Erik sensed something wrong in a vague way, as if he’d just noticed a faint alarm bell that had been ringing in the distance for some time. It was annoying. Now that he could hear it, he couldn’t ignore it. Whoever had set that alarm, they weren’t turning it off.
He was beginning to wonder if the alarm was for him. Maybe it wasn’t turning off because he hadn’t turned it off. Maybe he’d left something on the stove and gone out for a walk, and now the house was burning down.
Could it be… something he had done? Or something he didn’t do? Did it need fixing? Attention? What was it?
He was becoming increasingly sure he’d been sitting here, trying to read a single page of this comic book, for ages. It was difficult to read anything, to focus and follow a narrative string of events. He was always wandering off, and when he came back, he didn’t know where he was going or where he’d been. He stuck to leafing through calendars mostly, because they only had one big picture per page. He could handle that.
But he was paying attention now, he was worried and trying to figure out what was wrong. This comic just didn’t make sense. Who wrote this mess? It was all blurry, and the panels ran into each other like scrambled eggs. He couldn’t understand what was happening in the story at all.
He didn’t think the problem was all in his head, there had to be something wrong with the comic book.
Or maybe it was all in his head. These days, it was so hard to tell.
He flipped back to the cover for some inkling of what this story was about and who was in it.
There was no picture, no title in cool rockstar font to draw him in and get him excited to read. He was looking at a glossy, blank white background with plain black printing. Some idiot was out there selling shitty, generic comic books with no story, like that shitty, generic spaghetti sauce with no flavour. The label was exactly the same, like they didn’t even care.
PLAYROOM COMICS! he read, with a skeptical frown.
“Never heard of them!” he declared, stabbing the boring cover with a finger. “No way that’s a real comic. I got real-life brain damage over here, and I don’t buy that for even a second. Come on!”
Choose Your Own Adventure! the sham cover promised. Your Mind Makes It REAL! PLACEHOLDER! By Erik “THE BOY WONDER!” Weitz.
“I did not write this crap,” he muttered. “Someone is screwing with me. That’s just insulting.”
He opened the comic again. The first page was a series of soft watercolour images of a green figure staggering around. Its wispy, coloured shape wandered through a fog with other shapes, all of equally unknown meaning and purpose.
The nameless character produced nonsensical thought bubbles, wondering such things as, Am I hungry? What’s the deal with that music box? Why isn’t the silver spoon on the bathroom window? Where is the bed? and, What’s wrong with this dumb comic book?
The next page was the same.
He flipped through the book and all the pages were the same as the first. Like an endless pack of cards in a surreal horror flick, all of them the ace of spades, because you’re dead, you idiot. The rest of us in the theatre figured that out an hour ago. Now quit trying to solve the mystery and lie down, so we can all go home.
He sighed. “Yeah, yeah. It’s so easy when you’re sitting up in the balcony with a box of popcorn. But poor Mary or Barbara or whoever never figures it out until her dead body floats out of the car wreck and they roll the credits. Well, now I’m Mary, damn it. So what obvious plot twist do my ridiculous circumstances suggest?”
He picked up the whole, baffling book by one corner like a soiled hanky and stared at it, turning this way and that. Blank white generic cover promising an adventure, and nonsense inside. Any ideas, Mary?
It felt like trying to figure out what fish he’d been cooking by examining the stains on the wrapper.
“Well, first of all,” he said. “I have no idea what fish it is. Obviously.”
He poked the comic book several times, shook it to see if the pages were loose, and checked for stamps, a postmark, and helpful notes from a stranger. Yes, he was still as clueless as ever. He was not wrong about that.
“I know nothing of fish forensics,” he decided. He was secure in that deduction. “Fine. But why would I even do this? Let’s not forget there must be a whole movie going on outside of this weird scene. What madness has brought me to the point where I’m interrogating a comic book like it knows where the hostages are? The action itself makes no sense, nor does the object. Fish wrappers go in the trash, and if you need to identify the fish, you find the fish.”
