Finally, the end

Chapter 6, The Set-Up to the Climax

Some men reach a point in their life’s work when all obstacles to efficiency are removed. The Most Talented Man in the World called these periods “epiphanies of productivity.” The Most Talented Man in the World also had the custom of having these epiphanies all day, every day since his infancy.

The Most Scheming Man in the World (indeed, everyone else in the world) lacked such a capacity. Yet in March and April of 1957, he entered what can be termed a “scheming flow state.” Every day, Scheems would wake up with five or ten or twenty new schemes ready to be schemed, and somehow managed to set them all in motion by day’s end. “Red Dawn Stock Options” was certainly the grandest and most time-consuming, but Scheems also hustled the automobile industry, publishing houses, mining operations, and the military.

The Most Talented and Interesting Men in the World soon realized how far-flung Scheems’ schemes ranged. Scheems, meanwhile, preternaturally managed to hamstring his pursuers on dozens of occasions. Abandoning a number of upcoming world championships and shelving his plans to invent the internet, The Most Talented Man in the World devoted himself to bringing this villain to justice. The Most Interesting Man in the World, however, was simply having too much fun with his new hobby, acrobatic aviation, for him to postpone it for the cause of justice. But he helped out by providing The Most Talented Man in the World his airplane as a means of transportation. Together, they tracked The Most Scheming Man in the World from New York down to Miami up to Chicago over to Cincinnati back to New York up to Boston out to San Francisco on to Dallas and finally down to, of all places, Manaus, Brazil.

As had been foreordained by me three weeks ago, the three most outstanding men in the world (as of 1957, though The Most Destructive Man in the World would soon come along) met on the Amazon—in a sinking storm-tossed junk, to be exact.

The Amazon River, as you geographically informed readers already know, has a total discharge greater than the next ten largest rivers (the Congo, Megha-Ganges-Brahmaputra, Orinoco, Yangtze, Rio Negro, Parana, Yenisei, Lena, Madeira, and Mississippi Rivers) combined. Its average discharge is 219,000 cubic meters per second, versus 41,800 for the Congo and 16,200 for the Mississippi. So, it’s safe to say that the Amazon is “The Largest River in the World.” And that is the only reason why I am having the climax of my story occur there.

Well, that and the fact that piranhas add a little extra suspense.

Here’s final sequence.

Chapter 7, The Final Sequence

Like a fire hose, a monstrous swell swept The Most Scheming Man in the World and The Most Interesting Man in the World overboard, instantly putting six meters between them and the boat. Miraculously, The Most Interesting Man in the World maintained his Full Nelson grip on Scheems, and kept them both afloat with his powerful legs. Grabbing three life preservers, The Most Talented Man in the World dove in after them, surfacing near the pair.

“You can’t run forever!” yelled The Most Talented Man in the World over the white noise of a billion raindrops. “Even if you somehow get away this time, I’ll hunt you dow-- aga--!” The last few words were garbled by a swell that rushed over his head and also swamped the ship.

When he surfaced from the same swell, Scheems responded fearlessly: “Stop wasting your time! You don’t kn-- wh-- I’m capable of! I WILL RUIN YOU!”

Screaming into his ear, the Most Interesting Man in the World returned: “How do you think you’re even going to get back to land, punk? You can’t even see! YOU PROBABLY CAN’T EVEN SWIM!”

Just at that moment, the air was flooded with search lights and badly broken English: “YOU TWO, POOT YOUR HANDS EEN THE AIR!”

To the dismay of The Most Talented and Interesting Men in the World, the intruding watercraft turned out to be river pirates Scheems had hired earlier that day.

“AHAHAHAHAHAHA, you fools!” shouted Scheems, for whom the river pirates’ timing couldn’t have been better. But his jubilation was cut short when The Most Interesting Man in the World complied with the pirates’ poorly-worded command. When he put his hands in the air, Scheems sank like a stone.

It is here and here only that the relative goodnesses of The Most Interesting and Talented Men in the World become relevant to the story. For in the moment when The Most Interesting Man in the World loosed his grip on The Most Scheming Man in the World, a half-formed thought flashed across his mind that stayed his hand from proffering aid: Why don’t you just let him die? the thought said. And in the time that it took him to answer, Scheems dropped ten meters.

The Most Talented Man in the World, on the other hand, knew The Most Interesting Man in the World’s character better than The Most Interesting Man in the World knew himself. When he saw The Most Interesting Man in the World hesitate, The Most Talented Man in the World gulped down a huge breath of air and set off on a free-dive to rescue his hitherto antagonist. At ten meters, he caught a glimpse of movement directly below him, but at that depth he could hardly trust his sense of sight. Visibility dropped to essentially zero at twenty meters, and The Most Talented Man in the World had nearly given up hope at twenty-five meters when his hand brushed against something smooth. In three more vertical meters he had caught an unconscious Scheems, but instantly realized what a challenge it would be to fight against gravity with such a burden for nearly thirty vertical meters, the limit of human capacity. Had he not been training regularly for the First Annual Freediving World Championships, which he was organizing, he would have lacked the strength to turn them both around and get them moving toward the surface. But, fighting gravity, panic, and disorientation, The Most Talented Man in the World arrested Scheems’ freefall and began what would be the most tortuous three minutes of swimming of his life.

