Curioddity

 

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For my magical wife, the “real” Melinda

Thank you for giving our two little guys the gifts of creativity and compassion.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to my friend Bill Russell, without whose support and generosity this work would never have seen completion.

Thanks also to Frank Karic for your dedication, selflessness, and sheer honesty

To Marianne de Pierres for your amazing advice.

And to Mike Homler for your belief in me.

 

CHAPTER ONE

W
IL
M
ORGAN
awoke from his regular anxiety dream, in which he had just finished second in a World's Biggest Failure competition.

Outside the window of his one-bedroom apartment, another overcast morning grudgingly announced the start of yet another overcast week. Wil closed his eyes and considered going back to sleep. He briefly flirted with the notion that he hadn't woken up at all, and that his lumpy old bed was just a part of his dream. But it was no use—he'd long since forgotten how to escape reality by use of his imagination. This was going to be much like any other miserable Monday in his life. It would lead to a tiresome Tuesday, a woeful Wednesday, a thankless Thursday, and a forgettable Friday. Wil didn't even want to think about how dreadful the next weekend was already shaping up to be.

He groaned as he rolled out of bed. His left arm had gone back to sleep, and he silently cursed it for its good fortune. The various murmurs and screeches of the city began to filter upward through the damp fog. Wil cursed those as well, just for good measure. As always, a faint smell of mushrooms lingered throughout the apartment but Wil chose to ignore this; partly because the smell of mushrooms made him nauseous but mostly because he had neither purchased nor cooked mushrooms at any time during his entire life. Stepping over a discarded travel magazine, he trudged over to the bathroom mirror, rubbed his eyes, and stuck out his tongue. Not a good time to make eye contact with his reflection, he decided, and he hastily backed away. This particular Monday was already shaping up to set a new record for something, and whatever that something was it was probably going to be something bad. Feeling slightly empty, Wil pulled on his least rumpled set of clothing, grabbed his coat and keys, and headed for the door as a knocking sound coming from beneath his sink leveled up in intensity from mildly annoying to ever-so-slightly obnoxious.

As Wil shuffled past his apartment building's broken elevator and began to trudge down the stairs (he was good at trudging), he wondered for a moment if his devotion to endless repetition wasn't nudging him ever closer to permanent and irreversible madness. No doubt Mrs. Chappell, his landlady, would be waiting for him in the lobby of his apartment building. She would utter any one of four variations of the same pleasantry she had greeted him with since the day he'd moved in, and he would smile and issue one of his three standard responses, and be on his way before she could rally enough of her brain cells to attempt further conversation.

Wil paused on the flight of stairs before the lobby and stared at a deluded old calico cat that was attempting to sun itself on a windowsill. In the middle of the landing, a second, scruffy ginger thing was licking itself in an unmentionable place. It eyed Wil with a slightly annoyed expression that suggested it would have preferred if Wil had tripped over it and gone clattering down the final thirty steps headfirst. From below came the sound of Mrs. Chappell's rusty old voice, cooing to another of her thousand-and-one furry reprobates.

Wil steeled himself and rounded the corner. The old lady was nowhere to be seen. So far so good.

He turned his trudge into a kind of shuffle-cum-sneak, hoping Mrs. Chappell had walked back into her office or—better yet—had suddenly been rendered invisible. It was the use of this particular tactic that allowed him to make it within five feet of the front door before a voice like a sheet of forty-grit sandpaper wrapped around a kitchen knife put paid to his false sense of security.

“
Guten Morgen,
Mr. Morgan!” came the cry from behind him. “Wakey, wakey, rise and shine! The weather's fine!”

Wil gritted his teeth. Involuntarily, he dug in his pocket for his lucky English penny that he always carried with him—gripping it so hard, in fact, that he felt it digging into his skin. Might as well get it over with, he thought, as he turned to face his landlady. By now, his pained expression was morphing into a fake grin.

Mrs. Chappell stood at the far end of the lobby holding something scraggly and brownish wrapped around a pair of accusing green eyes. She had an expectant look upon her face.

“Hello, Mrs. Chappell,” said Wil. “Looks like it's going to be another nice day.”

He thought about adding a “don't you think?” to the end of his sentence but decided he'd stand a better chance of eliciting a response from the scraggly brown cat. The old lady was already beginning to look vacuous, and the silence was rapidly becoming awkward. With a quick wave of his hand, and not wishing to push his luck, Wil turned tail and hustled out of the front door before any further damage could be done.

