A man strides up to the company cafeteria’s breakfast grill, where he's greeted warmly by the cook. “What you want, Fat Boy?” calls the chef, fussing with a pan.
“Scrambled eggs, Carl, my man," Fat Boy replies. "That’s all I need. Other people desire wealth, happiness. Not me. I just want my scrambled eggs.”
Fat Boy smiles, pleased with this wry, if longwinded, observation. One isn't often treated to such philosophical wit, he thinks to himself, in the belly of the corporate beast.
One of Fat Boy's superiors, waiting for his no-nonsense egg-white omelet and toast -- dry -- shoots Fat Boy a look of bemused contempt. One- or two-word answers, idiot, the look says. This isn't “The Tonight Show.”
Fat Boy reads similar reviews of his performance in the eyes of others who've hurriedly scratched their orders on slips of paper and affixed them to Carl's spinning silver wheel. He swallows. He's relieved his order is in, that he'll not take up a minute more of anyone's time. Pearls before swine, he thinks to himself.
To his horror, the cook pulls away from his work to face him. “What’s that, now?” says the chef.
Fat Boy feels the warmth of the crowd's stares. “Oh, I guess I’m just kind of saying I love my scrambled eggs. Don't mean to distract you from your cooking,” he says.
But Carl doesn't return to his grill. Instead, he cocks his hip and screws his face into a grimace, thinking. The crowd gasps audibly when he sets down his spatula.
“Looky here, Fat Boy, you sound like a deep cat. You ain’t never heard of no noetic science?”
“No, sir. I don’t think so.”
“N-O-E-T-I-C. Got some shit to do with ancient civilizations.”
Fat Boy thinks he feels a kick from the woman next to him. It would be inconsiderate not to respond, right? he asks himself. Come on, people, he wants to announce in his defense, Certainly I can't just say nothing.
“I wonder if you mean Gnostic," he offers. "They were an ancient people who believed knowledge was everything.”
Carl’s on a roll. He lets the Gnostic observation go unconsidered. “One of your boys from the Apollo 13,” he continues. “That cat was up there, looking at the Earth and shit, and he had himself some kind of spiritual experience.”
“Yes. I read about that.”
“Right? I mean, how did those cats come up with them pyramids and Stonehenge and all that shit?”
“It’s an intriguing question," Fat Boy decides to respond. "They certainly didn’t have big tractors and earth movers like we see in our very own parking lot today.”
The cook nods excitedly. “Right? And them places was, like, hundreds of miles from each other. I mean, we run far today. But, that’s like 200 miles and shit. Can’t be like, ‘Yo, Fat Boy, I’ll see you in a couple a hours, I’m gonna run 200 miles with this big ol’ rock and shit.' You know?”
Fat Boy eyes the smoking grill, the spinning wheel festooned with orders, the angry faces of those surrounding him. "Interesting," he says. At last, he lets the conversation drop.
After a moment, he adds, "You got my eggs?"
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