The afternoon didn’t involve many more calls until it came close to the end of the day. At about four, friends and relatives began to ring, looking for their favorite inmates. Brad figured they were probably calling because they were surprised, with the official end of the day only an hour away, that the civil servants in question weren’t already home.

Were they dead? Brutally raped and decapitated, their bodies dumped in an anonymous patch of the Atchafalaya? Or were they just earning their paycheck for a bizarre switch?

Brad figured he knew the more likely explanation: They needed to photocopy church newsletters, and feeling vaguely guilty about the process, preferred to do it when all of their coworkers could be reasonably expected to be gone. He took the calls resentfully and punched halfheartedly at the phone system’s buttons, managing to track down one or two coworkers.

At some point, somehow, the day ended. The moment Brad’s watch read five, he jumped up from the desk, malevolently pleased that the phone happened to be ringing.

“I’m off-duty, bitch. Keep on ringing.”

Back to his office. A desperate cigarette, inhaled with the enthusiasm of addiction. He launched Civilization and began bombarding neutral countries with his fleet of battleships. Watching the phalanxes and chariots die amused him. Playing on “chieftain” had its benefits.

Brad hadn’t seen Liz in hours. He wasn’t sure what to do next. Normally, he would’ve bolted first chance he got, but he wasn’t even sure where he was going – his crappy apartment or hers. He wasn’t even sure anymore what they’d settled upon for a parting conclusion … were they dating? Engaged? Mortal enemies?

The encroachment of an utter inability to focus, pay attention, remember, or do anything in any way constructive seemed to indicate one thing: Brad’s system was devoid of amphetamines. He fingered his pocket pharmacy and thought about rectifying the situation.

Somehow, the need just wasn’t there. This moment seemed to call for improvisational skills. Objective evidence aside, Brad fully believed he was a more creative, more inventive person when he was off the speed. Less productive, sure, but more interesting.

Soft, fast knock at the door. It opened; Liz entered.

“Are we driving together, or what?” she asked. She pulled out one of her own cigarettes and lit it, looking pinched and nervous, thick makeup gleaming with the sheen of a long day sweating, talking, and natural exfoliation.

“Where’d Ethan run off to?” Brad asked, trying for a more neutral subject.

“He said he needed to contemplate or something,” Liz said. “I think he fell asleep on the folding table by our desks.”

“I guess we should probably both drive, since I left my car here last night and all. But maybe I could meet you at your place?” Brad offered.

“I think that would be best,” Liz said, squinting at him past the cherry of her cigarette.

Brad could see creases in her makeup, like laugh lines on an old woman. It looked greasy. Brad didn’t like greasy. Having that on his face was yet one more iteration of the many and varied forms of hell Brad could imagine. He wanted to take a squeegee and remove the makeup like excess grout from floor tile.

And he wanted, very badly, to bend her over his cluttered desk and take her with inexpert grace and feverish brevity.

Mazzy Star played in the background. More sweat broke out on Brad, although it would’ve been hard to tell, what with the existing sheen. He could probably use the squeegee himself, just to remove some of the oily sweat mixture that coated him like vernix on a newborn.

“You, uhm, …” Brad said. “That’ll be cool. Y’know. At your place. We can watch TV and stuff. Talk? Yeah.”

Brad’s hands started to move toward his pack to get another cigarette, but he hadn’t finished the one he was already smoking. He was painfully aware of his pulse, and he felt queasy. Brad never had understood why poets described the cocktail of adrenaline and endorphins – God’s own speedball – as “love.”  It was more a wistful sort of lust, at best.

Liz continued to stare at him. For all the months he’d been around her, he still hadn’t the slightest idea of what she was thinking. She’d make a good poker player, maybe – except for computing the odds, of course. Probably be a bit weak on the math angle, he figured.

Brad’s head got that weird tilting angle again, and he felt the hot metal blood thing from the day before and his “episode.” This seemed a lousy time for it. Brad clenched his jaw and willed the déjà vu to go away.

To his chemically disturbed mind, Liz was no longer a pseudogirlfriend or source of skeletal potential sexual release. She transformed into a gatekeeper of sorts. A jailer, watching over him as he served his sentence.

Brad’s head drifted further to the side, he argued with himself that it was all a chemical illusion, and Liz’s expression grew gradually more alarmed.

