Curioddity, Page 2

  * * *

  WARMED SLIGHTLY by these memories of past conflagrations, Wil’s pace quickened as he passed Gretchen’s Flower Shop some two hundred yards from his office building. Being of Dutch descent, Gretchen liked to present ornate tulip displays in her storefront. The closer Wil got to his oh-so-forgettable job, the more he would try to remember things that would connect him to his mom, just to give him the strength to wade into his day. Tulips were Melinda’s favorite flower, though she wasn’t allowed to bring them in the house on account of Barry’s allergies. Wil liked the smell of tulips, and Gretchen was the one person he’d always wave to on his way to work if she was outside by her flowers.

  Outside the Castle Towers stood a naked statue of Pan, which seemed to shiver ever so slightly in the frozen fog. Mom would have approved of it for the simple fact that Pan’s oversized naughty parts tended to make passersby cover their children’s eyes or look the other way. Certainly, the statue engendered two opposite reactions: upon seeing Pan for the first time, drivers would either avert their gaze or gawk like crazy people and run the risk of possible death or dismemberment at the hands of the too-complicated one-way system they were supposed to be navigating. Mom always liked stuff that challenged people to think differently. And Pan was certainly a challenge to the safe driving record of the local municipality.

  By the time Wil made his way through the revolving door that led inside Castle Towers, the memories of his childhood were winning the battle against his reluctance to show up at work; they always seemed to invite escape from his current predicament. He surprised even himself with a sudden and alarming notion that today might be different after all. Perhaps this would be the Monday when the first day of the rest of his life wouldn’t be like all the hideous days that had preceded it. Perhaps this would be the Monday when something finally happened. Perhaps this would be the Monday when—Heaven forbid—someone actually gave him something interesting to do.

  Wil moved quickly past the two denizens of the Castle Towers lobby: a pair of identical twin brothers who could be found playing chess by the front window come rain, shine, or Martin Luther King Day. Wil had never learned the brothers’ names; they appeared to be in their mid-fifties, and each had chosen a last line of defense against encroaching baldness by reverting to a disconcerting comb-over that could only be considered an act of desperation. The twins always gave Wil the creeps, though he could never put a finger on what exactly was the problem. It was probably the fact that they never spoke. Once, he’d made eye contact with the one nearest the window. It wasn’t so much that the twin had scowled at him on that occasion; it was more that the guy had looked right through him. Wil often wondered if one or both of the twins were blind.

  Trudge, trudge, trudge … KLONNG!

  Certainly, chances were high that the brothers were both deaf; they had every right to be.

  * * *

  THE ELEVATOR was dank and possessed its own peculiar brand of pungency. No matter how many times Mr. Whatley, the superintendent of Castle Towers, had replaced the single light on the elevator’s ceiling, it always flickered on and off and made a sound like an electric horsefly. As Wil ascended toward the nineteenth floor, he found himself being jolted out of his optimistic reverie and back toward reality. The elevator usually had the effect of bringing him down to Earth the farther upward it went.

  Wil exited the traveling coffin trying (and failing) to suppress his gag reflex. Mr. Whatley had cleaned the walls of the elevator with bleach on numerous occasions yet the place still always managed to smell like a mixture of curry powder and rat vomit. Curiously, Wil had never seen an actual rat inside the entire building. No doubt they were repelled by the smell of the elevator.

  Wil stood for a moment before the door of his office and fumbled inside his pocket for the smooth edges of his trusty English penny, trying to summon the courage to select his keys instead. He knew exactly what awaited him inside his office: an emptiness to match the one inside his heart, the emptiness that had followed him ever since the 207th day of his tenth year of existence. That was the day his mother, Melinda Morgan, had died.

  * * *

  ON THAT particular morning, Wil and his mom had been hard at work on an old and favored experiment: the Perpetual Penny. It was Melinda’s contention that somewhere in the world existed a penny that—if spun properly and with the right amount of inverted friction—would continue to spin forever and never fall to the ground. She and Wil had collected empirical data on the spinning of every American cent they could find, so much so that young Wil had the habit of asking people for spare pennies in the event they were unknowingly carrying with them the Holy Grail of all coins. Wil and his mom had collated the results of every penny spin since he was two years of age but had come no closer to finding the Perpetual Penny. They had so far achieved a 0 percent success rate but, as Mom pointed out, the experiment called for a 2 percent margin for error. This meant that conceivably, 2 percent of their spins had been successful—they just hadn’t known it. Despite his lack of success, Mom had encouraged Wil to always keep trying. For a good experiment, she said, could never be rushed.

  Lately, Wil had been resistant to his mom’s optimism. He had begun to exhibit the typical frustration of a ten-year-old coming to terms with stubborn reality. Something was going to crack, Mom had said, and her money was on reality cracking first. Even though young Wil was not so sure, he’d decided to play along.