He set the comic book down on the coffee table and stood up. “I’m in a room. …and there’s a coffee table,” he added, blinking at it. “Wow. Hello there!”
It had a smooth oval glass top, with a pile of comic books and magazines on it. All had generic white covers like the one he’d been reading.
THE GREAT OUTDOORS! Subtitled: Stuff You Did, and Stuff You Wanna Do!
THE BEST ROLLERCOASTERS! Subtitled: You Make ‘Em Up as You Go Along! Wheee!
NAKED PICTURES OF CUTE GIRLS, BUS STOP EDITION, VOLUME 1! Subtitled: You Have a GREAT Imagination, You Can Extrapolate!
JUST PLAIN IMPOSSIBLE STORIES! Subtitled: Flying Without Wings, and Your Favourite Dreams!
SENSE AND SENSUALITY, “DAVID VALENTINE” EDITION. Subtitled: You Sure Do Hate Him, but He Makes Your Whole Body Feel Like Insta-Soda!
He nodded and pointed. “Right. Okay. Nope. I still have no idea what that means. But I got here somehow, and things are happening to me. Here is the effect — I’ve been reading a comic book that makes no sense, I have no idea how long it took me to realize it makes no sense, and I don’t know how I got here. So where is the cause? Fish wrappers do not materialize out of nowhere with no fish.”
He wandered away from the coffee table and the hammock chair he’d been sitting in, wondering where the fish could be.
The red-and-blue-striped wallpaper had a cream-coloured background. The bookshelves pushed against it were mismatched, one green-painted metal, the other cheap particle board with a dark wood veneer.
He shook his head and glanced up at the ceiling.
There was no ceiling. It seemed like there ought to be something up there for him to look at, a hole with the sky peeking through, or even a featureless black void. But, uh, no. There was no ceiling. The camera wasn’t meant to point in that direction, so there was nothing there. He was looking right at it, and it looked like nothing. That didn’t seem like it should be possible, but he lacked the intellectual dexterity to figure out why.
His intellect was rattling around like a single stale breath mint at the bottom of the tin.
Right. Nevermind the total lack of ceiling, that was more wrapper stuff. Throw it away and find the fish.
He dropped his head, his intellect slid into the corner with a click, and he reconstructed the puzzle of what he’d been doing while failing to absorb any details of the floor.
Okay, yeah. He thought he’d felt a leak in the roof, but he hadn’t really been expecting a leak in the roof. Not a real leak in a real roof. He just wanted to check and make sure. It felt like a cold trickle seeping down the back of his neck, but instead of water, it was situational awareness. He was beginning to think well enough to look around and notice things, like the total-lack-of-ceiling.
So there were more clues available as to the location of the fish, he just couldn’t understand what he didn’t see.
The floor had warped wood planks arranged in a pattern his uncle said was called “running bond.” Yes, he remembered his uncle saying that, and there was the floor. He was standing on it. He stamped both feet. It held him.
That seemed to make sense! He’d put a pin in it and come back to it later, if he remembered.
He returned his fragmented attention to the bookshelves. A large, sturdy one with five metal shelves and green paint, and a little cheapie with three shelves total, if you counted the top of it as a shelf, and chipped wood veneer. The cheap one had begun to sag in the middle. The metal one stood as tall and sound as it had in the thrift store.
Probably taller. He’d been a lot younger when he picked out his furniture.
“Wait a minute!” He put up both his hands, signalling a full stop. “No, no, no. I am not in a place where I can just let thoughts like that slide on by and assume they make sense. Nothing makes sense. Stop. Back up. I picked out the furniture when I was younger?”
He shut his eyes.
Or maybe he didn’t. It seemed much darker than it should have been with closed eyes. No light leaked through at all.
He tried to remember.
He remembered when the only thing he could see in here was the yellowish darkness of closed eyes with light leaking through. Much later, it had become a featureless black void that echoed. The echo was creepy, he didn’t like it. His uncle said it was good that it echoed, because that made sense. If he wanted to stop the echo, he should pick out some furniture.
