3.1
So, Stanley was missing. Rupert had known Stanley for a few years, having met him when he’d started his non-janitorial job at the Spliphsonian. Stanley was a social anthropologist and with Rupert’s entropic background, they’d often worked on various studies and projects together. They’d made a good team, as Stanley was far more extroverted, more outgoing. In the past, they had bonded over their screwed-up childhoods. Rupert was who he was and Stanley had managed to somehow resemble a whole human being despite coming from a family of chronic addiction. Most of their work had been projects focusing on individual self-worth within the family units of certain cultures, but Stanley’s current project—the one Rupert had been in the process of consulting on—dealt directly with drug use, thus tackling Stanley’s pet issue and not Rupert’s, so Rupert was happy to help in any way he could.
But, apparently, Stanley was gone.
Rupert found Pyrdewy’s door, the sort with the mottled glass panel in the top half. Pyrdewy had had the letters MUSEUM DIRECTOR removed—letters that had been there since at least 1900—and replaced, in a flashier modern font: MR. CLAYTON PYRDEWY, and in much smaller letters below: MUSEUM DIRECTOR.
Rupert knocked, and a loud, nasal voice pierced the glass, causing Rupert to wince.
“Just come in!”
Rupert shut the door behind him.
“Sit,” Pyrdewy said, not yet having looked up from the papers on his desk.
Rupert wedged himself into a chartreuse vinyl and chrome chair that looked less like a chair than something that should have been across town in the Spliphsonian Museum of Art, though bad art it would be. Pyrdewy was absorbed with the two sheets of paper he held, so Rupert looked around, palms sweating. The office was period to the building’s initial construction—around 1860—and although it was furnished with beautiful birch shelves that lined the walls and high-gloss maple floors, Pyrdewy had gone a great distance out of his way to modernize, hence, this non-chair chair that squeezed Rupert’s hips like a vice.
The area rug—which still contaminated the air with its factory-toxic stink—was black and grey and white, with offensive geometric shapes that smugly insisted that one’s natural preference for the organic could go fuck itself. What had once been shelves full of antiquarian books on various intellectual, scientific topics had been replaced with current mass-market paperback thrillers and military/spy/special-ops testosterone fiction, and only just a few at that—it was mostly empty space punctuated rudely with one piece of “art” or another.
There was a marked absence of family photographs. This single, pathetic aspect particular to Pyrdewy served as the sole comfort to Rupert’s threadbare sense of ease.
Pyrdewy’s face was red. He looked to be red all over, or as much as Rupert cared to see. At first glance, one might think it was from over tanning, but for lack of the telltale Trumpesque white rings around the eyes. Whole-body rosacea, perhaps.
“Did you hear about those Goddamn Nig-Nogs over in Baltimore?” Pyrdewy asked without looking up from paper number two. There wasn’t much text on either sheet, nor did he seem to be reading the words—he just stared.
“Um,” Rupert began. “I heard there were some protests.”
“Protesting against what? You act like a thug, you get treated like a—”
Pyrdewy’s small, black eyes finally met Rupert’s.
Silence.
“We’ve never met,” Pyrdewy said, getting up, as if the conversation hadn’t yet started. He did not reach for a handshake and Rupert was relieved for a number of reasons.
“No, we have not.”
“Well, as you know,” Pyrdewy said, pacing the area behind his desk slowly. “Stanley’s dead.”
“He’s not dead. He’s miss—?”
“Whatever. The point is, he’s gone. But his work must go on.”
“It must?” Rupert couldn’t imagine what possible interest this man could have in continuing to fund a study on the effects of addiction within a family of addicts and the disintegration of that family and the community concept of “family” as a whole.
“Yes,” Pyrdewy answered and looked out the window at the imposingly critical Department of Justice. It was open a tiny crack, enough to hear the faint sounds of traffic and people. “I know you worked with him, I know you consulted on this study, and I know your specialty is Endocrinology . . . ”
“The study and treatment of the endocrine system—?”
