by Dan Mooney
He hoped Marshall bought the story about the burst pipe as he walked through the kitchen. He also hoped that a zombie, a clown, a cat woman and a fur ball wouldn’t walk into the middle of the room and start trying to slide across it. He knew that would unquestionably raise some eyebrows. To his relief, they remained hidden wherever they were.
“Now let me take a look at that,” he said, as he sat down in the office.
“Certainly,” Marshall said, handing him the sheet. “You have a really nice house here.”
He sounded surprised. As if he might have been expecting Denis to be living in tinfoil-coated walls covered in scraps of cut-up newspaper.
“Thank you,” Denis replied, pleased to be bucking expectations. Maybe Marshall would go back to the office and tell everyone how normal he was.
When he saw the piece of paper that Marshall had handed him, he knew there was slim chance of anyone believing that. His heart sank. The page contained work he remembered distinctly doing—printed items and lists and bar charts onto which he had handwritten several notes before he scanned and emailed it back. What he hadn’t seen before he sent the document was that one of his housemates had gotten their hands on it and scrawled all over it. Mathematical ignorance, said one note, with a line connecting Denis’s notes. Along the side they had written whose side are you on? Farther down the page they had written pointless and across the bottom everyone has a bottom, even you. Somewhere sandwiched in between two lines of text were the words can’t you read between the lines? The handwriting was crude, a rough approximation of Denis’s. It looked like a child’s forgery. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so he simply pretended it wasn’t there.
“We were just wondering,” Marshall asked delicately, “if you had made some kind of mistake and didn’t mean to send this, and we tried to sort it out on the phone, but you seemed distracted.”
It wasn’t a work call. Or a social call. Someone had come to the house to see if Denis was nuts. He smiled as politely as he could.
“So sorry,” he said, “I meant to write that on something else. A paper I’ve been working on. I must have gotten distracted. The stats all check out. You can go with this.”
“Ahhhh,” said Marshall, and Denis couldn’t tell if he had bought the lie or not.
They sat there, looking at one another. Denis had no intention of saying another word, regardless of how weird that would make him look. He still thought the notes were funny, in their own way. The damage was done regardless.
“Well,” Marshall said uncomfortably. “I guess that’s it. If the stats check out?”
“They certainly do,” Denis said pleasantly, trying to pretend like he couldn’t see the problem. A poor end to his week, all things considered.
He showed his colleague, only the second one he’d ever had a conversation with, to the front door and then stomped back into the office to wait for them to show themselves.
When they did, it was just Plasterer and the Professor. The burlier of the two leading the corpse into the room.
“I know what you’re thinking, Boss,” Plasterer told him confidently.
“You do?”
“I do, but if you recall, I’ve already taken care of his punishment.”
Denis remembered the kicking the Professor had received just a couple of days before.
“I must confess,” the Professor told him in his pompous drawl, “that I am most honestly and grievously sorry for any inconvenience I’ve caused. I can assure you that I meant no harm. Just a gentle ribbing between friends, you see?”
Denis found it impossible to be mad at him. He was just so ridiculous.
He’s not on the level though. He does what the clown tells him, and that should make you wary. If you were half smart you’d be wary.
“They’re going to think I’m going nuts, you know,” he told the two of them.
“Who cares what they think?” Plasterer asked. “Is it quitting time yet? Wanna play Slide?”
Denis laughed and shook his head. It wasn’t a complete disaster. He didn’t really care what they thought of him at work, it was just a minor irritation. He hoped the uncomfortable feeling in his gut would pass.
When Saturday rolled around, as it does, Denis found himself back in town, back at the Italian café with his newspaper and his coffee but alarmingly not back to himself. He had pressed his trousers as well as he knew how, and his entire apparel met and exceeded his own exacting standards of orderliness, and yet, as he walked toward the town center, he found his thoughts fleeting, hard to hold, and a vague sense of dissatisfaction settled on him that he couldn’t shake. The bothersome nature of his young colleague’s visit from the day before still nagged at him, but what was truly alarming, he thought to himself as he sipped his coffee, was that he found himself scanning the street for a scarf.
He had spent a whole week with her coming and going without any significant impact, but now he was quietly hoping she would show up again. He knew he didn’t have it in him to actually talk to her, but it surely wouldn’t do any harm to just see her again, flashing by as she went in her own toned-down style and that almost ever-present smile. His eyes scanned for her through all one hundred twenty minutes of his afternoon coffee with Ollie and Frank.
“Are we missing something?” Ollie asked at one point, trying to see what Denis was hoping to see.
“No. Sorry. Just a touch distracted.”
“Want to talk about it?” Frank asked helpfully.
Ollie laughed at the idea. Denis never wanted to talk about it. No matter what it was.
“Heard anything from Rebecca?” he asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Yeah, actually,” Frank replied, offering nothing further.
With dismay Denis realized that he desperately wanted to know what she had said, how she was, what she was doing home. There was no way he could ask without alerting the two of them about how he felt, and so he simply said, “Oh?”
