by Paul Jenkins
“Hello, brown cat,” said Wil. “What can I do for you?”
“You can give him a kitty nugget, if you’d like,” came a raspy, rusty voice from behind him.
* * *
STARTLED, WIL turned to find Mrs. Chappell hovering uncomfortably above him, looking as pleased as punch that he’d manifested in her lobby as opposed to sneaking through it like a ninja. In one hand, she held a cup of tea, and in the other, a carton of cat treats. “Would you like one?” she asked, beaming from ear to ear.
“I don’t think so, Mrs. Chappell,” replied Wil, hastily. “I think they might be a bit nutty for my tastes.”
“No. Chalky.”
“Or chalky. They’re a bit too chalky for my tastes.”
“Oh, Mr. Morgan, you silly thing. I meant give one to Chalky.” The old lady stooped to pick up the brown cat. “Surely you didn’t think I was offering one to you? They’re probably poisonous to humans.”
Realizing he was now at his customary disadvantage, Wil paused for a moment to extrapolate a way out of the situation while Mrs. Chappell paused for a moment to blink. This was the first conversation he’d ever shared with his landlady beyond discussion of the rent and the weather. Wil was inclined to think that some of Mr. Dinsdale’s residual oddity must have followed him home. He was also willing to bet that not a single part of his next three or four minutes was going to make any sense, yet somehow it would all fit quite neatly into Mrs. Chappell’s version of reality. Clearly, Chalky was the absurd name she had given to the brown cat, and now he and his landlady were having two different conversations about exactly the same thing.
Wil reached for a kitty nugget and fed it to Chalky. Might as well embrace the concussion symptoms, he decided. After a moment’s reflection, he decided to fire a first shot across the old lady’s bow.
“You know, Mrs. Chappell, we really haven’t spoken much since I moved in,” said Wil. “And I really haven’t spent enough time getting to know Chalky and the rest of your cats. Did you give all of your cats equally interesting names?”
Mrs. Chappell looked momentarily confused, suggesting that one of her patented moments of non sequitur was about to leap out and bite the situation. “Why, no dear,” she replied. “They choose their own names of course.”
Naturally, thought Wil. Right after they pass the common entrance exam and complete the daily crossword puzzle. He was half-tempted to ask if Chalky might see its way to coming by his apartment and inspecting his clattering bathroom sink. But he resisted the urge on the grounds that some confusion is always to be expected when making first contact with aliens, lost tribes, or rusty old landladies.
“You have a nasty gash on your head,” noticed Mrs. Cappell, oblivious to the context of the moment. “Would you like me to put some iodine on it?”
From his days as a test subject for his dad’s medieval Medicine Cabinet of Death, Wil knew that the application of iodine to an open cut could roughly be approximated to the application of hydrochloric acid. “Thank you, Mrs. Chappell,” he replied, hoping that his bright and breezy manner would distract her from her intended method of torture. “I think I’ll head upstairs and take a shower.”
The old lady blinked through coke-bottle lenses. Taking this to be an affirmation of his plan, Wil moved toward the flight of stairs that might possibly lead him upward toward warm water and relative sanity. But as he reached the bottom stair, a random thought occurred. And despite the fact that his instincts were now howling like Barbary apes, fearful he was about to blurt out something he shouldn’t, he stopped in his tracks and blurted something anyway.
“You know, Mrs. Chappell,” Wil blurted, “I was wondering if we had any spare units in the building that my dad could stay in for a couple of days? See, he’s going to be visiting next week and my place is really too small. Maybe something a little brighter, or a little more spacious?” Or maybe not so likely to spontaneously combust and fall down around his ears, he continued, silently. “I mean … you know,” he said aloud, “I can’t ever seem to stop my bathroom sink from sounding like a munitions factory.”
Pushed it too far. From beneath Mrs. Chappell’s protective wing, Chalky’s accusing glare now cut the sudden tension in the room like a hundred-dollar Japanese kitchen knife that could slice equally through a piece of corrugated metal, then a nice, juicy tomato. For her part, Mrs. Chappell was now threatening to be overwhelmed by an encroaching vacuum.
