Chapter 11
I
t’s the three-headed board animal, again. But the heads don’t look angry this time, just exhausted. Like they’ve been chasing a three-headed squirrel all day.
“We’ve had a meeting,” Head One says reluctantly.
“We’ve come to the conclusion that you’ve been right all along,” Head Two admits.
“That, of course, doesn’t mean we’ve been wrong
,” Head One clarifies.
“Certainly not! Just that you were a little less wrong than . . . we were.” Head Two nods.
Lucas understands nothing of this, even less nothing than he usually does, and during this confusion Head Three has the opportunity to lean in through his doorway and hear the music coming from the TV.
“Oh! I’ve seen people playing that video game on YouTube! You get to kill monsters in that, right?”
“Not now, Linda, please.” Lucas sighs and turns to Heads One and Two: “What do you mean I was right?”
Head One coughs a few times and then confesses:
“Well, we’ve had an evaluation meeting and decided that maybe we should have let you go down and pick up that very first frying pan. The way you suggested. Then it might not have
become a pile. Admittedly, we would then never have found the guilty frying pan thrower-outer, but now it seems we haven’t done that anyway, and now there are so many guilty thrower-outers that we don’t even know who’s the guiltiest anymore: whoever started the pile, or everyone else who left junk on the pile afterwards.”
“We’re going to have a meeting about that too! A meeting of a philosophical nature!” Head Two nods with great seriousness.
Lucas puts his hands in his pockets waiting for the board animal to say something more, but no more words come. Not even from Head Three. So then Lucas clears his throat and says:
“How would you like all this to resolve itself? If you could choose?”
This is something the board animal looks like it would need a whole separate meeting to figure out. But after considerable deliberation, Head One admits somewhat shamefully:
“It would be best, I suppose, if the pile disappeared against our will, so to speak.”
“Against your will?” Lucas repeats.
“Yes, yes, in a way so that the pile disappeared, but also in a way that we could say at the meeting afterwards that we had nothing to do with. That it was due to . . . the modernization of society. It can’t be stopped, can it, the modernization? So then it wouldn’t be our fault. That way we could appear to have been consistent in our principles,” Head One concludes.
Head Two nods eagerly.
“It would be good if we could appear consistent, yes. Being consistent is the opposite of being wrong.”
“If we’re wrong, we may be deposed at the next meeting. And then the neighbors might kill us,” whispers Head Three.
Lucas scratches his hair thoughtfully, before he says the most absurd thing he has ever heard himself say out loud:
“Come in. Let’s talk about it.”
The board animal is so stunned by this proposal that they can’t even form words. They step carefully into Lucas’s apartment, take off their shoes, and look around. Lucas makes sandwiches and lets the board animal sit on his couch. He even shows them how to play the video game. Head Three immediately shoots a monster in the head. She turns out to be a natural. Who could have guessed?
When the whole board animal has gotten really relaxed and forgets to look over its shoulders, Lucas sneaks out of the apartment, shuts the door, and locks them all inside. Then the board cries out in fear:
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WE CAN’T GET OUT NOW!”
Lucas replies calmly through the door:
“No, that’s right, now you can’t get out. So now you can’t stop any modernizations of society at all.”
There is silence for a moment, before the board shouts very, very happily:
“Oh no! Now we’re . . . powerless.”