Well, that sounds like a fun thing to do over the weekend, don't you think? Save the planet?
But stop. Wait. Pause, consider, ponder. Why save the planet at all? And even postulating the unlikely condition that you come up with a reason to save the planet, how the HELL can Simon Bendystraw, of all people, do it? This is the man who goes through a state of high crisis every morning upon waking up and looking in the mirror. Well, truth be told, it was the first thing that came to mind to write when I decided to resume Simon's... whatever this is..., and, authors being in the way and likeness of gods unto their creations, were I to go back and erase that title, I should then be a hypocritical God, and we can't have that now, can we?
Okay. Here goes.
It was a spring weekend. Bright, shining, full of promise, the two consecutive carefree days glittered like the two sides of a slowly spinning coin. Lazily, beckoning, teasing with glints of reflected golden promise, Simon watched the two consecutive days spinning just so through his mind. The prospect made him very dizzy. Indeed, vertigo swept him as he negotiated the busy New York city streets at the beginning of the first day of the weekend. He tripped over his wing-tipped feet and sprawled onto the blanket of a homeless person. After disengaging in humiliated misery from what was not altogether an unfriendly reception, Simon decided it was best not to ponder anything for a while, just let his feet do the walking. Thus he put the spinning, golden weekend out of his mind even as he was living it, managing, somehow, to enjoy it more. He continued to amble down one street and another, finally ending up at Central Park. Doesn't everything end up there?
Sitting on a bench, Simon watched and listened for a while. When his Coke-bottle glasses got annoyingly heavy, he took them off and closed his eyes before their screams of pain and confusion could deafen him. So, when a voice spoke from beside him, saying, '"Postulate entropy as a particle-wave phenomenon,'" Simon couldn't see with his eyes closed. When his eyes did manage to open, they instantly began screaming in pain and confusion, snapped closed and utterly refused to open again. Simon swung his head in the general direction of where he had heard the voice, and fumbled for his glasses. Since they were far too heavy and large to fit in the pocket of his tweed jacket, Simon began rummaging in the knapsack he always carried for just such a purpose. Finding the glasses, he wiped them and hurriedly placed them in their usual depression on his beak of a nose. After talking his eyes into accepting his word for the fact that the glasses were indeed back in place, they reluctantly opened, and sighed in great relief at the weirdly refracted world.
The voice spoke again. '"If entropy can be quantized, it can be focused and transmitted.'"
Simon's mouth caught up. '"Entropy?'" he squeaked, quite baffled at this point. Simon's glasses found themselves confronting a sight that was deeply disturbing, yet oddly comforting and familiar to Simon. A short, quite obese male stood before Simon, quite close, in fact. He war a polyester leisure suit with buttons far too large and gaudy to be legal. '"particle?'" queried Simon's mouth, quite independent of his brain. After this brave attempt, his mouth bogged down, and reverted to, '"What?'"
'"Entropy!'" the little fat man nearly cackled with repressed excitement. '"The force of chaos! The agent of the eventual heat death of the Universe! The thing that makes your plants die, your romance go cold, entropy! It's being transmitted from here!'"
Simon's brain seemed to be having a fist-fight with his mind. Somewhere, somehow, though, information was being processed and sorted. '"Bad luck?'" tried Simon. '"Broadcasting bad news?'" Finally, Simon gasped, "Paul Harvey!?'"
The silver bracelet on the stranger's wrist jabbed into Simon's stick-thin shoulder as the man patted him. '"Close enough for what you have to do. The entropy wave generator is here, on this planet. It's in the hands of that man, over there.'" He pointed generally into Central Park, but Simon's eyes just weren't up to the task of telling his brain what was out there, that far away.
Suddenly, the stranger turned to Simon, turning the patting hand into a gripping appendage! '"Don't you see it all around you?'" he growl at Simon. Simon became somewhat scared of the strange little person, with his large belly and the combat boots peeking out from under glittery polyester ankles. '"This planet is having the worst luck of the entire spiral arm! Wars! Pollution! Crime! Home shopping networks! Disease and homelessness and that insipid music they make you listen to while you're on hold! ..." He deflated, then, even his ponderous abdomen seemed to lose a bit of volume as the man stopped and seemed to regain control of himself. '"That man over there has a machine the size of a postage stamp that's ruining this planet. Traffic jams, plane crashes, starvation, they're all happening incredibly out of proportion! This planet is experiencing a distortedly high entropy quotient compared to the ambient, and it's that man's fault. He's standing right over there."' Simon followed the pointing finger, and this time his eyes reluctantly gave him an image. A tall, sensibly dressed and conservative looking man was strolling leisurely along a bike path, looking around and generally appearing spaced out. '"He's carrying it in his pocket. He thinks it's a piece of litter he picked up along the path, and he'll deposit it in a trash can somewhere, and it'll just go on crashing computers running Windows and popping little girls' Easter-Egg helium-filled balloons! You must stop it!"'
Simon stood up. He'd formed the dim hypothesis that, with his superior height, all he had to do was raise one long and gangly arm over his head and drop it on the little man's head, and maybe enough damage would be done to prevent a mugging or something. His now-dead Aunt Cassie had worn a small silver police whistle around her neck ...
'"You want me to what?'" shrilled Simon. '"Shut it off, you mean?"'
'"Yes, you must shut it off! You must take it from him and shut it off!"'
'"How would I get it?"' Simon seemed captivated by the prospect of obtaining the thing from the man's pocket. '"I read David Copperfield once, but it was missing several chapters ...'"