“I’d like to help you, Mr. Morgan,” she began. “But I’m afraid there’s not much I can do. I expect you probably have a couple of nixies in there somewhere.”
Odd, thought Will, even for an octogenarian.
“I’m sorry. Is a nixie one of the parts, like a plunger or a stopper?” he asked. “Can we have our building superintendent look at it?”
“No. I mean I expect the noise under your sink is caused by one of the nixies.”
“Do you have two cats called Nixie?”
The old lady furrowed her brow, in much the same manner as Mr. Dinsdale had earlier that same afternoon. “Now why would two cats choose the same name, especially such a strange one?” she remonstrated. “That would be very confusing for both of them. Not to mention it would cause a lot of problems at dinnertime.”
The incongruous nature of the moment was suddenly threatening to overwhelm the entire lobby. Wil stared at Mrs. Chappell, and she stared back, blinking. It was not so much that she had written the book on confusion, Wil thought. It was more that she probably consulted with librarians the world over and provided expert testimony on the subject during particularly difficult court cases.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Chappell,” Wil volunteered. “I’m afraid I’m a little perplexed.”
“Well, that’s probably what it wants,” replied Mrs. Chappell.
“What?”
“For you to be a bit perplexed. That’s what they do.”
Wil tried a vacant stare, just to see if he could beat the old lady at her own game. No dice. She was not about to be forthcoming with any further information unless prompted.
“I’m sorry. Who are we talking about again?”
“Nixies. They like to distract a person. But they don’t mean it. That’s just what they are supposed to do.”
“Both of them?”
“All of them. But they’re mostly harmless, even if they’re not very fond of cats. They won’t interfere if you ignore them properly.”
At this point, Wil’s tormented and battered cranial parts simply decided they’d had enough. Better to leave now, they theorized, than stick around and have to deal with the people in the white coats when they came to take the senile old dear away.
“Are you feeling all right, Mr. Morgan?” inquired Mrs. Chappell, concerned. “It’s just that you look a little green around the gills. You should probably go upstairs and clean yourself off, and then get something to eat. You need to get some protein and calcium inside you.” And with that final effort to one-up the rest of Wil’s day, she and Chalky headed back toward her office, to the now-insistent sound of a mostly empty teakettle that had probably caught fire on its stove. Wil stared at her, nonplussed, while Chalky’s accusing green eyes quickly became the only discernible part of the ensemble as the old lady receded into the gloom beyond.
That could not have been any weirder, thought Wil, as Mrs. Chappell headed to the end of the far hallway and shuffled into her office to stifle the pained cries of the dying teakettle. As if to prove him wrong, Mrs. Chappell reached into the box of cat treats as she moved from Wil’s line of sight near her office door and popped a kitty nugget into her mouth.
* * *
WITH A head full of matted hair, coagulated blood, and conflicting opinions on the subject of old people, Wil departed the scene and headed upstairs to gather his thoughts. But as he climbed the stairs past three or four indifferent masses of feline fur, he sensed his thoughts were stubbornly refusing to cooperate. He felt as if he were trying to shepherd them with, say, a fire-breathing trol
l as opposed to, say, a metaphorical border collie. And thoughts, like sheep, usually won’t respond to any kind of herding under those types of circumstance.
At the top of the stairs, Wil fumbled with his lucky penny, then his key. This moment was always the second-worst part in his day, for he always felt as if his apartment held a secret of some kind that he could never put his finger on. It was as if someone else lived here in the exact moments he was away from it, and that person was summarily sucked back into his or her own dimension the moment Wil entered, so that the apartment was magically returned to its previous state. This disconcerting notion was clearly a result of the paranoia Wil’s dad had instilled in him from a young age. Nevertheless, he fretted about the place constantly; a person might never be so surprised as to head into the bathroom to brush his or her teeth only to find a complete stranger already brushing, and looking equally surprised to find they’d been sharing an apartment for seven years without knowing it.
