought. What if we found out we were clones, on a ship heading for new lands, not really doing anything that hadn’t been done before? What if we were a life form that could exist, through replication long enough to explore the universe. What if we were already on a ship? What if we were made in the image of God? What if our intelligence was a bit shy of being able to fully understand. What if we understood? Or another line of thought, what if we are what remains of God after some apocalyptic event. What if a meteor hit our planet long ago and wiped most of us out? What if the meteor was beyond our control and everything we strived for, we were doing again. Golem had a feeling in his heart that we were rediscovering. Rediscovering what someone once already knew. Why if we are native inhabitants of Earth are we so different from all the rest? What is that part of us that can communicate with animals while not living in some garden, eating fruit… that part of us that searches out ideas. Do the animals already know them. Are they more advance than us? Did not lightening and electricity exist before us. Have we not learned to harbor electricity like castaways on an island of sand looking to improve their quality of life… the professor and Mary Ann. The skipper too… and every time there is a chance of rescue don’t we mess it up. Oh, Gilligan. What if all of us, members of the Tower of Babel, got along. What if we helped ourselves, rather than killed. Wouldn’t we be better off. All the bullshit in a book, but I’ve always seen this. This fact that the human race fights against itself. Is this the way someone planned it? I. I for one, am sick of that. A writer can work in several ways. He or she can work front to back, back to front, middle either way, can think thoughts along the road, along the way. Can put elements of fiction into place, the best of them can use these elements like a painter can. Can use a true story if they have one. Golem was a teacher, he switched points of view in sentences sometimes. He broke the rules, but more than one character was living in his head. The point of view… well, if two people live in the same bungalow and the point of view gets switched, is it really a change of point of view. Golem, he broke the rules. In search of some higher form of art. Sometimes genres got crossed. Literature, pornography. Catholicism, Puritanism, those were different thoughts. Commercial fiction, literature. Crime, psychological thriller. He didn’t know what to call his book. Were the elements of fiction exhausted? Not if imagination made new ones. In fact, Golem thought the imagination could ensure that the elements of fiction were never really finite. If something new was imagined, it was possible, he thought. Generosity, generosity, those were words for a novel. Tell people your mistakes. Tell people what you were guilty of. Isn’t it a bit too easy to write of others mistakes?

Shut up Golem, get on with the book.

“Don’t taze me Jack and don’t spell taze with a z. It’s an s.”
“Sounds better with a z to me… zap.”
“Golem and me smoked a bit of pot Golem. This is Charlie, do you know me yet?”
A scream was heard, it was Jack realizing he was Golem.

A forth-dimensional object, if shined on by the Sun would project a three dimensional shadow. Fuck, that’s us, isn’t it. Some higher power’s shadow. Are we dreaming or are we a dream in a three dimensional world? Are we projecting our own dreams too? Are they testing us with challenges before we can get back to the Garden of Eden? Or are we goldfish in a bowl. Pets. Do we provide entertainment for someone? “Let’s have his girlfriend get killed and see his reaction. We’ll watch the whole thing on HDTV.” Then again is not day by day footage of crime a sort of entertainment that we humans are watching. It used to be As the World Turns. Now, it’s reality TV. Does anyone else get sick when they watch that? Here’s mister so and so, he’s killed three wives, physically beat them, and now he’s writing a book. Wow. I guess if that’s the road were on we deserve to be someone’s pet. Throw up a tsunami, see how we react. Let the crust of earth slide around its core. Freeze Golem in his rocking chair. Kill off anyone who could read his flash drive. Let two thousand years go by before a computer is reinvented and someone can read his book.

“Funny Jack, let two thousand years go by before someone can read my book.”

“No, Golem, I rather think a higher power is speaking here. It’s not Jack. I’m gonna get frozen before the end of the book. See you don’t have to worry about killing me off. The beaches of Thailand are gonna become the new North Pole.”

