Patrick McLean - How To Succeed in Evil

Topper’s cry infects the crowd. Now thousands of people join in, “WRECK THE JOINT! WRECK THE JOINT!” as if the demolition is some kind of perverse sporting event. Topper feels the wall of noise pressing him forward before he understands what the crowd is saying. He turns and plays cheerleader.

Edwin does not take his eyes off Barry. Edwin now has a fear. It is too late to do anything about it. Another section of the building crashes down sending up a tremendous wall of dust. Edwin covers his face with an immaculate handkerchief. Unable to see, the crowd falls silent.

“Aw c’mon,” Topper shouts, “It was just getting GOOD!”

“Topper,” says Edwin.

“Yeah,” replies Topper, looking down on his friend from the top of a police car.

“I have a question.” Before Edwin can give voice to his fear, he is interrupted by a deafening sound. It’s a sound that one might describe as an impossibly large chandelier falling from its anchor point on the moon. But Edwin is far too practical of a man to make this mistake. He knows what the sound really is. He puts a hand to his brow and bows his head.

As the dust parts the crowd erupts in a roar. There is Barry, laying into one of the newer, sleeker, tremendously more valuable buildings.

“WRECK THE JOINT! WRECK THE JOINT!” Topper screams as he smashes the blue lights on top of the police car.

“Topper please,” Edwin says, not looking up.

“C’mon E. You gotta see this. This is awesome!”

Edwin watches Barry tip Lemahi Center Tower #3 into Lemahi Center Tower #4. Both buildings come raining down in an avalanche of shattered glass and twisted metal.

“HORAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!,” yells Barry as he destroys millions of dollars worth of real estate.

Topper says, “I know those are the wrong buildings, but you gotta admit, the kid’s got talent.”

“You moron! You incompetent! You, you, you complete toothless GOOB! I am going to break you. I’m going to break you and then I am going to have you ground up into little pieces, brewed into tea, drink you down and piss you out onto your own grave.”

Edwin turns his face and catches a fleck of spittle on his cheek. It is not often that Edwin gets yelled at. The novelty wears off quickly. As Mr. Lamahi continues to vent his spleen, Edwin wipes the spittle from his face with a handkerchief.

Intellectually, Edwin is aware of the idea of sympathy. He can understand that Mr. Lemahi has poured all of his hard work and dreams of real estate success into this project. A project that had just been destroyed by the drooling, ham-fisted man-child that is Barry. He can understand that Mr. Lemahi is upset. He just doesn’t care. Besides, all of this yelling is giving him a headache.

Edwin tries to calm Mr. Lemahi. “It’s not a total loss is it? You have insurance. Acts of God and such.”

“Damn it! There’s not an insurance company on Earth that will cover what happened. Acts of Superpersons are not Acts of God. That goddamned clause just killed me! No, NO. You just killed me!”

“Please Mr. Lemahi, for your own good, you need to calm down. Perhaps some tea?”

“Calm myself! Are you threatening me!?! Are you THREATENING ME?”

“No, I am offering you tea. I—”

“No, shut up. You don’t get to talk Windsor. You screwed it up. There’s no other way to say it. So SHUT UP. Only I get to talk.”

Edwin activates the intercom. “Agnes, we are in need of tea and scones.”

The angry man doesn’t stop talking. “25 years of my life poured into that project and 55 million in escrow isn’t going to cover it. C’mon, c’mon say something. I want to hear what you have to say for yourself.”

“I—”

“SHUT UP! I’m not through yelling at you yet.”

Edwin pushes his chair back from his desk, crosses his legs and cups his chin in the palm of his hand. Truly, Mr. Lemahi is turning out to be a barren form of amusement. In the background Agnes shuffles in with a carefully prepared tray. “Would you care for tea, Mr. Lemahi?”

“Tea? TEA! Aren’t you people listening? The only tea I want is made from his ground up BONES!”

“I’m afraid all I have is Darjeeling,” says Agnes.

“Well you can take your Darjeeling and shove it up your dusty old — !”

From behind the teapot, Agnes produces a stun gun. Before Lemahi can finish his foul sentence, she gets him right in the neck. Lemahi goes from outrage to shock to a kind of vibrating fish face. His eyeballs roll back into his head and he slides out of the chair like a sack of meat. Which, given the trauma his nervous system has just endured is pretty much what he is.

“Thank you Agnes,” says Edwin.

Agnes holds up the stun gun as an object of contemplation. “Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer a blackjack.”

“As much as I respect you and your unique mix of talents, Agnes, it is an unavoidable fact that your strength is waning as you grow older.”

“Oh posh. Strength? It’s all technique. One should not blame the brush for the shortcomings of the artist.”

“Mnnnnngah,” says Lemahi as he struggles to regain a handle on the moment. He drags himself to a knee.

“You see? You see?” cries Agnes. “It is a shoddy product that does not work as advertised!” She zaps him again with the Taser. Lemahi rag-dolls to the floor. Edwin find neither comedy nor tragedy in this. He watches the entire spectacle without emotion.

Now a normal person, say a man on his way to buy a hotdog for lunch, would have been rendered unconscious by two blasts in the neck from a stun gun. But Lemahi is fueled by truly righteous and exceptional anger. And he is not to be denied. One hand claws at the side of the chair as he struggles to get his badly jangled nervous system to fire in some kind of coherent order. As he rises, red-faced and sputtering, Agnes says, “Oh good Lord!” and bustles out of the room.

Edwin is left alone with a crippled and angry man. “Windsssssssssir!,” Lemahi slurs, hacking at his words like a stroke victim. “Urrrrrn ann idiot. An an an an an an”

THOCK!

It is, Edwin thinks, an odd sort of sound. He looks up from his desk to see how it has been produced. There is Agnes, standing over the now definitively unconscious Lemahi. In her hand is a piece of lead wrapped in leather.

“There,” says Agnes as if she has just set a quaint sea-side cottage to rights, “I feel better, don’t you?”

Edwin does not feel better. He stares off into a point where the wall meets the ceiling.

“Edwin dearie, what is it?” Agnes asks. The battle axe of moments before has melted away into an angel of compassion. A blackjack toting angel, but an angel all the same.

“He is right,” says Edwin.

“He is no such thing. He is rude and ignorant.”

“But Agnes, don’t you see? I know— I should have known better. To expect an irrational creature to act rationally…” Edwin trails off and Agnes lets the silence be. She pours Edwin a cup of the Darjeeling and quietly sets it on the desk beside him.

Edwin doesn’t even look at it. Agnes says, “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.”

Edwin does not respond. After a while, Agnes leaves the room to arrange for the removal of Mr. Lemahi. As the cup of tea cools, Edwin sinks deeper and deeper into depression. And this funk is a malaise of why. Why had Edwin chosen to put himself in this position? It would have required little enough imagination to figure out what might go wrong — and this most recent setback notwithstanding — was his entire conception flawed?

Could he truly expect the unrestrained and foolish to act rationally? Could he correct the flaws of a villainous world? Or was it destined to be that reason and logic would have little place under the sun? Edwin knows his logic is sound, that his ideas are good. But is the weakness and fallibility of men such that he can never succeed?