Missing Pieces

The construction of what would become the house on 314 Great Oak Street was not without incident.  The assembly was commissioned under the authority of the Suburban Development Board, an institution that insisted on oversight of even the most inconsequential dealings within the forty-square-mile landmass positioned directly in the middle of the federally owned Lake Atlas, an area known as Essential Island.  A grid of narrow, suburban streets cut the island through, cloaked in various layers of mawkish Americana.

On July 27, 2015, socio-cultural engineer Norman Richards discovered an odd aberration in the small expanse of land on which building was to commence.  Several of his surveyors noted the inexplicable disappearance of vital equipment, specifically those instruments designed to take psychodynamic readings of residual extended brainwave patterns.  Of the twenty-two devices sent out, none, thus far, had been recovered. 

The disappearances seemed to be happening precisely at 11:54 PM, during the ten minutes between two surveyors’ shifts.  Why this oversight had gone on this long, Norman Richards did not know, but he intended to correct it.  When Richards made inquiries into the identity of the surveyors on duty, specifically to ask why this ten-minute window (between 11:50 PM and 12:00 AM) remained unfilled by surveyor observation in the face of such a strange occurrence.

“Fuck that,” surveyor Bob Hilton told him in the company lunch hall, a trace of some unknown condiment still clinging to the corner of his mouth, “Those ten minutes are not in my contract.  I don’t get paid for those ten minutes.  Those ten minutes are not my problem.”

Richards could feel the muscles at the sides of his jaw quiver under an ice-cold blast of central air.

“Whose problem is it then?”

Hilton chewed on the remains of his sandwich, still left in his cheek.

“I don’t know… Matt Harmon from Recourses?”

Richards expelled a long sigh through the phlegm in his throat and moved to make his way to the Recourses building.  The world outside is hot and arid.

“And I’m telling you it’s not possible.  There’s only one way off that island.  Anyone stealing the instruments would run into the coming surveyor on his way out.  That’s how the system is designed.  Maximum efficiency.”

“Did I say anything about stealing the instruments.”

Matt Harmon cleaned his glasses on the edge of his t-shirt, ashen hands shaking.

“Well, no, but well… where else could they have gone?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.  And so I talked to Bob Hilton and he directed me to you.”

Harmon looked as if his eyes are ready to pop out of his head.

“Bob Hilton… Bob fucking Hilton?  Well there’s your fucking problem.  He’s a Class A criminal; I’ve been saying so for years.  Probably arranged the whole heist himself.”

“Did I say anything about a heist?”

Harmon took off his glasses again as if to clean them, but then just held them in midair, awkwardly, in two fingers.

“Well, I mean, you know how much those things go for on the black market…”

Richards winced.

“Spare me.”

He walked in silence out to his car, and Matt Harmon could see him drive off onto Highway 41 through the plate glass airlock.

Norman Richards was last seen at 1:33 PM, Tuesday July 28, 2015, leaving the Resources building of Jungian Designs, Incorporated.