Panquin Parafin stretched his arms and sighed. Another long day. He'd already lived it, with his head against the pillow - just now, straight out of his 8-hour dreamland. Now oh no, NOT dreamland. Terrible, painful real life. Nothing to do but live it.
But Panquin didn't "live" life; he was operable WITHIN it. A very fine point, only too important. Panquin is a primplin, you see, and a 300-year-old one at that. He is assuredly not a living thing. He doesn't look it (necessarily), either, with his split-down-the-middle black-and-white face and body, heart tattoo on his right cheek, proofreader's delete mark on his left. It was how he was made. But all of this isn't directly relevant at this moment.
Panquin rose from the bed and went to the shower, turned the dials, let the air get good and steamed up. He always liked that, perspiring like mad before ducking beneath the watery flames..."hairofryingly hot," as Nathan would probably put it. He cleansed per his ritual, hair and face first, body second, then unmoving beneath the still-burning rain, letting it hit him and run over him until it went cold on its own - how he'd been doing it for 300 years.
The phone rang ("As I knew it fucking would" he'd say later, to Nathan) directly upon his exiting the shower. He walked dripping through his bedroom and stood beneath the monitor.
It was Nathan.
"Yeah?" Panquin said.
"Hey, wussup?"
"I'm getting ready for work."
"Right..."
"So what did you want?"
Nathan stood there, squinting.
"Was there anything you wanted?" Panquin asked, irritated.
"I just wanted to tell you something."
Tell me something? Panquin asked himself.
"Okay...what?"
"I just heard it. They've - the government - has been listening to, recording, storing - even selling on the fucking black market! - conversations and private data on computers and all kinds of shit. What do you think of that? What does your nothing-but-fucking-apologies-all-the-fucking-time-for-the-fucking-befucked-fucks-of-sweetfuck'd-fuc
kness have to say about that? Huh?"
Panquin was silent a moment.
"Who cares," he said, lighting a Galant. He was 300 years old, after all. Of COURSE the Spindelian government was spying! It'd always spied, as the Egyptians'd always spied, as had the Romans and every other mohter...spying + power = eminently sensible.
It was always harder on the living.