“Uh right.”
“Basically we’re all just horrible bastards Barton is what it is. That guy in the box there did a bad thing and pissed me off and now I’m keeping him like that basically forever. It was a straightforwardly bad thing okay I’m not kidding and it wasn’t what you call it morally ambiguous but it was a shit ton less bad than the stuff we do on a regular basis so I’m not gonna try to tell you I’m some kind of avenging angel or whatever. Avenging asshole maybe you could say only maybe don’t because—yeah okay anyway. Head on a stick, guy in a box. Bad people. I will give you fifteen million American dollars, untraceable, to write that the noted artist Banjo Telemark who is heavily influenced by Warhol came through here with one of his freaky art stunts and his magically hot manager lady and some alarming art flunkies and consultants and bodyguards and what all and you will nod this whole collection through as massively significant modern art and you will never hear about it again. Or you can go confer with your friends in the office and I will offer them the same money and they will take it because I will also explain to them that if they don’t take it Volodya will one day come to their house and kill them and their family and friends and anyone they happen to live near and so on in a kind of biblical propagating extinction wave that will end in the death of I don’t know some really nice old lady in Kamchatka or something like in that game and she will die saying what the actual fuck and I will tell her before she goes that it was all your fault but you will not care because when I go and talk to your friends and colleagues in there the manifest will have item thirty-one Another Human Head Still Wet okay Barton so let’s just take the low road today my Canadian friend. This is where you say oh yah I guess.”
“Oh—”
“Come on Barton it’s okay this is the best day of your life man you’re rich and you’re alive.”
“Oh—oh my—oh yah I guess sir.”
“Yes Mr. Telemark Barton.”
“Oh yah yes Mr. Telemark.”
“You know the weird thing Barton is that in my own way I am an artist and this has exposed a deep and profound truth not just to the world but to me, which makes you I suppose some sort of muse or possibly I am your art right now, which is like heavy shit.”
“Oh wow sir.”
“Cool now let’s get this stuff in the car. You got your account number?”
“Uh yes sir.”
“You thought I was kidding about the fifteen mil I guess.”
“I—”
“You’re rich Barton. It’s really gonna be okay.”
“…Fuck!”
“There we are.”
“Go team sir!”
“Go team Barton. Go team.”
And that’s it we are on our way.
—
I stare out of the window into jetworld. Up is dark blue, down is cloud and that is all there is in the universe. After a while I eat Chinese food because Chinese food is good at altitude.
Doc says: “What’s in the box?”
“Firecracker chicken and rice. Rex and Lucille have the pork noodles, and Charlie and Volodya stole the crispy duck. The Russian is a sucker for those little pancakes I guess.”
“Give me the chicken.”
“But then I will have no chicken.”
“That is crime Price someone always gets no chicken.”
—
And then we arrive.
—
This is Bern it is eight hundred years old and has some people in it we will say a half a million if you count the whole sprawl, which is not a sprawl more like a kind of lotus or zazen. It is also is the capital of Switzerland and nothing un-Swiss is allowed to happen here and if it does they have actual bears in actual pits that they can feed it to I am not even slightly kidding. They do not do this of course because it would be bad for the bears but motherfucker the implication is right there on the cantonal flag: it is only because we are so fucking civilized that we care about the gastric comfort of bears that we are not going with the traditional option.
The actual technical city is small and pretty and ancient and there’s this clock and a river and you should totally go it will make you glad. It is the headquarters of the International Peace Bureau and the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation and the United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property and the World Jewellery Confederation and that actually tells you pretty much everything except that Volodya says that also it is typical of all places filled with rich highly educated respectable people who stay in shape and wear nice clothes in that it is like Babylon. They cannot stop with the erotic sexual boning. Volodya says Bern is spring break for museum curators.
Museum curators some of whom are evidently rich as oil barons because there are quite a few giant fucking jets here.
One of which completely parks me in.
Like parks in my giant fucking jet so I cannot put it in the shady spot which I wanted.
Seriously who does that?
—
This is not a pretty plane it is horrible. There are aesthetics in aircraft design as well as like you know the basic constraints of aerodynamics and there is shit that is not done and this thing does all of them it is green.
It is green I mean not like branding not like gemstones like oxidized copper like fucking rust. It has rust running down it and it smells like jet fuel from someplace that also sells moonshine liquor and babies in that order. It has giant rivets on the outside and these rivets hold on green rusted metal plates and it has chunky engine thingamabobs on the wings that