“ . . . and I know you are only qualified to mop the floors here.”
Rupert’s stomach did a slow, confused flip.
Silence.
“Are you listening now, smart ass?” Pyrdewy didn’t so much ask as state, still gazing out the window, and Rupert discovered that a self-satisfied smile had its own intonation.
That’s interesting.
“This study is going to continue, though it has been altered, about which you can educate yourself tonight.” Pyrdewy turned and pushed a thick file across his desk toward Rupert. It was labeled D.E.A.T.H.
Rupert’s eyes widened.
“You’re on a plane for Florida tomorrow morning,” Pyrdewy finished.
“Wait. But. Wait, what?” Rupert definitely did not want to go to Florida. He didn’t even want to leave his apartment to be here.
Pyrdewy heaved a deep sigh.
“Should I read the whole file to you?”
Rupert stared at him. He thought of the military/spy/special-ops novels dog-eared on the shelf behind him and found it difficult to believe that it wasn’t perfectly obvious to anyone looking at him that he was no Jason Bourne. All that was inevitable now was a series of explosions. And surely that would not happen.
“Drug Enthusiast Activity Treatment Harborage,” Pyrdewy said, clipped and matter-of-fact.
“Harborage?”
“You know, like a safe haven.”
“Activity.”
“Productive employment.”
“Enthusiast?”
“Look, we can’t have the public . . . ” Pyrdewy stopped, then inhaled through his nose and turned back toward the window.
“The Drug Enthusiast Activity Treatment Harborage is a charitable program designed and implemented by Yours Truly.”
“That’s very nice of you.”
“Shut it.”
Rupert did.
“It is a work program designed to help those who are addicted to methamphetamines and barbiturates get clean, save and administer an income, and become productive members of society.”
“I—” Rupert began, but Pyrdewy swung around and hairy-eyeballed him. “—am very impressed. Stanley would have approved. I would like to help in any way that I can.” Rupert imagined the apparent alternative: tossing sawdust over some kid’s puke outside the museum’s historical crawfish exhibit. “Where is the program located?”
“You won’t know until you’ve infilt . . . found a worker within the community who will show you. Top secret.”
Pyrdewy returned to his study of the Department of Justice across the way. More silence. Rupert looked around, breathed in, then out. Slow and cautious, he laid his hand on the folder and began to slide it toward himself.
“Who are you voting for?”
Shit.
It was mid-May and already 2016 was shaping up to be a banner year for Rupert’s theories on all forms of entropy, social and cultural. Texas had voted to allow public open carry firearms, the water situation in Flint, Michigan, was finally declared a state of emergency, Ammon Bundy had lead his band of Three Percenters in a forty-one-day standoff against the FBI in Bunkerville, Nevada, and a man had opened fire near the visitor center at the US capitol—too close to home for Rupert, but that’s what you get for living in Ground Zero of this national shit show.
Twelve hundred protestors had been arrested for demonstrating against campaign finance corruption and a rigged electoral system and the Secretary of the Treasury was trounced for announcing that a former slave—a woman to boot—would replace a white, male genocidal maniac on the twenty dollar bill—something Rupert didn’t believe for one moment would be allowed to happen. But on the bright side, Space X did a cargo run to the International Space Station, landing its “reusable main stage booster on an autonomous spaceport drone ship,” or so he’d read, and he didn’t know what the hell that even meant, but it sounded pretty bitchin’. If that wasn’t enough, NASA had announced just days ago that it had discovered more than 1,284 exoplanets. Exoplanets! Over 1,284 of them! We now knew everything about the Universe, and space, and all of the planets, right?
