The Tedium Patrol

Hector slopped the mop and wet down the floor again. Remaining puke niblets coasted into the drains. The cafeteria was empty.

He thought it was empty.

Robert J. Dunnadenny was in the bathroom adjacent to the empty a-la-cart station. He was on his knees, and his heaving innards were in the middle of a fourth turning of the Wheel of Nausea.

Hector knocked on the door.

"Meester Dunnadenny?"

"Yes?" Dunnadenny said between his fingers.

"Meester Dunnadenny, are you hokay? I can send for zee 9-1-1 if you wish."

"That won't be necessary."

Hector stood at the door for a moment longer, then shrugged and pushed the mop bucket further along the cafeteria wall. Another pile of Dunnadenny's vomit coated the peeling green latex paint of the display wall where the children showed their seasonal artwork. Tiny chunks of fruit Jello were sprayed across a spread of 3rd-grade thanksgiving drawings rendered in magic marker and traced hands.

Dunnadenny paused over the bowl, hoping the quakes had subsided. This was the third time this week he'd coated the cafeteria in sick. Principle Jurgenson had asked him to take on sick leave, but he refused. The kids needed him, but more importantly, the economy needed him.

When he was sure the day's nausea had ended, he pulled his cell from a khaki pants pocket and quickdialed his wife.

"Yes honey?"

"It happened again Sheila."

"Oh darn," she said in the sing-song voice he fell in love with fifteen years before that moment. "Are you coming home?"

"Yes."

It was a lie.


****


At 3:36pm, he was pulling out of the school parking lot. Hector was operating a push mower across the tiny strip of grass in front of the gymanasium. Dunnadenny gave him a wave, but Hector did not respond. Dunnadenny saw that he was mouthing the words to the iPod plugged into his ears.

Stepping into his car, he felt a slight static shock as he gripped the maroon plastic steering wheel.

"Are you ready Robert?" came the voice from the back seat.

Dunnadenny could feel the hard plastic tube poking from the headrest into the back of his neck. Mr. Gonzalez was the other end of said tube, punctual as usual.

"Of course, Mr. G."

Dunnadenny pulled out onto the traffic circle. A lone half-sized school bus was parked by the Kindergarten wing, and a line of students with pink and green lunch boxes was lining up alongside of it on the curb. The slow kids.

"Look at those fuckers," said Gonzalez. "They have know idea where they're headed."

"Today or in general?"

Gonzales did not respond. The plastic tube dug deeper into Dunnadenny's neck.

Soon they were at the loading dock behind the Pick-n-Save. The garage door was enormous for such an establishment -- Dunnadenny estimated it to be around 50 feet wide by 70 tall. The dock area dwarfed the actual storefront by a ratio of 3-to-1, the largest such ratio on Commercial Ave.

As they parked the car in the shallow pit in front of the doc, the plastic tube directed Dunnadenny out of the car, up a set of stairs, and onto the dock itself. Gonzalez whispered a command into his wristwatch, and the massive garage door began pulling itself upward with the sound of groaning metal wheel on rusted tracks. Dunnadenny was ushered inside, where a pair of hands grabbed him by the wrists and pulled him into the dark.


****


Sheila had stayed home for the day caring for Bobby Junior. He had come done with a stomach bug the week before, and had been laying face down on the couch in the TV room since Sunday night. Sheila called every doctor in the phone book trying to set up an appointment, but not a single office in town would see the Dunnadenny kid.

"Mom," called Bobby as she was putting another medi-pak in the microwave,"when can I do my homework?"

"When you stop puking Bobby. I can't have you puking on the text books again -- do you know how expensive they are?"

"When's dad getting home?"

The microwave rang. The medi-pak was ready.

"Soon," she said as she stepped down into the den and placed the pak on Bobby's freezing forehead. The bluish hue of his skin had diminished over the course of week, but his shivering had not. He was ensconced in a thick nest of blankets -- every unclaimed afghan the family owned -- and was had two space heaters piping hot electro-air at him like sentry suns.

"I'm so cold," said Bobby.

"I know honey," she said. She wanted to lay down next to him, to warm him up with the heat of her own body. But she knew she could not. To make up for it, she leaned over the couch to toggle the thermostat. She pushed the "up" arrow, increasing the desired temperature from 88 to 90 degrees.