“Sure, Jack. Anything you say. You smoke a joint or what?”
“No, I’m serious Golem. I’m gonna get frozen in a rocking chair, if you can believe that.”
“Just don’t get frozen before you finish Book 3. I’m getting used to the bikinis, the missing tops, planet Earth in general Jack. Don’t tell me it’s going to end soon.”
“Better enjoy it while it lasts. Jupiter and Venus appeared last night, visible to the naked eye. All lined up against planet Earth.”
“Naked, Jack. That’s the way to write a book. Sure is a lot of bullshit in a book containing quite a lot of philosophic shit.”
Golem, the other day I read a story of Socrates. He claimed the record of the human race was all wrapped up in a helical structure. Bands wrapped around each other. Shit like that. A few centuries later a couple a guys wrote a book that claimed that life consisted of a helical structure. They called it something bizarre like DNA.”
“Roll yourself a joint, get some beers, as you said I wrote the book. I’ve seen it all before. You’re right. It is bizarre. Now, why not stop pretending you’re writing a book and put your head on a pillow and get some sleep. These are secrets you could not possibly know. You’re not developed yet Jack. You’re just a character in a book.”
“Fuck off Golem.”
“You ain’t freezing me Jack. I am not just a character in a book. You let me get a hand in it, remember?”
“This is just the type of writing I hate. Wordy words separated from reality. Get a grip Golem. The public will hate you.”
“Nine out of ten editors should never be near a book of fiction. You taught me that Jack. I’m gonna say it from the heart.”
“Little motherfucker, you belong to me, I created you.”
“Created Jack. That means that I am supposed to be free. Join an egg and a sperm and what do you expect to happen? Egg meets sperm and wants a life. Wants to do the things that you have done. Did you really expect me to sit in a book and not start fucking chicks on the beach. Did you really expect me to listen to you in your room and not get one of those topless babes for myself?
‘Well, Golem, looks like you got a bit of philosophy in your jeans.”
“One more thing Jack. You insert a section of a book in a book like this, later on. People are gonna think you stuck it in there at the last moment. Sort of an afterthought. Sort of like you didn’t plan it and sort of like you are breaking a rule. Sort of too long to allow people to stay in the ‘fictional dream’. You taught me that Jack.”
“There is the fiction dream Golem and there is the story. This is story. Some books it’s hard to get the story across without breaking the fictional dream… the suspension of disbelief… is that what they call it Golem? The story has to be told exactly the way it happened and if a jerk like you came out of a missed period, well then, I can’t hardly get around it. Can’t lie Golem, ‘bout a matter like that. Course, a good lie makes a good book, but this story is true Golem.”

He drifted back in his kayak, paddled a bit forward. Then caught a wave and came upon the shore. Jack stepped off the dingy. His sailboat was just offshore. He was certain he knew how to tell a story.

