Curioddity

by Paul Jenkins

“Because you’re clever. And you’re scruffy chic.”

  “I’m out-punting my coverage, is what I am,” said Will, feeling morose.

  “Fair enough, Eeyore. So tell me more about this Curioddity Museum. It sounds incredible. I’m surprised I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Well, it’s definitely incredible in an ‘I can’t believe it’ kind of way but not in a ‘how do they do that?’ kind of way. A lot of the exhibits are a bit suspect.”

  “Oh. Bummer. Are they fake?”

  “They’re not well constructed enough to be fake.”

  Wil told Lucy about the lightning catcher and the Perpetual Emotion machine, and about the strange crates in the Curioddity Museum’s hallways and lobby. Strangely, she seemed excited about the prospect of visiting it.

  “Oh, I love all that stuff!” she exclaimed so loudly that it drew the attention of half the restaurant’s Thursday-night patrons. Feeling happily self-conscious, Lucy rearranged her chair and waited for the murmur to die down. “I love that stuff,” she repeated with an excited hiss. “I’m really into the paranormal. I’ve got a lot of theories about magic. And aliens!”

  “How do you feel about magic aliens?”

  “That’s what I keep telling people! What if they’re not from space but from underwater? Wouldn’t it be so cool if they were from Atlantis?”

  “Well, that certainly is an interesting theory.”

  “Did you know the British royal family is supposedly made up of reptiles from another galaxy?”

  Wil gulped; this was the type of thinking he’d been encouraged to follow in his formative years but that he’d been avoiding ever since he’d lost his mother. There were so many things he’d wanted to talk about over the years with random strangers, such as the weird markings he’d heard about on the floor of the Denver airport, or the strange, spherical balls that had been found all across the world with the aid of dousing rods. He’d heard that at least five U.S. presidents had had six fingers on each hand, and that the CIA had once conducted experiments on kangaroos to replace their marsupial brains with human brains. But whenever he’d had an opportunity to let loose creatively, all he could hear was an inner voice that sounded much like his father’s warning him not to stray too far from the path of human understanding in case he lost his footing and fell down the side of a mountain of illogic. Nowadays, the only people he interacted with were Mr. Whatley—who could be relied upon only for conversations about the weather and sporting results from the night before—and his addled landlady, Mrs. Chappell.

  Despite Wil’s genuine desire to relax and let the evening take him wherever it felt like taking him, he had been thinking about a certain subject he’d wanted to broach with Lucy Price ever since the first time she’d hit him over the head with a book. Now seemed as good a time as any. After all, what did he have to lose but the respect of a beautiful, charming girl who seemed smitten with him for reasons unknown?

  “How do you feel about ghosts?” Wil asked. “You said you thought you’d seen one in your store.”

  “Oh! What? Yeah! Wow!” exclaimed Lucy, unable to pick a suitable interjection and stick with it. “My store’s definitely haunted. Definitely. No doubt about it.”

  “So you’ve seen people back near the books at the far wall? What do they look like?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like an impression people are shuffling by back there and stopping to stare at you—like you’re a mannequin in a store window and people are checking you out. But every time you look up, there’s no one there. It’s really spooky.” Lucy’s eyes widened. Clearly she enjoyed this kind of conversation, and her manic embellishment only added to the fun.

  “Do you remember that box I found at the back of your store?” said Wil as he changed the subject (as far as Lucy was concerned) but stuck to the subject (as far as he was concerned). “You told me you didn’t remember how you found it.”

  “Yeah. I picked it up off a shelf at the back of the store, and by the time I realized I don’t have any shelves at the back of the store it was too late. And d’you want to know what’s weird about that box?” Lucy’s eyes darted around and she leaned in to whisper, just in case she and Wil were being observed by secret agents from another planet. “I think it moves all by itself.”

  “What, that old thing?” said Wil, doing a poor job of disguising his genuine intrigue.

  “Yeah. Every time you don’t look at it directly, it moves. One time I was doing a headstand against the back wall an’ I swear, it started to float!”

  Tempted as he was to ask why Lucy was doing headstands alone in her store—and immensely distracted by the mental image of her doing such a thing—Wil pressed on regardless.

