Nap Lapkin doesn’t get sympathy pains (Part 2 of 2)

(originally posted 8/1/2021)

A few hours later Nap landed in Milwaukee, courtesy of perhaps the last functional pilot in the country. He was dying to explain his theory but he knew he could say nothing lest he jeopardize the pilot’s safety. And perhaps even his own. If he was right about what caused this incident, than he was going to have to keep his mind from trying to figure it all out.

“One minute I’m staring up at the stars without a care in the world, next thing you know I’m dragged back into saving the damn world again” he grumbled to himself a few hours later as he approached the humble two-story home of the boy who started the whole mess.

He knocked on the door but knew that nobody was in any condition to answer so he let himself in. As expected, he found them all in the living room. Laying on the floor or on the sofas, moaning and whimpering, buckets of puke sitting by each them. The boy, his parents and his brother.

Just then his eye caught a big family portrait that was hanging over the mantle. The five of them smiling away. The boy, his parents, his brother… and his sister.

“Just as I thought” Nap thought to himself, sans exclamation point (although honestly nobody would have blamed him if he stuck one in). He turned and marched right upstairs. Once there he looked down the hall and spotted the room he was looking for. It was adorned by stars and pink unicorns and he kicked it in without a second to waste (defiantly what the trailer for the movie will highlight).

“Aha!!” he yelled. Loud enough to warrant two exclamation points and, if this is ever translated into Spanish, an upside down one before the ‘A’.

On the bed sat a teenage girl. Not writhing or clutching her stomach at all. Instead she was playing a hand-held video game. A game she promptly dropped as the shock of Nap’s entrance made its way into her amygdale.

“I knew it. Sort of… mostly” Nap said as the girl stared up at him. “It’s too late to pretend to have stomach problems now lassie.”

He wasn’t sure why he called her lassie, she didn’t appear to have a drop of Irish blood in her. Sometimes I guess people get carried away after using exclamation points (especially upside down one, estoy en lo cierto?)

“Don’t you have something to confess to your brother?” he asked her.

She turned bright red and Nap ushered her out of the room and down the stairs to her afflicted family.

“So let me get this straight” said a visibly-confused-yet-perfectly-healthy Madonna. “This whole thing was caused because the boy’s sister wasn’t feeling empathy when he was having stomach issues?”

“Yep. Simple as that. Once she admitted to her family that she didn’t really care if her brother was hurting that night the spell was broken and everything returned to normal” Nap stated in a tone that indicated that he felt that everything he said made complete sense.

“Spell?” asked Madonna.

“Well, sorcery or karma or whatever. I deduced that the only way that these symptoms could affect people who were not exposed to the original carrier would be through a transmission process that made no sense whatsoever. Beyond our understanding and whatnot.”

Madonna was having none of it. She shook her head slowly from side to side. “No. Nope.”

“Look, when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Sherlock Holmes said that” said Nap.

“You realize that Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character so he couldn’t have actually said anything?” countered Madonna.

“Then whoever wrote the Sherlock Holmes books. I believe Watson was his name. His first name eludes me though. Ed maybe? Either way, it just proves my point.” Once again Nap sat back with a ‘the defense rests’ look on his face.

“How does that prove your point? What was your point anyway?” an exhausted Madonna inquired.

“If a fictional character can come up with such a good point, why question when another fictional character figures out a mystery that on the face of it seemed unsolvable?”

Madonna’s mouth fell open. “Obviously I appreciate you saving the world and all, and specifically me, but did you just refer to yourself as a fictional character?”

“Come on Madonna, you must realize by now that this is just a story. We’re all just characters in a story. Whatever I did to fix the problem, however I approached it, it would have fixed the problem. As long as it was absurd and I believed in what I was doing.” (a statement that will definitely not feature in the trailer)

In some strange way his words suddenly made sense to her. They not only explained a lot but gave her comfort for whatever else might happen in the future.

“You never asked me about my vacation” he said after a long pause.

Madonna, who had until his recent appearance at her door been sitting on the floor doing her toenails, looked up at him, finished up her big toe with a flourish and asked about his vacation.

“It was nice. Very relaxing.” He smiled at her and wondered if she could tell that he’d missed her.

“You know, it would have been better if I you had invited me along” she noted.

“Yes, but then things might have not gone the way they went. We would have put the whole world at risk by not sticking to the script.”

“Maybe… but if it’s all just a story, we could have just changed then ending.” She smiled at how comfortable she had become talking nonsense with Nap.

Nap smiled, happy that she was finally getting it.

She, of course, wasn’t.