Curioddity

by Paul Jenkins

  “That sounds like it,” replied Barry, mercifully.

  “Yeah, Jerry,” said Wil with more than a tinge of guilt creeping into his voice. “I hate that guy.”

  * * *

  WIL EXITED the elevator at the nineteenth floor, gasping for air, and he staggered forward until he could steady himself on the far wall. He was going to have to think of a way to persuade his father not to visit while at the same time making the whole thing seem entirely natural. Ever since Barry had first called, Wil had been working on a series of excuses ranging from the outlandish to the downright ridiculous. Tales of alien abduction and being recruited by the Secret Service had given way to more reasonable explanations such as unexpected construction work and sudden contagious illness.

  “Dad,” began Wil, hesitantly, “I have a little bit of bad news.”

  “Oh?” replied his father. “Is anything wrong?”

  “We’ve had an infestation at work. Cockroaches.” That didn’t sound plausible, he thought. “And fleas,” he added, hastily.

  “Cockroaches and fleas?”

  “The cockroaches have fleas. They’ve had to shut the entire building down and cover it with a tent. We’re all having to work from home. It’s going to take a couple of months to clear the place out.”

  Utter silence. Wil hoped beyond hope that his father might bite. But now that he’d said the words out loud, his chosen trail of deceit was feeling more like a goat track through a minefield than the two-lane highway he’d hoped for. There was no going back now.

  “Don’t you work in the Central Building?” asked Barry, suspiciously.

  “Yes … yes, I do.”

  “And they’ve covered it with a tent?”

  “Floor by floor. But essentially, yes.”

  “Well, I suppose at least you won’t have to deal with Jerry.”

  “Who?”

  * * *

  WIL BLANCHED as he moved toward his office door and fumbled for his keys. He had always been a terrible liar; his lies had a tendency not only of catching up to him but also lapping him a few times just to prove a point. Phase Two of his lie now seemed even more outlandish than Phase One. But he was already in too deep. Might as well go for it, he reasoned.

  “So the worse news is that the fleas are carrying some kind of fever. Everyone’s been coming down with it. The doctors said it’s probably very contagious.”

  “Oh my word, Wil! That sounds terrible!”

  “It is. Jerry got it the worst. They said he might never recover—”

  * * *

  JUST AS Wil reached with his keys to open his door—now warming to his mammoth infestation tale and preparing to describe the symptoms of Yellow Mountain Fever, which he’d been researching on his Lemon phone interface—he suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. Looking through the glass door just above the word ROTAGITSEVNI, there appeared to be the dark silhouette of a figure seated in his office. In fact, this person seemed to be sitting in Wil’s own chair. He looked down at the lock and moved the handle slightly, discovering to his horror that it turned with ease. Someone was definitely inside his office!

  “Dad,” Wil hissed into the phone, “can you hold on for a second? Something’s come up.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure. I think someone’s in my office.”

  “Aren’t you at home?”

  “No. It’s complicated. Look, just hold on, okay?”

  Wil turned the handle oh so slightly, his heart racing and his mind doing cartwheels as he tried to imagine who might be inside his office. With any luck, Mr. Whatley had let himself in and was emptying the trash just below Wil’s desk. Perhaps Mr. Dinsdale had come to check on his progress—Wil wouldn’t put it past the old man to have found a way inside and casually be enjoying the sound of the Swiss clock’s many cogs and gears next door.

  But what if Mr. Dinsdale was an imposter? he wondered. What if this was someone from the authorities? Even worse, what if it was a sheriff or a debt collector, like one of those steroid-addled bodybuilders he’d seen on TV?

  The figure in Wil’s office chair seemed to be sitting with his or her back to the door, facing the window that looked out onto the brick wall of the Swiss clock. Wil opened the door slowly. But as he tried to squeeze quietly inside his office, his leg accidentally bumped into the package containing the orphaned Air-Max 2000 driver, causing it to clatter to the ground with a loud bang that suggested it most likely did not survive the fall. Wil gritted his teeth and blinked. He had given away his position.