The little man produced a long and quite nasty-looking knife from somewhere in his polyester cocoon. '"Use this, if you have to."' He held it out toward Simon, who raised his arm over his head, preparing to let gravity do its worst. For good measure, he raised both, figuring if he missed with one he might get lucky with the other. Then he noticed that the handle of the knife was closest to him. Acting of their own accord and quite automatically, the fingers of his left hand closed on the handle and Simon took the knife. '"Let me see if I have this right,'" summarized Simon. '"You want me to kill a man to get a piece of machinery the size of a postage stamp which is in his pocket and which is solely responsible for everything from spilled milk to the Industrial Revolution?'"
The short, fat man gasped and looked ill. '"KILL!?'" He almost screamed. '"I was suggesting you cut it free of his clothing and carry it off! You barbarian!'"
Relief flooded Simon. '"oh!'" he chirped, brightly. '"I can do that!'" He bounded off almost eagerly toward the unsuspecting man enjoying what there is to enjoy in Central Park. '"Excuse me, sir!'" called Simon in a cheery voice. He was happy this wasn't nearly as difficult to contemplate as that business with the gerbils. '"Sir! Could I have what's in your pocket?'" Simon ran up, almost but not quite tripping over himself, waving his hands with eagerness. Unfortunately, one of his hands was still quite firmly grasping a rather long and nasty-looking knife. '"I'm sorry, sir, but I need what's in your pocket." Simon gestured conversationally toward the man's left breast, again, unfortunately, with the knife-wielding hand.
To Simon's great delight, the man broke out in an almost rosy smile. '"Hey, there's no need to get rough, sure you can have anything you want! Wouldn't be Saturday morning without a mugging, would it?'" Very slowly, but smiling all the while, the man removed objects from his pockets and tossed them on the ground in front of him. '"It's weird, I've been having the oddest luck all morning. My dog ran away, and then I bought a box of laundry soap that didn't have a little plastic scoop thing in it! And why is it only raining over my head!?'" A well-bread yet sneaky whining tone came into his voice. Indeed, a small storm did seem to surround the hapless individual, and as Simon watched, three religious tracts littering the path flapped annoyingly around his head.
The man seemed to pull himself together a bit, and chatted casually as his possessions hit the pavement at his feet. Pocketwatch, '"It's cheap, sorry.'" Condom, '"Be prepared, I always say!'" Housekey, '"It's my brother's place anyway, he's got keys hidden all over the place, and nothing to steal.'" A small, faintly glossy object, '"This is trash, but it's sort of pretty .." Fumbling as he started to toss it, the object developed a wobble in midair and bounced several inches away from the rest of the stuff on the ground. Simon, having only wanted this object anyway, hurried forward to retrieve it. Only when a small musical chime sounded from under his heel did he realize that he was stepping on it. Bending, he found only dust where he'd seen the small thing land.
Simon's attention was arrested at that moment by a very enthusiastic embrace, from behind. A pair of pudgy arms reached around from behind Simon and squeezed. The shriek which resulted when Simon's diaphragm was forcibly compressed were so loud and alarming that several pigeons spiraled to crash-landings in the bushes. Simon at last managed to squirm away, almost losing his glasses. '"You did it!'" the odd little man crowed. '"You disabled the chaos field generator! Now entropy will resume its normal pattern!'"
As the recent mugee trotted away, carefully not looking back or causing any offense at all, Simon became suddenly suspicious. '"I don't feel any different,'" he observed. To prove his point, he turned around and bumped noses with the man, whose nose was also oddly long. Without missing a beat, they both murmured, '"Gezundheidt,'" and then mutually backed away.
Suddenly, as if boiling to the surface like lava, questions bubbled forth from Simon. '"what was supposed to happen anyway? Where was that thing before it was in that man's pocket? I don't eve know your name!'" The last became a keen of confusion, a bewildered whimper.
Simon found himself being patted again, silver bracelet catching on his earlobe. '"Oh, that thing's been kicking around since about the end of the last Ice Age, I'd say, one way and another.It's got a shield, but because you're who you are, you weren't effected by the shield, the way the body can pass chewing gum through your intestines completely unchanged. That's how you pass through the Universe, isn't it? And as for my name?'" The short, fat man paused and considered. '"Well, my name is a long, long story. You can call me Maxwell N. Sippiecuppen.'"
Simon, stunned, stood. If rocks could ponder, Simon pondered in this way. '"Sip,'" His mouth tried. '"cuppie ...'"
The patting resumed, then thankfully stopped for good, as the man spun, creating a small whirlwind by the shape of his body, and waved over his shoulder as he ambled off. '"Like I said, that's just the name for the very, very long story. You should know by now that no one ever really explains anything.'"
Simon again found himself walking. There had been time, between pondering and walking, a time of watching and absorbing and percolating and slow, spinning conceptualization. Now, he was walking. The sun, having taken advantage of Simon's not paying attention to it, had slunk to the downhill part of the sky, and was rolling hastily away from busy New York City.
Simon thought about waves. Or maybe he thought in waves, who knows. He thought about waves, crests and troughs, surges and swells. He wondered if there'd be a brief period of remarkable good luck, in the ebb of the wave of bad luck. Maybe Howard Stern would get fired. Maybe M&M's really WOULD melt in the mouth, and not in the hand. A slow, dreamy smile came to rest lightly on Simon Bendystraw's lips as he meandered down Saturday afternoon. One bright, promising, glittering day of aimlessness dangled before Simon, like a plastic rabbit teasing greyhounds. Sunday. Simon wondered what he'd do on Sunday....
I haven't written about Simon for years. He started out as a sort of
waste-your-time writer's exercise in character development, and instead turned
into a character development seems to be governed simultaneously by the laws of
quantum physics and the Universe according to Douglas Adams, who is a good
writer to imitate when it comes to this type of character, I think. Recently
some people took an interest in Simon, so I present him here, and ask that you
or