"Yello!"
"Yello? You've gotta be kidding me," he thinks which is how "hello" came out as he hoped it would. He sounded like a man - not at all like himself. "You should take up smoking," his grandfather used to tease, "maybe then you'll get a date." Bastard. "Richer than the Rockerfellers and I'm still delivering pizzas to pay off my student loans." Matthew felt a little guilty, of course, for proclaiming "poetic justice" at his wake. Frankly, though, he just never really liked the guy. And couldn't these people take a joke? Hell, the man worked for R.J. Reynold's for forty two years and headed the research team that first generated tetrahydrapoisonisprofit, hands down, the most addictive chemical added to American tobacco products. His mother gave a red faced apology at the funeral, with the explanation that Matthew's liberal arts college up north "certainly seem(ed) to be helping with his self-esteem."
"This is Commander Johnson." It sounds a little impatient.
"I'm sorry, sir. This is Matthew Jackson from the University Times. We're running a story on The Darwin Missions and I was hoping to get a few words from you on the matter."
"Oh," Johnson sounds startled.
"Sir, do you maintain that you were unaware of the project?" Matthew cringes. Too much. You sound like a game show announcer. Tell him what he's won!
"Yes, entirely." From hesitation to hurry.
"But you have a seat on the shuttle Apocellipse? How can this be?"
"I've been advised not to comment until-"
"Sir, with all due respect, you're not likely to go to trial. You'll be long gone. Hell, you'll be sipping mint juleps with the Supreme Court Justice." Whoa. Ballsy.
Commander Johnson, "call me Dick," rolls his eyes back into his skull and slumps forehead first onto his desk in a hammy attempt at narcilepsy. Darlene, his third wife, charges to his rescue, cradling his neck, her fingers savoring his head of white, but still very full, close cropped hair, smothering his face into "the best fifteen thousand" Dick ever spent.
"Exactly, so why are you working?" Dick muses. "Get a life." In poor taste, but funny. "Ha." "Ha ha." Darlene is bending down now to pick up the mint she's, "whoopsy," accidentally dropped, grinning under the wrongful assumption that Dick is laughing at her little charade. "Make him laugh, everyday" was rule one of Sandra Bullock's blog entitled "How to Be A Kept Wife." Sandra's a Southern belle, just like her. Her eyes smile as she dances her way over so that Dick can lightly slap her behind. "And you have proof that these photos on this wackyleaks are legitimate?"
"Sir,". Wow, was this finally puberty? "You have sixteen witnesses claiming to have performed contracted labor on the planet Mars." And, apparently, the New York Times got a call from a Russian fellow today with some pretty interesting-" Matthew wishes he could bottle this confidence
Johnson only catches bits and pieces of Jackson's accusation that the space race was a cover up. He's heard it all before though, "the Russians were really in bed with America - and the Germans too - cultivating an earth like habitat on the planet Mars - an apocalyptic escape for the elite... blah blah blah." He clicks the mouse and the next image, "Neo-Monaco" was the working name for the project, evokes memories of Judy. Oh boy. Judy was like the perfect child of Dagny Taggart and Scarlet O'Hara as far as Dick was concerned. Oh, boy. Hands down the most perfectly polarized day of his life. "The mile high club is for amateurs," they joked over a shared Lucky Strike. Johnson kissed "all three of my girls" goodbye before he pulled the blanket up and left her, beaming, to get some specs and signatures before the next day's launch. So what the hell was she thinking? Smoking next to a hydrogen tank? Johnson could only assume that she was a kamikaze of sorts, on a suicide mission to sabotage the second launch. There must have been a leak. "It's a shame," he chuckles. "She would have made a great ex-wife."
"...blown to bits down here while you're up there with the rest of the blue bloods..."
Darlene, a skilled bartender, flings a cloth coaster onto Dick's mahogany desk and sets a mint julep with crushed ice, "always crushed ice," onto the coaster in one quick movement. Dick lowers the phone, covers the receiver, and cranes his neck toward Darlene. "Baby," he says, "you're the bees knees."
