William J. Pendergast was an irrelevant woman, and was therefore a hero to many, though he did not desire their worship. Of course, his celebrity was unknown to him during his lifetime, but he had always had the unnecessary feeling that his greatest deeds would be performed after he was dead; that is to say, his deeds during life were so underwhelming that “nothing” would be better than them. William was shy, with an air of incontinence about him, and though some perceived him as “mysterious”, the only true mystery about him was what his middle initial J stood for, just as people wonder what the “J” in “Jack” stands for, misinterpreting it as the first letter of the name. Ironically, William J. Pendergast’s middle name did not start with the letter J at all, but for tax reasons it was necessary to retain it.
William often thought that his life had been one of wasted potential (though in truth this belief was ridiculous, for William, though well into adulthood, had only reached his 12th year at the time that he had this thought – but that is neither there nor even farther away, for his age does not come into this story), but the fact was that he simply lacked any significant talent. As his racqueteering coach had once said, “William, what does the ‘J.’ in your name stand for?” William had told him.
At this point in the story it seems compulsory to describe the physical appearance of Mr. Pendergast, though as an experienced reader will know, it is ultimately superfluous and pretentious to do so. Therefore, while filling the basic requirement of describing the man, I will yet provide a picture of him so obviously untruthful that you will be forced to imagine your own version of him as you would have done anyway regardless of what description I had presented no matter how detailed or accurate it might have been. With that in mind, William J. Pendergast was a falcon, with a helmet made out of disappointment, carrying a moon in between two of its talons and a rude comment in between three of its others, and the rude comment believed itself to be a debt collector, and thus wore a cape.
Now that we’ve gotten that over with (Got your own picture yet? Good.), we can proceed to what really concerns us: the plot of this drawn-out but politically motivated yarn. Speaking of motivations, it is important to note that most of this account is based on William J. Pendergast’s own claims, and though William never told a lie, his intentions were always false, and so this story should be read with a great deal of negligence.
William was sitting in his study, contemplating rearranging the furniture (furniture were the only things he had in the room), scratching his _______ (insert physical attribute here: this will depend on the appearance that you gave William in the preceding paragraph) in rebellion, chewing rapturously on a ________ (I have now decided to make food open-ended as well) which he had purchased in the market from the ______ ____, who we will find out later in the story was actually the __________ in disguise. It was just as he had realized that he was not, in fact, in his own house, and thus quite outside of his rights to venture to rearrange anyone else’s furniture, when a letter arrived from the maleman, who was famous for having killed a man and stolen his gender, just so he could be a man twice. Unfortunately, his victim had worked for the Postal Service, and the murderer had been forced to assume his duties after his fortunate demise. The letter, sensibly, was addressed to William. William opened the letter, after thanking the maleman with a box of lipstick and some pamphlets, and read it aloud just in case anyone was paying attention:
“Misster Pendergast,
We would be pleased if you could attend our next meeting this comely Tuesday.
Signed,
The Undersigned,
No, the next line,
The Anti-Gravitational Renunciation Cult Society Club, Senior Division (Ages 55-163)”
No return address, nor a location of where he was to attend this meeting, was given; only a smiley face winking was drawn on the letter, and William understood this perfectly to mean that the letter was not going to tell him exactly what to do, as this was not how romance worked. Rather, he would have to follow the letter’s subtle hints and intimations to find the scene of his rendezvous: in this case, the only hint was a crudely drawn winking face.
Several hors d'oeuvres later, William found himself standing outside of a tall building made of wood, though the wood was here and there interrupted by square sections of glass, which were in turn divided into smaller squares by two crisscrossing strips of wood. Trying to confuse me by mixing wood with glass, thought William, patting himself on the back. I see their game. William strode up to the single guard standing in front of the entrance to the building and whispered in his ear that he would not be deterred by any misdirective architectural amalgamations, and the man promptly shrieked his wig off and ran away into the sunset. He would not return until lunch.
Having bypassed the only security standing between him and whatever pompous mysteries lay inside, William sauntered incautiously through the entryway and down a dark corridor leading into a large, high-ceilinged reading room filled with frayed, much too small carpets and presumptuous sofas. The tall bookcases were all empty, for their contents (the books) were floating several feet above William in the air, their open pages fluttering about mockingly, their wasteful messages lost to any would-be readers. But perhaps this was not altogether true. For, flying gleefully among the weightless tomes, were men, but not the kind of men one would expect to see around sofas and bookcases and carpets: these men had mustaches, and they wore their pants at impressively great heights on their full-bellied bodies. One gray-haired, bug-eyed gentleman in overalls spotted William at once as he gazed upon this sad and prophetic scene, and hurried down to alight on the floor right next to him.
“Please, have a seat, at once,” he puffed.
“Ah! Not on the sofa, dear, not on the sofa!” he added, beckoning William down towards himself as he collapsed cross-legged on the floor.
“Now, just a few questions for you, Pendergast” spoke the man rapidly. “First, how old are you? Why, you must be nearing high school …”
“Yes, just about,” William replied, scratching his beard.