At about twenty-two meters, as his lungs burned and legs ached and before he had even noticed a glimmer of light above, the piranhas found them. Instantly, he downgraded his chances of survival from seventy to ten percent. At the first prick of razor-sharp teeth just two meters later, he dropped it down to five. The Most Talented Man in the World had one free hand to swat them away from his own body, but once they smelled Scheems’ blood, the piranhas truly began to swarm. By fifteen meters, they were mercifully tearing at Scheems’ flesh. At a depth of twelve meters, The Most Talented Man in the World was forced to divest his human burden and make a frenzied effort to get to the surface on his own. As he ascended, he thought he saw a figure pass him on his way down, but was too preoccupied with his own survival to care. At about ten meters, he had the proprioceptive hallucination that his lungs had caught fire. He kicked the last few meters with the very last of his reserves, finally surfacing to sweet, sweet air-- but not to safety.

He looked around, but the boat was nowhere to be seen in the fog. His shouts for The Most Interesting Man in the World found no answer, and his searching yielded only a piece of jetsam of ample area to protect his ravaged body from the brutalities of the Amazonian fauna. But he could not rest, and after a few minutes of tense waiting, he began to lose hope for the Most Interesting Man in the World. Yet just at that moment, he emerged, with Skeeter Scheems and thousands of piranhas in tow.

“GET ME OUT OF HERE!” he shrieked after sucking in a lungful of air, his eyes scarlet with free-flowing blood. With renewed energy, The Most Talented Man in the World hoisted both bodies up onto the makeshift raft, where the two figures lay motionless, one half-dead, the other over the precipice of utter exhaustion.

Minutes later, when he had caught his breath, The Most Interesting Man in the World sat up, looked quizzically down at the difigured heap of Skeeter Scheems, and said, “What the hell are we gonna do with him?”

The Most Talented Man in the World also bent over to examine Scheems, pondering that very question as the rain beat down upon them. He finally noted, “Well, he nearly cost both of us our lives—so we’d better make sure he doesn’t die on us. Who knows, maybe this will cure him of whatever made him such a villain.”

“Yeah, right. You know as well as I do that people like him never go straight. He’ll be a hustler till the day he dies.”

Deep in his gut, The Most Talented Man in the World knew The Most Interesting Man in the World was right. They spent the next minutes floating aimlessly down the Amazon, lost in the contemplation of human nature, the minutes turning into hours. They both knew without needing to say it that no prison could hold The Most Scheming Man in the World for more than a matter of weeks. The only prison that could hold him was death.

Yet even if it may have been morally justified, vigilante justice—even for a man like Scheems—went too strongly against the grain of their consciences.

Unfortunately for them, Scheems was not the kind of man who would ever tell them “thank you.”

THE END

The Third, Fourth, and Fifth Chapters of My Story

Chapter 3, The Shadows

As I’ve mentioned, it was the 50’s—more precisely, the 1950’s. The 1950’s were a decade of great “progress.” Progress is a term people often employ when they feel that, overall, things are getting better. For instance, over the course of the 1950’s, American households transitioned from a total reliance on the media of “print” and “radio” (which had been around for hundreds of years and nearly forty years, respectively) to a new and spectacular medium of communication known as “television.” In order to experience this new medium of communication, one had to commit one’s full attention to it, since it was a “full audiovisual experience.” Naturally, people thought this way of communicating was superior than the old ways of simply reading or looking at pictures or listening to the radio—why do just one when you could do all three at the same time?!

There was also the “nuclear arms race,” the beginning of worldwide “nuclear proliferation,” and the fear of a “nuclear holocaust.”

There was one man who noticed all of this “progress” and hatched a scheme to make a great deal of money using a)television and b)fear of a nuclear holocaust. His name was Skeeter Scheems—The Most Scheming Man in the World.

Scheems was a child of the Dust Bowl, the environmental disaster that literally swept America’s heartland in the 1930’s. On April 14^th, 1935, at the age of nine, he was working far out in a Kansas cornfield when the storms of Black Sunday hit. The grit scarred his corneas so badly that he never saw again.

