by Paul Jenkins
His lips and his fingers felt numb again; the vertigo was returning with a vengeance. Next door, the clock’s clapper began to scrape across the bricks and Wil steeled himself for the inevitable moment he would jump, startled, and hit his head.
KLONNG!
Interestingly, the noise of the first sonic attack came exactly as Wil imagined it might. Even more interestingly, Wil was actually ready for it, and this time he didn’t jump up, startled, and bash his head. Despite his many misgivings, Wil instinctively reached up and felt his face just to make sure he was still conscious.
KLONNG!
Wil looked down to find his lucky penny still spinning. Something was vibrating in his pocket. He produced his Lemon phone and found a text message from Lucy Price written upon its glowing screen: Looking forward to Korean. See you there—Lucy. Wil blinked, expecting the message to spontaneously combust, which it spontaneously did not. He pushed the phone away from him so that it skittered across the floor.
KLONNG!
Three down, three to go. Could it be, thought Wil, that after one encounter with the curator of the Curioddity Museum his worldview had changed so dramatically that he was now prepared for all the disasters headed his way? Could it be that not all of these imagined disasters would end in, well, disaster?
KLONNG!
A cloud fell across Wil’s window. He crinkled his nose as for the first time he heard a strange sound, hidden below the first: a kind of humming noise that suggested a massive electrical charge was being generated somewhere nearby.
Wil looked down. His lucky penny was beginning to wander aimlessly toward his discarded Lemon phone.
KLONNG!
Wil closed his eyes and concentrated. He’d made it through an entire clock episode without so much as an accelerated heartbeat! This was it—the moment his fortunes changed for good. Maybe his father’s visit had been for the best. After all, he’d finally confronted his dad, hadn’t he? That had to count for something. He was going on a date with a great girl who seemed to like him. And he’d even (indirectly) paid for dinner.
Things were going to be okay. All that remained now was for one last
KLUNK!
Wil screamed blue bloody murder as a large paperweight on the shelf above his head became dislodged and crashed into the very area of his skull that had conveniently been dented into shape by a street sign and a copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. His foot jerked out, involuntarily, kicking his lucky penny across the floor so that it clattered under his desk. “Arhhh!” screamed Wil, channeling his inner pirate.
Blinded by pain, he screwed his eyes tightly shut and tried to imagine himself unconscious in the hopes that mind over matter would prevail. But it was no use: his mind had shut down due to the overload of pain sensors flooding it with information.
He slipped sideways toward the hard wooden floor, thinking to himself how words such as “Arhhh” were incredibly uncreative, and with his eyes still closed he replaced it with a few very carefully chosen swear words. The pain was just mind-splittingly awful.
As if to remind Wil just who his nefarious boss really was, the Swiss clock next door made a few rustling sounds as it settled, and the faint hum of energy he had heard began to dissipate. Despite his eyes being closed so tightly they would probably require an oxy-acetylene torch to reopen, Wil felt a few tears of pain squeeze their way out of his tear ducts.
He lay silently on his side, trying to understand his place in the universe. “Why me?” he asked aloud. “Why does it always have to be me?”
* * *
“GREETINGS, WIL Morgan,” replied the universe in a familiar metallic tone. “Would you like me to look up ‘Why does it always have to be me?’ on the Internet?”
CHAPTER NINE
DESPAIR WAS finally pulling Wil Morgan into its slimy, sticky grasp. The blinding pain in his head had left him barely able to see out of one eye, and he felt a terrible bout of vertigo coming on in the eye that could still function. From his sideways angle, he could see his discarded Lemon phone close by, and his lucky penny just farther away underneath his desk. He reached out to switch off the Lemon phone and then desperately—feebly—reached out to grasp his lucky penny. He rolled it over and over in his palms, pressing the serrated edge so hard into his palms that he could feel the pain all the way up to his good eyeball; it didn’t feel so lucky anymore.
