Curioddity (6 page)

As Wil rushed to the exit, he passed the teenaged server, who for some inexplicable reason was now simply standing by the door holding a large carton of heavy cream. They made eye contact for a brief moment.

“Be careful out there,” said the teenager.

As he rushed outside, Wil admitted to himself he had absolutely no idea of the significance of that statement.

*   *   *

B
Y THE
time Wil got out to the street, he could see that Mr. Dinsdale was already some thirty or forty yards ahead, obscured partly by the freezing fog. It seemed to Wil that unless the little man was an Olympic sprinter of some repute, this had to be either an optical illusion or he was having another of his missing time experiences. He broke into a run, calling out to his quarry ahead just as Mr. Dinsdale turned a corner. By the time Wil reached the corner, some five or six seconds later, Mr. Dinsdale was now a hundred yards ahead on the same street. And yet the little man seemed to be puttering along at a speed that seemed in keeping with a person of his advanced years—in other words, at a pace equivalent to a crippled turtle.

Wil looked at his watch: two minutes to eleven. If he stopped now he could get back to the office in time to avoid two or three phone calls and perhaps share a conversation with Mr. Whatley about politics and/or cleaning products. He'd spend the afternoon fretting about the imminent arrival of his father and then have the living daylights scared out of him at exactly six minutes after three. Finally, he'd go home after a fruitless day of nothing in particular and run the gauntlet of his rusty old landlady and her moth-eaten cats. He decided to keep up his pursuit.

Running as fast as he could, Wil got within ten yards of Mr. Dinsdale just as the old man turned left onto the main artery of the one-way system. “Stop!” he cried. “Mr. Dinsdale!”

Wil barreled around the corner, half-expecting Dinsdale to now be a full half mile ahead. Much to his surprise, he ran full bore into the little man, and he barely managed to grab at Dinsdale's mustard-yellow coat lapels before the two of them went clattering to the ground. Wil heard a honking sound: most of the people traversing the complicated one-way system in their cars seemed to now be staring in their direction as they passed. Mr. Dinsdale furrowed his chin again. Wil felt nothing if not mildly ridiculous.

“What on Earth are you doing?” asked Dinsdale. “Is something wrong? You look like you've seen a ghost.”

“I'm sorry,” replied Wil as he tried to catch his breath. “I tried … catch up … back there … too fast!”

Mr. Dinsdale extricated himself from the embrace, stood up, and dusted himself off. “I can see it was too fast.” He sniffed. “You'd better slow down before you do yourself a mischief.”

“Slow down? Slow
down
? You come plowing into my office like a crazy person, you show me Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Unfinished Whatever while I'm pumped full of caffeine, and then you speed off like a clown car without any brakes … and I'm supposed to slow down?”

“Couldn't have put it better myself. Come on, it's this way.” Mr. Dinsdale narrowed his eyes to peer at something on the road ahead before striking out in its general direction. This kind of erratic behavior really seemed to be Dinsdale's thing, thought Wil, as he jumped to his feet and gave chase, determined not to lose the old man in the now-thickening fog.

“Where are we going?”

“The Curioddity Museum, of course. It's just up ahead.”

“Up ahead? Waitaminnit … where exactly is this museum?”

“Oh, we're situated on Upside-Down Street right across from the abandoned cinema,” said Mr. Dinsdale, cheerily.

Wil knew for a fact that no museum could possibly exist for at least two miles in the direction Dinsdale was now headed. This was the way he walked home from his office every single day—following the flow of the one-way traffic, naturally—and he would most definitely have seen something as obvious as a museum on his travels, not to mention an abandoned movie theater. Up ahead lay a particular stretch that led cars and pedestrians alike along a featureless causeway lined by enormous banking buildings. This in turn led to a second old railway bridge that rivaled the first for its ability to rattle one's fillings. Wil was just beginning to come to terms with the absurdity of the concept that was “Upside-Down Street” when up ahead, Mr. Dinsdale ducked to his left and onto a street that Wil had never, ever noticed was there.

