Curioddity (11 page)

EEEEOOOOWWWW!

*   *   *

W
IL JUMPED,
startled, as a rusted old Ford Pinto plowing through the city's one-way system at eighty miles per hour missed him by inches. The blare of the car's horn was quickly replaced by the residual sucking sound of a nearby puddle of water struggling to refill itself after depositing most of its muddy contents over Wil's clothing.

As he struggled to recover from the shock of this near miss, a fist emerged from within the rusted Pinto, shook itself angrily, and aimed what seemed to be a loud epithet in the direction of the suicidal lunatic it was leaving trailing in its wake. Not to be outdone by this inconsiderate and faceless maniac behind the wheel of half a ton of moving metal, Wil raised his own fist and readied a choice epithet of his own:

KLONNGG!

*   *   *

T
HE SUDDEN
crash of the clock tower banging away like a maniacal monk in the distance instantly scrambled Wil's thoughts like so many eggs across a busy one-way system. The clock was much louder at this part of the roadway than the scientific discipline of applied acoustics might have predicted. The klonnging sound caused Wil to stumble sharply sideways; or to be more precise, he stumbled abruptly sideways until his head connected painfully with something sharp: namely, the edge of a metal street sign that until now had seemed perfectly incapable of causing actual bodily harm. It's always the ones you least suspect, thought Wil, as he staggered slowly to his knees.

Shocked by this sudden and stunning reversal of allegiance on the part of the street sign, he reached to his forehead. His fingers found a nasty, bloody gash hidden beneath matted hair. Wil briefly considered calling Washington, D.C., and reporting the Swiss clock to the immigration authorities in the hope that they might somehow be able to revoke its visa. But it was no use. Blood was now cascading down his wrist, and his forehead was beginning to swell. Wil could not possibly walk back toward his office—not against the flow of traffic, surely. There was only one thing for it: his first meaningful action in the search for Mr. Dinsdale's missing box of Levity would be to stagger along the one-way system and go home.

*   *   *

W
IL SET
out with the flow of traffic, silently cursing anything that happened to enter the periphery of his awareness, or be remotely connected to the country of Switzerland. He cursed the clock, and the Castle Towers, and his pathetic sham of a life in particular. As he passed one of the city's ubiquitous advertising boards, Wil cursed Marcus James and anyone stupid enough to make three easy payments of $19.95 for what looked to be, on the face of it, a large piece of tent canvas with a hole in the middle that supposedly doubled as a poncho. But he reserved his most passionate swearing for the cold and steady mist of rain that had now decided to make a comeback, and had reverted the city's appearance to its usual variety of drab. The colder Wil's skin felt, the more he was forced to concede that harsh reality had set in, and that most (if not all) of his day had actually happened the way he'd remembered it. Mr. Dinsdale's envelope showed no signs of dematerializing from his pocket, which suggested that the money it contained was some kind of karmic payoff intended to soften the blow of the known universe being turned on its head. Wil knew that his post-concussion syndrome was simply an excuse he'd created to explain away all of the day's curious events (though in light of his new head injury, the statistical likelihood of future post-concussion syndrome episodes was now rising exponentially). He refrained from glowering in the direction of the passing cars—they'd caused him enough trouble for one afternoon. Instead, he would head back to his apartment building and try to find a bottle of rubbing alcohol, which he would first apply liberally to his head and then drink until he was mercifully unconscious.

*   *   *

T
HERE WERE
plusses and minuses to his day so far, he thought. The minuses followed vaguely similar themes such as general confusion, or utter puzzlement. The plusses, on the other hand, were more specific. For one thing, Wil had in his possession an envelope containing roughly five hundred dollars, which would be enough to stave off the debt collection agency representing the owners of the Castle Towers. He'd never met his landlords, having rented his office via a telephone call to a local real estate company. But he'd always imagined them to be of the nefarious and mustachio-twirling variety, modeled after an old Vaudeville performer one might see in a black-and-white comedy from the 1920s, perhaps. Given his landlords' insatiable appetite for sending threatening letters, and their relative indifference to the noxious smells emanating from their own elevator, he'd always felt his mental picture was far too interesting to be spoiled by actually meeting these people. For some reason, he'd always imagined they might look like rats. Well, he thought, the rats were going to be getting a little cheese in the mail, which would prevent them from gnawing at his patience for at least a week or two.

