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problems can be solved by being scratched behind his left ear. Nick absentmindedly began scritching Bill while forlornly staring back at his laptop’s screen. The strange thing about programming bugs is that you can stare at the code as long as you want but it never spontaneously changes on its own. You know that a programmer is well and truly fucked when they start muttering, “This should work. This should fucking work.” And then they go back to staring at the same code that still has not miraculously changed of its own volition.
    “This should work. This should fucking work,” Nick muttered.
    “Okay everybody let’s get some breakfast,” Katelynn cheerfully announced.
    “This should work. This should fucking work,” Nick continued to mutter.
    Bill was momentarily torn between scritching and breakfast. Breakfast won (no contest, really). Kate reached over and closed the lid of Nick’s laptop. “Bill wants breakfast, the client is buying, let’s go.” Bill began the happy doggy dance as Kate and I put him in his harness and Nick rubbed his eyes. “You know, this should fucking work, Jake” Nick told me.
    “Yeah, I’ve heard,” I answered. The four of us headed out the back door of the little yellow house and piled into Kate’s VW.
    “Where to?” Kate asked.
    “Good question,” I answered, “not a lot of places that want to keep their licenses are going to let Bill in.” And then Kate and I looked at each other and then over our shoulders to Bill smooshed up against Nick in the backseat. “Drive-thru!” we announced simultaneously. Bill knew drive-thru, too. The drool really started flowing from Bill’s dewflaps now. “Oh, jeeze, Bill! Oh, man!” Nick began wiping himself like he was covered in mosquitoes. “Hey! The back windows don’t open!”
    Kate put the bug in first gear and we rumbled over the gravel driveway and into the street. I’m not going to tell you what franchise we went to because I’m not doing endorsements.
    “You went to the Burger King on Brady Street,” the Authoritarian Man said, “We found the receipt in Ms. O’Brian’s Volkswagen beetle.”
    “Yeah, whatever,” I continued. These guys don’t miss a thing. So why am I still strapped to this gurney? What the hell do they want from me?
    From the Burger King we drove down to the levee by the ballpark where the sprinklers were on and the infield grass was soaking in the cool water. Andy, the groundskeeper, was driving a green John Deere 220B (did you know they make them right here in town?) and mowing an intricate design of the team’s mascot, Roscoe Rat, into the outfield grass. He had placed untwisted coat-hanger wire with strips of red cloth to mark the lines that he would follow and with an artist’s precision was now sculpting Roscoe’s insolent jaw that clenched a stogie. Later Andy would add some chalk from the line marking machine to simulate smoke from the cigar.
    Kate parked the bug in the shade of the bridge that crossed the Mississippi and we all tumbled out and walked over to a gazebo that had been built on a manmade mound from where we could see Dynamite Island and a bit further downriver.
    Bill was hanging on Kate’s every move – well, she held the greasy bag with the breakfast omelets and the hash rounds. I had the cardboard tray with the three large black coffees (Caution: contents are hot!) which was already disintegrating back to its component parts and was leaking caution-hot-contents scalding my fingers. Carol Montheim, perhaps the greatest game programmer of the late 20 th century, once said to me, “America is addicted to the three ‘ines’: caffeine, nicotine and gasoline.” Hey, can I have a smoke?
    I think I heard the Authoritarian Man chuckle before he answered, “You know I can’t let you smoke. The three ‘ines’. That’s pretty funny. Go on.”
    Has my life become some sort of twisted Arabian Nights? Maybe what I need to do is keep on entertaining the Authoritarian Man