“Australian visa expired. She wants to go traveling again, but there’s a job offer on the table and she’s thinking about taking it.”
“Here?” Denis asked, still trying to sound cool.
“Yep,” Ollie told him.
So Ollie had heard from her too. Was he the only one of their old gang that she hadn’t contacted? He felt left out, isolated. He told himself that he didn’t care, but it was hard to take. He wondered if she still played guitar and remembered the first time he ever saw her, performing at a house party.
“Very nice,” he said, hoping he sounded sincere. They let it slide, Ollie moving onto a fresh story about how his girlfriend made him sleep on the couch. Frank watched him again, carefully weighing him up. Denis offered him a casual smile. He gave nothing away.
After the allotted time was up, Denis gathered his belongings and made for the hospital, stopping off to pick up the purple flowers. The sky overhead was a solid wall of white, overcast, but dry. His shoes pop-popped all the way to the corridor where he had stood for years now, and he took up his ritual position.
The room frightened him more than usual. It wasn’t just the limp, unmoving form of his best friend, nor the sickly patients of the hospital moving here and there all around him; it was more. A tension, something coming from within himself.
The purple flowers from the week before were wilting a little, and Denis found himself back in his nightmare. The Professor smiling at him as he clutched the rotten bunch of petals. The memory of Plasterer telling him to shut up. He had to double-check that Eddie wasn’t screaming. Ned and Ann smiled at him. They smiled the exact same way that they had in his nightmares. He fled the hospital after a measly twelve minutes.
He walked all the way home in shame and anger. As with the week before, he found that the party had raged in his absence and Denis spent his Saturday night unclogging the kitchen sink, which had been filled with something P
enny O’Neill called Donkey’s Breakfast Cereal. He didn’t know what it was made of, only that it was lumpy, sticky and smelled of things that shouldn’t be mixed together. He would have to order a host of new cleaning products. He lost himself in the cleaning again, and by the time he was done, the world had righted itself. As much as his world could.
The following day, Denis performed each of the appointed tasks at their appointed time and in the appointed manner. The soothing feeling he earned from running, each footfall propelling him away from his own thoughts, was complemented by the warm glow he got from organizing his life just so. He even felt that he could deal with his mother’s visit, which would be happening, as appointed, at some time on Sunday afternoon.
Her arrival was the same as it had been the week before, and when he denied her the hug she wanted, a little part of him died all over again. She covered her broken heart with a tiny forgiving smile.
It wouldn’t kill you, you know. At the very least pat her on the arm or something. Give her something to keep going on.
“How was your weekend?” he asked pleasantly.
“Excellent. I met Marge and the girls. We went to see a show. How was your week, love?”
“Just fine,” he told her, deliberately neglecting to mention that a zombie had made him look like a madman and received a brutal beating from a clown for its troubles. He shifted on his seat, his muscles still hurt him from sitting awkwardly.
“Anything new at work?” she asked.
“No,” he lied, as he wondered what her reaction might be to finding out that one of his work colleagues had been in the house. He decided against telling her.
They continued making idle chitchat—the weather, again, some new book or other, something about a new television show. He nodded and smiled his way through it, trying to pretend that the physical gap between them wasn’t killing his mother slowly.
He waited for her moment, because he knew it was coming. Some weeks he could just sense that she was going to make him uncomfortable. She tried not to show it, fiddling with her purse. He ventured nothing, knowing that when it was right for her it would come.
She talked about the show she had seen, how wonderful it was, how brilliant the theater was and wouldn’t he think about going to see the show? He nodded in what he hoped she would take as agreement while inwardly shuddering at the thought.
She talked about her plans for the new bathroom. Uncle Jack, in his guilt, was going to help her get it all done up. She didn’t mention the guilt, but Dennis heard it all the same. Trapped by his brother’s absconding into being a permanent friend for his now ex-sister-in-law, because she had put up with so much. Because she continued to put up with so much.
She wondered if one Sunday Denis might like it if Uncle Jack came to visit. Denis tried to nod at that one, but he must have done it wrong, because his mother just looked alarmed at his expression and moved on. He liked Uncle Jack, but despised pity, so he wasn’t overly keen on the idea of the man coming to see him. When she finally got around to asking him, it was so simple that it shocked him.
“Denis, love,” she began tentatively.
This was it. Here was her moment for this week.
“Are you happy?” she asked.
Happy? Was he? He didn’t know. He wondered if anyone knew.
“Of course I am. Why would you even ask?”
“It’s just...”
She paused, trying to frame her thoughts. He watched her struggle with it, various emotions playing across her lovely, kind, serious face.
“It’s just that you live a different life now, and I know I barge into it, and it’s because I want you to be happy. I just need to know that you’re happy.”
He looked her dead in the eye and lied.
“I’m happy. I promise.”
After she had left, Denis pondered the question. Was he happy? Was anyone? And found himself back in the same peculiarly uncomfortable place he had been in the day before when he couldn’t shake certain thoughts from his head.
