My mood continued to sink after my encounter with Horus. I felt the way I used to as a child, having gotten into a fight with my then-brother, the almost physical sense of shrinking that took over after the pleasure of landing a good insult had faded. It didn’t help that my mouth was still bothering me, and that I felt vaguely sick all over as well, as though I’d pulled an all-nighter and was only just beginning to pay for it.
Washing-up done, I placed the plate back in the cabinet and headed for the bathroom in my sock feet. Water seeped into my socks from a puddle in front of the sink that somebody hadn’t dried. I stood at the mirror and unspooled a foot of floss. Leaning forward, I inspected my teeth and ran the floss between them a few times.
I thought I felt a little better. I rinsed my mouth and face with water. A few muffled thumps came from Calf’s room as I passed it, as though she were moving her furniture or stacking books. I slowed, held my ear closer to the door, but heard no further.
Once in my own room, I traded my wet socks for dry and pulled my typewriter from its case beside my desk. The keys on the Olivetti Valentine don’t have the same solid, businesslike thunk of the Lettera 22’s or the softer, deeper, industrial feel of the 35L, and the make is arguably worse overall. But I’ll admit, when I stopped at Goldmeat’s for my typewriter six years ago now, the sight of the Valentines in a glittering semicircle at the window took me hook and sinker.
The Valentine was what I used to call metaphysically symmetrical. There was a handle loop on the back end of it which went into its rectangular body, and the keyboard stuck out in a way that suggested another handle on the front. It felt as though, having taken the Valentine from its outer case, you could theoretically grip the keys and open it again from that side to find another handle on the reverse, and so on perhaps forever, providing you had the expertise. It was an enigmatic piece of engineering.
If I had to pick again, I might have decided differently, but I loved my Valentine.
A sheet slotted against the platen, I sat patiently thinking. A squirrel or a raccoon or a rat or something lived in the attic. The sound of its skittering ran from one end of my room to the other. I became fascinated by the sight of my breath in the air, then by the brightness of the sky outside. I shut the blinds.
I was feeling sicker the longer I sat. The maroon reflection of my face in the shiny plastic of the typewriter looked irritable and deformed. I rubbed my face. My legs wouldn’t stop moving, and my mouth was feeling more and more uncomfortable. It felt now as though there were a hair or a few of them between my teeth, as though a shred of floss had come untwined and stuck there. The harder I tried to focus on my writing—or the lack thereof—the more difficult the sensation in my mouth grew to ignore.
I felt in my mouth with my fingers and found nothing. Then I took out my notebook of ideas to see if I couldn’t just start somewhere. Every idea seemed dull and lifeless. I typed randomly:
The girl was afraid
Start with an emotion, then make people care. I wracked my brain: what girl? What did she fear? El Chupacabra? Demons? I continued with
of her own death
and immediately felt stupid. Brilliant: mortals fear mortality. What an insight into the human psyche. I ripped the page from the typewriter, slotted it into my notebook’s overstuffed Bad Ideas pocket, jabbed a new sheet in the platen, and tried again.
The girl was hopeful.
That was even limper.
Whatever the sensation in my mouth was, it was only getting worse. The itch had intensified, now bordering on straight-up pain. With a frustrated sigh, I rose to return to the bathroom. It sounded like Calf was in an argument with someone on the telephone this time as I passed. I leaned over the sink, careful not to step in the puddle, and opened my mouth.
A shock ran through me. Across my tongue was a thin layer of fluid the color of eggwhite. It crawled and curled like heat waves off a hot car, continually in motion, flowing outward as I exhaled and sucking back in as I inhaled, then wriggling up like a candle fire and then back down, seemingly at random.
For a few seconds I stood, first simply confused and then filling with panic. I lurched back from the sink in horror. I slipped in the spilt water and slid to the floor with the heaviness of a drunk. A massive thud of pain burst on the back of my head. As I felt myself slipping from consciousness, I noticed with an odd jolt of clarity—the sort of focus with which people at gunpoint zero in on a pistol’s barrel—that someone had taped a note to the underside of the medicine cabinet:
Skinner foster Queen of psychopomps Was Sent to the light Unwilling
My consciousness flashed with the same blankness it had in the morning, the sucking sensation of water pulled off the sand toward a wave.
I was back at my desk. It felt less like I had backtracked in time—as I might have expected from, say, waking out of a dream—and more like I had simply appeared there, as though I’d concluded whatever it was I was doing in the bathroom and proceeded with the last meaningful state I’d been occupying.
Skinner foster Queen of psychopomps Was Sent to the light Unwilling
The fragment blinked in my vision like the afterimage of a lightbulb. I replaced the sheet reading The girl was hopeful with a fresh one. On the new paper I typed out the sentence.
