Any Coincidence Is / Or, The Day Julia & Cecil the Cat Faced a Fate Worse Than Death

Copyright (c) 1994-2004 Daniel Callahan
Any Coincidence Is (or, The Day Julia & Cecil the Cat Faced a Fate Worse Than Death) v9.2 (January 2004)
Daniel Callahan
Copyright (c) 1994-2004 Daniel Callahan This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
This novel can be found online at http://www.eclectic-cheval.net in html, pdf, and zipped text formats.
What will be is. Is is. — James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
1. The Dim Bulb If you guys don't listen to me, we're going to end up in that box again! — Davy to the other Monkees, Head
The young man (boy, really) played with his fingers in the garish light cast from the lone bulb hanging in the concrete basement. He scratched at an imaginary itch on his right hand (just below his thumb) in order to take his mind off the man in the lab coat who sat across from him at the beaten, scarred, wood table. It didn't work. And whoever this man in the lab coat was, he was insistent about paperwork. He had three inches clipped onto a weathered clipboard which he flipped through with precision.
Can I offer you a glass of water? asked the boy's captor in a calm, sensitive tenor.
The boy, Kurt, continued to scratch the imaginary itch, which had leaped magically from his right hand to the left. Eventually the falseness of the itch would be deduced, and the lab coated man would disappear out of the cell and return with… God knows what. Kurt had seen torture hundreds — if not thousands — of times on TV, and he was glumly aware that there would be no commercial breaks for him.
Can I offer you a glass of water? The question was repeated without urgency, as if the speaker was an absent-minded waiter. The itch now leaped with the dexterity of a trained flea onto the boy's leg, and the dutiful fingers followed.