“Are you okay?” she asked, sounding more accusatory than concerned.

“Yeah, just a hot flash, like,” Brad said. “I’m cool. Really.” Banter lies were tricky when you were saying them at a 90-degree angle. His head had tilted so far to the side, he wondered if he was in danger of falling out of his rolly chair. Brad took a cigarette for fortitude and managed the sickliest, least sincere smile on record.

Liz rolled her eyes, squinted up her face, and resumed smoking. She seemed to think Brad was making fun of her.

Brittle silence stretched, and finally, they’d both finished their respective smokes. Liz snapped, “I’ll see you later,” and left.

Brad took a moment to gather his pulse. He felt flushed, queasy, and weak – and not the romantic way he’d been feeling a few minutes earlier. His chest felt tight. Was this how a heart attack started? Surely he was too young for that, morbid obesity be damned.

Clicking back onto the computer, more phalanxes fell to his Civilization wrath. Soon he’d research the atom bomb, and once that happened, he planned to nuke the rest of the world into an ecological apocalypse. It eased the tension.

“It’s so romantic having you here,” Liz said as she let Brad into her apartment.

Once again, it was the Good Liz, Bad Liz routine, some strange perversion of the old Jekyll and Hyde mythos. At work, prudish, paranoid, bitter. Here in the privacy of her own apartment, she was a veritable sex kitten, albeit one with slightly crazy eyes.

“I’m, uh, me too,” Brad replied suavely. “Say, you hungry?”

Brad was feeling pretty good. He’d stopped off at his own apartment and loaded his nervous system to forbear. He had more drugs coursing through his system than your average over-medicated centenarian. Neurons giggled to one another like Japanese schoolgirls. He had become Bacchus, archetype of joy and indulgence. Liz’s own peculiar acceptance only served as further proof that all was well with the world.

Brad was also quite pleased that their apartments were so near each other – he’d had a few swervy moments while driving over, and wondered in an abstract sort of way whether he might’ve killed himself or others had he stayed longer behind the wheel.

Somehow, the image of the boner-jet-pack commute had occupied most of his attention for the drive over. He’d grinned out his window at passers-by, imagining they were staring at his junk with dumbfounded fascination. He even did a few quick pelvic thrusts for the audience, delighting in his lack of inhibitions.

It was during one of these thrusts that his car had run off the road into the gravely-grassy shoulder, and Brad had been forced to slew it back to the blacktop. It’d seemed pretty funny at the time, although a brief chill had come upon him when he pondered how unfun it would be to explain himself to a cop were he to get pulled over.

But that was in the distant, nebulous, ancient past. Now he was with Liz, and she seemed in on the joke, which was great.

“Let’s get some pizza already!” Brad said, collapsing onto her couch like a gelatinous wrecking ball. “I’m so totally hungry, man.”

“You sure are happy. I’m happy, too,” Liz said. “I don’t normally order pizza, because I can’t ever finish it, and I don’t like it once it gets cold, so usually I just throw it out after a couple of days, which makes me feel bad, too.”

“Awesome,” Brad said. “I’ll eat it. No sweat. I’ll eat all of it, y’know?” This seemed like a rather witty observation, and he wiggled an eyebrow at her to show that he knew how clever he was.

But then a terrible thought occurred to Brad, and he sat upright on the couch.

“But, look, I can’t call them! I can’t! I’ve been on the phones all day! It’s a terrible, terrible thing to do, to someone delicate like me!” Brad said, suddenly in a near panic. “You’ve totally gotta call them, okay?”

Liz shrugged. “I can call. What do you want?”

“Meat! Meat, and more meat! And olives! Black olives! But never, NEVER any onions.”

Brad collapsed back on the couch, completely and totally pleased with the superb job he’d done in voicing his preference. He was great. This was great. Everything was great.

Liz looked up the number in a tidy phonebook, dialed, and started talking.

Brad could almost taste the pizza already, so he started singing a badly butchered version of “Yellow Submarine,” mostly because he couldn’t remember very many of the words other than the chorus.

“Oh when our hats, are in our hands, and the cheese, it’s very good … Every one of them, is all we need, is all we need, oh, we all live in a yellow submarine … a yellow submarine … a yellow submarine … Oh, we all live in a yellow submarine … a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine. And then our shirts, get full of fish, and the other dude, says he’s sick of it … So we call him names, and kick his ass, and then that other thing, we also do that, cuz … We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine. We all live in a yellow submarine, in a yellow submarine live we.”