  “I believe you,” he said. And he widened his eyes for maximum effect in a manner that would have made Mr. Dinsdale proud.

  “You do?”

  “Yes. And what’s more, I think that old box has made a strange old man very happy. That old man not being me, of course.”

  “Well, I like making people happy—and I was doing yoga, by the way—so that’s a good thing. Now how do we make you happy, Wil?”

  “You’re already doing it. But my forearm aches a little bit, I have to be honest.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I keep pinching it to see if I’m going to wake up. You really are a tremendously gorgeous girl, Lucy. I can’t see what someone like you would see in a guy like me.” Wil was suddenly becoming self-conscious. “I mean … that is, if you see something.”

  Lucy narrowed her eyes in the way that Wil had very much become accustomed to in his daydreams about her. She smiled, and her eyes searched his heart and instructed it do a cartwheel.

  “Are you really the person I think you might be, Wil Morgan?”

  “I’m not sure. Who do you think I am?”

  “The antiboyfriend.” She continued, encouraged by his puzzled expression. “If every boyfriend I have had so far has been a self-involved jackass with less humility than a peacock, then there must be an antiboyfriend. It’s kind of like antimatter. It’s probably scientific fact.”

  “I don’t know, Lucy. I mean, I’m not the most ambitious person. I let things overwhelm me a lot.”

  “But you’re honest about it.”

  “I don’t feel proud of that. Ever since I lost my mom I’ve felt like I was stuck in a centrifuge. Everything spins a bit.”

  Wil’s eyes welled up. It was always so hard to talk about his mother. Lucy’s eyes welled up even more, and a single tear of happiness wandered down her cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” said Wil. “I didn’t mean to get all heavy on a first date.”

  “No, it’s amazing. I feel like I know your mom just because you loved her so much. I can see her in your eyes.” Lucy wiped away the tear and smiled such a beautiful smile that Wil wanted to put it on a billboard outside his office. “Tell me about the centrifuge.”

  “Well, I guess if you stand in the middle of a centrifuge then you’ll probably get really dizzy in a very short space of time. But if you take a single step forward you’re likely to go splat, and wind up as a little red stain spreading across the walls. At least, that’s what my dad kept telling me. That’s why I haven’t gotten very far, I guess. I figured it was better to stay in place and deal with the vertigo than take a step forward and bloody my own nose. But the weirdest thing happened this week: I started looking at things differently and doing everything backward. And now I’m seeing all sorts of things that were probably behind my back the whole time.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like laser beams and ghosts and tulips in winter. And you, Lucy. I’m having a hard time accepting any of this is real.”

  “Well, we can figure this out,” said Lucy, softly. “It’s really easy. All you have to do is answer one question.”

  “What’s the question?”

  “If I asked you to kiss me, would the answer to that question be the same as the answer to this one?”

  Wil’s heart
leaped up through his mouth, and his elbows did an involuntary tap dance on the table. “Yes,” he said. “Wait … no!”

  And moments later, his heart went from a damp squib to a firework as Lucy Price kissed him.

  * * *

  “GREETINGS, WIL Morgan,” came a familiar metallic voice from inside Wil’s pocket. “It has been approximately ten hours since our last interaction. Would you like to check the skiing reports in Libya?”

  Wil tried to ignore the commotion coming from below. Not now. Not unless SARA wanted to take an early bath in a bowl of cucumber soup.

  “You have seventeen new messages,” continued SARA. “Would you like to check the sailing reports in Oklahoma?”

  Lucy stopped kissing Wil, and chuckled. “Is that your Lemon phone? Do you think she’s jealous?” she asked.

  “No. I think she’s mental.” Wil pulled the Lemon phone from his pocket and stared at the glowing screen, which suggested SARA was in the process of switching herself back on. “I told you I’d talk to you later.”

  “Are you yelling at your phone?” asked Lucy, incredulous. “Does it have conversations?”

  “They tend to be a bit one-sided but yes, essentially. I think she’s trying to kill me. SARA, why don’t you introduce yourself to Lucy?”