Because he could no longer work on the farm, his parents sent him off to the Kansas State School for the Blind, where he excelled, especially in history, psychology, and art. Either because he was an introvert or because he started at the school later than the rest, Scheems was never able to make friends with his classmates, so every day after class he would lock himself in his dorm room, plant himself in his chair, and listen to the evening radio dramas such as “The Shadow,” “The Whistler,” and “The Adventures of the Thin Man.” Even after he left the school in 1945, Scheems would religiously post himself by his treasured radio from the hours of 5:30 to 9:30, transported into worlds of drama and intrigue he could see only in his mind’s eye.

On same the day he graduated, Scheems started working in the call center of Kansas City’s most popular radio station, KUDL. Over the next decade, he earned a number of promotions until, by 1955, he had held nearly every position in the company. But the year 1955 (the same year that the Pentagon announced its plan to deploy intercontinental ballistic missiles) proved to be a fatal year for KUDL and many other radio stations and programs, for one very important reason: television.

Jobless and destitute, Skeeter Scheems’ heart broke with each passing of his favorite radio dramas. The tipping point of his psychosis finally arrived as the last words of the final episode of “The Whistler” faded into static on September 22, 1955. As a sign-off, the series ended the way each episode began: with the sound of footsteps, a person whistling, and the unforgettable lines: “I am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes ... I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak.” That night, embittered beyond cure by a world that had rejected all he had loved, Scheems stepped into the shadows. He defenestrated his radio from his third-story apartment (killing a cat in the process) and started scheming.

Chapter 4, The Big Apple

His first schemes were simple pyramid schemes and matrix schemes that collapsed after a few months, but not before raising thousands of dollars and clouds of judicial ire which Scheems would escape by mere hours. He would then travel to the next city, come up with the next catchy title, such as “The National Exchange,” or “Investors Unlimited,” then prey upon hordes of ignorant and gullible citizens. Scheems merely portrayed himself as a wholesome, handicapped entrepreneur, and his schemes practically sold themselves.

As 1956 dragged on, Scheems made ever-increasing amounts of cash—but he began to tire of his itinerant routine. As the frigid Midwestern winter set in, limiting his activities, a grander, more ambitious scheme began to quilt itself together in his mind. In late February, 1957, he decided to act on it—so he packed his bag and caught the next bus for The Big Apple.

Chapter 5, The Source

This is the part of the story when I make you realize how and where the trajectories of the protagonists and antagonist intersect.

Legend: Red: The Relative Location of The Most Talented Man in the World. Blue: The Relative Location of The Most Interesting Man in the World. Yellow: The Relative Location of The Most Scheming Man in the World. So there you have it—the whole story lies in that picture. As you can see, the lives of The Most Interesting and Talented Men in the World had continued to intersect in the intervening four years, forging a lasting friendship. They both happened to be in The Big Apple for the spring and summer of 1957, the Most Talented Man in the World for the Fencing World Cup, various international summits, and high-profile development projects and The Most Interesting Man in the World for alleged buried treasure in downtown Manhattan (which he found) and for the planning stage of his next expedition to the Arctic. Scheems—soon to be the official Most Scheming Man in the World—arrived around the same time, and it wouldn’t be long before their paths crossed.

Parenthetically, you can also see that The Most Talented and Interesting Men in the World had almost met Skeeter Scheems in early 1955, when they gave a series of guest lectures at the University of Missouri- Kansas City School of Law just two blocks from KUDL. But I digress.

On a windy April morning in 1957, the Most Talented and Interesting Men in the World met up for coffee at a shop on Wall Street two hours before the Pulitzer Prize Ceremony, where The Most Interesting Man in the World would accept the prize for a book he had recently written entitled Me.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Dispensing with formalities, The Most Interesting Man in the World steered the conversation toward an issue that had been troubling him that morning.

“Hey, have you heard of this new corporation called ‘Red Dawn Stock Options?’

“Never,” responded The Most Talented Man in the World.

“I just heard about it from a friend at the Stock Exchange yesterday—it’s very hush-hush. Anyway, the company offers exclusive stock options on other companies whose business would benefit in the case of nuclear war—hazardous waste disposal companies, companies like that I guess.”

The Most Talented Man in the World’s eyes narrowed. “‘Exclusive stock options.’ The only other time I’ve heard those words were in reference to Charles Ponzi, the famous swindler of the 1920’s.” After a brief pause, he continued, “I’d like to talk to this friend of yours down the Exchange. He available?”

“Now? Um, he should be.”

“Let’s pay him a visit. It’s just a couple blocks away.”

To summarize, the two extraordinary gentlemen found the trader, his source of information, his source’s source, and, after hours of sleuthing, his source’s source’s source. In the process, they forgot all about the Pulitzer Prize Ceremony-- which was ok since The Most Talented Man in the World planned on winning it the next year. But finding the first four levels of information on "Red Dawn Stock Options" was the easy part. The hard part came over the next three weeks, as they tracked the wispy traces of the trader’s source’s source’s source’s source: The Most Scheming Man in the World.

Stay tuned, beloved audience. You're not going to want to miss this showdown.