He stopped in his tracks to consider what might be Actually Occurring, as opposed to Apparently Occurring. By this point, he had begrudgingly accepted this was no ordinary miserable Monday. A manic Monday, perhaps, or maybe a momentous Monday. Wil felt it was a testament to Mr. Dinsdale's, well …
curioddity
 … that he had barely even thought about the hideous and awkward likelihood that his dad was going to visit sometime in the next few days. And in thinking this, he suddenly realized that indeed, his father was coming, and he had to catch himself against the wall of one of the banking buildings to stop himself from succumbing to his vertigo and toppling over.

Wil squinted at the little side street, which to all intents and purposes had suddenly and magically appeared overnight between the two largest banks in the entire city. He'd heard that such terrifying diseases as flesh-eating parasites and temporal lobe epilepsy might cause sudden hallucinations followed by irreversible insanity. But try as he might, he couldn't concentrate in such a manner that the little street would simply go away. The street sign read, simply,
MONS
. Wil's sixth-grade-level French classes had taught him this was the French word for “mountain,” but the idea of a street named after anything higher than fifty feet in what was quite possibly the world's flattest city seemed absurd. A lot of things seemed absurd. Wil edged closer to the corner of the little street, wondering why he felt so nervous about peering around it.

At the corner stood an ordinary trashcan. Wil looked inside it. It contained trash, including a banana peel and some old newspaper. No surprises there. Wil peeked around the corner of Mons Street to find Mr. Dinsdale standing just up ahead in the mist, tapping his foot.

“There you are,” said Mr. Dinsdale, impatiently. “What took you so long?”

“How long has this street been here?” asked Wil. “I've walked this way home for years and I've never noticed it before.”

“You know what your problem is, Mr. Morgan?” said the little man in the mustard coat. This was not going to be a question, Wil determined. This was going to be the sentence that preceded a criticism; and this was something Wil had become used to during his last twenty-odd years on the planet. “Your problem is that you look at things too carefully, like a detective specializing in insurance and divorce cases.”

“I don't see how that's a problem. That's how I'm supposed to look at things, isn't it? I mean you wouldn't be about to hire me for whatever-it-is-you're-about-to-hire-me-for if I didn't!”

“Not even close,” said Dinsdale. “You need to learn how to un-look at things if you're going to take on this job of mine. Life is not about how you use your eyes; it's about having vision. It's all about how you un-look at the world.”

Wil decided this had gone quite far enough. This trek through ever-falling temperatures had now put him in a very grumpy mood, and this seemed like as good a time as any to voice his opinion. “Life is an ugly lake of treacle,” he said. “You can try to wade through it but eventually you're going to get stuck. If you try to enjoy it you'll end up sick. And if you go about looking at things bent at the waist like you do, Mr. Dinsdale, you'll probably end up with treacle up your nose.”

“I see,” said Mr. Dinsdale with a sniff. The sniff was intended to be a little sullen so that Dinsdale could make it perfectly clear his nose was just a little out of joint.

“And one other thing: there is no such place as Upside-Down Street. There never has been. Any statement to the contrary would be the ramblings of an old man with too much treacle up his nose!”

Wil's angry comment had the desired effect: it left one of the two men feeling satisfied and the other looking rather disappointed. “I'm sorry you feel that way, Wil,” said Mr. Dinsdale. “I can see I must have been mistaken about you. I'm sorry to have troubled you, and I wish you the best in your future endeavors. Now if you'll excuse me…”

Mr. Dinsdale began to turn away, making a good show of drooping his old shoulders and being as convincing as possible that his demeanor was now fully deflated. Wil couldn't tell if this was yet another of the older man's bizarre tactics: by this point, Wil's timing was completely off its chosen track. He couldn't be sure how he felt about anything but he was pretty sure he wasn't about to let Mr. Dinsdale off this easily.

“Now wait just a minute,” he began. “You can't just jump into someone's Monday and thrash about like a crazy person, and then walk away and then allow yourself to be caught and then walk away again! People don't do that sort of thing. And I'm not going to fall for that whole victim thing so please stop drooping your shoulders and for the love of all that is holy, tell me what the heck is going on around here!”

