Conscwhatever

Backspace backspace backspace... oops, too far... 'I preceeded' darn, backspace 'preceded into the apartment's living room where we found Mr. Bruce Jones knocked out...' Gotta change that! '...on the divan.'

Vin Tanner paused to take a sip of coffee. The bust had been, well, a bust. Their main target had slipped away, but not before conking Jones - who they'd been feeling out, trying to turn - but good. There'd been enough evidence on the coffee table to build a nice, clean case against the victim. Documents that made Jones seem to be a big fish, when Tanner and his team were almost certain he weren't naught but the driver.

After two nights of staking out Jones' apartment, trading off sleep with JD, Vin knew he was past punchy, but experience had taught him that he'd be best off if he at least got the general gist of events down before falling asleep. Now, all he had to do was finish this blasted sentence and he'd feel okay about staggering down the hall to bed and sleeping until whenever it was he woke up.

Back to work. Chris would choke when he saw 'divan', but that's what you called a flat sofa-type thing with a removable back. 'Daybed' or 'divan'. As in, "You stay away from m' divan, boy." It wasn't just, as JD'd put it, "A sofa that wants to be a futon." It was funny, the holes in some folks' educations.

Besides, it had taken Vin 10 minutes to figure out how to spell 'divan' after he'd gotten back to the office and pulled out a dictionary to prove to JD it was a real word. 'Divan' was staying in.

'Knocked out', though, wouldn't do. Select, backspace, take another sip of coffee, type 'unconscience'.

What the? MS Word, it seemed, was in a pissy mood. Vin removed the 'un'. Okay, no problem there, the 'conscience' part was fine. Vin added the 'un' back, and the red underline reappeared.

Muttering "Let's see what YOU suggest," Vin sicced the spell checker on the word. The only recommendation was 'unconscious.' Well, that looked right... wasn't that what he'd written? Nope. 'Unconscience,' but that looked good too.

Vin pulled out Big Red, his Websters, and looked up 'unconscious.' The first part of the definition was 'Not knowing or perceiving.' Further on came 'Having lost consciousness.' Yup, right word.

But what about 'unconscience'? There was no entry in Big Red, so Vin flipped to the 'c's. The definition of 'conscience' was long-winded enough to please Ezra, and the tiny type started to swim a bit. But, what he started he might as well finish. He rubbed his eyes and let himself read aloud, here, safe in his apartment where nobody could hear him. "The sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness of one's own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of obligation to do right or be good." Okay, that made sense.

So how was that different from 'conscious'? He scanned to the top of the next page. The definition of 'conscious' was less to the point than the definition of 'conscience' had been, but basically seemed to say the word meant 'aware'.

Vin leaned back. How could you have a conscience if you weren't conscious? And how could you be conscious without a conscience? Weren't they the same thing?

Well, no, Vin realized. It didn't take much thinking to come up with a bunch of people he'd met that managed to operate as if they had no conscience - as if they were, well, 'unconscience', maybe? - ranging from axe murderers to, maybe, that woman who'd never let him near her precious divan. But, in his mind, the two had always been joined - fused, Ez might say - and he'd always somehow thought that being alive and kicking meant that, somewhere, there was a conscience at work. That being aware of yourself implied at least the possibility of righteous living.

How corny was that?

But the world now seemed a slightly less good place.

Hell, he was never going to get to sleep if he kept this up. Back to the write-up. '...found Mr. Jones unconscious, reclined on the divan.' But wasn't there a word that rhymed with 'recline' and 'divan' that described a way of lying? 'Supine' or 'supline'?

Vin pulled out Big Red one more time. 'Supine' it was, defined as 'Lying on the back or with the face upward.' Yup, that described Jones.

'Reclined supine on the divan,' he retyped. End of story. Chris was going to birth a calf.

END