Cyril in the Flesh

by Ramsey Hootman

“But everything seems empty when they’re gone.” She leans against him for a moment, exhaling a tired sigh before letting him help her back to the couch. By the time he gets her settled, wrapped snugly in a blanket, the kids are back, in pajamas now, still arguing. This time it’s about which bedtime story he’s going to read.

  He hands Robin her phone. “I told you guys, your mom—”

  “Is going to read the story,” Robin interrupts. “Seth, go get the next Three Investigators book.”

  Cyril gives her a disapproving frown as the kids thunder back out of the room. “You said you were gonna let me—”

  “You were about to snap.” She holds up two fingers, pointing at her own eyes. “I could see it. It’s fine; I want to. When I was going through my mom’s stuff, I found a box of my favorite books from when I was Seth’s age. We started going through them together the last time I was in chemo, so it’s kind of our thing. I can read. You can wrangle them to bed.”

  So in the end, he’s the one left cleaning the kitchen while Robin snuggles up with the kids on the couch to read from a small hardback book with a once-brightly-colored cover now worn to shades of brown. As it should be. When he’s done, he grabs the laptop which seems to have become his by default and parks himself at the kitchen table, close enough to intervene if the kids get out of hand.

  It’s the first opportunity he’s had to access the internet since his brief conversation with Cooke, but he checks his email before Googling the Castro Valley shooting. It can’t be anything good. If his email somehow contains a lead on a job, he’ll be able to jump on that and avoid the inevitable for just a little longer. But there’s nothing.

  He glances at Robin. Her face is Madonna-like as she reads, glowing with a perfect balance between serenity and exhaustion. He makes a note of the time so he can shoo the kids off to bed before she wears herself out completely.

  Then he clicks over to his incognito browser, hesitates, and finally types in the requisite phrase.

  As one of the smaller of the dozens of mass shootings that had occurred while he was in prison, the Castro Valley shooting hadn’t even made a blip on his radar. White male walks into a Denny’s just after midnight and opens fire. Six dead. Two of the victims are children. But what the hell does that have to do with this asshole?

  It takes him a while to find the connection, mostly because the fringe communities who once congregated on unindexed forums have migrated towards more ephemeral channels on Discord and Telegram—but also because news agencies are getting slightly better at not obsessing over the shooter in excruciating existential detail until the next nutcase decides it’s his turn to get famous. But he finds it. The guy’s manifesto is fifty rambling, handwritten pages long, and in that space, he manages to drop the name Cyril Blanchard about two hundred times.

  Once he knows what he’s looking for, it’s everywhere. Hundred-page 8kun threads that begin with tongue-in-cheek memes mocking the shooter for his bizarre fixation on the comically obese hacker slowly morph into conspiracy-laden analyses connecting Cyril to the shooter and their supposedly shared ideology. Cyril Blanchard is a hero. A true citizen. His data leak exposed the rotting underbelly of a government corrupted by Jews and Blacks who want to take away the white man’s agency and make sure he never gets laid.

  Jesus Christ. No wonder this asshole can’t find anyone to hire him; if he believed even half the shit that’s being attributed to his name, he’d be the bastard stepchild of David Duke and Jeffrey Epstein.

  He’d like to shrug it off. What has he to do with the actions of a lunatic wielding a gun? The guy would have snapped regardless; Cyril was simply in the public eye at the wrong time. And it is, obviously, lunacy. Shooting up a restaurant full of people is definitional.

  And yet. Lodged beneath every half-coherent declaration of outrage is a seed of truth.

  Here was how he’d justified his hacktivism, back before it had cost Tavis his life: he was fringe, yes. Radical, absolutely. But his flagrant, willful disregard of the law provided the essential function of keeping the balance of power in check. His exploits—the lulz—were a bulwark against the slow erosion of digital and intellectual liberty. You want to regulate an idea? Yeah, go ahead and try.

  Except that wreaking digital havoc in the name of liberty was necessary only so long as he was in the minority; a trivial faction railing hopelessly against a monolith to compel at least some level of accountability. A man tilting at windmills never plans for victory.