  “Hello,” he said, nervously. “Is anybody there?”

  No response. The chair began to swivel slowly. Wil’s teeth were now trying to bite their way out of his mouth.

  The chair swiveled a full 180 degrees. Wil’s Lemon phone clattered to the ground as he stood—jaw agape—rooted to the spot.

  “I came a few days early,” said Barry Morgan, fixing his son with a glare made of pure hardened steel. “I would’ve been here even earlier but I got delayed talking to Jerry.”

  * * *

  WIL STOOD rooted to the spot, doing his best impression of a Texas live oak that had just been peppered with a twelve-gauge shotgun. A quick internal wellness check informed him that his eyes were bulging, and the outsides of his little fingers had begun to tingle. He suddenly needed very much to go to a bathroom: preferably, one in South Africa.

  “Melissa,” said his father.

  “What?” replied Wil as he tried in vain to control his rapidly blinking left eye, which seemed to be trying to fold itself over his right cheekbone.

  “Melissa,” repeated Barry. “Last time we spoke, the coworker you didn’t like was called Melissa. She seems to have undergone a dramatic personality change, not to mention gender reassignment surgery. And a total body transplant. I wonder if she’s aware of what’s happened?

  “Dad, look … I can explain—”

  “Speaking of personality changes, I’m sure ‘Melissa’ isn’t alone. The last I knew my son was on a steady path toward partner at a reputable accounting firm. He was living in a rent-controlled apartment in a safe area of town, and he had been saving his money wisely. My new son—”

  “Dad—”

  “My new son lives in a cat-infested flophouse just blocks from a flea-infested flea market. He follows people in secret and tries to take pictures of them in compromising positions. He has apparently chosen a career in the twilight world of insurance fraud, and has been living a lie for at least the last seven years.” Barry frowned, as if the scale of Wil’s deceit was just beginning to dawn on him. “What have I done to deserve this?” he asked no one in particular.

  The room fell silent for a moment. Wil could feel a scraping movement emanating from his heels, and he wondered briefly if this was coming from the depths of his very soul, or if the Swiss clock next door was gearing up to rub salt into his gaping psychic wounds. By Wil’s rough estimate, it was approximately one minute past three. He had a brief and sudden notion that just for once, the hated clock would not catch him by surprise. Instead, it would jolt his angry father into a sudden bout of short-term memory loss, leaving Wil free to skip back out the door and be five miles away before Barry had ever realized what happened. Alas, such flights of fancy were usually doomed to catch fire a few thousand feet above sea level and inevitably crash into the ground from a great height. In the years Wil had been preparing for this moment, he had never quite hit upon what he was actually going to say. And so he did the only thing he could think of doing: he bent double at the waist, covered one eye, and tried to see if he could un-look at his father in case the entire situation might unexpectedly turn around. The situation, unfortunately, refused to budge.

  “What on Earth are you doing?” asked Barry, incredulous. “Are you on some kind of medicine, Wil?”

  “I’m trying to see if I can think of a way to begin at the beginning, Dad,” replied Wil. “You wanted to know what you’ve done to deserve something, and I’m trying to think of
what it is.”

  Barry’s face reddened. It was clear he thought Wil was making fun of the situation. “Stand up, for Heaven’s sake! You’re making a fool of yourself. What would your mother have said?”

  “That’s just the thing, Dad,” replied Wil. “She probably would have laughed and encouraged me to follow my heart, or something.”

  “She would have been worried for you, Wil—would you stand up straight, for the love of God? And she would have agreed with me that living a lie isn’t living at all. It’s living in someone else’s shoes!”

  Wil straightened, trying his best to return his father’s furious gaze. This was all unfamiliar territory for him, and he had no idea how to proceed. “Maybe,” he said, evenly, “she would have liked the other person’s shoes.”