The words drifted out of the darkness, blurred with static like a distant radio signal…
…Like that cool flamingo lamp with the light bulb head from the thrift store, Uncle?
Exactly like that, dear one. Let’s try it. See a light, a round glass bulb…
The light bulb hung in midair, disembodied for the moment, and showing him little more than the faint outline of the floorboards, as it had so long ago.
Off, he thought at it, curiously. It persisted for a moment, then faded as he pictured the darkness returning.
“On!” he said. This time, the bulb snapped right back into existence, attached to the gawky body of a long-necked metal bird with one leg raised.
And gone again, without a word, because he wanted it that way.
Well, heck, that wasn’t so hard. And it shouldn’t be. He’d known how to build a seamless reality for himself since before he could even remember. Everyone did — they had dreams every night! His uncle had helped him practice, so he could do it whenever he wanted.
He was in charge of everything. It was his room.
He had to have somewhere safe to exist while there was a god driving his poor body around with his mind locked in the trunk. If he fixated on how trapped he was, he’d start panicking and banging on the lid, trying to get out. He’d only hurt himself that way; he couldn’t get out.
It was much easier to dissociate from a nightmare situation with a distraction.
Yeah!
So he built his room out of familiar things that he’d known in real life. It was like one of those dreams where you’re in the kitchen with a manticore, but the kitchen looks just the same, so you don’t mind the manticore. You could spend the whole time drinking coffee and eating cookies with her, no screaming and bolting upright in bed at all!
The green-painted metal bookshelf appeared in the blackness, as if lit by a spotlight. It was empty. He didn’t want the things on it, he was concerned with the shelf itself.
“That is from our favourite thrift store, the one on Sabot Street,” Erik said. “All the shelves look just like that, and they have round racks of clothes that smell like mildew.”
The other shelf appeared beside it, also empty.
“That is from our front room. It lives under the big staircase next to the coat closet. My crayons, scissors, and construction paper are on the bottom shelf.”
A shallow cardboard box with coloured paper inside appeared on the bottom shelf.
“Nope!” Erik said.
The box vanished and reappeared on the top shelf.
“Because,” he told himself, winding up for the reveal as if keeping his eager audience in suspense, “Calliope had Lucy, Lucy learned how to crawl, and I had to start putting up all my toys so she wouldn’t eat them.”
He had grasped a thin thread of thought here. He could feel it. He could almost see it, stretching away into the darkness, leading towards a light. A whole houseful of family was waiting for him. They loved him. They’d be happy to see him. They would serve cake.
“I know all those people,” he said. “I remember. But they are not here with me. They didn’t do this to me. They can’t help me, and I can’t help them. So let’s leave that alone, and find the fish.”
He dropped the thread. It vanished as if it had never been there at all.
He put the room back a piece at a time, the same way he’d built it. First the uneven plank floor and the wallpaper from the house. Then the end table with the goofy flamingo lamp, its light bulb head glowing cheerfully. And now the rug…
The rug was white shag with black printing on it: RUG.
He snorted and covered a laugh. “Yeah. Okay. That’s my sense of humour.”
He’d wanted the Farsian rug from their bedroom for his mind-room, but trying to reproduce the complicated pattern drove him nuts. His uncle had tried to tell him a dream didn’t have to be perfect, just good enough that you didn’t notice you were dreaming. But he was a meticulous kid, and sometimes stubborn to the point of paralysis, so he kept trying until he gave up in disgust.
RUG.
He snickered and changed it to the real rug from the bedroom, as effortlessly as winking an eye. It was the real rug because he knew it was the real rug, not because he lay down on it with a magnifying glass, reproducing every strand and matching it to a photograph of the original.
He had tried that when he was little. It didn’t work.
He was older now, he had the hang of it. This place ran on faith, fun, and intuition. Looking for the cracks created more cracks, so just let everything be. Now you can hang out and do whatever you want!
Everything in the room popped back into place at once, as if he’d poked the clown back into the jack-in-the-box for an experiment, then lifted the hand holding the lid closed. That was how the damn thing worked!