  It’s not his fault the world turned out to be full of vulnerable idiots who couldn’t tell the difference between targeted misinformation and news. Or, worse, didn’t care. He’d been part of the effort to inoculate the world against targeted misinformation—and instead he’d become a vector for disease.

  Still—that's how these things work, right? In the mind of a lunatic, the kernel of truth gets warped. That didn’t make the truth less pure or right.

  Oh, but he’d watered those seeds.

  He clicks on a link and reads the obituary of a three-year-old victim. And he looks at Seth and Nora. And he wonders how the truth he clung to so fervently could possibly be worth the lives of two innocent children.

  Robin glances up, catching his eye as she turns a page, and he looks away, reflexively, because he doesn’t want her to see what's on the screen reflected in his face.

  He closes the open browser tabs. He visits each forum and systematically deletes each of his newly opened accounts. He uninstalls his IRC client and Tor. Then he closes Robin’s laptop.

  And he does not open it again.

  Robin is no longer on the couch when Cyril finishes putting Seth and Nora to bed. He ducks into the bathroom, thinking perhaps she’s stranded herself in the shower again, and finds the sink littered with medical detritus—latex gloves, plastic wrappers, and a bloody swatch of gauze.

  She is in bed. “Did you fucking change your own—”

  “I know, I know.” She drapes an elbow over her eyes. “I have regrets.”

  He jerks up the bottom of her (his) shirt, revealing a pair of pale pink underwear.

  “Disappointed?”

  The dressing is messy, but it looks all right. No swelling or discoloration that he can see, although he obviously didn’t get a look under the gauze. He pulls the shirt back down. “What am I even here for, if you’re not gonna—”

  “I know,” she moans again.

  “Fucking send you back to Kathy Bates,” he mutters, covering her with the duvet and using his fingers to tuck it in around her, tightly. “Let her take care of you.”

  “Oh, cut Greta some slack.” She lifts the arm off of her face. “You don’t survive a quarter century in the public school system without getting a little rough around the edges.”

  “Yeah? She should give prison a try.” He turns on the bedside lamp and takes her empty water glass, flicking off the overhead light as he exits the room.

  After he fills a clean glass, he starts the dishwasher and then the washing machine. She seems to be asleep when he returns, but when he reaches for the chain to turn off the lamp she says, “Took you long enough.”

  “Well someone’s gotta keep this household running.” That gets him a smile. He sets the new glass of water on her nightstand and turns to leave.

  “Wait,” she says, like it’s the beginning of a sentence that hangs, incomplete.

  “Those dishes aren’t going to wash themselves,” he replies, with chipper, housewifely sarcasm. Like they both don’t know he’s on his way to toss a frozen pizza into the oven.

  She stretches an arm out, patting the empty side of the bed.

  Like, what, she’s doing him a favor? “Give me a fucking break.”

  “Binge in the morning, whatever. Can you just—” She sighs. “I just hate sleeping on my back, okay? I haven’t been able to get comfortable since that first night. You know, when you—”

  “Are you serious?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Yes, I am serious.”


  He is forced to admit she might be telling the truth. “Fine. Gimme a minute, I gotta piss first.” While he’s at it, he brushes his teeth, too. No particular reason.

  She is watching, this time, when he heaves himself onto the mattress. “That’s, uh, quite the workout for you,” she observes, and then thrusts her arms out.

  He ignores her while he stuffs all the pillows within reach behind his back. He sleeps half-sitting on the couch anyway, but he’s not interested in enduring another night with the headboard gouging his spine. Once he’s situated, he pulls her—gently—onto his chest.

  She sighs as she settles in, using a hand to smooth his shirt down over the curve of his side. “Hey,” she says. “Thanks for handling the kids. They drive me nuts, but when they’re gone I miss them.”

  “Figured I’d better, after what you said the other night about having babies.”

  She tsks annoyance. “Apparently not having ovaries means dealing with some weird emotional swings. I definitely do not want any more kids.”

  “If you say so.”