  Barry’s eyes narrowed, dangerously. Wil had only ever seen this look twice before—once when he’d sailed his father’s entire tin soldier collection into a watery grave on the back of an Unsinkable Electro-Concrete Troop Carrier, and once when he’d told his father in a fit of teenage pique that a career in accounting was infinitely less preferable to, say, being the lead guitarist in a rock band. On both occasions, there had been a kind of psychic fallout that had lingered for well over a year or two. Wil felt sure that the fallout from this particular incident was going to have a half-life of roughly ten to fifteen years.

  “I’ve always believed in you, Wil,” said Barry with a tone that demonstrated his uncanny ability to incapacitate his son’s opinion before it had even been stated. “I’ve tolerated your idiosyncrasies and I’ve put up with any number of stupid and thoughtless whims on your part, all because I recognize you are your mother’s son more than you are mine. But this … this is unforgiveable.”

  Wil blinked; he had not expected such a rapier to the heart, and had expected even less to find himself experiencing an immediate visceral reaction to his father’s anger. “That’s funny,” he replied, brazenly. “From where I’m standing you’ve always believed in the son you thought was a chartered accountant. But you’ve never actually believed in your real son at all.”

  “My real son? The one who’s lied to me for the last seven years?”

  “No. The one that’s been forced to lie because you’ve sat in judgment on him for the last thirty-two. The one you’ve discouraged at every single important moment of his entire life.” Wil could feel the bile rising in his throat. Though he had never expected this inevitable showdown to take such a disagreeable turn, the argument had been a long time coming and now that it was here, it needed to be greeted with enthusiasm.

  “Oh, so this is my fault?” said Barry, incredulously. “You’re living hand to mouth running some kind of insurance scam and I’m to blame? What on Earth happened to your conscience?”

  “News flash, Dad: I never wanted to be an accountant. First of all, I don’t perpetuate insurance scams, I prevent them. And secondly, you seem to be unclear on what a conscience really is. I do this job precisely because I follow my conscience and not the blueprint you laid out for me when Mom died!”

  “Don’t you dare bring your mother into this, Wilbur Aloysius Morgan!”

  Wil stared, furiously. For thirty-two years, every time Barry Morgan had needed to regain control of his errant son, the dreaded “full name” card had inevitably been played. The middle name of Aloysius had been Melinda’s idea, apparently as some kind of joke; Wil—for the life of him—had never understood why an otherwise-loving parent would commit such an atrocity on a poor, unsuspecting child. Well, it wasn’t going to work this time. This time, Wilbur Aloysius Morgan would stand his ground. Better still, he’d fight back with his own brand of vitriol and see where that took things for a change! “That’s right,” said Wil in the most condescending tone he could muster, “let’s go over your litany of disappointments, shall we? Better still, since I already know them by heart, I’ll write them down on a piece of paper and you can just use that as a reference card!”

  “Wil, you have never—ever—spoken to me in this manner before—”

  “My mother would have been proud of me. My mother—your wife—would have told me to follow my heart, and she would have put a Band-Aid over the bruises whenever I inevitably followed it headfirst into a tree! My mother was someone I could easily understand because she tried to understand me. But do you know what part of her I never did understand, Dad? The part that somehow wanted to be married to you!”

  * * *

  BANG. ZOOM. Man overboard. In the imaginary sea battle between two men floundering on different ships so many miles apart, Submarine Captain Wil Morgan had most definitely fired a fifty-ton torpedo right into the bow of his father’s Unsinkable Electro-Concrete Troop Carrier. Wil trembled slightly, refusing to look away from his father’s hollow gaze as Barry’s expression of apoplexy gave way to one of utter shock. The older man seemed to waver for a moment, until his gaze drooped along with his shoulders, and Wil realized his dad was now looking at his feet.

  “Is that the way you really feel?” Barry asked his shoes.

  “I don’t know, Dad,” said Wil, unexpectedly finding himself in the ascendancy and realizing this was miles away from the place he actually wanted to be. “It’s been a weird week. Just about everything that’s happened since Monday has been weird. I’ve had everything turned upside down. I’m not sure why, but I’ve suddenly got money in my bank account, a new appreciation for this city—the Castle Towers excepted—and I feel like I’m finally beginning to find my way. All because I’ve been encouraged to un-look at things and follow my instincts for a change instead of following the one-way system. Oh, and I’ve met a girl. If you weren’t so angry at me, you’d probably like her.”

