Worst. Person. Ever(42)

Neal added, “And your lobster-like sunburn from our afternoon beerfest gives you a previously missing outdoorsy air. We should go drunk-driving around Wake Island a lot more.”

Wake Island had left me a bit tender red on the scalp and face. Still, standing on the Bonriki tarmac, I was feeling pretty darn good about myself, and felt even better when I spotted Sarah, with a clipboard, overseeing some staffers while something was being unloaded from an aging prop plane. She smiled and waved at me, and my heart swooned. And then a pickup truck approached and came to a stop. Stuart got out of the passenger seat. He looked at me and said, “Oh, great. It’s you.”

“Hello, Stuart.”

“Jesus, you look like Rock Hudson with late-stage AIDS. What the fuck happened to you since Hawaii?”

“Well—”

“Like I could care. Which one of you is Neal?”

“That’s me.” Neal raised a hand.

“You’ve got some Harry Potter CDs for me.”

“Brilliant! So you’re Stu Greene.” Neal reached into his jacket pocket and removed the CDs I’d labelled. He handed them to Stuart, who looked at them and froze.

“Everything okay?” asked Neal.

“Neal, who labelled these CDs?”

“Um, Raymond here. What’s up?”

“It’s just that Raymond spelled ‘Harry’ with an ‘e’ instead of an ‘a’.” He held it up for Neal to check out.

Neal looked and said, “H-E-R-R-Y. Huh. Don’t see that every day now, do you?”

Harry is a male given name, the Middle English form of Henry. It is also sometimes used as a diminutive form of Harold or Henry. It is never, ever, ever spelled with an ‘e’.

Now, I like to think of myself as an educated bloke. I wasn’t head boy or Stephen fucking Hawking or anything, but Stuart—what a dick.

“Jesus, Gunt, how the fuck could anyone be stupid enough to spell Harry with an ‘e’?”

“It’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be.”

“Not as bad? How did a useless imbecile end up on my payroll?”

“That’s deeply unfair, Stuart. I was a bit drunk at the time.”

“Drunk? Gunt, even if my brain had been raped by a gallon of tequila, I’d still have the fucking wits to spell ‘Harry’ properly.”

At that moment, a rusty, windowless van used for hauling medium-sized groups about the airport was approaching. On its sun-rotted leather seats lounged a spent-looking array of executives, plus a handful of stocky types who could only be cameramen—hod carriers in any other period in history—torsos lopsided from decades of tramping across deserts and mountains and battlefields and swamps with a Sony always over the right shoulder, their livelihood also betrayed by their nylon cargo pants, capable of conveying a nineteenth-century hunt’s worth of crap from airport to airport to airport, fully washable and dryable in any hotel room on earth in under three hours.

Stuart whistled for the driver to stop, then bellowed, “You! Bus people! Come over here!”

Neal studied the passengers more closely as they disembarked. “They’re looking a bit wasted.”

Stuart agreed. “They’re all of them drunk and pissed off. There’s been an international incident that’s utterly screwed up our supply shipments. Some dipshits somewhere let off a bomb. Airports are shut down all over.”

“Bombs go off all the time,” Neal protested.

“An atomic bomb.”

Neal and I looked at each other. “Well, that’s different, isn’t it?” Neal said. “Where’d they drop it, Stuart?”

“No one’s saying. Rumour is Hawaii. Anyhow, this bunch here has been drinking away the boredom all night while we wait for word about supplies and tech support staff.”

Neal asked about the luxurious TV network yacht.

“It was en route from Hawaii, but now it’s delayed because there’s an exclusion zone for all boats.”

“Probably stuck in the trash vortex,” I said.

Stuart had no time to reply, as twenty of my new co-workers, at the tail end of a long drunken night, staggered towards him from the rusting wagon. And then one more figure came bouncing along. Oh good fucking Christ: Fiona.

“Raymond? Raymond! Could that really be you? You look like Rock Hudson with late-stage AIDS.”

Stuart smirked.

An executive beside Fiona said, “Who’s that, then?”

She replied, “That’s Raymond Gunt. You’ll be working with him. He’s a dreadful human being.”

“People!” shouted Stuart, holding up the offending CDs. “I ask you, would any of you, even at the end of a five-day meth binge, ever be stupid enough to spell ‘Harry Potter’ with an ‘e’?”