There were so many things! Why didn’t he notice all the things, and the memories of the things? Could he still be missing even more?
Here was a hammock chair he’d seen in a catalogue. That, over there, was a glass coffee table from a department store window. He understood the scatter of comics and magazines he’d have to write himself, and he also had a tape deck with all his favourite songs. His violin rested in its case against the wall, ready for playing.
There was a window. There was a huge plate-glass window shaped like a windshield, with a fuzzy green bump in the middle. He’d have to cross his eyes to see his nose any better, and he couldn’t do that now. Almost the whole wall was a window. It was eerily clear, with no reflections, as if that wasn’t really glass muffling the sounds and sensations outside at all. A person could fall right out of this safe little room, if he wasn’t careful.
He turned deliberately away, and did not look back.
Wow. There were a lot of toys on those shelves. It was kind of embarrassing. These weren’t real toys that would break and get lost, so after he made them they were there forever. His red-and-gold-spangled stuffed elephant had been handed down to Lucy long ago, but by the time Dave showed up, it was too worn out for Hyacinth to fix. They had tucked it into the trash bin and sent it to Toy Heaven.
But here it was on the shelf, complicated patchwork and all, right next to a complete set of tin soldiers.
He had one tin soldier left from that set in real life, he’d even lost the box they came in. The soldier lived in his Memory Box now. Just in case.
He had a Memory Box! Yes! A big wooden cigar box with a rope handle. Just in Case. He wrote that on the side of it in marker. It was missing the hinges and the latches, the lid was stuck on with magic. He kept it on top of his dresser, next to the wash basin, and occasionally added an item or two. He talked into the box and it saved his voice, because when he got hurt before, he forgot how to read.
He wasn’t good enough at magic to do something like that…
Maggie helped him make the box. It was his idea, he started saving stuff all on his own, but she found out about it and asked him what it was for. He hadn’t really thought about it being for something, he was a kid and he liked having stuff. But when she asked him, he knew.
I guess it’s in case I get hurt again. My memories aren’t safe in my head, but I won’t lose this stuff.
He thought she might laugh at him and say that’s stupid. If she did that, he’d throw everything away and never talk about it ever again.
She’d nodded with all due seriousness and said, Then you need a bigger box, huh?
His hand drifted up and felt the metal patch around his eye. He knew it was there. He knew why. It felt just like he remembered it did.
“But I don’t remember,” he muttered. “There’s so much missing, I can’t even figure out what I’m missing. Where’s Maggie? Where’s my house? Why doesn’t somebody give me my Memory Box?”
He filed through the familiar objects on the shelves, looking behind and under each, pointlessly. It wasn’t here. It wouldn’t be safe here, now, would it?
There was a radio on the worktable with a glowing yellow band across it. The radio was Milo’s radio, from the basement. The worktable was from the basement too. Erik had spent so many stormy days stuck in the basement, and listening to that damn unpredictable home-brewed radio; it was effortless to imagine.
“Nope!” he said firmly. He switched off the dial and walked briskly away from the table.
He stood facing his toy elephant on the shelf.
“We,” he said.
(An imperious, elephant-including royal “We.”)
“…do not have a radio in Our room, because We do not want any signal from the outside. No breaking news updates. No Eye in the Sky. No AM, no FM. Zip! There is nothing I can do about whatever-the-hell is going on out there,” he flung a grand gesture towards the window without looking, “so there is no point paying attention to it. I do not like being belted into a dark ride that could kill me. It’s not fun.”
He removed the elephant and held it up so they could look each other in the eye. “Listen. Do you know what happens when We have to watch and feel Our body being dragged around by forces beyond Our control for the-gods-alone-know how long?”
He regarded the elephant, giving it space to reply.
“Well, you’re an imaginary stuffed animal with a cotton brain,” he allowed, “so I’ll give you a hint.”
