I was at, roared Agrajag, a cricket match! I had a weak heart condition, but what, I said to my wife, can happen to me at a cricket match? As I’m watching, what happens?
Two people quite maliciously appear out of thin air just in front of me. The last thing I can’t help but notice before my poor heart gives out in shock is that one of them is Arthur Dent wearing a rabbit bone in his beard. Coincidence?
Yes, said Arthur.
Coincidence? screamed the creature, painfully thrashing its broken wings, and opening a short gash on its right cheek with a particularly nasty tooth. On closer examination, such as he’d been hoping to avoid, Arthur noticed that much of Agrajag’s face was covered with ragged strips of black sticky plasters.
He backed away nervously. He tugged at his beard. He was appalled to discover that in fact he still had the rabbit bone in it. He pulled it out and threw it away.
Look, he said, it’s just fate playing silly buggers with you. With me. With us. It’s a complete coincidence.
What have you got against me, Dent? snarled the creature, advancing on him in a painful waddle.
Nothing, insisted Arthur, honestly, nothing.
Agrajag fixed him with a beady stare.
Seems a strange way to relate to somebody you’ve got nothing against, killing them all the time. Very curious piece of social interaction, I would call that. I’d also call it a lie!
But look, said Arthur, I’m very sorry. There’s been a terrible misunderstanding. I’ve got to go. Have you got a clock? I’m meant to be helping save the Universe. He backed away still further.
Agrajag advanced still further.
At one point, he hissed, at one point, I decided to give up. Yes, I would not come back. I would stay in the netherworld. And what happened?
Arthur indicated with random shakes of his head that he had no idea and didn’t want to have one either. He found he had backed up against the cold dark stone that had been carved by who knew what Herculean effort into a monstrous travesty of his bedroom slippers. He glanced up at his own horrendously parodied image towering above him. He was still puzzled as to what one of his hands was meant to be doing.
I got yanked involuntarily back into the physical world, pursued Agrajag, as a bunch of petunias. In, I might add, a bowl. This particularly happy little lifetime started off with me, in my bowl, unsupported, three hundred miles above the surface of a particularly grim planet. Not a naturally tenable position for a bowl of petunias, you might think. And you’d be right. That life ended a very short while later, three hundred miles lower. In, I might add, the fresh wreckage of a whale. My spirit brother.
He leered at Arthur with renewed hatred.
On the way down, he snarled, I couldn’t help noticing a flashy-looking white spaceship. And looking out of a port on this flashy-looking spaceship was a smug-looking Arthur Dent. Coincidence?!!
Yes! yelped Arthur. He glanced up again, and realized that the arm that had puzzled him was represented as wantonly calling into existence a bowl of doomed petunias. This was not a concept which leapt easily to the eye.
I must go, insisted Arthur.