“Ethic background?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Can you name three synonyms for ‘taurine’?”
“There aren’t any.”
“Good, good. Well, that’s about all I have for you today, Mr. Pendergast.”
“Sorry,” said William, ogling the flying society men and the winged volumes bouncing repeatedly against their heads. “But I still don’t quite understand what exactly it is that you do here!”
“Oh, well, that’s good, as we don’t rightly know, either,” chuckled the overalled man.
“How can you not know?”
“Well, that department is outsourced to another firm.”
“What department?”
“The department that finds out what we do. But I undress.”
He undressed.
“The reason, Mr. Pendergast, that we have summoned you here today — actually, we summoned you several weeks ago, but I suppose the letter was delayed, some sort of murder inquiry at the post office — in any event, for obvious reasons, we are not fit to leave our Cult Society Club for any long period of time due to our Anti-Gravitational obligations. Therefore we have contracted you to do our shopping for us. We get quite hungry, you know, never touching the ground. We wonder if you might just nip over to that there jolly old marketplace and pick us up a few things to munch on, eh, what?”
The man began to froth at the mouth.
“What’s the pay for this job?” William inquired, winking at the man, which the man promptly misinterpreted.
“We’ll kill you if you refuse,” he replied, the froth vanishing in an instant.
“I accept!” cried William, overjoyed. And with that he loped out of the Anti-Gravitational Renunciation Cult Society Club Headquarters and made his way leisurely and ambiguously to the marketplace.
Here, then, among the fruit and fowl and fajita stands, did William J. Pendergast find himself on a wintery Tuesday afternoon in June. However, not surprisingly, his Anti-Gravitational Renunciation Cult Society Club liaison had neglected to provide him with a shopping list. Instantly, William sensed that someone nearby had forgotten to shave. This morbid presentiment was confirmed when William noticed that every third peach in the sixth row of the nearest fruit stand was slightly off color, perhaps not quite ripe. With no shopping list to help him, surrounded by leering, margarinely scruffy-faces and premature fruit, William felt destitute. And, in fact, he was. But thankfully for our story, William J. Pendergast had always lived his life with an obnoxious and thoroughly unrealistic attitude of excruciatingly sickening positivity, not to be defeated by these severely unfavorable conditions. Therefore, he presently did nothing, and waited for the next paragraph.
It came! Miraculously, as it seemed. For William, much like his author, had not the slightest clue what was to occur in any given paragraph, nay, any given sentence, even as its very predecessor was being written. So he waited. And soon found that, in this sentence, to his astonishment, appeared the very gray-mustachioed, still naked man who had contracted him to do his shopping, not five minutes before, in the Headquarters of the Anti-Gravitational Renunciation Cult Society Club. Well, William, so initially crestfallen upon the realization that he was without the so indispensible shopping list, was so delighted to see the very man to solve the problem, that he was completely ignorant of the fact that the man’s presence here rendered his own mortal threat-induced employment completely pointless.
“Well, William, you’ve performed your duties splendidly, and will be handsomely rewarded with the appropriate monetary compensations,” gleamed the Anti-Gravitational Renunciation Cult Society Club representative. “By providing me with a new disguise, you’ve ensured that I can once again conduct my business here in the city marketplace without any of my colleagues at the Cult Society Club suspecting my duplicity and blatant breaching of our code.”
“Providing you with a new disguise!” William caterwauled. “Whatever do you mean?”
“Aha!” cried the man as he rambled forward and sirloined William’s helmet from his feathery head, placing it in due time on his own.
“Now, look!” he exulted. “Completely unrecognizable.”
“I’ll say,” said William, and, indeed, he eventually did. “But wait! I know what this means! You are the one from whom I purchased that unidentified food item I was consuming earlier in the story! It was you all along!”
“Yes, yes,” confessed the helmet-headed shapeshifter. “I was using a different disguise then, and it served for a while, but eventually, my fellow marketeers began to grow suspicious of, and more than a little confused by, my flesh-colored shoes, and I was forced to flee back to the Anti-Gravitational Renunciation Cult Society Club. But this helmet is far and above my head! Also, it is far and above the best disguise I have ever come up with. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to think of it!”
“You villain!” William teared. “What trickery!”
“Hey!” defended the mercurial masquerader. “Now. How. Cow. Brow. The point is, I’m not a bad fellow, but I am a bedfellow. I don’t smoke, I always use trash receptacles, I only ogle ladies when their backs are turned …”
Had William followed the man home, he would have found all three of these claims to be immediately proven untrue, but unfortunately, he had run out of the patience to be written about any further. The Cult Society Club member sensed this immediately, and made haste to return at once to his Cult Society Club, but first informing William that, in the expense of any future pecuniary vulnerabilities on William’s part, that he could feel free to contact the Anti-Gravitational Renunciation Cult Society Club in future that he might be contracted again for a discreet sort of occupation, provided he was discreet about the one he had just through much time and toil completed. With that his employer withdrew, and William, sensing many more shocks and disappointments in his future, traipsed his way back to his non-existent home.