Wil could now barely contain his breath; his brain and stomach were doing competing cartwheels somewhere under the various parts of his skin, and his left eye was beginning to twitch. Mr. Dinsdale eyed him with the kind of calm demeanor that would have made a devout Trappist monk jealous. Wil couldn't tell if the little man was scrutinizing him for some reason, toying with his emotions, or just plain pushing his buttons. Wil felt like a musical equipment repair workshop, in that most of his organs now seemed to be functioning improperly. How exactly had he gone from a routine-obsessed, tedious human punching bag to a stark raving, wild-eyed lunatic human punching bag in the space of about an hour? No matter which way he looked at his morning, none of it made sense. He'd followed a man dressed like a refugee from a 1950s Shell's Wonderful World of Golf rerun halfway across town to a hidden street in search of an abandoned cinema and a place named the Curioddity Museum, all without even knowing exactly why. Well, he thought, this was about to come to a conclusion one way or another, whether Mr. Dinsdale wanted it or not. He was going to maintain eye contact with the object of his antagonism until he either got some answers or passed out in the snow.

Wil looked up in the sky. It was now snowing. Of course, he thought, as one large and extremely cold snowflake settled on the middle of his nose. Of course it's snowing. Because I am neither cold nor disoriented enough to fully complete the various challenges being presented to me on this particular Monday.

“I'm sorry, Wil,” said Mr. Dinsdale. “I truly am. It's just that people are like mopeds sometimes. They need a kick-start.”

Looking down, Wil realized that Mr. Dinsdale had undergone a rather unsettling shift in both demeanor and appearance. The little man seemed altogether different, and while Wil had grown to expect such things in the short time he had known Mr. Dinsdale, this was an entirely new proposition altogether. The slightly disheveled appearance was now somehow less ruffled and, indeed, Dinsdale's odd choice of clothing suddenly seemed altogether appropriate. In fact, the mustard-yellow coat seemed quite fetching as large snowflakes landed on the little man's shoulders. His bow tie now had a touch of elegance about it, and the plaid golfer's pants added a modicum of class to his overall appearance. Most importantly, this new Dinsdale gave off a kind of perceptive calm and worldly-wise confidence that had previously been lacking in almost every single facet of his former personality. Wil fancied this particular version of Mr. Dinsdale was the one that had been hiding in plain sight all along.

“I don't feel like a moped,” said Wil, unable to think of anything else he particularly wanted to say.

“Yes, I should probably apologize for that analogy,” replied Mr. Dinsdale. “I could've thought of something more powerful and less likely to break down at a moment's notice.”

“Or be sat on by an Italian teenager.”

“Right again. May I ask how you feel right about now?”

“I feel like a fish that just jumped off the side of a fishing boat, and accidentally landed in a stray net that a previous fisherman hung out to dry. Either you're trying to catch me on purpose, Mr. Dinsdale, or I'm trying to be caught by mistake. I'm cold, and it's snowing, and my coffee has worn off. I don't know where I am or why I am. Does that about cover it for you?”

“It does indeed.”

Wil was astonished to realize Mr. Dinsdale had now undergone a complete transformation, paradigmatically speaking. His kindly side was now fully in evidence, and his eccentric side was now fully in remission. His manic side, with any luck, Wil hoped, had gone on ahead by a few hundred yards. Wil realized that to all outward appearances, Mr. Dinsdale seemed like someone he could trust, which made absolutely no sense whatsoever. And for the very first time during his entire Monday, he felt as though things might be looking up, albeit with little to no explanation.

“Look up,” said Mr. Dinsdale.

Peering up once again through the tumbling snowflakes, Wil could now see that he was standing in front of a very large building fronted by ornate Ionic pillars. A wide set of marble steps led to a warm-looking foyer. Above, massive lead-lined windows suggested an expanse of space within. The building screamed “museum” in much the same way a stadium with a diamond-shaped playing field might scream “baseball.” Wil was getting the sense that something was awry with either time or space: he surely could not be standing in front of a building of this size. Hadn't he just turned the corner onto Mons Street? He turned to his left, only to realize that by some accident of time and space he'd come fully fifty yards from the corner of Mons Street.