  That morning, Mom had had an epiphany. She’d given Wil an old penny she’d brought back from a trip to England, where she and Barry had visited for their honeymoon some years before. This penny had a picture of the Queen of England on it, and she appeared to be floating on the sea in some kind of chariot. Like most of Mom’s notions, the idea of an English penny being any better than an American one seemed to make little sense at first blush. Wil’s dad, as usual, was skeptical about the potential for success. He’d given the pair his customary haughty sniff and had gone off to the upstairs toilet to read about something called the Dow Jones index. So while Mom busied herself with some scientific paperwork, Wil got to work trying to impart just the right amount of inverted friction upon this new candidate. It wasn’t long before frustration took hold of the process.

  “I can’t do it,” Wil complained. “It doesn’t matter if it’s English or American. It’s just a penny. Just like all the other ones.”

  His mother gave him her most patient and understanding sigh. “Everyone knows the Perpetual Penny looks just like any other penny, Wil,” she replied. “It’s all in how you spin it. Maybe every penny is the Perpetual Penny, or maybe none of them at all. You have to believe you’re going to get it just right. But you’re never going to get it right if you give up halfway through.”

  This was a variation on a familiar theme, and it was one that to Wil’s ten-year-old mind was becoming painfully transparent.

  “That’s not fair!” he whined, doing his best impression of a nine-year-old. “You said I had to believe in the Easter Bunny and the Candy Goblin and then when I asked Santa about it at the mall he said he didn’t know who the Candy Goblin was!”

  “Fine. Then what do you believe?”

  Wil realized he was probably going to have to be careful with his next statement, just in case. Maybe he was getting a little old for the Candy Goblin but there was no sense in ticking off Santa just to prove a point. “Maybe he just forgot,” he replied, sheepishly.

  Melinda seemed wistful, perhaps realizing this was a pivotal moment for her son. Wil was going to go one way or the other, she probably thought. Either he’d make the conscious choice to retain his childhood innocence and bring his wonderful imagination to bear, or he’d reject the notion of belief entirely and move through life in an entirely different direction altogether. She kissed her little boy and hugged him tightly. “Never forget,” she told him. “Your eyes only see what your mind lets you believe.” And for some strange reason, she had a small tear in the corner of her eye when she said it.
/>
  With that, Dad came down from upstairs to take Wil off to school. He and Mom kissed each other goodbye, and Dad told her to be careful at work, just like he always did.

  Wil watched through the back window of his dad’s sensible car that morning, and as Mom receded in the distance, he somehow knew with absolute certainty that this would be the last time he’d ever see her. He carried a sense of dread with him the entire day at school, and for some unknown reason he fiddled with the English penny and spun it on his desk innumerable times until the school bus came. Only later that evening did Wil realize that instinctively, he’d known his heart was emptying of all its joy. It became clear the moment the school bus turned the corner on his street and he saw the cop cars outside on his driveway.

  * * *

  WIL ENTERED his office in much the same mood as he’d left it. Thoughts of that terrible day long ago always sent him back to a dark and empty place, and this morning was no exception. The police had come to inform his dad that Melinda Morgan was tragically atomized during an experiment involving 17 trillion megawatts that had reversed the Earth’s polarity for a period of almost two nanoseconds. No trace of a body was ever found, such was the intensity of the explosion at the laboratory. Since that fateful day, Dad had never forgiven himself. Neither had he forgiven Mom for leaving him alone, nor the entire universe for taking away the one person he had ever truly loved, and whom he now needed more than ever before.

  Wil’s junky old answering machine blinked an insistent red. The contents of his desk and most of his shelves had been disturbed over the course of the weekend. His stapler had vibrated all the way across his desk until it was touching the pencil sharpener, and three of his pencils had fallen on the floor altogether. Wil’s little air freshener had left a trail in the dust as it had magically wandered from one side of a shelf to the other since the last time he’d seen it on the previous Friday. Wil growled; he knew this was the work of no ghostly agency. Far from it: this constant shifting of his office contents had a very simple, terrestrial explanation. Sighing heavily, he picked up the stack of letters that Mr. Whatley had thrust through his mail slot over the weekend, and he jettisoned the entire pile into the trash. He knew he’d fetch them out a little later in the day but for the moment it felt good to toss all of his overdue bills and pretend he had the power to do so.

  Propped up against the wall stood a moth-eaten package—roughly fifty inches long—that represented an ongoing battle of wills between Wil Morgan, the universe in general, and corporate America in particular. It contained an unwanted item that Wil had neither ordered nor even considered ordering, but that had been shipped to his work address on multiple occasions nonetheless: the Marcus James Air-Max 2000 golf club. On the first occasion it had arrived, Wil had duly shipped the driver back to its manufacturer and thought little more of it. The package had subsequently been reshipped to Wil’s office a total of seventeen times before he’d succumbed to the stress and made a phone call to the Air-Max 2000’s corporate office. Arrangements had been made with the help of yet another indifferent sales associate—presumably, an ex-employee of Mug O’ Joe’s—and the item had been returned for the eighteenth time. However, this had the effect of generating an alarming number of increasingly threatening bills, statements, and notices from collection agencies seeking the total cost of the driver, plus shipping, handling, interest, and apparently a subscription to the entire Marcus James Gleemodent toothpaste and clothing catalogue. Within days, the package had mysteriously reappeared just inside his door, thanks no doubt to the ever-diligent Mr. Whatley. And so for the last two years, Wil had held on to the item, still inside its crumbling packaging. In the meantime, the product had been redesigned and reintroduced as the “new and improved” (and slightly more expensive) Air-Max 3000. These days, Wil tended to add the occasional demand letters for the club’s purchase price to his regular discard pile. The only loser in this situation was the poor Air-Max 2000, well past its prime and sadly lagging behind the times, destined never to hit the fairways of the professional tour.

