Wait a moment, let me fetch some tea.
*Right. If you’ve been following my adventures, you might recall that a few months ago I had the temerity to resign from my Creative Director position at Harvard Medical School, after which I fled the country, almost immediately going to Spain for fear that I might fall prey to a moment of good judgment and thus go slinking back.
Over in Spain I holed up in the house of my Spanish hermano Paco and there I spent the days working on The Harvard Skull Fiasco.
I had liked being a Creative Director. I don’t know why mental health professionals had warned me against ever taking a position of authority because I found it quite bracing. A few things had bothered me, like Harvard’s strict rules about not throwing furniture at the people who report to you, no matter how much they might have it coming to them, but any job from which you leave of your own accord instead of being carted out by security can be chalked up as a success in my mind.
Look I made up the part about consulting mental health professionals - I make things up sometimes, please don’t worry, I am still perfectly sane, if not dangerously so – an accomplishment of which others who have labored for more than seven years inside the Harvard bureaucracy might be unable to boast.
But I left Spain after a month and returned to my little house in Cambridge, and rescued my dog from the company of her cousins Monty and Zola, with whom she has a love-hate relationship - by which I mean that they love her and she hates them. My dog was pleased to see me, but let it be known that she was seriously irked about being sent off to stay with relatives while I was swanning around Europe without her. My dog is named Chloe, and she is a proud, regal creature who often seems irked by things. She’s irked at me right now as a matter of fact; her eyes are regarding me with cool disdain due to her having overheard the word ‘walk’ in conversation an hour ago, about which she has now, independently, concluded must have been complete bullshit.
My house is small, as I mentioned, and, because it is mine, I will describe it as rustic and leave a full description to your imagination. It has a nice central stairwell under a skylight, and I like that, though that stairway, which leads up to the Dojo of Deprivation, is perilous and unsafe, and one of these days is going to collapse. So if Wrongcards ever goes very strange one day, it’s because the stairway collapsed and took me with it, and Byron has inherited the site, in which case I hope you will all remember me fondly.
Upon my return to Cambridge I decided it was high-time to deal with the rat problem. My basement wall is a crumbling mess of a thing, so it doesn’t pose any real inconvenience to the local rodent community who have been using the place as a sort of community hall for the past six months. Now, I like rats slightly less than I like clowns, and it pains me to admit that the regional director of the rat community, whom I call The Rat Captain, is the approximate size of a small goat. I wouldn’t like to go down there without half a bottle of rum in my system, which is why it’s such a pity I haven’t touched the stuff in years. I would never say I was afraid of rats, but only because I know that women sometimes read this blog and if my Nanna taught me anything it’s that emotional topics like fear, dread and uncertainty are not suitable subjects for a man to mention in the company of ladies unless he enjoys being smacked about the ears.
I did manage to catch one of the chief rat’s lieutenants though. Being somewhat, er, large, he wore the rat trap around his neck as an ornament and carried on with his regular duties, while I sat up here with my arms around my knees shaking for an hour. So I called up Byron, who I’ve already told you about, and he came over to lend a hand.
Again, I’m from rural Australia; I’m a bloke, and what’s more, the ladies often have told me that there’s something distinctly piratey about the cut of my jib. I suppose that the fact I have a constitution that is impervious to alcohol, and that I’m the veteran of three or four dozen fist-fights, has accustomed me to swaggering through life with the confidence of a retired buccaneer. But the thought of going down into my basement did something strange to me.
In short, my mind would stop working altogether.
I don’t know why I make things like this.
I’d approach the door and stand there and forget why I was there, and then go and sit down and have a nice cup of tea. Then I’d remember the Rat Lieutenant and his grisly rat-trap necklace, and I’d approach the door again. Then brain waves would collapse and I’d find myself sitting in the kitchen wondering how I’d gotten there. I had no idea if I’d been to the basement these past two months because even if I am able to force my body to get near the basement door, my brain refuses to go with me. But I was certain I’d gone down to the basement this very day, because I was dimly aware of the Rat Lieutenant’s necklace. My mind was just being uncooperative. An act of self-preservation, I suppose. I called Byron’s cell phone and said: ‘help’ and hung up.
So, as I was saying, when Byron turned up I just looked at him in a stricken sort of way; I suppose I was unable to put words into sentences. I pointed at the basement door and made a gurgling sound, I think, and did a lot of shaking of my head. Then I said the word: ’nup’ about a dozen times and stared at him in a pleading sort of way.
So down he went, and then he came back half a minute later.
“Maybe you should get a cat.”
“Byron, you know very well that those rats would eat the cat the moment it set a paw down there.”
Byron agreed and he thought about it for a while, and then he said: “What if it was a bobcat?”
I didn’t know what a bobcat was (I mentioned I was from Australia, right?) so I went and looked it up. Then I came back and said: “Only if the bobcat had had some sort of combat experience.”
Byron agreed with me, and we sat about trying to work out how to rent a bobcat. Ideally, we wanted a bobcat with a few battles behind it, a veteran bobcat with a few scars and a glass eye and a tendency to brood about old friends who had died at his side in places he could never bring himself to speak about.
“This is like a role-playing game,” said Byron. “You know how the first quest is usually like, clearing out a basement filled with giant rats?”
“You’re right, what we need is a wandering hero.”
“In this case, that wandering hero will need to be a level 25 sorcerer.”
“Well look, it can’t be me, man,” I told him. “My brain keeps resetting whenever I approach the door.”