****


"Well, Mr. Dunnadenny," said Gonzalez, "how's it been? Any better? Still shivering?"

"Look," said Dunnadenny, "whatever point you guys are trying to prove, you've proved it already. You even got my kid sick! Give me the fucking antidote!"

"All in good time, my friend," said Gonzalez, stroking his thick black mustache as he rocked back and forth in the cheap metal folding chair. Gonzalez was sitting to Dunnadenny's right, and another man was to his left. The other man held the plastic tube aloft and said nothing. In the center of the room, between the two men, sat the dog.

It was puppy-sized Golden Retriever, but had the exhausted eyes and mangy furry of a full-grown adult. It panted, staring at Dunnadenny with expectation. Just then the door to the back room opened. Dunnadenny looked up to see into the room, but it was closed before he could see beyond the figure now entering the front room.

The man was huge, possibly seven feet tall, with steel blue eyes, closely-cropped sand-colored hair, a pink polo shirt partially untucked, and a huge pair of blue Dockers bulging with thick leg muscles. In one hand he held a pipe, and in the other, a sheaf of blank paper.

"Greetings, Dunnadenny," said the man, his outsized voice bouncing from the ceiling of the garage straight down to strike Dunnadenny in the crown of his skull. He felt his toes shake in the cheap white running shoes Sheila had bought him for New Years, many months ago.

The two men at either side of Dunnadenny stood at attention, saluting with ham-sized brown fists. The man with the plastic tube handed the tube to the giant, who brought the open end of the tube to his nose, sniffed it, and set it aside on a brushed steel table, otherwise empty said for a pink neon plastic chew toy for the dog.

"At ease, boys."

Gonzalez gestured to the man to take his chair, but the giant remained standing.

"I'll make this very simple," said the giant, peering down at Dunnadenny with gleaming white teeth, his incisors shaped to the sharpness of inhuman fangs.

Dunnadenny looked up at the man, and thought about something Bobby said to him that morning, as they stood above the toilet bowl side-by-side taking turns throwing up: "Are we dying, dad?"

"You are not dying Dunnadenny," said the giant. "We've administered a slow-acting 'agent' to your system, which will be rendered completely inert once we get what we want."

"And what do you--" began Dunnadenny.

"Information," said the man, "pure and simple information. Specifically, we want information about one of your students, a Mr. Rex Rexroth."

The Rexroth kid was the 5th-grade troublemaker. Two months ago he'd forced Dunnadenny to throw a desk across the classroom after Rexroth had stolen bologna from Sally Jermaine's three-tiered sandwich and put it on the rim of the Teacher's Toilet.

"What for? What kind of information?"

"That's what this paper is for," said the giant, holding the sheaf of blank printer paper up to the light, followed by an expensive chrome-plated ballpoint pen he'd pulled from his back pants pocket.

"We want you to write down every single memory you have of this kid, starting with the ring of the school bell on the first day."

There was a pause. The retriever was still panting.

"Ok..." said Dunnadenny, deeply confused.

"Well?" said the giant. "START ALREADY!"

He dropped the sheaf in Dunnadenny's lap, followed by the pen. The giant then handed the plastic tube Gonzalez, who held the tube to the back of Dunnadenny's neck as he began writing.


****


Sheila was in the kitchen again when Bobby began moaning.

"What's wrong honey? Do you have to throw up?" she called.

"No," came the reply. "I'm just bored."

"Do you want me to rent some more movies? Get some more games? Do you want to hear another CD?"

"No," said Bobby. "I don't want to escape anymore."

Sheila dropped her dishtowel, put a carton of milk back into the fridge, and reentered the TV room.

"What do you mean, honey?"

Bobby's eyes were closed, but his forehead was furrowed in the deep concentration she'd seen him manifest while practicing his trombone.

"I don't want to escape anymore. I don't want to watch TV or play games or listen to anything."

"Why not honey? You're sick, you should do something to keep you occupied. You don't just want to lay there all day. Isn't that boring?"

"No."


****


"Very good, Mr. Dunnadenny, very good."

The giant was scanning the sheets of paper Dunnadenny had already written out. He estimated he'd filled about 100 sheets, front and back. It was getting late, the little slits of daylight emitted by the closed garage door had long gone to black.

Dunnadenny put the pen down and looked up at the giant, but Gonzalez shoved his gaze back down to the paper.