Skinner Foster, queen of the psychopomps, went unwilling into the light.
My mouth was still burning. The blind on my window was back open, and before I continued, I rose to lower it. The sky was a misty pink-gray. Through the clouds just above the horizon, the sun’s aura was like a wet patch on paper, red as a throat, red as the typewriter resting on my desk.
I lowered the blind, sat in the half-light and wrote.
I had heard of people “getting it all out” in their writing, or “bleeding onto the page,” or any number of other phrases to represent writing your feelings away, but until I had finished that day, I had never experienced it myself. Ordinarily, what I produce takes meticulous planning, time, energy to exhaustion; now, I had written six full pages, fluently and easily as breathing. The story was an unexpected one, distinct from my regular style, but as I reread it afterward, I found myself proud of it. There was a girl named Skinner Foster; there was a faceless, grasping corporation named White Sky; they had, through fine print in a contract she’d unknowingly signed, forced her into a space flight to explore some unknown cosmic entity which had appeared in distant orbit behind the moon. I wasn’t sure yet about the queen of the psychopomps bit, but the story was leading the way, and I was more than pleased to let it.
At the very least, having written my story, the horrible sensation in my mouth had passed. I couldn’t tell how much of my giddiness was due to my creative breakthrough and how much was due to not feeling like shit, but I’d take it either way.
Stretching my arms and taking the last sheet from the typewriter, I became very aware of my hunger. In good humor I returned to the kitchen, set a couple of eggs boiling. The day was bright, and I was hopeful. I’d finish my story, send it off somewhere (where? I didn’t know yet), and who knew—perhaps someone would read it, find it worthwhile, and get back to me. I knew too much of the industry to think I’d be an overnight hit, but nothing written meant nothing read, and this was a first step.
The saucepan was bubbling when Calf entered the kitchen again. She looked even tireder than she had earlier. Her eyes were red. She was still in her robe.
“You’re still in here?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Good.” She stared at me pointedly.
My egg timer had only a couple of minutes left on it. “I’ll be out soon,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said, sighing. “I’m not feeling it today. Migraine.” Steam rose from the sink as she splashed the rest of her coffee into it. She leaned against the counter with a far-off stare.
“Ever done something you regret?” she asked.
I reflected. “Probably.”
“Probably. Yeah. Okay.”
Just when the silence had gone on a little too long, she burst out: “Actually, you know what I don’t get? This.” She gestured with her head toward the steam still rising from her poured-out coffee. “Look at this shit.”
I glanced at the steam, unsure what it was she wanted me to see.
“Look at it. Ice cold and still steaming.” She breathed out a short, sharp breath, and the cloud of it mingled with the coffee vapor. “Do you have any idea how cold it has to be for something like that to steam?”
“How cold?” I asked.
“Fucking very.”
I nodded.
“Is this, I dunno, something you just can’t be bothered with?” she asked. It sounded like an insult.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“Of course you don’t. Of course you don’t. But that’s fine, you probably have regrets.” Her eyes were hard and unkind.
“Excuse me?”
She rubbed her face wearily. “I don’t feel good,” she said again. Another pause, and then her face set again. “No, I feel fine actually, and I’m not actually sorry.” She licked her lips and began to gather momentum. “I’m not sorry, because of course you don’t get it, because poor, dumb Horus, who has three jobs, if you didn’t know that, pays for all your shit, and you’re not the one whose wages go to keeping the house, you know, not warm at all, even though the electric bill is through the fucking roof, because you—the pragmatist, or whatever shitty, no-meaning phrase you use to make yourself feel better about being a freeloader—you can’t be bothered with doing anything. And meanwhile Our Father—“ she broke off, drew her teeth together, spat her next words out like spent dieselchews: “Our Father, the fucking whip-sniffing old ragweed—“
My egg timer went off, rattling obnoxiously into the space between Calf’s curses.
With a jerk, Calf seized it and hurled it at the floor. It exploded into fragments of plastic and aluminum. Its tiny bell shot across the linoleum and, with a sharp tinkling noise, it collided with the floor-to-ceiling window behind the kitchen table.
A huge crack spiderwebbed upward across the glass. At its base, where the bell had gone through, was a little spot like a bullethole, and through the hole, the February wind whistled.
I stared at the window. From deep in the house, back somewhere in the boiler room, the break-in siren which Our Father had warned us doubled as a property-damage alarm began to whirr, muffled through the walls.
I looked at Calf in horror. Her face was impassive. She walked slowly—very slowly—to the cabinet, took a cup, filled it with water, took a couple of sips.
“Fuck you, Garland,” she said, suddenly calm. “I’m going to bed.”
The Executors were already on their way.