  “It’s weird because I never like... seriously identified as female? I mean, I’m a woman, I’m not saying I ever wanted to be something else—it just wasn’t that important to me. But now that I’m kind of androgynous, I—”

  He clears his throat. “You’re, uh, definitely not androgynous.”

  “You’re just saying that because you want to fuck me.”

  “If I were going to lie to get into your pants, Chica, I’d think of something better than ‘Hey, you don’t look like a dude.’”

  “Point.” She hesitates. “I mean, you do, though. Right?”

  He lifts an eyebrow. “Lie? Yes.”

  “No, do you want to—” She lifts a hand. “Never mind. You’ll just say something to piss me off. Here.” She shifts, letting out a grunt of discomfort, and stretches a hand back toward the nightstand. Her fingers fall a few inches short.

  “What do you want?” He puts one hand on her back, holding her securely against him, and uses the other to tap the glass. “Water?”

  “No, the—yeah,” she says, as he touches the rolled-up magazine sticking out of the nightstand drawer. “Read to me.”

  “From...” He tugs it out, letting the pages flop open on the bed. “Architectural Digest?”

  “I just like the sound of your voice. Very... soporific.”

  “I’m flattered.” He tosses the magazine aside and pulls out his phone. He’s already got the Project Gutenberg app installed, and he flips through the “classics” menu briefly before landing on Don Quixote. Robin wasn’t a consistent reader, but about once a year she’d get sucked into something big and heavy and be unable to think of anything else until she’d devoured it whole. In college, Don Quixote had struck her as both hilarious and remarkably contemporary in its worldview, and quotes from Cervantes had peppered her emails for months.

  He thumbs through the table of contents, the introduction, and the sonnets, then clears his throat and speaks from his lungs: “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember—”

  Robin laughs. “Ow.”

  “Are you—”

  “I’m fine. I’m fine. Keep going.”

  He works his way through paragraphs detailing Don Quixote's attire, estate, and favorite books and is starting to regret his choice about halfway through the lunatic’s deliberations over the name of his horse—Rocinante—when Robin lets out a long sigh.

  He pauses. “Are you—”

  Her body jerks slightly. “Uh?”

  “Oh.” She’d been halfway asleep. “Sorry. I’ll keep going.”

  “Mm. No. That’s good.” She stretches her neck, yawns loudly, and settles back into him. “You’re so comfortable,” she sighs.

  He sets the book aside and clicks off the bedside lamp. “Is that all I am to you? A giant pillow?”

  Her arms contract, briefly, squeezing him. “I was imagining a teddy bear, but yeah. Sure.”

  Something—something about the simple, unguarded affection in her voice when she says this—gets to him. He cannot pretend there is even a shadow of a lie.

  It is, quite literally, the first time in this asshole’s miserable life that he has ever been forced to consider the possibility, however remote, that his physical presence might be anything other than repulsive. Even this ghost of a thought makes him want to shove her away, roll out of bed, and flee. But he can’t. She is holding him.

  He squeezes back, ever so slightly, and suddenly finds himself fighting the urge to exert the full force of his strength. She exhales a small mm of contentment, and he feels her relax into sleep.

  Comfortable.

  He sits, carefully holding but not crushing her, awake to the realization that he is being pulled inextricably in. No; it’s far later than that. He’d thought the escape hatch was open. Told himself that if this were a trap, he could always turn and leave. But that was a lie. If there was a threshold, he hadn’t seen it—but he is inside. The door is locked, and he’s lost the key.

  “Cyril, wake up. Shit. Cyril.”

  “What—” He grabs the fist she is drumming against his chest and releases it again when she yelps in pain. “What the—what's wrong?” Mentally, he’s already leaping into action: Keys? His pocket. Her insurance card is in her wallet, in her purse, on the kitchen counter. He can get her to the hospital in less than—

  “It’s raining.”

  He reaches into the darkness, fumbling for the lamp chain, and finally clicks the light on so he can get a good look at her face. “Come again?”

  Her eyes are wide with panic. “It’s raining.”