Then Byron surprised me. No, he amazed me. He said, “Alright, I’ll go and do what I can.”
So, he went down into the basement. I stood at the top of the stairs, listening. I heard him reach the lower level, his footsteps crunching over the rotten timber floor into the dirt. It’s a really primitive place down there. The rat community has even taken to carving crude murals, dark depictions of religious rites along the lower walls; all very sinister and best left uninvestigated by scholars if you ask me.
I stood trying to listen over the beating of my heart. Then I had a thought. I turned and tiptoed into the kitchen and came back with a kitchen knife and stood there waiting. If Byron accidentally provoked the Rat Lieutenant into single combat, it might come upstairs, covered in Byron’s blood, and looking for vengeance. Perhaps I could swing my knife at it before my heart stopped of its own accord.
Ten minutes passed, I think. I wanted to call out to him, but I didn’t want to startle anything down there. Finally, I heard Byron’s soft tread on the stair. He was holding something with two hands. My vision went grey around the edges. I tried to speak, and then there was nothing.
A little while later Byron was squatting alongside me, prodding my neck with his fingers and asking me absurd questions about my will, and powers of attorney, and that sort of thing. I was on the floor, leaning against the lower stair of my stairwell, just by the basement door, which was now firmly shut.
“I must have dozed off,” I said. “What happened?”
“I got it.”
“You got what?”
“That Rat Lieutenant. I took it outside a moment ago and –”
“You released it there?” I uttered, feeling a rising horror. The fool! By now the creature would be in the basement and drawing its dark plans against us.
“No, no. I took it into the backyard and … you probably don’t want to hear this.”
“Tell me,” I croaked.
“I crushed its skull with a brick.”
I have known this man for fourteen years; he’s a mild-mannered, gentle sort of pacifist, a vegetarian who’s always getting upset over man’s inhumanity to man. This is the first time he had ever done anything I could not anticipate. See, though many blunder through life being confused about the people around them, I’ve always made a point of ransacking the minds of my friends for a deeper understanding of them. I think it’s because I don’t like being surprised. And when you know somebody well and you have a complete comprehension of that landscape we call their inner-life, then you can actually get them to do things for you.
So you can imagine how unsettled I felt. I knew Byron quite well – I was always tricking him into making me tea. It was news to me that he was, deep down, a stone-cold killer.
“Byron,” said I, “I am reminded of the great warrior Auda Abu Tayi, who led members of the Huwaytat tribe of Bedouin Arabs to victory over the Turks during the First World War. He said, I am a river to my people. I’m sure I must remind you of him.”
He said nothing.
“Because I am obviously a river to my people,” I continued, glancing at him with annoyance. “And as you know, from the moment you first met me, your life has improved. Frankly, when I met you, you seemed a bit of a wet blanket. Then, a few days later I saw you passing by the window, and I decided to throw a potato at you, to see how you’d react. You looked so lost and helpless, so I decided what you needed most of all – apart from people not throwing potatoes at you – was a friend like myself. And so, I’ve been improving your life ever since.”
He looked nettled.
“I’ve got you jobs. I’ve arranged opportunities with beautiful women that you’ve spectacularly failed to follow through with - but we both know that you have struggled through this past decade, weighed down by an awareness of being profoundly in my debt. But that’s what it means to be my friend, I suppose."
“I think I’ll make some tea,” he said.
I’ll admit it. This moved me. “Tea would be good, thank you. Anyway,” I called out to him as he fussed in the kitchen, “though I rescued you from a boring, untroubled life, and have engaged you as an accomplice on all sorts of capers – "
“Like when you got us arrested in Poland?,” he said, from the kitchen.
“I got myself arrested in Poland. You were merely the unhelpful bystander – which I’ve never held against you, so I don’t know why you’re mentioning it. I am scertain that, in a parallel universe, there is an Alternate Byron who was not struck by a potato, because Alternate Me somehow overlooked him, and that Byron is living a hapless life now, married and beset by the mortgages and responsibilities, which I have spared you over the years, via quiet intervention on my part –”
“Is that what’s been happening?” he asked – rhetorically, I suppose. He does have a sense of humor.
“Well, my point is that today, whatever obligations you may have justly felt toward me are at an end. We are square.”
“At last,” he said, returning with a cup of tea and setting it down on the lower stair by my elbow.
“For today,” I repeated.
Byron sighed. “Well, who knows what will happen tomorrow?”
“You know what? I really have to fix this stair.”
“I don’t know, it lends an air of precariousness to the house.”
“Maybe I should fix the basement wall then,” I thought out-loud.
“I think you’d better. I’m not certain, but I think one of those rats saw my face.”
“I’ll get it fixed,” I decided.
And this is why I have not been writing my book for the past two months; I’ve been web-developing. It’s not the way I saw myself spending the autumn of 2013, but you haven’t seen the rats. A friend at Stanford offered me a job two weeks ago, and I declined in order to keep working on The Harvard Skull Fiasco. My decision to write stories is already costing me quite a lot of money.
Where will it all end, I often wonder. We live in troubled times, and the world does not seem to be hurtling into a happier, more prosperous era. I hope this decision of mine – to not go work in Silicon Valley – is a good one. Because there are rats hosting satanic parties in the basement and I have a crumbling wall, and the Staircase of Peril leading up to the Dojo of Deprivation that needs fixing. These problems need money flung at them. Well, I guess I’d better get back to work.
With Chaste Affection,
Kris St.Gabriel