  Wil looked at the frosted-glass door to his office. From his vantage point, the lettering on the glass read, ROTAGITSEVNI ETAVIRP—NAGROM LIW. Underneath this, in smaller letters and clearly legible from his side of the room, was written the legend DIVORCE AND INSURANCE CASES OUR SPECIALTY. This odd mix of betwixt and between presented an obvious problem, for no matter which side of the door a person stood on, at least one of the lines read completely backward. Wil sighed heavily again, as he always did whenever he considered how much he’d paid a local glass etcher for that particular piece of promotional genius. He wondered for the thousandth time how many potential clients had been put off by his obvious lack of organizational prowess, and settled on “not very many” since they’d have to be crazy to come all the way up to the nineteenth floor of the Castle Towers.

  * * *

  BEING A private investigator, especially one specializing in divorce and insurance fraud, was a far cry from the splendiferous blueprint Wil had originally drawn up for his life. As a child, Wil had planned to follow a unique and spectacular career path, narrowing down his options to one of few possibilities: (1) a hedgehog doctor, (2) developer of the world’s first fruit-flavored wallpaper, (3) designer of the personal matter transmitter, or (4) quite possibly all of the above. He’d later settled upon just plain “inventor of stuff.” That was, of course, until he reached the 207th day of his tenth year of existence.

  After Mom died, the house was a very quiet place for a very long time. Then one day without warning, Wil’s father had decided to sit him down and explain How Things Were Going To Be From Now On. Things were going to be very different.

  As far as Barry Morgan was concerned, Melinda’s fertile imagination and her penchant for electrocuting things were the cause of her demise. While the second of these things was quite possibly true, the logic of the first part escaped Wil entirely. For all of his life, he’d been encouraged to use his imagination, to grow as a person, to see the magic hidden in plain sight all around the world. Well, his dad told him, this was going to change. For one thing, there was no such thing as magic. For another, looking for answers in difficult places had proven to be a dangerous fool’s errand that could only end in atomization and subsequent tears.

  “You can’t live your life like a firework,” Barry had explained to his son. “Fireworks explode, and they usually take a few fingers and eyeballs with them. You’re better off staying rooted to the ground and watching other people flame out.”

  After that nugget of wisdom, Dad had made Wil listen for three hours as he explained about the difference between imagination and reality. He’d told Wil the shocking truth about Santa, explained the economics of safety, and drilled into Wil that magic was always a trick. Always.

  Young Wil had been resistant to his dad’s new world order at first. He would secretly build little inventions out of cardboard, and whenever Dad was out of the house he’d leaf through Mom’s old science magazines. When his father found out, the magazines were thrown out with the trash. Blueprints and cardboard were subsequently and consequently forbidden from the house.

  One day, Wil came home early from school to find his dad sitting alone in front of the fire, clutching a photo of his mom. Dad was crying but when Wil moved to intercept, Barry gruffly pretended he was coming down with a cold, or something. What became clear from that experience—it was something that Wil would never forget—was that his dad had lost the thing most dear to him the day he had lost his beautiful and beloved wife. The only thing Barry Morgan now cherished—his only connection to Melinda—was his son, Wil. And it would be a cold day in a hot place before he ever lost his boy to the same fate that had claimed his wife.

  Over time, Dad’s constant needling about the perils of possessing an imagination and believing in things wore on his son. Harsh reality seemed to triumph more frequently over flights of fancy. Dad was never so proud nor relieved as the day Wil chose calculus over art in hig
h school. He helped Wil choose a proper accounting college and set him up with a bankable IRA, which could only be cashed in without penalty once Wil reached the oh-so-safe age of fifty-five without being atomized in a terrible accident. To this day, Barry Morgan had absolutely no idea that his son had chosen a relatively perilous career in insurance fraud detection over a more sensible path through the safe and steady world of chartered accounting.

  * * *

  WIL TOOK the old English penny from his pocket and spun it on the table. As it wandered across the desk, he found himself staring at the blinking red light of his outdated answering machine. He’d promised himself on many occasions that he’d buy a service provided by the telephone company that took messages at a remote location and kept them for him to retrieve from the system whenever he chose. Alas, he could not afford such a luxury, and so his primitive system was his only option. On the rare occasions the telephone actually rang, Wil half-expected the 1980s to be on the other end of the line, asking for their old answering machine back. His machine was rotten, quirky, and quite possibly possessed by demons. It seemed to delight in switching on and off at the most inopportune times. It recorded messages either at a whisper or trapped beneath hideous feedback that sounded like something out of the early Apollo missions. Worst of all, it worked perfectly only when the message being left belonged to a debt collector, auto-dialer, telemarketer, or recorded message from a local politician trying to spread dirt about his or her political opponent.