  Barry seemed to blink rapidly at the mention of the girl. For a moment, Wil was concerned that his father was getting light-headed. But he knew better: this was Barry’s process for arriving at a conclusion, one that would prove to be so spectacularly passive-aggressive that books would be written on the subject by legions of future professional therapists.

  “You don’t need to change the subject, son,” said Barry in a conciliatory tone born of a psychoanalytical expertise prepared in the oven of sixty-four years of amateur cooking. “I’m glad you’ve met someone.”

  “Well … good, I guess…,” began Wil as all of his instincts screamed at him to run in the opposite direction to the one he was headed.

  “And you’re right,” continued Barry. “We always knew it, both of us. But we never had time to discuss it before your mom was gone, and everything changed. I know she only ever felt sorry for me.”

  “Hang on a minute, Dad. I didn’t mean—”

  “The sad thing is, yes you did. And you’re right. I didn’t deserve your mother any more than I deserve you. I’m sorry.”

  “C’mon, Dad,” said Wil as he reached out to place a hand on his father’s shoulder. “I’m to blame here. I should have told you how I felt—”

  But as Wil’s hand moved close to his father, he was surprised to feel it knocked forcefully backward. This was a push-back delivered in anger, and it had the effect of knocking Wil silent as well. Despite Barry’s woe-is-me demeanor, Wil knew that he had done something that might never be undone: his Dad might forgive the years of lies, but he would never forgive this one moment of absolute truth. “I’m leaving,” said Barry. “I’ll be staying in the Waterbury Hotel near the train station until my return trip home on Sunday morning. I wish you the best in your insurance fraud work.”

  “Dad, don’t be melodramatic. You can stay for a few days. Maybe it’d do us good to work this all out. You know, there’s a person I’d like you to meet at the Curioddity Museum downtown. I think you’d get quite a different perspective if we all sat over a cup of coffee.”

  But Wil already knew the ending to this particular scene: his father would leave, and he would feel miserable. And a few moments after the door closed, the gears of the clock would scrape and he’d be so lost in miserable thought that he’d bang hi
s head on something when the Swiss clock inevitably attacked just as he least expected it.

  Just to get the ball rolling, Barry shuffled toward the door. “I’ll be in touch,” said the older man. “But I need to leave now. Goodbye.”

  * * *

  WIL COULD only watch, helpless, as his father exited through his backward-forward door. He listened quietly as Barry’s footsteps shuffled in calculated fashion across the creaky hallway outside, and he waited for the expectant scraping sound as the elevator doors came open, and the clattering, grinding sound as they closed. His father’s rat-vomit-induced coughing got quieter and quieter, until Wil was certain the elevator had descended a couple of floors. And at that point, there was no turning back for either of them.

  Nearby, another scraping sound came into his awareness: the Swiss clock was getting ready to add its own particular sonic flavor to the moment. Wil glanced at his watch. Five minutes past three. Not today, he thought. Not today.

  Eschewing a seat at his desk—a place where any number of scrapes and bruises could occur as a result of sudden, alarmed movements—Wil sat with his back to the far wall, removed his lucky penny from his pocket, and waited for the clock to strike. He felt the smooth edges for a moment and then, disconsolate, began to spin the penny on the ground. It moved impossibly quietly for a moment while next door, the clock’s gears began to grind. Maybe this time, thought Wil. Maybe this time his penny would spin for eternity.

  But even a man who has paid his rent doesn’t have forever, Wil acknowledged to himself. That same old lump began to well up in his throat as—like clockwork—old thoughts began to resurface. Wil thought of his mother, and how proud she might have been of all that he’d accomplished during this particular week. If not for what he’d just said to his father—her husband, and the man she had chosen to love.