“Jack… Jack…”
“Yes, Golem.”
“Wanted you to know that your dialog is getting damn good. Better than before. Almost natural for a Californian, frozen Yankee who couldn’t speak Japanese before.”
“Yes, Golem. I’ve been workin on that. Even read a few books. Tell me one thing Golem, are you bein kind to me cuz I told you I was gonna get froze in a rocking chair. I’m a bit suspicious of that. I haven’t changed yet. I’m workin on that one. Are you tellin me I’m getting better cuz you don’t have to be killin someone no more?”
“I wrote the story.”
“Yes, Golem, you write the words that make the grown men cry. I told you, you said the words. You said you didn’t. Which is it?”
“I gotta tell ya, at first I thought it was all a bunch of crap, this book. But now I’m starting to see some story in it. Some character development so to speak, but I want to see more generosity, You gotta tell me where it was that you made your mistake.”
“Golem, I’m fifty, I made my first mistake just the other day. I was honest with you.”
“There you go Jack, honesty, now keep it up, forget about the commas and tell us where and what it was that shows people you are not an infallible creation of mine. That you are not just another boring character in some dishonest book.”
“Golem, there is something worse than I’ve said before. Yup, sort of like that ain’t it. Sort of like I created you, understand you, shit’s just like that. Fuck, life’s like that ain’t it? But my son, he’s getting on fine. Had a mom with cash and a good heart. I think I’d have to say, had a mom with a heart and a sense of society, more than I can say for you Golem, you’ve smoked a bit of pot, drunk a few beers down, had sex with biks on the beach, been afearin of the sharks sense the day you been sun… Son. Thought you were better than me since I’d been on the beach. Thought your native-like Japanese would get you through the swamps. Thought you’d avoid the gators and come out on top. Let me tell you, in my country we had a Santiago who caught a big fish and made his way to shore and when he got home he had bones. Bones son. Got it. Just bones. Got himself a big fish and went home. Thought all his neighbors would understand him, but when he got home no one really gave him a second thought. He was still an old man with a skeleton and not much more. Factually speakin, son, I don’t think the inhabitants of the town even saw those bones, or realized that an old guy had caught a fish. I’d say Hemmingway’s life was pretty much understood in generosity and not taken credit for in the story, but you know more than me son. I’d say the people of that great town saw the bones and figured that it was just that—bones. That the great big fish never did get home. And I’d say that’s why they call Hemmingway a member of the lost generation, driving jeep ambulances around pickin up wounded empty bins, cans. Cuz, they saw the necessity in it, nothing else. And I’d say that’s why a great guy killed himself. Flesh on bones, Golem, it’s something that has to exist in yourself.”
“Purdy heavy for a first novel, Jack. This generosity. In a way I’m your son then. You created me. I see that now. Sperm, eggs, bullshit, Jack. You created me man. It’s sort of like you’re my father.”
“They say Hemmingway needed a well-lit place to write.”
‘They say that don’t they. So do I, I need a well-lit place to write. A place outside a box, cubicle, whatever, but I’d never kill myself Golem. Know why?”
“Why Jack?”
“Cuz I started out life on a good ship, headed for a good place and now I want to write. If I never write a book, I’ll write and do some work. But no amount of work that goes into a book is worth a life.”
“It’s lies Golem, all of it. It’s just a story. If you write, no one wants the words. Work. Make a life, keep a writing the stories. Van Gogh never was known before he died. But his memory is higher than all the pyramids Golem. He made gold with ink, didn’t cost him a thing. Now, his immortal soul lives on. That’s worth a lot of words Golem. Egyptians paid in gold, and generations of slaves to build those pyramids. Golem, hear my words, art can be appreciated by a living generation, can go unheard, can re-surface even, one day. Art has value whether or not the living can see it. Art is ever-lasting words. The juxtophakasinon of elements. The painting of words.”
“Yeah, like a surfboard, Jack.”
“Yeah, like a surfboard, … Golem, flows through the waves, sentences have direction, SVO.”
“Jack, did Stephan King use some plot for a book from Fall on Your knees? No, I don’t think he did. I think he was just tryin to one up hum.”
“I mean the book with the pics he’d never seen.’
“Yup, know the book, story was rather like it.”
“Jack, he was your hero wasn’t he?”
“Yup. his imagination is my words, his story on the beach, the guy dead up against a trashcan, lookin out to see. Them are words Golem. That book, it had a rather different ending put up against some. Never sent him an email, but was pissed about the ending. Those the words. Then again he’s always written words with a non-conformist endin. I myself wanted to hear about the dead guy’s story at the end. I wanted to see that the lady found the end of the story, she didn’t. But then again in Book Three folks, some folks, may say that I didn’t end the story. I did really Golem, its just that I didn’t end the story the traditional way. I rather than that left it to folks to figure out on their own. I am a witch, wantin sex before marriage?”
“Purdy long flashback Jack. Donaknow if the editors will go along with it.”
“Golem, I a donta know if they will goalong with it either. Gettha your point…A…”
“Jack… Van Gogh…ink?”
“Whatever. What? You never read Van Gogh, A Rose in the Sand?”
“Love ya Jack”

