Johnny Theremin – A Young Tax Man Brought to the Edge

A story by Cat Alex

A/N: A small explanation. Neil Gaiman once got a strange request on his blog for chapter summaries, but no details were given. So Neil made them up and so the cult of Johnny Theremin was born. People write Johnny Theremin stories and put them up, so I decided to put my one up here. To learn more about the Johnny Theremin experience, you can visit the johnnytheremin which is at .net (it won't let me put the address up for some reason) and learn all about how it happened, etc. It's pretty funny. So here's my go.

Chapter One: Johnny Theremin – The Man We Give Our Taxes To

In which we are introduced to Johnny – who 'we' are – what taxes mean to Johnny – why he doesn't work for the Inland Revenue

Johnny Theremin was a man. He had two arms, two legs and one head. Together with other bits and bobs, they made a body and Johnny liked it because he had no other choice.

He was a man of taxes. And we, the people, gave them to him on occasion. Well, the wealthy lazy ones were supposed to that is. Johnny didn't like his job, and classed 'we' as "those lazy rich English snobs" simply because he wasn't rich himself, though really he wanted to be. In his single lone filing cabinet, we were 'Them' and Johnny wished he had more than two folders in his filing cabinet.

"Oh God, why me?" he mumbled into his arms, his head resting morosely on his desk, which looked as if it had recently involved in a fire. This was because Johnny was in debt. Working private had been a bad move on Johnny's part; his lack of thinking further ahead than a month making his life more difficult than necessary. When he left university and was able to aptly process taxes, he had had the stupid notion to start up his own business wherein he would sort out taxes for other people. This seemed like a good idea, until Johnny had experienced the reality and wished fervently he had just got a job in a bank and let the job slowly kill him.

However, instead he had rented an office in a dilapidated building, in a scummy part of London where the sun never seemed to shine and the area was in a constant state of misty downpours. Johnny had advertised using himself to hand out flyers he had made by begging friends to steal paper and utilise photocopiers from their shiny, clean offices. It hadn't gone well. He had three customers – the lady who lived in the flat next to him and appeared to be under the belief that she was famous and was constantly sighing dramatically, and his parents. It wasn't looking good. Twenty three years old and where was he? In a poky little office the size of a matchbox stuffed with weird instruments he couldn't even name. This cramped bloody office wasn't even all his. On weekends it was let out to a classical band to practise their performance. He was desperate and to earn extra cash allowed them to store any instruments they wanted for a small charge, and now he was seriously regretting it. The amount of space he had was pathetic, even it the instruments did help pay the rent. Johnny wrinkled his lightly freckled nose and finally took the initiative to sit up, which revealed a not exactly gorgeous, or a completely ugly young man. He had the face of a young accountant in turmoil; his ear length light brown hair was messed up and his sky blue eyes looked tired and withdrawn, to match his bank account.

"What am I going to do?" he mumbled to himself and stood, straightening his crumpled shirt before weaving through the instrument cases to his filing cabinet. Reluctantly he opened the stout grey cabinet and picked up the front folder labelled 'Me', which was just behind the last file 'Them'. With a heavy sigh, Johnny looked at the letter he had been sent by the resident landlord of these offices and his heart sank again, deciding reading it a second time didn't help at all.

The letter had clearly been typed on a typewriter and the person who had typed it had been angry, the letters jiggling about the paper as if each line of typing had gone through a wave machine. It was short and to the point: pay this month's rent or don't expect an office to come back to by angry ink blurred date. But Johnny Theremin had no money, nothing that could cover rent and feed him, so Johnny had settled for being able to eat. He hated old Morris Glanz's guts anyway, the man who liked to come into his office so he could jeer at his lack of clientele. On Morris's more malicious days he brought along tax forms and waved them in Johnny's face while the younger man tried to pretend to be working on some important tax work.

Ah, taxes… Johnny held no love for them, but at the age of twenty one had thought that taxes were the future – the only depressing future along with death. People always had to pay them, and more and more people seemed to have no idea how to do the damn things and Johnny had quickly become convinced that flocks of people would come knocking. Even adding that he also gave financial advice on the flyers hadn't helped move business.

It hadn't panned out that way and this was what Johnny was left with – destitute, with the burden of a late office rent payment and a depression that weighed down on him more each day. Johnny rubbed the freckles on nose, a habit he indulged in when stressed, and lightly banged his head against the wall above the filing cabinet. He instantly regretted it, but continued to behave as if it had been the plan all along, perhaps to convince himself he wasn't a fool.

"I should have been a detective," Johnny announced to the wall as he put the file away and returned to his threadbare office chair to pick up his heavy trench coat – the only possession he owned that he found useful. His parents had given it to him last year when he had complained of always being cold and now he had the toughest, multiple purpose coat in existence. It was made of thick and heavy material that was waterproof and on the inside was soft and warm. It was long and Johnny used it as covers for his bed, a coat, an emergency miniature tent, on extreme occasions as a weapon, and during really bad months, where a loaf of bread was a commodity, as a rainwater collector. Johnny had the sinking feeling one of those kinds of months were on their way.

Johnny felt tiredness wash over him. It had been doing this all day and he felt like he'd been eroded to the point he would crumbled into the sea. Scratching his head, he decided he would close his office for the day and go home to sleep. As if to confirm this decision, he put on his coat and strode to the door. Well, he would have if he didn't have to wind his way through the instruments.

"Bloody… whatever the hell that is," Johnny grumbled, giving the instrument case a small kick and shut his office door, which rattled ominously on its hinges, the hinges shuddering. Shaking his head, Johnny turned and left the building, unable to understand how his landlord was able to charge him so much for such a pathetic space.

Little did Johnny Theremin know of the events that were to proceed after he had left his office and crossed the road. The road was quite unobtrusive, except for the droning traffic that flooded by on a daily basis. The road was well worn from traffic and had never endangered his life so far. And, well… it wasn't going to threaten his life yet. Let's see…

With his trench coat warming him up and the burden of his job lifted a little now he was in the polluted London air, where a light drizzle began to flatten his exploded hair, he managed a genuine smile and looked about before crossing the busy road. The cars rushed by, but did not run our protagonist over. Though Johnny hated drizzle, it refreshed him and he took in a breath of moderately fresh air – the cars and general London air tended to have that congested city pall that slowly weighed your lungs down if you weren't a regular in the city. Johnny took in the lungful as if it were the freshest air he had even breathed.

Just as he had reached the other side, he was mown down by a giant man with a large backpack on his shoulders and Johnny felt his head smack on the already cracked concrete. He whined, wondering why today had to be so cruel to him and squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to block reality out.

"Dear me, what was that? Hello – are you alright?" a voice boomed from above Johnny's head and Johnny reflexively squeezed his eyes shut and wanted to curl into a ball, like a hedgehog. Before he could achieve ball status, a large hand had reached down and grabbed his shoulder, hauling him to his feet.

"What a terrible thing for me to do, knock a poor lad down!" the voice continued as if he was addressing a crowd. Johnny opened his eyes to come face to face with a large friendly looking man who was easily a foot taller than Johnny, but wasn't menacing.

"Look over there – that's the pub we were heading to. Let me buy you a drink to make up for nearly killing you," the man told Johnny and all Johnny could do was weakly nod, his head still spinning slightly from the impact.

"We'll get a few good ales down you and you'll be right as rain, you'll see," the burly man led Johnny down the street, with Johnny dazedly following, a large arm weighing down his shoulders.

And with that, the men lead Johnny away towards the pub labelled 'The Greenfinch Paradise' and Johnny wondered if the rest of his day was going to go a similar way.

How little did he realise how true the statement was.