Wil knew that he had to get out of his office before he hurt something; namely, the giant clock next door. He felt no desire to spend the night in prison on a charge of assaulting an inanimate building. Lacking any sense of direction that might otherwise guide him through the rest of his day, he simply retraced his steps—Taiwanese box and Tesla Kit tucked safely under his arm—and trudged slowly and painfully back to his apartment. It was no use pretending anymore; he was going to simply cave in, as he always did. Barry Morgan now knew the secret Wil had been trying to keep all these years; there was no going back. Years of past pain were about to be replaced by years of a different kind of pain. Wil hoped he might be lucky enough to suffer another bout of post-concussion syndrome, for he would have liked nothing more than to forget the second part of his Wednesday, and just move right into Thursday.
Wil’s apartment seemed surprised to see him as he dragged himself excruciatingly through the front door. The rattling noise in his sink stopped suddenly, as if startled.
“Don’t mind me,” he said to no one in particular, “I just live here.”
Inside the bathroom, his reflection glowered back, accusingly: hadn’t he just fixed that head injury? He glowered back, hardly in the mood to get into a fight with an unreasonable facsimile of himself. Out in his kitchen area, he pondered for a while over his Lemon phone charger but decided against recharging SARA in the hopes that this would teach her a lesson. He left the box tucked safely under the Tesla Kit on the kitchen counter and threw himself into his bed fully clothed, refusing to remain conscious until such time as the universe promised to behave itself and stop hitting him on the head.
That evening—and all through the night—Wil dozed fitfully in his lumpy old bed. As the world turned, he wrestled imaginary bugs in his sleep and swatted at his face occasionally, convinced that his cheeks had become a skating rink for a traveling troupe of performing circus ants. In his dream, the befuddled organizers of the World’s Biggest Failure competition had now added a rather arbitrary golfing skills challenge, in which Wil’s inordinately long drives were frequently let down by his abysmal putting. As usual, he finished a distant second. Had he come awake at any point, he would have understood that this strange and seemingly disconnected reverie could indeed be logically explained: his television had abruptly switched itself on, and someone—presumably, his imaginary housemate—had tuned his television to an infinite loop of a two-hour infomercial for Marcus James’s outlandish golfing product, the Air-Max 3000 (available for four easy payments of $39.95).
* * *
WIL OPENED his eyes to find Thursday glaring in at him through his window; apparently, the universe was already in a foul mood. Over at the far side of the room, his television was inexplicably showing episodes of the Shopping Network’s Hundred Greatest Reruns. His apartment smelled like the kind of mushrooms that only a Frenchman might find edible, and the knocking sound under his sink had found a musical partner further along the pipes that made a scraping sound whenever it felt like it. The inlaid box and the Tesla Kit lay almost exactly where he’d left them, suggesting his invisible roommate had tried to take a peek in the night while trying to be as careful as possible to replace everything the way it was found.
Wil considered the tasks ahead of him and concluded that the first part of this particular Thursday was going to be just putrid.
* * *
OUTSIDE HIS door he found a cat painted across the landing. Chalky had been waiting for him, an expectant look in its eye. On a whim, Wil loaded the creature into his apartment door in the same way one might feed a washing machine.
“
Don’t pee on anything,” he instructed the purring little beast, “unless there’s someone else living here without my knowledge. In which case, you have my permission to pee on him until he is gone.”
Chalky licked his paws as if to make it clear that he understood the mission perfectly. Just to be sure there would be no mishaps, Wil left a bowl of milk by the fridge door, and cracked his alleyway window just wide enough for Chalky to reach the fire escape. He left his apartment with whimsical visions of kitty parties and other feline shenanigans that might occur in his absence. No time to worry about that; he had a job to do.
* * *
ON THIS particular Thursday—after an evening spent lamenting his lot in life in general, and his relationship with his father in particular—Wil trudged slightly more slowly than usual. Gale-force winds battered his body into virtual submission, while his mind had already given up after the first fifty steps or so. Wil growled, quietly; he already knew that this was the end—he was going to forsake the magic currently reawakening in his heart in favor of a quieter and more predictable life: one that involved insurance investigations, arguments about coffee with random teenagers, listening politely to his building supervisor’s betting advice, and zero head wounds.