  SARA remained silent, and the Lemon phone’s screen continued to glow. Wil took this for an act of defiance. “How about if I apologized?” he said with a conciliatory tone that sounded even faker than he intended. “I’m sorry I yelled at you before, and I’m sorry I didn’t charge your battery last night. Now please say hello to Lucy and stop making me look foolish.”

  Lucy smirked. “That’s the trouble with inanimate objects. They don’t—”

  “Greetings, Lucy Price,” said SARA, suddenly. “Would you like the sailing reports in Libya?”

  Lucy cackled with delight. “Oh, that is just awesome!” she said with a broad grin spreading across her pretty face. “How do you do that, Wil?”

  “By default, apparently. She comes this mental out of the box.”

  “Would anyone like a report?” insisted SARA, her shrill metallic voice increasing in volume.

  “Yes please, SARA,” said Lucy, gamely. “I’d like to know about the hang gliding conditions in Sao Paolo. And can you also find out for me why bad things happen to good people for no apparent reason?” Lucy winked at Wil. Apparently, this was the sort of thing that didn’t faze her in the slightest. “That ought to keep her busy,” she said, gleefully.

  “Calculating…,” replied SARA. And with that, the Lemon phone fell silent and the screen stopped glowing.

  Lucy looked Wil in the eye, and narrowed hers for maximum-maximum effect. “Now what?” she said. “Ice cream or coffee?”

  Wil would have taken “fire walking” if it had involved Lucy at this moment in time. Instead, he fished his lucky penny from his other pocket. “I can’t decide. How about we go heads or tails?”

  “Sounds good. But I like ice cream.”

  “Okay, heads, ice cream. Tails, coffee ice cream.”

  Lucy giggled. Wil spun the penny on the table and they watched it together for a few moments. For a change, Wil found himself mesmerized by something other than the old coin. He wanted to jump for joy and take a nap at the same time. He wanted to ask a hundred thousand questions and just be silent and let it all soak in. Because he was beginning to understand he was already in love. And just by virtue of instinct, he was beginning to believe that Lucy was, too.

  The penny wandered across the table and headed for a collision with his bowl of cucumber soup.

  “Can I ask you something?” said Wil as he found himself staring not at the penny but at the girl staring at the penny. “It’s not heavy, I promise.”

  “Sure,” she replied, mesmerized by the penny, which was beginning to wobble.

  “Can we go on a second date sometime? I mean if you don’t think I’m being an idiot by pressuring you too much. I’d like to take you by that museum. If nothing else, you’d get a good laugh out of it.”

  “This has been a fun night but I’m not as easy to persuade as you might think. Let me think. Okay, sure.” Lucy cackled, evilly.

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “My pleasure. So how do you do that, anyway?”

  “Do what?”

  “Keep it going like that. Is it a trick?”

  “Keep what going?”

  “That!” said Lucy, looking down in the direction of the table.

  * * *

  WIL’S EYEBALLS took the form of a child’s balloon rapidly being filled with too much helium. Down on the table, his lucky penny was still spinning in place.

  * * *

  PERPETUALLY.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “At the next intersection, turn … at the nearest available … in five hundred yards, make a … in twenty yards make a legal … please observe all posted speed limits…”

  WIL MORGAN had once heard that a person’s life flashes before his or her eyes in the moments just before death. Indeed, he had experienced this phenomenon many years before when he was half-buried on a snow-covered hill underneath a tea tray. Even so, he was unprepared for the second time it happened to him. He was also unprepared to believe a thirty-year-old Ford Pinto could exceed speeds of eighty miles per hour through one-way Friday evening traffic without disintegrating like a broken test aircraft on reentry—certainly not a rusted Ford Pinto driven by a beautiful-yet-deranged young woman he’d just fallen in love with. Surely, such a feat could only be accomplished by a New York City cab driver aided by a seventy-mile-per-hour wind and numerous illicit substances.

  So astonished had Wil been by the sudden appearance of the Perpetual Penny next to his bowl of cucumber soup, he’d grabbed his old coin and hurriedly suggested that he and Lucy immediately go on their second date: an impromptu visit to the Curioddity Museum. Following this, they’d climbed into her Pinto of Death and set off toward Upside-Down Street. Wil suspected he and Lucy were on a collision course with something interesting at the museum, so he felt it was pointless to worry about colliding with anything resembling another motor vehicle. This entire thing was Dinsdale’s doing—he just knew it.

