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In This Issue

• Water On The Knee
• The Annihilator of Mathematics
• Demonic Speak-n-Spell
• The Fed Interviews Jon Voight
• Letters to the Feditors
• Sam Jenning, or: Eating Children For Profit
• Immigrate This!
• Where In Our Hearts Is Carmen Sandiego?
• The Life and Times of Carmen Sandiego
• Redder Rabbit?
• Good Golly Fucking Gumdrops, I Like Candy!
• The City’s New Hot, Sexy, Superhot Nightclub!
• Where's Waldo?
• Logical Journey into Eugenics
• Think Columbia Sucks? It's Your Fault, Doofus.
• A Farewell to Harms
• A Farewell To Bill
• Tracy Briskit, Fed Queen
• Make Your Own Safe Space!
• Columbia Trail: Safe Space, Bathroom in 347 miles
• Cook with Barney!
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 21.8
• The Staff of Volume 21

Michael Bredin

I didn’t mean for him to go down so hard. The shove was meant like a casual reminder, a friendly “Hey, William, you are not paying attention to me whilst I am soliciting your attention/money” sort of thing. But after years of haranguing I wasn’t going to go quietly. Bill owed me and the Swiss government fifty thousand dollars apiece, and one way or another, we were going to get it out of him.

So imagine my surprise when Bill McLaughlin reached the bottom of the long flight of metal stairs at the New Jersey waste treatment plant, his gangly limbs contorted into positions that their hinge joints never would have dreamed imaginable.

On August 24, 2002, I had killed Bill McLaughlin. What could I tell the Swiss government? “Sorry, guys, looks like your one cultural super-spy, deeply in debt to both me and you, got shoved down a flight of steps?” They’d love that. Do you know what the Swiss do with failures? They give them to the other Swiss Guards for halberd practice. The pope watches. He loves that shit. It’s better than “The Osbournes.”

What could I do? I packed Bill into my suitcase (he was always an accomodating, bendable sort) and flew back to Zurich, explaining that the dull thud of my luggage was merely thousands of clocks and heroin encased in Nazi gold.

By the time my dull gray cab arrived at the base of the secret Swiss Guard mountain fortress, Bill McLaughlin was undergoing rigor mortis, his face drawn back in a ghastly smile that I would get to know all too well in the coming months.

“You what?” said my commanding officer when I opened the suitcase, revealing the contorted mess.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said.

“Oh yes it is. McLaughlin was our top agent in the field. And he’d maxed out his company card. He owes us money.”

“He owes me money, too!” I said, feeling indignant. “You can always ‘discover’ another piece of ‘hidden’ artwork from the war and sell it at Christie’s. What am I gonna do?”

“Perhaps you misunderstood,” said my commanding officer. “We’d given McLaughlin’s identity all he needed to live comfortably in New York City. He could pretend he was just some goofball kid at Columbia University, too lazy to do so much as write his own farewell articles for whatever organizations he becomes involved with. He owed us money because his plan was long term.”

“Well, you can get someone else to do it,” I said.

“McLaughlin’s been accepted!” howled my superior. “They expect him in his dorm any day now! What can we do?”

I looked down at the grinning corpse. My mind drove headlong into horrible, horrible thoughts, anything to save me from the inhumanity of becoming a halberded failure.

“How tall is he?” I asked.

So began my long journey. For four years, I wore the face of another man. I recieved regular updates from the Swiss government on how to proceed with their dastardly schemes, but as the semesters wore on, procrastination reared its ugly head. I had become something more than Bill McLaughlin. I was a college student.

I joined this newspaper to further the devious plans of the men in Zurich, who demanded some sort of journalistic credentials for “McLaughlin” to succeed in his goals. But the Spectator’s staff reminded me too much of a Washington DC cocktail party of would-be socialites discussing their own importance before engaging vigarously in group masturbation, and the Blue and White made a contemptous remark about my income tax returns when I attempted to present my credentials. Oh, if only they knew the monetary power I truly wielded!

Instead, I joined The Federalist, and it was there my schemes were finally ruined.

I began a steady downward spiral into nonchalance. My superiors expressed irritation at this, until I stopped giving more than a cursory glance at their communiques. Finally, one sunny Spring morning, my cell phone rang.

“Are you ready to deliver the forged vote tally?” said a voice on the other end.

“Huh?” I said, still in bed. It was 3 in the afternoon.

“You are in the Journalism School, are you not? You are about to place the forged vote tally so that the pope wins all the Pulitzer Prizes from now until forever, are you not? You have been paying attention all these years, haven’t you?” I hung up and smoked another joint.

It wasn’t until the next day that I’d realized my tremendous failure. I woke up with a halberd buried in the bed Iusually slept in. (I’d spent the night on the floor in a puddle of rum.) I immediately resolved to escape.

You asked why I didn’t have time to write this article. Now you know the truth. By the time you recieve this voicemail, I will be on a pirate ship off the coast of Somalia. When they ask who I was, tell them this. Bill McLaughlin died in 2002, but his spirit lived through my failures. In a way, Mclaughlin never really died at all, and even in my departure, he’ll never really be gone. As long as there’s a kind-hearted slacker to help out and fight injustice through apathy, there Bill McLaughlin will be.