Wil stopped for a few minutes below the railway bridge to visit his large-nosed vendor friend, where he stocked up on otherworldly coffee (two cups) and a pair of giant lemon Danish that might see him through in the event of a nuclear attack by the Chinese. But even this welcome detour could not put him back on the course he was hoping for. He dallied for a while in the marketplace in the vain hope that Lucy might appear to rescue him from his morning of trudgery. When she failed to randomly appear, he eyed his Lemon phone for roughly two seconds before deciding the better of it and putting the atrocious device back in his pocket.
If the universe was in as foul a mood as he believed it to be, Lucy would no doubt come clean at dinner that evening and inform him the entire thing was just a joke, and that she had a boyfriend who doubled as a professional wrestler. But before he could experience such heartbreak, he was going to bring the mother-of-pearl-inlaid box to the Curioddity Museum and hope Mr. Dinsdale was too careless to spot its obvious Taiwanese origins. For Wil had arrived at his point of diminishing returns, and his solution, as usual, would no doubt be to let it all play out and see how much damage he could eventually withstand.
Wil sighed, heavily, as he headed across the railway bridge and reacquainted himself with all his loose fillings. Telling a bald-faced lie to his new friend and mentor, Mr. Dinsdale, was exactly the thing he’d been doing to his own father for all these years. And where had that gotten him? Only as far as the Castle Towers and back. Sure, the last few days had been an interesting detour, but now that Barry Morgan had cottoned on to his web of deceit, it was only a matter of time before Mr. Dinsdale would do the same. The problem with spinning webs of deceit, thought Wil, is that they’re not very useful if you run around like a housefly and get yourself caught in them. His second cup of coffee and his emergency Danish could do nothing to assuage his guilt at how he’d lied to his father.
As he walked into the teeth of the gale, Wil tried to look as forward as much as he possibly could with his one good eye. This was a perfect time, he decided, to practice un-looking at things. For example, he was going to ignore the innumerable advertising billboards to his left, while at the same time trying to avoid eye contact with drivers of passing cars on his right. While he understood this was cheating Mr. Dinsdale’s concept a little, at least all of this un-looking prevented him from dealing with the truth: namely, that he’d come right back to where he’d started, and was now moving with the flow of traffic a mere matter of days after he’d tried to leave the system.
He passed the Castle Towers just as a large, black stretch limousine pulled out of the lower parking garage and made its way around Pan’s nether regions. The vehicle seemed inordinately long, and far too cumbersome for the tight roundabout as various cars were forced to veer out of its way while it occupied a full three lanes. No doubt an occupant of the upper floors, Wil assumed. The sheer ostentatious design of the limo served to remind him of his place in the world, which he currently estimated was dead last.
Wil gritted his teeth and headed on, determined to get this day over with so that he could at least pretend to enjoy himself at dinner later on when Lucy showed up with a three-hundred-pound wrestler on her arm. Up above, the clock tower began to scrape … and yet again, Wil felt the air being charged with electricity as a dissonant whining sound began. Looking up, he was amazed to see a bright laser-type light being shone into the sky from the top of the tower. The sideways drizzle and the ominous clouds above only heightened the effect of the light; Wil could see that the intense beam shone up all the way into space. Strange … he’d never noticed this before. Had the clock tower really been projecting this incredible laser beam up through the clouds all these years? And if so, why? Looking around, he realized that this small stretch of the world was beginning to look very different from the way he’d always remembered it. The front of Gretchen’s Flower Shop was covered in a mass of orchids and tulips that barely seemed to move despite the force of the wind that battered everything else into submission. Looking more closely, Wil noticed an opening in the door frame that seemed to lead toward a forest thicket within, where all was calm and—if his eye did not deceive him—sunny. Come to think of it, he had never actually ventured inside the store. Could this utopia have been staring him in the face all this time and he’d barely noticed it?
