So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams [12]
This was the pub in which he had passed the fatal lunch-time during which first his house and then the entire Earth had been demolished, or rather had seemed to be demolished, no, damn it, had been demolished because if they hadn’t been then where the bloody heck had he been for the last eight years, and how had he got there if not in one of the big yellow Vogon ships which the appalling Russell had just been telling him were merely drug-induced hallucinations, and yet if it had been demolished, what was he currently standing on…?
He jammed the brake on this line of thought because it wasn’t going to get him any further than it had the last twenty times he’d been over it.
He started again.
This was the pub in which he had passed the fatal lunchtime during which whatever it was had happened that he was going to sort out later had happened, and…
It still didn’t make sense.
He started again.
This was the pub in which…
This was a pub.
Pubs served drinks and he could certainly do with one.
Satisfied that his jumbled thought processes had at last arrived at a conclusion, and a conclusion he was happy with even if it wasn’t the one he had set out to achieve, he strode toward the door.
And stopped.
A small black wirehaired terrior ran out from behind a low wall and then, catching sight of Arthur clearly, began to snarl.
Now Arthur knew this dog, and he knew it well. It belonged to an advertising friend of his, and was called Know-Nothing-Bozo the Non-Wonder Dog because the way its hair stood up on its head reminded people of the President of the United States of America, and the dog knew Arthur, or at least should. It was a stupid dog, but it should at least have been able to recognize Arthur instead of standing there, hackles raised, as if Arthur were the most fearful apparition ever to intrude upon its feeble-witted life.
This prompted Arthur to go and peer at the window again, this time with an eye not for the asphyxiating emu but for himself.
Seeing himself for the first time suddenly in a familiar context, he had to admit that the dog had a point.
He looked a lot like something a farmer would use to scare birds with, and there was no doubt but that to go into the pub in his present condition would excite comment of a raucous kind, and worse still, there would doubtless be several people in there at the moment whom he knew, all of whom would be bound to bombard him with questions which at the moment he felt ill-equipped to deal with.
Will Smithers, for instance, the owner of Know-Nothing-Bozo the Non-Wonder Dog, an animal so stupid that it had been sacked from one of Will’s own commercials for being incapable of knowing which dog food it was supposed to prefer, despite the fact that the meat in all the other bowls had engine oil poured all over it.
Will would definitely be in there. Here was his dog, there was his car, a gray Porsche 928S with a sign in the back window which read “My other car is also a Porsche.” Damn him.
He stared at it and realized that he had just learned something he hadn’t known before.
Will Smithers, like most of the overpaid and under-scrupulous bastards Arthur knew in advertising, made a point of changing his car every August so that he could tell people his accountant made him do it, though the truth was that his accountant was trying like hell to stop him, what with all the alimony he had to pay, and so on—and this was the same car Arthur remembered him having before. The number plate proclaimed its year.
Given that it was now winter, and that the event which had caused Arthur so much trouble eight of his personal years ago had occurred at the beginning of September, less than six or seven months could have passed here.
He stood terribly still for a moment and let Know-Nothing-Bozo jump up and down yapping at him. He was suddenly stunned by a realization he could no longer avoid, which was this: he was now an alien on his own world. Try as they might, no one was even going to be able to believe his