Somewhere out in the electronic ether, Mr. Dinsdale's banking representatives were no doubt informing Wil's own bank that they were preparing to deliver the sum of a further five thousand dollars to Wil's account, and this had probably created an automated alert of some kind that would prevent the transaction from going through. Wil imagined this would be brought to the attention of his local branch manager and then summarily ignored for a week as a clerical error. He didn't mind: he'd already persuaded himself that Mr. Dinsdale, though eccentric to a fault, was not completely insane. During his first encounter with the old man, Wil had been mentally prepared to start negotiations in the general area of fifty or sixty dollars for whatever the curator had been preparing to throw at him. And during their later conversation at the coffee shop, Wil had daydreamed he might drive a hard bargain and ask for a full hundred, hoping Mr. Dinsdale might respect his chutzpah and actually fall for this obvious bluff.

Well, it couldn't hurt to let the clerical error go unnoticed for a while. As an added bonus, Wil realized he was now well into the afternoon hours and quite far away in both time and space from anything likely to make a sudden
klonng
ing sound in his ear.

For the next ten to fifteen minutes, Wil trudged painfully back toward his apartment building. He spent the first three minutes of his trudge engaging his Strange Feeling of déjà vu in a rather one-sided argument about the relative merits of keeping oneself to oneself and not intruding on another person's day. To conclude the argument, he admonished the intrusive notion and banned it from occupying any more of his thoughts for a period of at least sixteen months. After that, he trudged in complete silence—both inwardly and outwardly—and tried not to think about how he was going to navigate the flea-infested waters of his apartment building's lower floor. By the time he'd hit upon a solution to the problem of Mrs. Chappell and her cats—namely, to have them kidnapped by armed Venezuelan drug dealers and stored in the hold of a converted oil tanker—he found himself standing in front of the door to the lower lobby. The Venezuelan caper would have to wait. Wil was losing blood and he needed a shower.

Summoning every remaining ounce of his courage—and gripping his lucky penny so tightly that it threatened to carve a coin-shaped slot into the palm of his hand—Wil drew a deep breath and stepped inside.

*   *   *

I
NSIDE, THE
lobby seemed warm and inviting in contrast to the savage fog floating across the city streets. For some strange reason, Wil imagined that the building purred, which was exactly the opposite of what he had expected. His grip on the penny loosened. Could it be that he was happy to be home?

This thought had never occurred to him in conjunction with the rusty old apartment building and its rusty old landlady—he'd usually associated the place with words like “godforsaken” and “tragic.” But in spite of—or perhaps
because
of—his gaping head wound, the lobby seemed to possess a peaceful atmosphere very different from its usual appearance as the Atrium Where Tumbleweeds Might Go to Die. Mrs. Chappell's old calico monstrosity had found a comfy niche near one of the old steam radiators and was no doubt dreaming kitty dreams of fish and milk. Two or three of its friends were eyeing a small hole in the far wall, each pretending they had inside information on the imaginary mice that lived within. An old metal teakettle hissed on a distant stove inside Mrs. Chappell's office, and this made Wil think of cold winter afternoons spent outside with his elementary school friends, of Barry Morgan's most excellent hot chocolate recipes, and of toasty warm fireplaces and being cuddled up under a blanket next to his mom as she read from
The Hobbit
while his dad listened to stock market reports on the family's old-style radio.

Wil moved quietly across the floor of the lobby and headed toward the stairs where much to his surprise, a blob of scraggly brown fur moved to intercept. It was Mrs. Chappell's green-eyed favorite, a creature that to this point had summarily refused to acknowledge Wil's presence in its scraggly world in any way whatsoever. Odd, thought Wil, I wonder what it wants. The creature looked up at him, longingly.

On a whim, he bent to stroke the animal's fur and was surprised to find the brown beast felt as soft as satin, and that it was pleasantly docile. The cat leaned into Wil's leg and rubbed a little bit, just to let Wil know that he had officially been given permission to exist.

“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.

*   *   *

S
TARTLED,
W
IL
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.