Dealing with this unwelcome sensation was surely partly responsible for what happened next. Denis Murphy went off-book. He took his phone from his pocket and called Ollie. The phone had begun to ring when he realized what he was doing. He thought about hanging up, but it was too late to go back now; Ollie would call back, and if he didn’t answer, Ollie would come to the house. Denis blinked in momentary confusion when he heard the voice on the other end.
“Hello?”
Silence.
“Denis? You there? Is the world ending? Have I slept a whole week and it’s already next Saturday and we’re supposed to meet for coffee again? Buddy?”
“Um.” He coughed, embarrassed. “No. I’m here. I just wondered if you felt like a coffee today. Sunday. Would you like a coffee on a Sunday?”
“Sure I would, dude,” Ollie said slowly. “You okay, big guy?”
“Yeah. Thanks,” he lied. “I’m fine. Just wondering if you’re not busy, that is.”
“Never too busy for you, my friend. Italian place or Fish Place?”
The Quarter was the official name for what Ollie and Frank had dubbed Fish Place in reference to their misguided prank.
“The Quarter,” Denis told him, smiling in spite of himself.
“Cool. See you in about half an hour.”
Plasterer was standing in the doorway, watching.
“Just going to pop out for a bit,” he told the poorly dressed clown.
“Yeah. So I see,” came the reply. It was not friendly. Some people can invest a deep wealth of meaning into few words. Plasterer was one such.
Denis looked at his housemate closely. Through all the makeup his very slight frown was hard to see.
“All right there, Plasterer?” he asked nervously.
“It’s just that Sundays are our days. No work. No friends. Just us and the fire once your mother leaves. What will I tell the others?”
“Tell them I’ll be back in a while,” Denis replied. “I won’t be long.”
Plasterer stood his ground. He seemed larger than normal somehow. Denis’s mind could play tricks on him at the best of times.
Carefully now. Very carefully.
“It’s just that Mom was a little difficult today,” Denis told the clown. “I think I could do with some fresh air.” He left it hanging. For a minute Denis felt like he was asking permission. This was new. He never asked permission from them.
Plasterer’s frown deepened; under the thick makeup it gave his face more contours, more edges, but after a moment he nodded. Turning on his heel, he strode from the room, pulling the door closed behind him. Hard.
Denis sighed with relief.
The walk to town on this particular day came with a fundamental difference to the previous day: an umbrella. The modest umbrella was a source of unending contentment to Denis. It provided shelter from the elements. No spatter on his tie, no rain in his hair, no fear of sogginess that would cause the indescribable discomfort of trying to sit down in sodden trousers. Instead, it was protection of order from unpredictability. He laughed inwardly at his own disproportionate fondness for the common umbrella and conceded to himself, privately, that his friends may be right. He might just be a little odd.
The walk brightened his spirits a little. Strolling along, he could focus his thoughts on work, or avoiding that crack on the road instead of pointless nostalgia brought on by the picture incident. While walking with his shoes smartly rapping on the pavement, he could drown out the sound of his mother’s voice asking him to love her, and he could forget the look in her eyes when his actions told her no. Forgetting things comes easily when you’ve spent several years working at it.
In town, Ollie, dressed in jeans with a ripped and dirty leg, a hoodie and a baseball cap, had deliberately chosen a table as far away as possible from Denis’s regular spot. He had als
o added a fifth chair to the rectangular table, positioning it so that the chair was right at the corner, half facing away from him. Denis shuddered inwardly and made his way to his regular spot. The coffee shop was quiet, which was why Ollie had been able to get away with opening several sachets of sugar and emptying them all over the smooth steel surface. Denis was unsure which of them looked crazier: the guy who emptied sugar sachets all over a table and then walked away and sat somewhere else, or the guy who refused to sit at any other than one table, and then can’t sit with the mess.
A waitress made her way outside and, seeing Denis, she busied herself cleaning his table, pausing to shoot Ollie a withering glance. She knew Denis by sight and knew he couldn’t sit at any other table. Ollie beamed back at her, clearly pleased with himself. Denis shook his head and suppressed a smile. After the table had been cleared, he took his seat and waved Ollie over, ordered a coffee and watched his friend light up a cigarette.
“So what’s up, D-Dog?” Ollie asked, affecting an accent.
“Nothing, just felt like a cup of coffee. What’s up with you?”
“Don’t think you’re getting away with that one, buddy. It’s a Sunday, which means, breakfast, exercise, cleaning, fire, your mom visiting and then television or movies all day. You think I’m not aware of your schedule by now? I’m pretty sure NASA uses you to program clocks at this point. So spill, what’s up?”
Denis paused. Yet another departure from standard conversation. Twice in one day. Worse again, it seemed to Denis that ever since he had glimpsed a pink scarf over the top of his newspaper, he felt the comfort of his routine had been diminishing. It had served him so well for so long, and now this. Nothing was working out at all according to plan.
“A few deviations from the usual order. I’m just trying to reestablish my pattern,” he told his friend.
“Interesting. By going for coffee you can just reset your weirdness?”