Agent Orange - Inconsequential

Episode 10 - D'OCD continued...

D’OCD Part 2

CHAPTER 8 continued…

Orange examined the disturbed dust on the top of the bookcase. The person who had done the disturbing (the disturber?) either had large, flat and dry fingers or he had been wearing gloves. Occam’s razor told him that the later was more probable, it didn’t tell him he was a huge dork who overanalyzed everything.

Over the next hour he searched the apartment more thoroughly.  He found that his coffee cup had been moved. The cup was at least half an inch off center with the circular stain that was now permanent on top of his bedside table. Orange always placed the cup directly on the stain; he preferred the vivid symmetry of a single circle to the blurred Venn diagram that was the predestined result of placing a cup haphazardly day after day upon the same surface.

There was also a lack of dust. Who ever had done the searching must have noticed the trails that moving thing around would have left. Each shelf was clear of dust, except of course the shelf where he had originally found evidence. Wonder if I’ll be getting a bill for that?

Suddenly, Orange threw himself down across a stuffed chair. There was no emergency. It was his Sherlock Holmes pose. Head propped at a thoughtful angle, a single leg dangling over a single arm of the chair with his back against the other. The chair could be described as “overstuffed” but really that makes it sound like a bad thing. As if someone was going to say, “This chair is entirely too comfortable! There should be a law against having this much stuff stuffed into a chair.” The chair was Orange’s favorite spot at home, a captain’s chair on the bridge of his mind. From here he gave orders that allowed him to boldly go where no man had gone before or maybe where no man really cared about going.

Obviously not a robbery unless stealing someone’s privacy counted. Maybe someone looking for something, but what? Or someone making it look like they were looking for something just to let me know that they could access my personal things anytime they wanted to. But the hints were so subtle it would have to be someone who knew me.

He absently picked up a huge hardbound encyclopedia from a table barely large enough to hold a paperback. He opened it to a random page and stared at it like a fortuneteller reading the entrails of a civilization that still lived.

The entry was: Jeroboam, king of Israel. Orange didn’t usually go for this kind of historical speculation but fate, or as he liked to call it, the Random Divine, had brought him to this page, so he read on. He thought of it more as a kind of mental exercise, reading words on a page to get the cerebral blood flow moving at optimum levels. The words didn’t have to have a meaning, the subject didn’t have to be relevant.

Jeroboam had split the nation of Israel, influencing ten tribes to join under his rule. He reigned for twenty two years and was succeeded by his two sons Abijam and Nadab. It appeared that Jeroboam, much like other rulers during biblical times was a sinner. To prevent people from going to Jerusalem, Jeroboam setup two shrines within his own realm where people could worship – What? Orange read it again. The words still said the same thing.

                He said to the people, "It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem. Here are your gods, Israel, not those who brought you up out of Egypt but those who are more powerful than that god." One he set up in Bethel, and the other in Dan. And they were a horror to look upon.

It was said that these idols were kin to those things that crawl upon the blackest depths of the ocean floor. And it was said they were strangers, outsiders who had swum through the eternity of the sky, from beyond the domain of the Creator. And hence that he held no sway over them and that he feared them.