***

He drifted back to the time of the events (And Fyodor Dostoevsky) and typed these words… and continued typing in the words in his mind. Later he would transcribe them. He had a brother who had been in jail on and off. He had talked to him behind glass. It had always bothered him, and when he looked in the mirror now, it still bothered him. It was a different offense, but his brother was behind bars for a year again. It was as if prison was a lifestyle for him. Eight years younger made his brother a true generation X. Did x stand for erased? Was x a big mistake? Golem didn’t think that x was given a fair shake. He thought they may have been fed so much bullshit in school that they saw the world from behind a different lens. A lens that let them think that they were perfect and only others had imperfections and what can be expected when the teachers are perfect humans that don’t discriminate in any way and never have. That it was only them who somehow understood the fallacies and pitfalls of marriage even though in many cases they have never been married. Brainwashing is not a thing that can be blamed on the recipient. The guilty parties would have to be older than they. Kind of strange isn’t it, so many people coming out of school, hell bent to change the world. Almost as if they’d received something a little more than education. Sort of like an Al Qaeda camp school. Odd. The teaching of opinion is a dangerous thing.

***

A much younger Golem twisted the cap off a bottle of Norfloxacin and took two tablets. As he replaced the cap on the bottle, he heard footsteps below. He glanced out the bathroom door just in time to see a woman, her back emaciated and her shoulders resembling those of an aids victim towards the end of the progression of the disease. She looked like a stick. She was disappearing into his basement door. Before he decided how to handle the situation, she had reemerged at the top of the stairs. She spied him on the second floor balcony and ran for the door. As Golem went out the front door a car pulled off the curb and quickly left the house. Golem ran to his basement and discovered that the woman had taken his briefcase. He had no idea what she was after, but was well aware that he had information in his briefcase pertaining to his exploits at the Iguana Bank. He thought that she had looked familiar but couldn’t place her. Possibly someone he had seen in the offices of Window. He would pull some employee photographs tomorrow and try to figure out who had invaded his sanctuary. If he found out who it was, he would kill her. The information in the case was damaging. With the government investigating, he couldn’t help but wonder if it was some sort of high-level intelligence operation with Window’s activities as the target. He knew that the lady was not a complete stranger. She looked to be in her fifties but going on seventy in a hurry. What bothered him most was the look of hatred that he saw as she turned and looked directly at him before running out the door. She looked like a woman who had used a lot of LSD in the sixties. He went back inside the dimly lit first floor of the house and made his way into the kitchen. He was not a completely cruel person. He kept a German Sheppard for just this kind of event. The thing was the dog had not made a sound.

Exercise, drink, Exercise, drink. Not the other way around. Leave the knife in the drawer. Don’t punch out, don’t ride the motorbike drunk.

Lying just inside the door of the kitchen, head angled up in an unnatural position; the pungent smell of burning hair. Some sort of burn on the dog’s forehead that looked to surround the entrance of a hole. The lady had killed the dog somehow. The weapon was not obvious to Golem. Whatever it had been it had been quick. It had taken the brain out of the dog. The dog had not even had time to think with a single bark. It may have shown some emotion, a growl, a quick reaction, bared its teeth. But then the lady stole its brain. There wasn’t any evidence of a stolen brain so to speak, but maybe she’d put the skull cap back on the pumpkin. Intact. Golem had stolen a few brains like that. Intact. Took them back to his lab and lived their lives, each and every one of them had a life complete. Shit. Someone had stolen technology from Window’s labs. Golem held the patent.
The lady was a killer. Golem wasn’t so much of a dog lover (He loved dogs, but certainly did not love them the way the mass media did.), but he wouldn’t unnecessarily kill any animal. Golem enjoyed killing when he was in the midst of his condition, but that enjoyment was locked behind a partition and at other times he abhorred the idea of killing any of God’s creations. Even in this pathologic state, his prey was limited to people. This time, though, he was going to enjoy killing this malnourished woman with the hateful eyes. He didn’t need to become his other in order to fantasize this time around. When she looked at him he did not see a personal kind of hate. It was more of the kind of hate some people have for successful people: the kind of person who, perhaps, believes that they are the only person in the world who should be allowed to be successful. The kind of person one imagines to be a back stabber. The kind of person that one day would lead him to simply say no way when he viewed Hilary Clinton passing out coffee, crying on TV and holding a dog in a pet cage the very next day after her advisors told her she needed to appear more human. When she said “I really do care about people, he thought of other people who said they cared about people and knew it was always the ones who didn’t that were prone to use the words when it suited their purposes. The stilted previously put together prose designed to perpetrate a plan; designed to further their ambition of controlling other people.

