It was an insurmountable, frustrated weariness that I felt, tasked with having to introduce Foster to Calf and explain even a fraction of what had gone on that morning. It was like pressing the estimation button on a road trip as a child, waiting for the printer to blip and buzz its way along, and ripping off the little sheet, only to read, say, 6HRS 58MINS on the receipt paper and fling yourself back against the headrest in desperation.
Calf was sensible and usually smart; I had to give her that. Given the credibility I’d built up til then—I fancied it was considerable—if I gave her a beat-for-beat description of the morning, she’d be forced to either believe me or assume I’d finally lost it. There wasn’t a practical alternative. I wasn’t sure which was worse.
It was all very vexing. I felt a little nauseated, and more than a little hungover—odd; I hadn’t actually drunk for weeks—and I didn’t want to parse it all. The ambient light in the room was too bright, too pale. I wanted to sleep.
“Shit’s sake,” Foster said. “Guess I’ll do the introducing.” She gave a little circular wave toward Calf. “Hello, hello,” she said. “I’m Foster. Garland knows me. Sorry for breaking in. Although it’s not technically breaking in if you’re with a resident, is it? Is there a term for that?” She paused suddenly, staring into the middle distance, then proceeded at the same blazing pace as before. “Yes. Of courrse. Entering. Anyhow, you can call me Foster, or if you prefer—actually, never mind, just Foster is good.”
She stepped forward and offered her hand to Calf.
“Damn,” Calf said. She grinned. “I’m Calf.” She holstered her spoon in her bowl with a clink and shook Foster’s outstretched hand.
“Right then,” Foster said. “Mind one of you showing me around? Or both. Wait. The clock.” She pivoted toward me. “Your bedroom, that’s right. One second; I’ll be back.”
She zipped off down the hallway. “Chat amongst yourselves,” she said over her shoulder.
Calf turned to me. “I like her,” she said. “Why’s she here?”
“I thought you had a headache.”
“I do. Doesn’t mean your friend’s not cool.”
It was frustrating, for some reason, both that Calf could see my fictional character at all and that they’d taken to each other so, or at least that Calf had taken to her—I didn’t have enough of a read on Foster to tell what she thought of Calf.
“She’s not my friend,” I said. I shut up then, feeling the same irritated weariness from earlier. It wasn’t worth trying to argue about it.
“Whatever,” Calf said. She shrugged, still grinning.
“I’m just saying if you really have a headache I’d think she’d make it worse,” I prodded.
“You’re awfully mean today,” Calf said, taking a bite of cereal and talking between chews. “Have you thought about maybe, I don’t know, not being that way?”
Before I could answer—not that I was going to—Foster was back.
“Just as I thought,” she said. “Noon-oh-four. Now. Show me around?”
“Don’t see why not,” Calf said, looking at me briefly and then back at Foster. “What is it you’re here for?”
“Everything, if you would, please,” Foster said. “I’m just fact-gathering at the moment. We’ll talk as we go. Sound good? Great. Lead the way.”
“Sure,” Calf said. She was looking more and more amused.
Why was Calf acting like this, so open and friendly? She was terse—unkind, even—with me, but here she was welcoming a complete stranger into a house tour. My head was beginning to ache worse, down at the base of my neck.
“Am I allowed to come?” I asked, putting a touch of hurt into my voice.
“Nobody said otherwise,” Calf said.
I joined them.
“Where’s Horus?” I asked.
“Left an hour ago,” Calf replied. “Like he always does.” She focused back on Foster. “This is the entryway. Down there’s the bedrooms, which I think you’ve already seen; the other side goes to the kitchen.”
“Perfectly normal house, then,” Foster mused, taking off for the kitchen. “Guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. What about you all? Who’s Horus?”
“Our other housemate,” I said. “He works at the sorters’.”
“He’s a musician,” Calf said.
“And you’re siblings?”
“No,” I said. Calf could explain if she felt like it.
“We met at school. Both writers. We figured it’d be a brilliant plan to move in together, all three of us, so we could share living expense—all three of us.” I didn’t look at her, but I could feel her eyes on me.
“Interesting,” Foster said. Her eyes flicked from me to Calf and back again.
We crossed the boundary between the fake wood in the entryway and the linoleum in the kitchen. In the kitchen, the light from the window—the one Calf had cracked before—spilled in, brilliant and blooming and strangely thick, piling up against the baseboards as though it were a gel. Given the absence of the two Executors and Calf’s altered behavior, I peered into the light to see if the crack in the window was still there. I didn’t see anything, but whether it was from the blindingness of the light outside or the crack not being there I couldn’t tell.
“This is the kitchen,” Calf announced, even though it was obvious. She spun around once with her bowl outstretched. A couple of plashes of milk splatted on the ground.
“I’ll get that, if you’re not planning on cleaning your mess up,” I said helpfully.
Calf glared at me.
“Here’s the thing,” Foster said. She looked into the mug cabinet and surveyed the mugs in it. “I’m here, and I shouldn’t be here. That means I have to understand: why is it that I’m here when I shouldn’t be? Or, should I be? And I’m merely thinking I shouldn’t?” She paused again. “Meanwhile Garland has been less than helpful, so I figured a quick once-over of the surroundings wouldn’t hurt,” she concluded.
Calf took another bite of her cereal. “Indeed,” she said, nodding and chewing in a ruminative sort of way.
“I know this one,” Foster said sharply. She picked up one mug, a dark blue printed with scarlet blackletter that read THE GRIND DOES NOT EVER STOP—NO, NOT ONCE; NOT EVER. “I’ve seen it before. Where did you get it? Whose is it?”