Wil entered, cautiously. As usual, everything seemed exactly the same as when he’d left it, and yet it all felt completely different. Stepping over a discarded travel magazine that he could have sworn he’d left in the kitchen area, Wil sniffed the air and frowned; the residual smell of mushrooms was a little fainter than it had been earlier. His bathroom sink seemed to rattle a few times and suddenly go silent, as if surprised to find him home so early. Perhaps it needed to plan out its evening clattering schedule, thought Wil. If so, he would ignore it to the point where it might get bored and go live in the Swiss clock tower near his office.
Over at the kitchen counter, just at the edge of his peripheral vision, a discarded box of cereal seemed to twitch of its own accord. It stopped twitching the exact moment Wil looked at it, which was exactly the way it should have behaved to begin with. “Don’t you start,” he admonished, antagonized that some part of his day might have followed him home. The cereal box duly obliged and refused to move again, though he gave it a decent fifteen to twenty seconds to state its case.
Wil settled down to watch television, hoping to lose himself in the hideous morass of some awful reality show or other. This was not his usual habit, for he detested television in general and the so-called reality genre in particular. But after the events of the day, he felt he might let off some steam by yelling at a group of dysfunctional amateur actors purporting to be from some distant region of the country. He was to be disappointed, however: his television immediately warmed up to a thirty-minute infomercial for a flimsy air mattress made of “space-age polymers” (plastic), which had apparently been designed by Russian cosmonauts for use in a weightless environment. The obvious flaw in this logic—not to mention Marcus James’s psychotically embellished voiceover—led Wil to conclude that he would rather make three easy payments of $19.95 for a large brick, which he would throw through the screen of his television. Wil grabbed his remote control unit instead, tossed it at the TV, and missed. Look on the bright side, he told himself as he switched the unit off manually and recovered the mangled remains of his remote from behind the TV stand. At least you no longer have to pay for replacement batteries.
Wil felt so desperately, desperately tired. His hair was matted down with blood that had now coagulated above a fairly nasty cut beneath. He knew that if he took a shower, the water would open the wound again and, much like a twenty-four-hour superstore, it would probably not close again until Christmas Day. He had been metaphorically shot at, spat on, shut in, and spat out since the moment he’d left for work, and the thought of enduring any more of this particular Monday was more than any man had any obligation to bear. He’d been hired by a man dressed like a cartoon to find a box full of a substance that seemed as likely to exist as a good Canadian table wine; he had visited a museum full of space junk on a street that didn’t exist, been yelled at in body language, and, worst of all, he’d ordered a large cup of coffee by describing it as “oversized.” A return call to his dad would have to wait—at this point in his day, Wil formally and officially surrendered.
But forty seconds later—as his head thudded onto his pillow and he drifted into an immediate state of catatonia—Wil would allow himself just one tiny little smile. For this was the very kind of day he had been conditioned to expect, up until the 207th day of his tenth year of existence, when days this interesting had really just ceased to exist.
CHAPTER FIVE
WIL AWOKE to the distant hum of the one-way system and an insistent clattering noise in his sink, which refused to be silent no matter how many times he cursed it under his breath. His head felt like it had lost an argument with a street sign, and his nose felt like it had been bombarded by spider cannons during the night. If he hadn’t known any better, he would have sworn that someone had been making mushroom stew in one of his skillets. But he knew better, of course. This would be a day like any other day, save for the fact that he now had a job to do.
Outside his window, Tuesday’s thick broth of a fog was already making Monday’s weather look like miso soup by comparison. The day would be cold and soggy, and the rain would feel like needles on his skin; Wil sensed that conditions would not be favorable for finding boxes full of impossible substances. The pain in his scalp caused by the previous day’s street sign assault felt insignificant next to the headache yet to come. For while he stood a reasonable chance of bringing back something six-sided and wooden to the Curioddity Museum, the chances of this actually being Mr. Dinsdale’s missing box of Levity were about as remote as an outpost on the third moon of Jupiter. He had absolutely no idea where he was going to start his search, although the third moon of Jupiter seemed as reasonable a place as any.
