Triumpf of Johnsonsonson…

By Mark Moore

John approached the Dispute Station at the Names Alteration Bureau and presented his numbered queue ticket to the seated clerk, who then stated that John was out of line. John pointed to the digital display above the counter, which read ’13,’ and then to his ticket, which also read ’13,’ and said, “My number matches the display.”

The clerk shook his head condescendingly and with a slightly twisted smile said, “The numbers do not match. The number on the display is green, while your queue number is indigo. You must return to the Unpleasant Waiting Room and continue to wait.”

John knew that to argue this point with a Dispute Station clerk was futile, and therefore he stood with a sigh and returned to his seat in the Unpleasant Waiting Room. There, he diligently contributed to the ambient unpleasantness by smelling, and by grumbling and mumbling in a melodic tone which mimicked and mocked the security guard’s radio, eliciting a menacing glare from the guard and several other unofficials who likewise waited.

Meanwhile, John stared at the queue display and twiddled the keys, coins, bullets, and magnets with his fingers and other appendages in his pockets, and oscillated his legs and tapped his heels upon the floor, and executed several yogic shoulder rotations, and finally slumped down so far in his chair that his buttox hung completely off the front edge of the hard plastic seat. When the number ‘13’ on the display changed from green to blue, John slid forward onto coiled legs (not his own) and sprang upward with such vigor that the soles of his purple astro-boots left the surface of the planet briefly, and, at the apex of his vertical flight, John felt himselph suspended in time, as if that instant might endure an eternity.

When John landed, he again approached the Dispute Station clerk. However this time John distinctly felt the presence of another person converging with him at the clerk’s counter. Indeed, though John’s eyes were fixed upon the clerk as he reached out to present his ticket, in his peripheral field John detected another arm reaching toward the clerk in parallel to his own outstretched arm. This was strange enough to induce John to shift his gaze to the queue ticket in the hand attached to the parallel arm. A sudden sinking sensation developed in John’s chest when he realized that the color of the number ‘13’ in his competitor’s hand was a shade of blue much more like that of the digital display’s than his own.

The Dispute Station clerk was already reaching out to accept the blue ‘13’ and thus rejecting John’s indigo ‘13’ when it occurred to John that the nuances of bureaucracy were easily sufficient to confound and defeat him. Whereupon John’s right purple astro-boot misfired a rocket, and the imbalance of this force caused John to spin and his arms to flail wildly, one of which inadvertently struck the clerk crisply across its right cheek, while the other arm struck the person with the blue ‘13’ in the back of the head, sending the head flying across the clerk’s desk, which furthermore sent random objects flying through the air, and it seemed for an instant that the pandemonium would never cease.

Yet, to John’s amazement, the clerk composed itself in short order and returned to its desk, simultaneously offering the person with the blue ‘13’ a seat, and giving John an abrupt tilt of its head instructing John to return to his seat. Luckily for John, these rocket boot misfirings were commonplace at the Bureau, and people tended to take the resultant mayhem in stride. John turned slowly toward the matrix of hard plastic chairs, but before he could take a step, he overheard the person with the blue ‘13’ ask the clerk very specifically for “the infinitely repeating name suffix ‘sonsonson….’”

At that instant in spacetime, John froze in place, poised on the synthetic balls of his feet, deep inside his purple astro-boots. That was the very same name suffix of his yearning. All his life, John craved to transform itself from John to Johnsonsonson…. Now, at the crux, at his personal historic moment, the vile one with the blue ‘13’ would deprive him of it. John could not move. He stood two paces from the dispute station, where unfeeling administrators had already forgotten that he existed. Facing out across those terrible rows and columns of the uninformed, who waited intently for a moment with the clerk, a moment which would likely end in disparaging flummoxment, he waited and listened in horror as the clerk addressed the interloper with the blue ’13,’ whose head was laying sideways upon the desk, near an overturned stapler. “Would you like to go ahead and reconnect your head before we continue?”

“No, I have a new X5 ligature to install. Since my head is already off, I will wait till I get back to my car and do the installation before I put it back on.”

Meanwhile, the interloper picked up its head and held it about chest level, and pointed the face toward the clerk to achieve some courteous eye-contact. The clerk printed a barcode and affixed it over the older one in the ID region of the interloper’s wrist scan-band.

“Congratulations, Johnsonsonsonsonsonsonsonsonsonson…….”

The beautiful iterative name suffix echoed harmoniously in John’s ears, but he was mortified. The clerk had repeated the suffix verbally more than the standard polite three repetitions, and this indulgence in flattery by a generally indifferent bureaucrat accelerated John beyond disappointment and catapulted him to an unprecedented level of executive enthusiasm.

John squeezed the actuator bulbs in his cuffs and ignited his astro-boots to full power. He rocketed past the nouveau ‘Johnsonsonson…’ seizing the number ‘13’ queue ticket and stuffing it into Johnsonsonson…’s left ear. John then whipped around in a spiral pattern, grabbing the clerk’s stapler and firing four staples at the clerk’s right cheek, where they stuck in the plasma condensate of its synthetic skin. John flew up to the ceiling and then jetted toward the Dispute Station for another assault. But as he passed above the terrified heads in the Unpleasant Waiting Room, John scanned the barcodes of several people.

They were all John! Even the “women.” John thought, “We are all John?” But which one thought that?

In a new tremor of dysphoria, John zipped past the counter and landed beside Johnsonsonson… who was still holding its head, but now pointing the face toward John. It knew that John was speaking, but couldn’t hear clearly. It rotated the head and removed the queue ticket from one ear. “What were you saying?” it asked.

“I was saying that I want that ‘Johnsonsonson…’ barcode, Johnsonsonson….”

But even under these unpleasant circumstances, the simple utterance of the iterative name suffix, the object of his many precisely calculated formative drone period cravings, caused John a soothing sensation of his circuits, a resonance which in turn cooled the rockets of his astro-boots; whereupon John began to oscillate positively and with constructive interference.

Johnsonsonson… stood and set its head on the clerk’s counter, aiming the face toward its wrist band. It peeled the barcode off and applied it to John’s wrist ID band, while Johns watched in joyful delight, especially John.

“There! Are you happy now?” asked John.

“Delighted!” said Johnsonsonson… with a smile. Then without hesitation, Johnsonsonson… powered up his boots afresh, and vanished into the hexospere, leaving behind him a seven-foot tall question mark made out of fuzzy marshmallow which quickly toppled and sent Johns scrambling for candy.

At the Dispute Station counter, John rotated his head on the counter so as to courteously face the clerk.

“One infinitely repeating ‘sonsonson…’ name suffix please.”

The clerk, who was pulling staples out of its cheek and putting them back into the stapler, then printed another barcode and applied it to John’s wrist. As Johnsonsonson… departed from the office, the clerk pushed a button on his desk twice, and the ‘13’ on the display changed from blue to indigo, and then to violet. The clerk emulated a nostalgic sentimentality, looked out across the sea of heads in the Unpleasant Waiting Room, and said in a loud voice, “NEXT!”

Fin