Golem wanted desperately to find and kill her. He wanted to get started now, forget about tomorrow. He went out to his car, drove to the building and called personnel from the parking garage and told them to meet him at his office. He nearly tripped walking from the garage into the lobby and was sweating as he reached to push the button for the 64th floor of Window. When he walked into his office a young woman was waiting for him. He described the woman he had seen in his home. She gave him a few names. She left the office. Golem pulled up photos of eight women. Within three minutes had identified a lab tech by the name of Candy Car as the woman who had been in his home. He wanted to know why. He called security and two men headed for his office. He told them he wanted to know everything they could find out about this woman. Then, as they left the office, he opened a game of scrabble on his computer. He did this to calm himself. He had always done this to calm himself. He didn’t know why it worked. He only knew that it worked. He wasn’t even any good at the game. He didn’t like playing games with himself. He just played it because it worked. When he wasn’t playing scrabble he worked on crossword puzzles. He kept a crossword puzzle dictionary on his desk. He had never been any good with these puzzles. His hands were shaking badly. His mouth quivered with an uncontrollable sneer on one side; an affliction that he could not control when he got angry. He reached into a long cylindrical steel tube that sat upright on his desk and withdrew a shish kabob skewer. He ran it through his forearm, pulling the tip of it, as it popped out the other side to bring it completely through his arm. He wrapped his arm with cloth the way teachers with tattoos sometimes did in Thailand. Most schools had rules about visible tattoos. These rules did not match the people of Thailand who got tattoos for fun. The people who taught school in Thailand were there to show them how things should be done, whether or not they taught them anything was debatable. (But students in Thailand did write a lot of assignments with their mother as the topic. ‘I love my mother, she does everything for me.’ was one of the most popular themes. Students in Thailand knew how to get an A on a paper. It was exactly what all the old ladies in the institutions wanted to hear as the students sat on the floor begging their forgiveness and making them feel as if they were something much more than they were...)

Golem L. Window was not a regular kind of guy. He never had been. His hair looked funny, and his ears were too big for his head. His hair was thin. He looked on the surface like Bill O’reilly on steroids. Sort of ultra-clean, the shiny example of the C.E.O., but this one appeared to be crossed with an alien. His head was a bit high, ears poking out to the side, skin paper white, face curved like some sort of melon. Only attractive in the way that any real clean person appears attractive. On impulse, he reached down to the bottom right hand drawer, pulled out a razor and shaved his scalp and then his eyebrows clean off. He looked just like a honeydew melon. One of the really white ones without the hint of green. His eyes were blue with green specks that looked like flowers though, so people who needed green to see the melon could get it from the light of his eyes reflecting on the white of his skin. Don’t ask me about the rest of him. Just let it be known that his body was not proportioned in the way that most are. Use your imagination.
He popped his mp3 player into his head and clicked on Reggae. He sat just that way for forty-three minutes, (It was measured in time, reality was unreal now for him.) and then reached into his bottom left drawer and pulled out an automatic pistol (Since cops were no longer allowed to use big guns, they chose to use mini-submachine guns—ones that pumped out lots of bullets in order to be politically correct. Golem wasn’t a cop, but he sometimes wanted to be one.) He got up, jumped on top of his desk, and over it. He was faster than lightening. He was the king of the sea. (CHarLie had good taste.) Walking to the door, he turned around and took a look at the picture behind his desk, and once again wondered if it was just a bluff, and then proceeded to make his way down to the laboratory. He had a date with a very hot woman. It would be a first date; sort of an introduction. He wanted to kill her, but would not. He had hired people for the tough ones.