Gretchen appeared and began to fuss over a few tulips. As she moved smartly back inside, Wil was slightly perturbed to see that she had very pronounced shoulder blades on her upper back—so pronounced, in fact, that they almost looked like wings. He stared at the strange storefront for a few seconds, dumbfounded, turning his lucky penny over and over again in his palm before finally relenting, and heading away with the box tucked under his arm. Better to make his escape quickly, he thought, than to make it later with another bump on his head. But as he moved off with the flow of traffic toward Upside-Down Street, he couldn’t help but wonder if he was actually seeing the world properly for the very first time.
* * *
WIL MADE his way along the one-way system toward the banking district. He moved along the divided highway between the two largest banks in the city, squinting through the traffic as he searched for the entrance to Upside-Down Street. For some reason, the entrance to the Curioddity Museum wasn’t where he remembered leaving it. Wil scowled, and furrowed his brow. He rubbed his chin. No sign of anything but the heavy traffic and the rows of trees Wil had always been accustomed to. Was this all an elaborate hoax? He furrowed his chin, which surprised him to no end. Still no dice. Lacking any further option, he covered his still partly closed eye, bent at the waist, and tried looking upside down.
He allowed a brief moment for his eye to adjust and the blood to rush to his head. To pass the time, he glanced at the brand-new street sign next to him, which read UPSIDE-DOWN STREET. From this vantage point, the letters were oriented correctly. Startled, Wil straightened and found himself standing next to a familiar trash can at the end of the very same street he’d been unable to un-see just moments before. The street sign’s lettering was now upside down, suggesting that either an errant municipal worker had taken matters into his own hands, or that Wil was indeed going insane. And there—fifty yards down the street across from an old cinema—stood the Museum of Curioddity. Wil swore up and down, and sideways for good measure. This street could not have been here all this time, just waiting for Wil to make an idiot of himself. It must have materialized while he wasn’t looking.
Or while he was un-looking.
* * *
ONE MINUTE (and twelve choice swear words) later, Wil found himself standing in front of the Curioddity Museum. Parked outside was the same ostentatious stretch limo that Wil had seen just minutes before emerging from the Castle Towers. Wil could not quite un
derstand the significance of the vehicle but he could sense his intuition yelling into one of his ears, telling him to go back home and forget he’d ever met Mr. Dinsdale. In the other ear, his Strange Feeling of déjà vu was making high-pitched noises, and it seemed to be jumping about and waving its arms in an attempt to put off his concentration.
Wil paused at the museum’s revolving door, eyeing it as one might eye a leprous coypu. He’d defeated the thing on their first encounter but that was because he hadn’t been paying attention; he’d been so busy trying to make sense of his odd Monday morning that he’d quite forgotten to get himself stuck. He frowned, puzzled by a sudden revelation: perhaps this was the trick all along. What if the secret to making it past a seemingly impassable obstacle was to ignore its existence entirely? For example, if a person was chased by a tiger toward a burning pit of pure hydrochloric acid, they would probably fret a little bit about how to get across, at which point the tiger and the acid pit would have already won half the battle. But what if a person chose to ignore things such as tigers and acid pits, and simply concentrated on something more mundane, such as the stock market reports in Monaco? At that point, perhaps the universe would recognize a person’s chutzpah and look the other way. Wil smiled to himself as he imagined running away from the far side of a burning acid pit with a disappointed tiger in his wake. He stepped forward to do battle with the revolving door, satisfied that he might cow it into submission with his circular logic.
Just as he reached for the door, his reverie was interrupted by the sound of sharp, angry voices coming from within the museum—the kind of low, urgent exchange that might usually be associated with a bank robbery or a family gathering, such as a wedding. This momentary distraction caused him to forget his fear of revolving doors, and thus he found himself inside the museum, unharmed, before he had time to realize that he’d ever entered. He glared back at the door. Either he’d played a dirty trick, or the door had. But he wasn’t going to give it the satisfaction of thinking it had won either way.
