‘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.

Into the meeting place of two walls, diagonally farthest from the computer corner, was squeezed one more, regular, desk coupled with a wooden hardback chair. The neat cylinder of black mesh holder—the translucent plant-pot to grow exactly one stick of a catty-corner pen—stood in the center beneath the slim stem of touch lamp rising obliquely from the black tiny slab of a power bank. The harsh aspect of the sheeny desktop was partly mitigated by the green scroll of a synthetic yoga mat dropped near its right edge. A couple of wall sockets, the lamp under the ceiling and, certainly, the door exhaustively completed the room interior.

’Oh, I see,’ here 2ic used a kinda Oxbrigean finicky articulation. ’In general, making friends presupposes meeting certain preconditions and possessing a number of necessary prerequisites, does it? Now, being sufficiently lazy and too libertine for watching our respective mouths made us created for each other, huh? Have I omitted anything, I wonder?’

’The basic recipes might always be enhanced by whimsy fancy of a cook.’

’And what additional nutrient spices our case?’

’How about hatred?’

2ic placed his bear can back onto the floor an crossed his arms over his chest.

’Holy cow! I do know you mean whatever you utter. V’s jests are not just jests. So would you clarify please?’

’Hate is a super bond in interpersonal relationship of any kind. Ours is not as well. It’s hate that makes you want the girlfriend of your buddy so badly. And you should surely hate a chum who makes a cuckold of you.’

’That’s crazy!’

’Nope. Just wiping dust off our sentential logic. To spend time pleasantly.’

’Well, I never…’

’ The use of “should” does not turn the predicate obligatory true. Besides, I know you did not fuck her. It was she who laid you up, my friend.’

…eeeeeeeeeeee…

…pain… pain… pain… pain…

too boundless to feel anything else… its surging tide since long went over the brim of all capacity to hold it… exceeded… inundated… sank any ability to sustain… restrain or fight it… too mighty a tide… too shallow containers…

it’s bigger than the ocean… it’s wider than the universe this here pain… crushing… nauseating… unbearable… guts ripping…

so too merciless… it stops at a sliver of a notch from killing you… not to be… I wanna not to be and not be filled with this pain… to die of pain would be a blessing… sadistic double-dealer pain keeps that bliss away…

impossible to evade… escape the of pain… no strength for cries… for moans… for squeals… for whimper… for nothing but this squashed and crippled ‘eeeeeeeee’ unable to reach anywhere beyond this side of pain…

no way to squirm or writhe like an earthworm cut in two… like any maimed animal struggling to adjust their ruined body to… to find some kind of alleviation in whatever quirky and unnatural contortions so as to shun their pain at least a split grain of it… to dodge… to feel it less for half a second…

no room for hope… it will be pain and only pain… pain… pain… till the very end… o were it nearer… but nearer it can’t be… there’s no time… it’s meaning gets annihilated where each moment is an eternity of pain…

no room to move… this immobility deprived of death… pressed in between unyielding walls of pain… a helpless powerless subhuman overcome by Pain… your cruel Master…

impossible to move a limb when having none at all… all your possessions stripped away… replaced by just this feel of pain…

you’re nothing but a captive… a slave… a crushed plaything of your excruciating Master…you are immersed… engulfed and squashed by the immeasurable pressure in the unfathomable abyss of pain…

eeeee… how it pains… eeeeeee…

There was no chewing gum in the blue wrapper which V picked up from the table in the Uncle Tom’s Cabin before Sally brought meal for him and 2ic taken away already.