  He listens, and does indeed detect a telltale patter on the window. “Well, that should improve air quality.” And hopefully put out the fires. He taps his phone. “It’s also two in the morning. Are there any other interesting facts you’d like to—”

  “Upstairs, Cyril.” Her hands sink into his stomach as she tries to push herself up and away from him. “The roof’s on, but everything else is open.”

  Oh. Now he gets it. “Okay, okay. Chill.” He grabs her by the shoulders and props her against the head of the bed. “What do we need to do?”

  She massages the palm of the hand he grabbed. “Um, okay, well, first I need to get my tools out of there.”

  “I will get your tools.” He pockets his phone and heaves himself to the edge of the bed. “You stay here.”

  “I put a hinge and a latch on the top of the stairs, so you’re gonna have to—”

  “I’ll figure it out.” He rocks forward once more, gets his feet on the floor, and stands. “Go back to sleep. Or at least pretend.”

  Dutifully, she shuts her eyes.

  Tavis would have known exactly what to do in this situation.

  This asshole can’t even figure out how to get upstairs. The hatch she’s installed over the top of the stairwell is battened down tight, and even using his phone as a flashlight he can’t figure out the latch. He starts back down the stairs, realizes there’s no way in hell he’s about to drag Robin up here, and finally puts a shoulder to the plywood and rips it off its hinges. Good thing both the kids sleep like the dead.

  The rain is light but steady, sheeting in through the open window frames as the wind whips around the house. Holding his cell phone out like a dowsing rod, he finds his way into the central room. Tavis would have been able to effectively triage the tools, but since this asshole knows nothing he grabs whatever he can carry from the wettest area, near the big picture window.

  It takes four trips to get all the crap—cords, drill, circular saw, boxes of screws and nails and whatever the hell else—down to the bottom of the stairs. Tavis would have made an effort, at least, to put the plywood back in place, but Cyril’s knees are killing him and he’s slick with rain and sweat. It’s not raining hard enough to flood the first floor, and the stairwell climbs through the center of the house—though there’s definitely a draft. He leaves it open.

 
He visits the bathroom to towel off his face and armpits before opening the bedroom door. “You’re not even pretending,” he says.

  Robin looks up from the glowing rectangle of her phone. “Thought I’d better be on hand to call an ambulance if you had a heart attack. Did you get everything?”

  “Yeah. I think.”

  She lets out a long sigh of relief. “Good. Okay, so, there’s a big roll of Tyvek down in the barn. You’re not gonna be able to get the whole thing up the hill, so get the sheetrock knife out of my tool belt and—”

  He lifts a hand to stop her words. “Hold up. What?”

  “I need you to seal off the windows.” She holds up her phone. “The forecast says it’ll be raining for at least two more days.”

  “Mommy! Mommy?”

  He feels Robin move against him. She groans, expressing his sentiments exactly. Whatever time it is, it’s too early. “What do you need, sweetie?” she mumbles.

  “I’m hungry!”

  Cyril blinks and uses a thumb and forefinger to clear the sleep from his eyes. Nora stands in the open doorway of Robin’s bedroom, arms akimbo. The toilet flushes and Seth appears behind his sister, tugging his pants up.

  “Me too,” he says. “Also, don’t we have school?”

  “Oh shoot,” Robin says, although this is clearly a substitution for a different word. Her attempt to push herself up lands an elbow in his ribs.

  “Ow! Fu—ow. Will you stop?” He moves her aside. “Stay put. I’ll take care of it.”

  Thoughts which run through his head as the kids watch him rock his bulk to the edge of their mother’s bed: Do they think this asshole and their mom are having sex? Does a five-year-old even know what that means? Probably not. But nine—definitely. Or is it assuming too much to imagine Seth would entertain the thought of his mom sleeping with anyone other than his dad? And since they’re definitely not sleeping together—in the metaphoric sense, if not the literal—why is he even worrying about this? Why does he give a fuck?

  Because they’re kids, that’s why. They don’t deserve to be caught in the backwash of adult drama from which they have no escape.