Liz had a finger in one ear to try to hear the voice on the phone. Apparently, he’d been singing a bit loud.

The danger of missing out on pizza was a startling thought, and Brad violently closed his mouth to prevent any more brilliant lyrics from escaping. He also bit his tongue. It hurt. Tasted a bit like blood.

Brad dug into his pocket and pulled out a pill to cheer himself up. It was a Tylenol No. 4 – 60 mg of codeine phosphate with a protestant punishment dose of acetaminophen to ensure that the fun didn’t get out of hand. Or, more likely, to ensure that when the fun did get out of hand, you’d have some liver damage to remember it by.

Brad dry-swallowed it, which brought up an important issue: “Hey, hey, wait a minute! Don’t hang up! Hold on! Do you have any Coke? Because we need some! Make them bring some with the pizza! Otherwise, we’ll have nothing to drink!”

Liz frowned at him, but it sounded like she was including his request in her dinner negotiations over the phone.

Brad was immensely relieved and slumped back into his amoebic, relaxed state. One benefit of being so fat was that you could give the illusion of having been born without an endoskeleton. Whether this was accurately classified a “benefit” might be up for debate, but the results weren’t. Brad looked like a puddle of flesh, and he felt bliss.

Liz got off the phone, and her frown hadn’t gone away. “I saw you take a pill while I was talking to the pizza guy. What was it?”

Brad suppressed the desire to giggle, because he knew exactly how to answer that one. “Tylenol!” he replied, quite pleased that he hadn’t lied. His was, at most, a sin of omission.

Which brought him to his other recurring theme – he really wanted to get back to the sins of emission he’d experienced with Liz the night before. “Hey, why don’t you come sit down while we wait for the pizza?”

Hearing that he’d taken a Tylenol seemed to make Liz feel a bit better. Brad was pretty sure it was going to make him feel better, too, although it did put a bit of a time crunch on his plans for sexual indiscretion.

Opiates tended to interfere dramatically with his ability to get laid. Sometimes they caused impotence. Sometimes they kept him from ever achieving orgasm. Sometimes they just made him go limp midtryst.

Codeine was a fairly mild opiate for him (which was why he had it – he’d run out of anything harder), so he hoped he might be able to grunt and grind his way through this latest impediment. Still, the safest choice would be to take care of the sex thing before the pill started to work, so he held out his arms to her in the universal symbol of “Hey, c’mere, you!” and gathered her into his substantial embrace.

The night before, he’d been far more timid with her. Both afraid of rejection and sober, he’d suffered from the cautious inhibition that normally marked the intimate efforts of the sexually starved. Well, half the time. The other half, they were like he was now – way too eager.

Liz didn’t seem to mind a bit as his hands reached out to grasp her firmly by the ass and his mouth started roving like a piranha with ADD. She still had a sweater on, over some kind of blousy thing, so he had a very hard time coming anywhere close to her small breasts. Brad frowned and took one hand away from her rear to work on her front.

“You’d better be careful,” Liz said. “The pizza guy will be here soon.”

“Exactly!” Brad said. “We’re under the gun here! No time to waste!”

Liz didn’t resist. If anything, she seemed to go right along with it. Brad forced a hand under his belly and toward her crotch, working hard to figure out the zipper and button of her jeans. His own slacks were easier to free, and soon he was in an “open-air environment,” even if it was surrounded by their respective bodies.

Something alarming was happening, though. He felt a bit sticky, which wasn’t too uncommon when sexually excited … but he felt, at best, to be at half-mast, which wasn’t good news.

Liz sort of shifted her body as he began desperately thrusting up toward where he hoped was the right spot and said to him, “Not before I’m married.”

Brad was puzzled and started to wonder if maybe things had just taken a dramatic turn for the horrific, but as she rocked her hips forward, he suddenly understood: She wanted to remain a virgin. The other stuff was fair game.

This was awesome news, although the awesomeness had yet to penetrate his semiflaccid state. Brad put even more force into his upward thrusts, as if that could somehow force more blood into his member.

Liz came down onto him and guided him in toward her ass, frowning when her fingers reported his state of arousal or lack thereof.