He leaned in closer, lifted its floppy ear to whisper, and then screamed so loudly the wallpaper warped, “When I get my body back, I’m so freaking traumatized I can’t remember how to move! You remember that? You remember standing in the dining room with our pants around our ankles because Auntie Enora fed us nothing but coffee and cigarettes for two weeks and we couldn’t remember how to MOVE? Because I do!”
He pressed down the elephant’s ear, so this new knowledge would not fall out of the elephant’s brain, and set the toy back on the shelf. He bowed to it. “I’m sorry. I lost my temper. It’s been really stressful lately. I can’t even figure out how my comic books work. Forgive me.”
He turned away with a sigh.
The radio was still there on the worktable and the band was glowing yellow again. It flickered and gave a little squawk of static.
Erik addressed it with a pointed finger, “Forget you!” He switched it off and walked towards the big window with his head down. “I’m not stupid. I have curtains. Let’s have some peace and quiet and…”
…don’t do that, stupid, I need to know what’s going on!
He had his hand on the drape. It was a bit sheer, but it would help if he pulled it across. “You are an imaginary radio, you do not have a mind of your own,” he said absently. “I have no idea why I made you, but that’s…”
Of course I don’t have a mind of my own! I have YOUR mind!
“Oh.”
Well, that made sense. Milo made that radio, the real radio, and Milo… It would be most polite to say Milo was not in full control of his own intellect. It was bigger than him, he could only do so much. He made a magical radio, just as a convenience, and sometimes it could read minds.
You’d hear your own voice faintly talking back to you amid the static, or someone else’s. It didn’t always make sense, and sometimes it was scary, but a lot of people’s thoughts were scary and didn’t make sense.
Geez, maybe no one was in full control of their own intellect.
So he remembered a mind-reading radio, and he needed some help to read his own mind. That thing wasn’t getting an outside signal, it was getting an inside one.
Erik dropped the curtain and wandered back towards the table and the radio. It had switched itself on again.
No, he’d switched it on again. It was his room, his radio, so he’d been switching it off and on… and off, and on, and… Yikes. He’d been having an argument with himself.
“Roses are red, Violets are white. I’m schizophrenic, and so am I,” he said mildly. It wasn’t the worst mental health issue he’d ever dealt with, but he doubted his stale mint of a mind could sustain two Eriks for long.
He knelt by the table, folded his arms, and rested his head near the speaker box. “Okay, pal. If you really do have my mind, give it back.”
…can’t!…
Fading in and out, blurred and indistinct, like the comic book. He adjusted the dial, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. It was bad reception all across the band.
…so much static… don’t know why it’s like this… fuzzy… comes and goes…
He tapped on the radio’s glass front. “You need help in there, me?”
…yes!…
He frowned. “Do I need help, then?”
YES!
“Oh.” He groaned and put both hands over his face. “Well, that’s just perfect, isn’t it? I’m gonna get distracted by a shiny object and forget all about that. Why don’t you tell me I need help when I’m out where I can get some?”
…can’t!… too much noise… pushing and pulling… I don’t know…
He spread both hands and bobbed his head, as if trying to get the crowd to quiet down so he could play another one. “All right, all right. I don’t mean to stress you out. Given that all these things will be forgotten and you may lose my attention at any time, is there anything you want me to do for you?” He shook his head. “Gods. For myself, I mean?”
…find the fish?
He sighed. “I want to know what’s going on as much as… as much as I do, but there’s not much I can do with one mint left in my tin. If I find out what caused this, there’s almost no chance I remember it long enough to fix the problem, and that’s if it can be fixed. This is just spinning my wheels, I am stuck real good right where I am.”
…got anything better to do?
“To be perfectly honest,” he told himself, “I see some dirty magazines mixed in with the comic books, and I am curious, but they’re probably broken too.” He shrugged helplessly and stepped away from the table. “Yep. So let’s break all the rules, put my fragile mental health on the line, and see what’s going on out there.”
He picked up his head, looked right bang in the middle of the huge window, and fell out of the room.
