"You traitor!" Brenda Brundtland-Govanni shouted.
"Do I know you?" Marcella Carborundurem-McVortvort asked.
"How many six foot six women do you know?" Brenda Brundtland-Govanni incredulously shouted.
"Plenty!" Carborundurem-McVortvort hotly retorted. "But, none of them would be caught dead in a pink sundress!"
"What have you got against pink sundresses?" Brenda Brundtland-Govanni, suddenly, surprisingly protective of her disguise, bellowed.
"I've never trusted anything with a colour that wasn't found in nature!" Carborundurem-McVortvort roared. Then, she roared more thoughtfully: "Hey, I know that bellow..."
Just as she was about to reveal herself to Carborundurem-McVortvort, Brenda Brundtland-Govanni heard the tinkling of the London Symphony Orchestra's version of the Dead Kennedys' "Holiday in Cambodia." Her cellphone. Looking at the display, she saw it was her mother.
"Hold that thought," Brenda Brundtland-Govanni, holding up a restraining finger, told Carborundurem-McVortvort.
Cursing the day the universe was born under he breath, Brenda Brundtland-Govanni turned and activated her cellphone.
"Brennie?" Barbara Brundtland-Govanni brightly asked.
"Please do not call me that, mom," Brenda Brundtland-Govanni testily whispered.
"Could you please get a baggie of catnip on your way home?"
"Mom, we don't have a cat."
"Do I question how you entertain?"
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni sighed. It sounded like two very metallic things promiscuously rubbing against each other (think: a pair of stainless steel rats in heat). "Alright. Is there -"
"Yes, there is: when are you going to bring that cute Darren to dinner?"
"Oh, mom, I'm sure you know your share of Hell freezing over jokes."
"Young people today are so cynical. How is Friday night?"
"Excuse me," Carborundurem-McVortvort loudly interjected, "but, is this going to take long? Because, I really have to get back to wo -"
"Do you mind?" Brenda Brundtland-Govanni turned and hissed. "I'm talking to my mother, here!"
"But, you're the one who wants to talk to me!" Carborundurem-McVortvort protested. Unfortunately, Brenda Brundtland-Govanni had already turned her back on the woman and didn't hear the chastisement.
"Ma, please! You know that's not gonna -" Brenda Brundtland-Govanni started, but was cut off.
"Oh, by the way, Brennie, you're barking up the wrong track."
"I'm sorry?"
"Your investigation? You're tracking the wrong person."
"How...?"
"I have a friend at the NSA - Dmitri? The things that man can do with a plumber's helper and some ferrets!"
"MOM!"
"In the name of national security, sweetie. National security. Why? What did you think I was talking about?"
"I really didn't need to hear that, mom."
"You're just like your father! He was a terrible prude, too!"
"Mom, you know I never met dad."
"What? Mendel's work on genetic inheritance never happened in this universe?"
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni counted to 10. It didn't work - the world was still there.
"Counting to 10 again?" Barbara Brundtland-Govanni asked. "Because, you know, Brennie, the world isn't going to go away."
"You know, mom," Brenda Brundtland-Govanni quietly hissed, "some day, I am going to find out what your pet name is."
"Oh, sweetie, if I've told you once, I've told you 746 times: my pet name is classified. If you were found guilty of knowing what my pet name was, your sentence would be not less than seven and no more than 12 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000."
"It would be worth it!"
"So, thanks to Dmitri," Barbara Brundtland-Govanni tried to get the conversation back on track, "I was able to look over Marcella Carborundurem-McVortvort's emails for the past six years. Mostly, they contained plastic surgery porn. The important thing is that there was nothing there that would connect her to Rooney McSlice."
"She wasn't the leak?"
"She wasn't the leak. Sorry. How about seven pm? You know, for dinner with Darren?"
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni put up a token resistance, but she knew that resistance was futile. Her mother hadn't trained with the Borg, but she had studied their field manual very closely. After a couple of minutes of planning, Brenda Brundtland-Govanni closed her phone and turned towards Carborundurem-McVortvort.
"It would appear that I...owe you an apology," Brenda Brundtland-Govanni said through gritted teeth.
"Oh, you don't know the half of it," said a large man in a blue uniform that looked impressive to the general public but that anybody could have gotten from a dollar store.
A security guard.
Security guards are bred to have only two facial expressions: contempt and anger. Contempt is their default position. They only show anger after 8.723 minutes of disdainful argument, or sooner if somebody maligns the queen or spills ice cream on their uniform. Security guards have to clean their own uniforms, you know, they don't get any special funding to cover cleaning bills from their clients or the agency that hires them. Knowing this, what kind of horrible human being would be so inconsiderate as to spill ice cream on a security guard's uni - do you have any idea what mace can do to a person's eyes?
"You know," the security guard stated, his disdain leavened by a dull, yeasty wit, "Eva Gabor was only five foot six."
"I'm wearing heels," Brenda Brundtland-Govanni replied.