*   *   *

O
UTSIDE, THE
city streets were gray and sodden. Indeed, Wil often fancied this was the city where they had invented the color gray. He settled quickly into the same routine he had practiced since the day he'd arrived, which involved a large amount of trudging and a general avoidance of eye contact with anyone passing by. As he headed off to work, Wil slowly rolled his old English penny in and out of his fingers, feeling its smoothed-down edges and thinking of days long gone. And as he trudged, he allowed his mind to wander. Though not too far, just to be on the safe side.

He thought about his oh-so-predictable life and—not for the first time—he considered the meaning of his recurring dream. If the World's Biggest Failure competition had any significance at all, then why second place? Lately on his morning trudge, he'd come to the conclusion that such was the depth of his inadequacy he couldn't even finish first at finishing last. Somewhere out there was a proper failure, a memorable loser of epic proportions—someone you could look at and say, “Now there goes a real idiot!” Someone who—at the very least—possessed a spark.

Wil settled into a medium-paced trudge, which soon took him across an old stone bridge in the center of town: a decrepit former railway crossing that no local government official had ever seen fit to condemn, and that was fed by a confusing one-way system. Each passing vehicle rattled the bridge in such a way that Wil was reintroduced to every single one of his silver fillings as he crossed. Up ahead, an old brown edifice loomed on the skyline like a fungal growth of brick and mortar: the Castle Towers. Wil's office on the nineteenth floor was the only place in town where he could afford the rent, and from which he was under constant threat of eviction. He glowered at the Towers, and they glowered back at him.

It was Wil who blinked first. He sighed, feeling inadequate. If his life had a soundtrack, he imagined, it probably sounded something like this:

Trudge, trudge, trudge …
KLONNG
.

*   *   *

H
AVING SUCCESSFULLY
navigated the bridge—as he had done for innumerable consecutive weeks, rain or shine, with no days off for either sickness or vacation—Wil headed for the temporary sanctuary of his local coffee shop. The morning fog was thickening directly over his head, and the cold moisture felt like little needles on his skin. Maybe the weather was singling him out, he thought. No one else looked as cold as he did.

*   *   *

L
ATELY,
W
IL
had become more philosophical about life in general and his mediocre contribution to it in particular: So what if he was a damp squib in a world of fireworks? It may well be, he thought, that people always remember bottle rockets that accidentally explode and no one remembers the cheap ones that are left out in the rain. But at least a man living a soggy and boring life would get to the end of it relatively intact. No, he decided, he wasn't going mad. Insane people were those who made the same mistakes with the expectation of a different result. Wil had lowered his expectations to the point where he could comfortably go about his daily routine and anticipate only minimal success.

He paused at the front entrance of the aptly and unimaginatively named Mug O' Joe's, letting the bitter aromas and the whoosh of the latte machines wash around him. If there was an isolated pool of happiness in his world, it was at Mug O' Joe's, where he could be found dipping his toes on a daily—and sometimes hourly—basis.

Exactly the same people seemed to be scurrying in and out of Mug O' Joe's as had been scurrying in and out of it since it had been named Koffee Korner and before that, the short-lived Ye Olde Towne Café. (Like most of the patrons, Wil had felt no purveyor of the simple coffee bean deserved a name with an
e
on the end of all four of its descriptors, and he had avoided the place like the plague until sanity had been restored. Those painful three weeks without caffeine had been a test of endurance and mental resolve but one had to make a stand somewhere.) Wil closed his eyes for a moment, losing himself in the bustle of energy coming from within, and wishing for all the world that some of this energy might somehow rub off on his day. Here was his Garden of Eden, a place where Chocolate Vanilla Lattes fought a never-ending battle across the elaborate chalk menu with Mocha Pumpkin Spiced Thingamajigs, and other such earthly delights.

Wil resolved to order his usual, a large regular coffee with space for extra cream. This was not the time to try anything that might interfere with his Monday-morning routine. Opening his eyes, he sent up a quick prayer to Saint Joe, the Patron Saint of False Hope, and headed inside.

Behind the counter stood an indifferent teenager of indeterminate background. Wil could never remember one day to the next if this was the same indifferent teenager he'd ordered from the day before; they seemed to come and go with alarming regularity. Yet while the faces changed, the attitude remained the same: namely, one of bored confusion. Not for the first time in his life, Wil felt he had been here before.