Wil closed his eyes again and made a mental toss-up, using his lucky English penny as a visual aid: if the imaginary version of his coin landed on heads, he would get up, take a shower, and set about Mr. Dinsdale’s impossible task. Otherwise, well … he secretly hoped the coin would come up tails. In his mind, the English penny glinted in imaginary sunlight as it tumbled over and over toward an imaginary landing. Wil considered the absurdity of this, knowing he had the power to choose which way the coin would land but feeling powerless to decide nevertheless. The penny tumbled in slow motion toward an imaginary wooden floor where—much to Wil’s surprise—it landed on its imaginary side and stuck, refusing to budge one way or the other.
So much for this being a day like any other day, he thought. Clearly, this was simply going to be one of those days.
* * *
WIL OPENED one eye and searched his apartment for something to ground his reality in. His pillow was covered with a faint smearing of dried blood but this made sense in a strangely nonsensical way, for it told Wil that his painful memories of Monday were most likely real, and not imagined. He looked further into the gloomy apartment, searching for the source of his regular nighttime frustration. The moment his eyes alighted on the bathroom sink, the fixture ceased to make its knocking sound. At that very instant, however, one of his discarded travel magazines began to flutter at the edge of his peripheral vision. How bizarre, thought Wil, considering his apartment lacked the barest approximation of ventilation except for the occasional gust from outside that would occasionally rattle one of his cracked windows. He knew this odd occurrence could not possibly be a product of his imagination, primarily because he no longer possessed one. If Tuesday was going to be this unreasonable, he reasoned, then so was he. He sat up in bed, rubbed his eyes, and pretended he was actually going to do something productive with his morning. That’ll show it, he thought.
Tuesday scowled back at Wil, but he had already made his decision—he was going to seize the day, preferably by the unmentionables. Summoning a quick draft of energy, he swung his feet across the side of the bed and padded quickly toward the bathroom across the cold carpet. This positive approach lasted approximately four seconds, at which point Wil trod awkwardly on a shoe that he hadn’t remembered leaving by the bathroom door and then stubbed his toe on the doorframe. So much for that whole carpe di
em nonsense, he thought, forlornly, as he stared down at his throbbing toe. Thankfully, his attention was quickly drawn to some rather large flakes of crusty, white toothpaste that he must have dropped on the carpet over the past couple of weeks while brushing his teeth, and so obsessed was he in wondering where all of this toothpaste had come from that he almost forgot the pain in his toe, not to mention the day’s impossible task.
Wil shook it off. Such procrastination would never do, not when Tuesday had basically stared him in the eye and challenged him to a duel. He thought about his mom, Melinda, and how she would always urge him to stand his ground when faced with the cold and cruel inevitability of Tuesday mornings spent at a damp and angry school bus stop waiting for the yellow Box of Doom to appear. On those mornings, she’d fill him up with sugar-frosted cereal and his very own cup of coffee and urge him to look Mrs. Timmins—his bus driver and nemesis of nine-year-olds everywhere—in the eye at all times. There’s nothing so annoying to your enemies, she’d say, as to greet them with a smile.
Well, today procrastination was the enemy. Wil needed to get onto the streets and start with some detective work. With a quick pat down of his bloody hair and a brief glance in the mirror, he hastily donned his ever-more-rumpled clothing, grabbed an overcoat and gloves, and made for the front door to his apartment.
* * *
DOWNSTAIRS, THE lobby was silent but for the hiss of a steam radiator and a strange cooing sound emanating from Mrs. Chappell’s office. Wil was not going to hazard a guess what this noise signified, though he suspected it was either a trapped pigeon about to meet its maker at the hands of a slightly underworked feline, or Mrs. Chappell herself making clucking noises in the vague direction of one of her fuzzy companions. Quickly, Wil began his morning sortie through the lobby. He half-expected this strange noise to be a brand-new tactic in Mrs. Chappell’s eternal quest to throw him off guard. But he passed without incident across the warped parquet flooring and made it to the front door in record time. Mrs. Chappell was most likely watching one of her morning game shows, he supposed.