“Oh,” said Calf with a quick laugh. “That’s Horus’s for the month. He grabs a new one each month secondhand as a guiding prophecy or a goal or something. I inherit it when he’s done. Saves me having to buy them, and they’re usually pretty funny.”
“Hm. Perhaps not, then.”
It was comical, the way Foster stood there as though she were some grand interdimensional detective, clutching Horus’s stupid mug like it was a priceless clue. The mug’s lettering was atrociously tacky, the red-on-blue forming vibrating edges that, as I stood there, seemed to pop out from the already too-bright lighting in the room and worsen my headache. And nobody used blackletter typefaces anymore—or, I suppose, Gothic miniscule, to be accurate—not unless they were actively aiming for kitsch.
I tuned them out. My eyes fell on the egg timer Calf had broken in her rage that morning. It was sitting now, unbroken, on the counter next to the saucepan I’d boiled my eggs in—the eggs Calf had eaten.
If the egg timer wasn’t broken and the window wasn’t, what else hadn’t happened in this version of events, after I’d returned from the cavern? Had Calf not gone through with her whole unfounded outbreak at all? Was that why she was pissed at me—unexpressed anger bubbling under the surface? It pleased me a little to think of the idea, that I knew how Calf felt without her knowing I knew.
Foster replaced the mug on the shelf and Calf led us toward the garage, the door to which branched off opposite the kitchen window.
Foster trailed behind, walking beside me. “Why do you keep doing that?” she asked.
“What?” I said, and, saying it, realized half of my left hand was in my mouth, scratching at the surface of my tongue. I took it out.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
I looked at my hand. There was a pink tint to the saliva on it. I looked around for a paper towel and found none, so I stood there with it half-outstretched from me.
“Your mouth bothering you?” Foster asked.
“No,” I said, realizing at the same minute that it was. My irritation at her grew. If she hadn’t drawn attention to it, I would’ve been fine, but now I could feel it, and I couldn’t stop feeling it: an itching sensation between my teeth combined with a dull burning, like someone tickling a blister. I pressed my tongue against the back of my teeth hard.
She didn’t look convinced. We followed Calf through the door.
“Garage,” Calf said, flicking on the light. The room filled with a dim ambience. “Garland, could you put a new bulb in sometime?” She clicked the flat button next to the light switch and the overhead door began to hitch itself upward.
The air grew colder as the pressure changed. The hi-hat on Horus’s drumset clanked gently.
We threaded through the plastic bags and the empty crates that filled the garage floor. Outside, the sky was gray-white, the cloud cover complete as it usually was. A chilly wind rattled the branching bones of the post-oaks and sent a couple of dead leaves skittering along the driveway with a noise like sand. I shifted from one foot to the other, uncomfortable under the daylight.
“You’re bleeding,” Calf said. “You’ve got blood around your mouth.”
“I’m alright,” I said, with rising anger. I found myself inexplicably longing for the warm, dry cavern through the portal in the bathroom, the gentle red light and the stillness which were worlds away from the bleak surface out here. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
“You’re not alright,” Calf said. “Your mouth is literally dripping blood. Come on. Let’s get you inside.”
“Don’t fucking tell me what to do,” I spat. My tongue hurt to talk. I slapped at her hand, leaving a little smudge of blood on the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
“Whoah,” Calf said, taking a step backward. “What the hell’s wrong with you.” She said it like more of a statement—an accusation—than a real question.
Foster’s eyes bored into me. I backed up a little, under the shade of the garage overhang.
“You’ve both been sniping at me all fucking morning. Let me the fuck alone.” The daylight was oppressive, blinding. I couldn’t see. The sunlight that made it through the clouds had piled up in dunes along the driveway, or seemed to have, and the outlines of the trees wavered as I squinted at them. The whole world seemed to be wheeling around me without moving, like one of those wriggling optical illusions that move until you hold a ruler up to them.
My mouth was on fire. I felt a soft, rhythmic patter of drips on my shirt—blood—and wiped my lips again. I jammed my tongue against the roof of my mouth. It felt as though there were something inside me struggling to get out, something crawling its way upward through my throat. It was like I was holding some hideous spider cupped under my palm, terrified at every moment both of keeping it confined and of letting it out.
“I’m trying to help you,” Calf said, mounting worry in her voice. “You need help.”
“Like shit you are,” I said.
“We need to call someone. I’m gonna call someone.”
“This is good; this is good,” Foster said excitedly. “Not good, I mean, sorry—for sure I’m not intending to exult in your misfortune—but we’re getting somewhere, at least. Garland, could you describe what it is you’re feeling?”
I hated both of them, hated them with a thick, liquid hate—Calf’s passive aggression and mock-caring veneer, Foster’s frenetic controllingness and devil-may-care, flatlined semi-sociopathy. I couldn’t imagine what had drawn me to friendship with her in the first place. As for Foster, she was every moment obliterating the joy I’d taken in planning out her character, the sense of fascination and pleasure I’d been looking forward to in discovering how her story played out.
Gravel popped on the driveway as a nondescript automobile approached behind the two of them. I wildly hoped it would continue, crash into them—not kill them, of course, but at least hurt them. But they turned around as it drew near and stepped to the side, and the vehicle came to a smooth stop in the middle of us three.
Two figures extracted themselves in unison from the doors and straightened: a tall, hunched man in a cream peacoat and a shorter woman, unseasonably equipped with a sundress. The woman shaded her eyes and glanced back and forth between us.
I recognized them dimly, even in my raving, half-conscious state: Yarrow and Warfel, the Executors.
“Dear me,” Yarrow said. “I fear we’ve arrived at a bad time. But that’s life.”
Warfel’s face broke out into a gradual smile. “Indeed,” he said.