Fight Song

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Way out in a puzzling universe known as the suburbs, Bob Coffen rides his bike to work. He pedals and pants and perspires past all the strip malls, ripe with knockoff shoe stores, chain restaurants, emporiums stuffed with the latest gadgets, and watering holes deep enough that the locals can drown their sorrows in booze. Each plaza also contains at least one church, temple, or synagogue — a different way altogether to drown one’s sorrows.

After arriving at the office, Coffen hightails it to the bathroom and wildly paper-towels away the pond of sweat from his crack. He works an unfortunate bundle in the back of his unzipped pants with such fury that the flab above Bob’s belt shimmies in a kind of unintentional hula. He splashes water on his face, fixes his tie. He is overdressed and overheated and ready to slog through the stupor of another day at Dumper Games.

Bob plops down at his desk for only a few minutes before the head honcho of the company, Mister Malcolm Dumper himself, walks up, holding something behind his back. Dumper is only thirty, almost ten full years younger than Bob. He comes from family money (his grandfather was a Canadian oil tycoon). To show his north-of-the-border allegiances, Dumper always wears a throwback hockey sweater to work, Wayne Gretzky’s #99 Edmonton Oilers jersey. To make matters worse, Dumper refers to himself as “the Great One,” which was Gretzky’s nickname on the ice.

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