◆◇◆
He couldn’t gasp, or blink. He couldn’t put out a hand to steady himself. His heart didn’t even speed up. This wasn’t his body now. He’d traded it away, he didn’t know for what or how long, and he couldn’t have it back. He could only stare out of eyes he couldn’t move, and feel what was happening.
The room was cold, with the only heat seeping feebly from the radiator under the window. Its pipes rattled like chattering teeth. The light from the window was as cold as the room, blue and pale. Night was creeping into the grey clouds, and the snow was whispering against the glass.
His rear was resting in one of the folding chairs, on a vinyl-padded seat that sighed when he shifted. The card table in front of him glittered with small metal parts — screws, gears and wires. The finest rested on a white silk handkerchief, easy to see, easy to fold and store away so they wouldn’t be lost.
He didn’t see the cat. Potato wouldn’t let a person do something complicated like this without trying to help. He hoped she was okay.
One of his feet was hooked around the chair leg, the other bounced against the floorboards, the hard heel of the shoe keeping time like a metronome.
He was humming to himself. He had just put the finishing touches on the bird’s beak, and the metal was still glowing a faint orange. He blew a breath on it. It flared brighter and cooled to a dull bronze.
He stroked its little head, feeling the grooves of its carved feathers. “Poor sweet bird,” he muttered. He felt the motion of his tongue, the vibration of his throat, and the warmth of breath leaving his lips, but he had no control over any of it.
“You exist only to destroy yourself,” he said.
He felt his mouth pull into a wicked smile, one he never would’ve made on his own. Too pointy. Too many teeth.
“Ah, but that is art. That is life!”
He gave an airy little laugh.
◆◇◆
“Urgh!” Erik fell back onto his default white shag rug. He stuck out his tongue and wiped it on his sleeve, as if he’d taken a big swig of cleaning vinegar and couldn’t swallow any more bitterness without throwing up. “Yuck! Oh, goddammit!”
…I hate that guy, the radio agreed.
“Imposter,” Erik spat. “Boring motherfucker. What’s he doing back again?”
…I am just gonna go out on a limb here and say we must’ve asked him in, the radio said. Right? We don’t, uh, happen to remember what we wanted him to do for us, do we? At all?
Erik shook his head, scowling. “No, no. That… I have no fucking clue. I know I should know, but I don’t. It’s like I drank till I blacked out, and now I can’t even remember going to the bar. Woke up in a SoHo doorway, and instead of a policeman, it was a weird comic…” He looked down at himself and gave a cry of dismay. “Oh, gods! And these aren’t my clothes!” The pants were so tight they looked painted on, with loud black and white stripes. They pinched.
The sleeve he’d wiped across his mouth was rich black velvet, with a fancy lace cuff trailing out of it. He waggled his hand and watched the droopy fabric flop all over the place. “How can he do anything like this? He’s gonna set me on fire one of these days. You…”
…don’t get distracted!…
“Okay, okay. Right. It’s hard. I hate his clothes. I hate everything about him.”
…what’s he doing?…
“Metalwork. That’s what he does, metalwork. Ya got some metal? Ya want it altered to your exact specifications? Call David!” He glanced out the window, very fast. “Looks like a music box. Apparently, I had some metal, and I wanted a music box. With birds on it. I am out of my mind.”
…no. In it.
“Yeah. Hilarious. ‘Erik with the sense of humour,’ that’s me. Well!” He threw up his hands and sat down by the radio again. “I invited a god I hate into my body, and he’s making a music box with birds on it. Makes no sense at all. What do you want me to do about it?”
…destroy itself…
“What?” He shook his head. He tapped the glass front of the radio and wiggled the dial. “Say it again, slowly.”
…destroy…
He remembered the gears, and the wires. A music box didn’t need wires.
He nodded. “Okay. Yes. There we go. Well-spotted, Radio-Version-of-Me. New question: What do I want with a bomb?”
A bomb that didn’t look like a bomb. A bomb that fit in a coat pocket. Magical! Portable! Beneath suspicion! Wrap it in pretty paper and say it’s present. Tuck it into a valise. Hide it under your hat. Oh, the possibilities. A bomb like that could go anywhere.
