Read from the bottom up to enjoy these episodes as written.
If you’re current on your Third Chance lore, you’ll know Henri and his daughter Fabienne Rivard are cunning, ruthless, and dangerously inventive #supervillains. But are they the most formidable we’ve faced?
Not even close.
Dr. Knut Zhorrgum, an academic powerhouse at California Institute of Technology before his supervillain turn, now lives in a fortified bunker buried deep within an obscure spur of the Sierra Nevada mountains. He’s continued much of his CIT research, only unbound now by any moral or ethical restraints. Whales genetically modified for everlasting life. A species of eel capable of propagating geothermal events — essentially a biomechanical fuse for the world’s oceans.
On the merits, his piranhas work should’ve placed him squarely in contention for the Nobel.
I’ve tried spitballing with @DurwoodOakJones about where Dr. Zhorrgum could branch his experiments to nefarious ends. Might he weaponize some breed of hawk for assassinry? Create an uber-invasive carp species to foul all the planet’s waterways?
Durwood’s typical response to these musings is, “No telling.”
*No telling?*
“Are you serious?” I responded the other day. “That’s the extent of your worry — ‘no telling?’ I’ll bet you’re stringing a lure, aren’t you? Sitting on some rock, fishing with Crole.”
“We fished earlier,” Durwood said. “Sue and I are on the porch.”
I heard some bird call in the background, then what could’ve been Sue’s snore.
I don’t know. It’s possible Dr. Zhorrgum is benign, or too warped to hatch a plan of any significant threat to civilization. Contrary to popular belief, evil geniuses do misfire. They overestimate themselves. Their managerial skills prove lackluster. It’s possible if we just leave him to stew in his cave, he’ll end up blowing himself to smithereens or die pursuing some Grand Unified Theory that never pans out, the stalactites and stalactites finally converging on a crazed man scribbling coefficients on the walls with his fingertip.
Tell you what, though. I’ll bet he can hook me up with a parrot.
#QuaidPet
A parrot.
When Karen suggested it, I laughed because it sounded like the punchline to some playground gag. But those green eyes — big and round, just like her mother’s — were deathly serious on the computer screen.
“You *should*,” she urged. “Then you could sit up in your hotel room all day and talk, and the parrot would talk back!”
Molly entered the shot, carrying silverware and dinner plates. She told her daughter, “Mr. Quaid is a busy man. I’m sure he can’t spend his whole day talking to a bird.”
Durwood cleared his throat in West Virginia.
I gave Karen a thoughtful grin. “You just may be onto something. I’m gonna kick the tires on that.”
The girl, screwing up her face, turned to Molly. She whispered like she didn’t want me to hear, “What does kick the tires mean, Mommy?”
Molly stood with a knife and fork in either hand. “It means he’s going to … consider the possibilities.” To me: “Close enough?”
I shrugged.
Durwood put in, “Pets are work. Responsibility.”
I checked the screen to find my longtime partner planing a board on his porch. The router he was using had a brass knob and could’ve been from the eighteen hundreds.
“While I appreciate your passive-aggressive criticism,” I said, “I must say I think I could manage. Birdseed. Cup of water when the thing gets thirsty. How hard is it to keep a bird alive?”
Durwood observed, “Birds poop.”
In New Jersey, Karen laughed.
“So?” I said. “I can set out newspaper at the bottom of a cage. Change it out every few days.”
Why was I arguing? It infuriated me that a man with as little regard and generosity for the English language as @durwoodOakJones could goad me into a position like this. This Covid quarantine, George Floyd — clearly, circumstances had driven me to the edge.
Just then, building upon the theme of bad things stacking ever higher, Molly’s grandmother Eunice shuffled into the shot. She squinted accusingly.
“*Is that the cad, Rafferty*?”
Molly confirmed it was me on the video call.
Eunice, in her robe despite the late-afternoon hour, said, “I wouldn’t let that one on my computer screen if I was you. Bet he gives you one of those viruses.”
Before any of us could undertake the tech support challenge of correcting Granny’s gripe, little Karen piped up, “Mr. Quaid might get a parrot!”
She gleefully recounted our conversation to date, then asked, “What do you think, Great-Gramma? He should, shouldn’t he? Shouldn’t he get a parrot?”
Eunice sized me up from 2500 miles away. She ran her tongue over the bottom row of her dentures.
“Oh sure. Sure he should,” she answered deliberately. “A bird’d be perfect for him. A big one. Big mean one with a sharp beak.”
#QuaidPet
McGill’s kindergartner, Karen, is convinced I need a pet.
“You look lonely, Mr. Quaid,” she said today during our weekly Third Chance Enterprises Zoom. “We have Simba, and Mr. Durwood has Sue-Ann. But who do *you* have?”
I looked around my room here at Caesars Palace. “Don’t you worry about me. I get out a lot, I talk to people.”
Karen asked, “What people?”
Her mother, tearing open a salad mix in the background, peered at the screen for my answer.
“People — fun people,” I said. “I understand pets have their appeal. Heck, I’d be a dead a dozen times over if it wasn’t for Sue.”
I checked Durwood’s feed. He sat with head down on his screen porch, cleaning his M9 semiautomatic. He’d suggested on more than one occasion that we switch from weekly to monthly meetings.
Karen looked confused. I wasn’t sure if her six-year-old brain had stumbled on the concept of mortality, or what constitutes “fun people,” or something else entirely.
Then a sunbeam burst across her face.
“You need a pet that talks!” she said. “A pet that talks like you — ’cuz you talk so much!”
Zoom briefly brought Durwood into focus. A phrase close to “Say that again” made its way from West Virginia through my laptop speaker.
“That’s good thinking,” I said to the girl. “Did you have something particular in mind?”
Knowing the girl’s fanciful imagination, I was sure she’d suggest some whispering pony or magic beagle from a book Molly had read to her.
Instead, she clapped her hands excitedly and said, “A parrot!”
#QuaidPet