  The steady stream of flashing brake lights ahead, confused faces in passing car windows, and invective coming from the driver’s side of the Pinto served as a calming mechanism even though these things should probably have served as a warning. Somehow, a thousand moments of vehicular madness seemed to blur into each other, allowing Wil to free his thinking. He concluded that Lucy Price was not a violent maniac with a hair-trigger temper when holding a steering wheel in her hands; rather, he preferred to think of her as “slightly excitable” in the same way a clown could be considered “overdressed,” or a bathtub might be considered “uncompromising.” It all depended on the spin one was prepared to put on things, and given the speed at which the Pinto was currently traveling, spinning at some point seemed inevitable. Whatever the case, Wil felt it would be contradictory to discourage Lucy’s apparent goal of creating an interdimensional shortcut through a nearby wormhole, since this impromptu car ride had been his idea in the first place.

  For her part, Lucy yelled and screamed at the drivers and passengers of every passing car—most of whom whizzed by at breakneck speeds, even though they were going in the same direction as the Pinto. She made a point to single out pickup truck drivers as her most hated enemy, and swerved out of her way on numerous occasions to try and collide with them. Thankfully, in the roughly thirteen minutes it took for Lucy to drive from Happy Spice to the Curioddity Museum, no fatalities occurred—at least none that Wil was aware of. To be fair, had there been any fatalities in the wake of the Pinto traveling at virtual light speed, Wil would hardly have had time to register that horrific eventuality. He was too busy fearing for his own life, after all.

  It was interesting, Wil thought, as his life flashed before his eyes, that he’d chosen to fall in love with a gorgeous, nigh-perfect young girl who jus
t so happened to be a demon of Satan when behind the wheel of her car. This was going to make for some fascinating road trips. In the meantime, he had rather begun to enjoy himself. On a whim, Wil had engaged SARA’s navigation function, just to see what might happen to her AI programming at warp speeds.

  SARA was not enjoying herself one little bit.

  * * *

  “AT THE next T junction take a … make a left, then … turn left … turn left … turn left…”

  Wil giggled to himself as SARA tried to keep up with the Ford Pinto’s maneuvers. He cackled with terrified glee when Lucy plowed through a gas station at fifty miles per hour in an attempt to cut off a right turn signal and the three cars waiting there.

  “Please proceed to the highlighted route…,” said SARA, hurriedly, as the Pinto banked off a brick wall and clattered onto the main one-way system leading to the banking district. Her metallic voice now seemed a little pitiful as she trailed off into silence. Like everyone else in this town, the poor creature probably had no idea where Upside-Down Street might be found. And like everyone else on the road, she was no doubt more terrified than she had ever been in her entire robotic life.

  Wil resolved to extract SARA from her infinite loop of confusion by handing her a problem to solve so that her fuzzy logic might have something else to worry about. “Okay, SARA,” he said with a grin. “I think that’s enough with the directions. We’ll take it from here. Please call the Museum of Curioddity on Upside-Down Street. I would like to speak with Mr. Dinsdale.”

  “Dialing…,” replied SARA hastily, relieved to be given a task she could actually handle. The Pinto slammed through a stop sign and clattered off in search of trouble. At that moment, Wil heard the phone pick up at the other end of the line.

  “You have reached the Museum of Curioddity,” said Mr. Dinsdale’s uneven tone across the ether. “If you wish to leave a message … uhm … leave a message. Boop.” Mr. Dinsdale actually said the word “boop” aloud in a falsetto voice, just for effect.

  “Mr. Dinsdale!” yelled Wil into his smartphone, “Mr. Dinsdale, are you there? I need you to stay right there! I’m coming over! I’ll be there in ten minutes!” At that moment, the connection cut off as Lucy buzzed a pickup truck and yelled at its driver. As Wil replaced the phone in his pocket, he could not help but be struck by the fact that his connection sounded suspiciously like it had been recorded inside a submarine. He stared at the smartphone’s glowing screen for just a moment, with his Strange Feeling of déjà vu trying to yell at him over the noise of the Pinto’s engine. Didn’t this already happen?