For example, it could go on a train. On a train track. Or perhaps a railway bridge. Boom. And where will the train go now?
…know this… whispered the radio. I know what it’s for. I do know this… I don’t…
Erik batted a nervous drumbeat on the worktable with both hands. “I don’t think we’re up to anything good, Radio Me. Heh.”
…shhh… Shut up!… I’ve been listening, I KNOW this!
…but I don’t…
He had found the fish. There it was, in the oven, still simmering. He’d arranged it carefully in a dish, put a great big lid over it, banged shut the oven door and walked away. Like he walked away from the radio. Forget you.
It had been cooking for quite some time, but it wasn’t anywhere near done. It was a very large, very complicated fish. It could cook for a very long time and not be done. Years. A whole lot of birthdays, and no going home for cake. No more family, no more home, just a series of hotel rooms in a strange land where he didn’t belong. Endless fish.
This wasn’t the first time he’d found it. Well, it was right there. It was obvious. This was an extremely fishy situation. The whole place stank of it.
All he could do was stare into the dish, feeling sick and afraid.
It wasn’t a fish staring back at him. The cause of it all was a train car full of people who didn’t want to die. They stared up at him, wide-eyed and terrified. He was a powerful colossus, holding their lives in his shaking hands. Their faces were pleading. Help us.
Oh, gods, no, I’m sorry, what do I do?
He set down the lid and closed the oven door quietly. He whispered, as if the fish might be sleeping, “I don’t want to know this.”
…Can’t remember. I forget things all the time. It’s okay. I don’t have to get better all at once. No big deal. No big…
He looked down at his loud pants and fancy shirt.
“‘David Valentine,’” he muttered. He tossed his head. “Faker. Boring, fake David Valentine. Whatever. Where the hell am I?”
There were some shelves with things, a coffee table with magazines, and a great big window.
Well, wherever he was, he definitely wasn’t going to look out the window. That would be stupid.
There was no radio.
He knocked himself on the head with the heel of his palm. “You know, Erik, there are frequently rooms without radios in them. That’s not special. That doesn’t help. What’s the matter with you?”
He sighed. “Oh, lots of things.”
He brushed at David’s clothes, which he hated. “I’m just not myself at the moment.”
His violin was resting against the wall in its case, ready to be played.
He grinned. He stroked his hand down the side of the case and undid the latches with a subtle touch. One. Two. Like the busk on a lady’s corset. The wood and rosin smelled like sweet incense. Nestled amid balding purple velveteen, the instrument gleamed.
“Hi, Angie-baby.”
He picked her up, cradling the familiar curves that warmed instantly to his touch.
“I sure missed you. Wanna have some fun, girl? Wanna be super obnoxious?”
He glanced out the window, just to be sure. It looked like “David” was trying to concentrate and accomplish something out there. He was welding a metal plaque with birds onto a music box.
“Hey, David?” he said conversationally, tucking the violin beneath his chin. “Oh, I know you ain’t listening, not yet, but I wanted to ask you… Do you ever stay up at night wondering about the big questions? Where are we going? What are we doing here? What happened to the fish?” He laughed. “Is my chewing gum on the bedpost slowly, inevitably losing its flavour as I sleep?”
He didn’t know any of the big answers, but he knew about five different versions of a song asking more questions. He liked Lonnie Donegan best. He could play all five consecutively, over and over. For hours. Until “David Valentine” had no choice but to abandon his task and start screaming and beating his head against the wall.
(Heh. That idiot. Erik didn’t have to feel anything he didn’t want to.)
And then he and David would have a nice little vacation. A nice little separate vacation. For ten dings of the timer or more.
“Entropy, baby,” he muttered. “Nothing lasts forever. Things fall apart. Spearmint dies in darkness. Dig on it awhile.”
He shut his eyes, touched the bow to the strings, and sang along, loud and clear: “DOOOES… YOOOUR…”