"You're not done yet," hissed Gonzalez.

"Mr. Dunnadenny, we are tracking a very disturbing trend amongst the youth of your school."

"You don't say," said Dunnadenny. "And just who the fu--"

The tube shut him up.

"Let's just say we're a group of concerned parents," said the giant from gleaming teeth.

This was true, at least on Gonzalez's part. His son Leron was in the 6th grade, and he had a little girl in 1st.

"You see it here, on your page 63: 'Rex tapped his foot on the floor three times. He stood up to go to the bathroom, touching each chair on the way to the back of the room. I could hear him counting under his breath: 10 chairs, 11 chairs, 12 chairs.'"

Dunnadenny shifted in his chair, but kept writing.

"Or page 22: 'Rex was checking himself in the mirror again, counting his buttons -- he had 8 -- and picking lint from his shirt. The other children had their heads wrapped in their learning visors, earplugs firmly jammed in their eye sockets, hand stimulators vibrating them, learning cockpits shaking up and down. But Rex was standing still, standing up, counting the hairs on his head. Then he would sit on the floor, and just breath. Not doing anything, just breathing. It was driving me crazy.'"

Dunnadenny put his pen down.

"What's the trend?"

He ignored the tube prodding him.

"WHAT'S THE TREND!?" he demanded.

The giant's smile didn't lose a single gleaming tooth.

"Tedium," said the giant. "Our kids are becoming fascinated with tedium. It's as though the more high-density interactice learning immersions we throw them into, the more they turn to the world of the boring to escape."

"They are becoming stim-shy, in other words," added Gonzalez from behind his tube.

"Preposterous," said Dunnadenny, "it's only been a few isolated cases. We had a 4th grader crash his spin cycle to stare at the brick wall during recess last year. This past June, another kid refused to get up off the grass when it his turn to enter the Biodome holo. His entire class was entering the consciousness of a pack of army ants, but he was content to sit and stare at the security fence."

"These are not isolated instances," said the giant, pulling another sheet from his backpocket and holding it under Dunnadenny's nose. It was a print-out of a three-dimensional graph showing "Instances of Banality Ingestion" on the X axis and "School Semesters" on the Y axis. He noticed a sharp increase over the last three semesters.

"This is nothing short of sedition," said the giant in a flat tone.

Dunnadenny looked up at the giant again, but the smile had disappeared. The giant's hands were on his hips, and his hair was aflame with the harsh light of the single lightbulb hanging over his head. The plastic tube was burrowing into Dunnadenny's skull.

"We've noticed you've yet to try escaping us," said the giant, "Even though it's clear we have not secured you in any fashion."

"But the tube--"

"Is a tube," said Gonzalez. "It's harmless."

"See," said the giant, "we've intentionally placed you in this boring environment, with boring furniture, in a boring part of town, and threatened you with a boring weapon, to see how you would adapt."

"And?"

The giant's right hand reached back, and then returned with a vicious slap to Dunnadenny's face.

"TRAITOR! MURDERER!"

The giant was screaming. Flecks of spittle pelted Dunnadenny in the eyes. All he could do was yawn.

"It is YOU who've infected these poor kids with a tolerance for banality!" screamed the giant. "YOU who have turned them away from their rich dynamic full-immersion learning environments, from their CDs and video games and movies and masturbation and synthetic drugs and pornography!"

Dunnadenny didn't say a word. The louder the giant screamed, the sleepier he felt. Already his eyelids were drooping.


****


"Bobby, where are my magazines?" asked Sheila. Bobby was now sitting up on the couch, scratching an arm with that same furrowed brow of concentration.

"I threw them out when you went to the store," said Bobby. "There were too many colors and boobies and things to look at and quizzes and ads."

"But I wanted them! They were mine! You had no right to throw them out!"

"But they were boring!"

"What am I supposed to do when I'm on the toilet or waiting for a cake to bake or talking on the phone with your grandma Dunnadenny, stare at the wall?"

Tommy just looked at her and blinked.


****


Rex Rexroth was sitting in a sandbox with his little sister. Each time she molded a clump of sand into crude Taj Mahal or Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Potala with her sand molder, Rex would smash it down with a fist and hum in a low tone.

"Rex! You jerk! MOM!!!"

"Shut up Sally," said Rex.