"Eva Gabor had a Swedish accent, being Swedish and all," the security guard continued.
"I had my accent surgically removed," Brenda Brundtland-Govanni insisted.
"Eva Gabor died in 1995."
"I...uhh...yeah," Brenda Brundtland-Govanni did not know the meaning of defeat. She did, however, sometimes run out of words and have to be escorted off the premises with a stern warning never to show her face in the establishment again. This was one of those times.
"She doesn't see people without an appointment," Mabel, Brenda Brundtland-Govanni's personal assistant said as she returned, dispirited, to her office. (When the security guard hustled her out of Bob's Tox Box, he shattered her bottle of Chivas Beagle.) "Naah - the person who books her appointments has been on maternity leave for the past four years - Norwegians are very...fecund that way."
Putting a hand over the mouthpiece, Mabel asked Brenda Brundtland-Govanni, "And, where do you think you're going?"
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni replied: "Butt cheese." It was the secret signal they had worked out for emergencies. It had saved her more than once (and embarrassed her more than twice).
Mabel sniffed. "That's a new look," she dryly commented.
"Tell Darren I want to speak to him immediately," Brenda Brundtland-Govanni sourly commanded, and went into her office.
"Hi, yeah, I'm afraid I'm going to have to put you on hold," Mabel told the caller. "What did you have planned for the next six weeks?"
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni slumped into her chair (bass posture is an occupational hazard when you're as tall as she is) and called up the personnel record of Elmore Teradonovich.
Before she could look at it, however, somebody timidly knocked on the door and Darren Clincker-Belli's cowlick walked into the room, the rest of him following immediately behind. Brenda Brundtland-Govanni looked him over; he was attractive to a certain type of woman, she supposed. She couldn't imagine what that type of woman was, and if anybody other than her mother had suggested that it was her, she would have ripped out their superior vena cava and stuffed it up their nose without a second thought.
"Ms. Brundtland-Govanni," Clincker-Belli started, "I was told you - oh. Who are you? And, why are you in Brenda Brundtland-Govanni's chair? You know, she - she - she's very protective of her stuff, and if she ever found out -"
"Swear to all that really means to be holy but gets distracted by a pretty face or a beer commercial and doesn't quite live up to its intentions," Brenda Brundtland-Govanni loudly cut him off, "if you don't shut up I'm going to slap you into next month! Do you really want to miss the series finale of Lost, because you know you won't be able to avoid spoilers before you can download it off the Internet!"
"Ms...Brundtland-...Govanni?" Clincker-Belli tentatively asked.
Brenda Brundtland-Govanni contorted her face into what she hoped was a smile. She had seen other people do it before, sure, plenty of times - how hard could it be? Then, as gently as she could, she said, "Please have a seat. ...Darren."
"I'm not being fired," Clincker-Belli gulped, "am I?"
In her mind, Brenda Brundtland-Govanni slapped her head with her palm. A little harder than she had intended to. All Clincker-Belli saw was the grimace of pain that swept across her face. Thus, he was not reassured when she responded: "Of course not. I just have something I want to - I need to ask you."
"If it's okay with you," Clincker-Belli said with all of the false bravado he could muster (he was running low after a disagreement with Flo and Eddy over the reason the big red button wasn't actually blue, and he hadn't had time to go to the Emotional Self-Defense Emporium to buy some more), "I would rather stand."
"Oh, sit the ferk down and shut the ferk up!" Brenda Brundtland-Govanni barked.
"Yes, ma'am," Clincker-Belli replied. He immediately shut the fuck up and sat the fuck down.
After a long, tense pause, in which Brenda Brundtland-Govanni, not for the first time, imagined herself to be an incarnation of Shiva, she took a deep breath and asked: "What are you doing tomorrow night?"
"Well, actually -" Clincker-Belli started, but she immediately cut him off.
"Forget it. My mother has taken an interest in you. You don't want Barbara Brundtland-Govanni to take an interest in you, but there you are. She has taken an interest. In you. She seems to think that you would be a good mate for me. We have to dissuade her of this notion. Unfortunately, once she gets an idea in her head, it is almost impossible to dissuade her. But, we must try. You think you might be able to avoid this by moving to the Arctic? You sap! She would eventually track you down. She is relentless. In the pursuit of her ideas. So. I think the best thing you could do is actually show up at this little dinner thing she has planned. Once she sees how obviously incompatible we are, she will move on, and you can go back to your boring life. So. We leave here after work and grab a few drinks before heading out to the apartment. Right?"
Clincker-Belli took a long time before responding. A really long time. The sort of length of time that makes onlookers look at their watches and wonder what depths of soul he was searching. Clincker-Belli's soul was more like a wading pool, if you want to know the truth. He was actually more like a computer that has been caught in a paradox and doesn't know which way to turn, so stops processing in the hope - usually vain - that that will forestall it from blowing up.
At length, Clincker-Belli asked: "Wouldn't it be easier if you just fired me?"