Across the nation, people had died in shootings, stabbings, and machete attacks, in high schools, office buildings, and at Ku Klux Klan rallies; they died from freak winter storms and record floods, Lancair IV microplane crashes, Amtrak train derailments, and rolling charter busses; they died from the Zika and the Elizabethkingia meningosepticaviruses; they died from goddamn Malayan tiger attacks, and Rupert was pretty sure his fellow DCers would likely be dying from some form of cancer within the next decade with the three-chemical 175-CSX freight car derailment near the Rhode Island Avenue Metro station at the start of this month, but Justice Anton Scalia got to die in his sleep after a day of quail hunting and a nice dinner.
The country had watched in fascinated horror as Donald Trump slowly racked up the necessary votes to win the Republican primary—O’Malley dropped out, then Rand Paul and Rick Santorum, then Christie and Fiorina, then Ben goddamn Carson, Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich, until the unthinkable had happened. The first primary—New Hampshire—considered to be a political bellwether, called it for Trump and Bernie Sanders on February 9th. The predicted Republican primary winner was confirmed just a couple of weeks ago, to the shock and befuddlement of anyone breathing. Rupert, though—a professional Entropologist—wasn’t surprised. As of this meeting with Pyrdewy, it was obvious New Hampshire was batting 2/2 and Sanders would be nominated. Obviously. The DNC smelled rotten.
But as to Pyrdewy’s question—who would Rupert vote for?—in the words of Jesse Jackson, the question was moot. The DC Republican primary had already passed, with Rubio as the victor and who suspended his campaign three days later. Presumably, Pyrdewy had concluded that Rupert was a liberal and would be voting next month, but he would be wrong. Rupert considered the twelve thousand arrested last month over the ten-day demonstration against corruption in campaign finance and dubious election laws, which currently shut out third (fourth, fifth, ad nauseum) parties in myriad ways, among other deeply undemocratic concepts. Voting, Rupert had concluded, was like holding a piece of tissue paper over your head as protection against a fatal deluge of socio-economic entropy and thinking—believing fanatically—that you could stay dry in that flood of abject chaos.
Rupert cleared his throat and looked at the Department of Justice—recently under fire over its mishandling of encryption software as it worked with Pear, Inc to access the oPhone of the 2015 San Bernadino attack suspect—and he was happy he did not own a cell phone, for reasons that should be obvious by now, both personally and culturally.
“I . . . haven’t . . . I don’t know.”
Another deep, disgusted sigh from Pyrdewy
Rupert opened his mouth, said nothing, and closed it again. As Rupert got the folder into his hand and was about to slip it into his cross-body bag, Pyrdewy said his second-to-last thing.
“Let me tell you, when we win back the office, shit’s going to change around here. You folks can kiss your upper hand good-bye.” He paused. “These Federal dollars sure are nice, though.”
You folks. Upper hand. Federal dollars? It was too much to address quickly, so Rupert decided to let it go and GTFO. Then:
“Is that a purse?”
“What? No, it’s a bag, a man’s bag. It’s a cross-body bag. It’s ergonomic and very good for your . . . .”
But Pyrdewy was back at his two papers, studying them with an intensity that Rupert was sure he was faking. Rupert felt dismissed, but it was hard to register because he often felt this way.
He zipped up his cross-body bag and closed the office door behind him as he left. Now, if he could only find his way out.
Rupert’s head swam, not just from this sudden, inconceivable assignment, but from having to think about the state of the country over the last few months, though he, of all people, shouldn’t be too taken aback. Larger, macro entropy trickling down into the micro—his life. Things were going to change, alright, and that he expected. When you put zero effort—literally energy—toward keeping entropy at bay and only work neutrally to keep up superficial appearances, things will fall apart. Merely painting a hundred-year-old bridge won’t keep it from deteriorating underneath and eventually collapsing. Society, though, refused to apply this simple, basic law—the Law of Thermodynamics—to its own culture (let alone physical infrastructure). It lets its figurative bridges rot alongside its literal ones. By all intents and purposes—or a complete lack thereof—we should all be dead by now.
Rupert’s stomach growled. Time to feed.
Lee Harper Oswald 
Sock it to me...