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callipraxia · 1 year

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The Unexpected Memoirs of Fiddleford H. McGucket: Chapter Two

Continuing from where we left off in Part I - have a Part II. The typographical errors in the first section are deliberate, reflecting Our Hero's confusion and alarm while writing it. "Denken mit der Hand" is German for "thinking with the hand," which is the slogan of Leuchtturn1917 notebooks, which are rather nice notebooks; I wrote the vast majority of FWJB in three of them I got on a really good sale once, so just a little shout-out there.

Again, the Prologue and Chapter One can be viewed here. That said, on with the...tale? As before, warnings for references to Fiddleford's OCD, and this time for very mild reference to the existence of sex.

Chapter Two

[A page of the manuscript is creased and stained, letters blurred in places from being handled before the ink dried fully. After the sentence “Stanford? Is that really you?” there is a meaningless series of keystrokes, ‘wekaqothwo[eknf[oaqnwooooejf,’ followed by heavy presence of scribbling, seemingly to conceal a mix of typed and handwritten text. Visible through these marks are variations on the word ‘no’ in different sizes and multiple repetitions of the statements ‘what did I say,’ ‘why,’ ‘I know what I know,’ ‘I’m sorry,’ and ‘God help me’ before meaningful content resumes near the bottom of the page]

Icol I couldn

It’s been a few days since i last worked on myremembering, and I spent them hiding out wherever I could. Couldnt stay still couldn’t rest anywhere not after what I wrote and how it just came into my head.

Stanford.

I suppose there could be two people who both cross paths with me, and they’re both named Stanford, and it’s their first name both times – but I can’t tell, because my brain is playing tricks on me. It has got to be my brain playing tricks on me, but as soon as I typed it, all at once – suddenly, I could see him like he was in front of me – this person I am remembering now, my Friend - in my head, and sure enough, he looked plenty like -

I know it’s insane. It’s got to be. My mind playing tricks on me. I don’t know the man personal or anything, but everybody around here knows all about Stan Pines. People are almost as sorry to see him coming as they are to see me! And, of course, we can’t go forgetting that time he smashed a baseball bat over my head. Though I was peering in the man’s windows at the time.

Why? Doesn’t make any sense. But then, what about my life has made sense in a long time? It seemed like I needed to keep an eye on him, so I did, at least until he knocked me upside the head and let me know he’d decapitate me with the same instrument the next time he found me lurking – though as I recall, he used a much longer sentence which contained a number of elegant terms and descriptions to embellish that idea, all of which I’d rather not repeat, as they were the kinds of things that do not look nice in print.

Because that’s just how Stan Pines is. He’s a big loud carnival man. No subtlety. He comes up with funny stories but he is not going to do the things I half-rememberst he things I have done, that we did, whatever they were. I’m just surprised he don’t chase me off from around the M.S. more often – cause I go there, and it’s like I know what’s real and what ain’t, at least as long as I stay in certain rooms, and I have no business going in the other rooms anyway. One time I did turn the wrong way and somehow end up in Stan’s kitchen and I pulled all the hair I had out and got started on my beard, just trying to get out of there, didn’t want to be in the kitchen, don’t like the kitchen, I was going to leave and then it was like nothing had ever happened and I didn’t know if it really happened did anything happen who wasn’t there I dont rememmbener

It isn’t possible. This person I remember – he can’t be Stan Pines. Stan Pines can’t be him. Something is wrong. I don’t know much to do about it but keep typing, though, and just use Stan’s name until I can think of something that makes more sense, because I can’t remember nothing just thinking about it in my brain like that’s any good. My brain’s no good. Side effects. Scars. Neuroplasticity. But when I just stop thinking and types, then the words just comes, the pictures in my head, the memories….Denken mit der Hand. The fingertips, anyway. It helps.

It isn’t possible. I didn’t work with no Stan Pines, and the Stan Pines I know of ain’t – what? A monster? A hallucination? He ain’t! He’s a real person and I am not going to do anything to him because that would be morally wrong. He exists and has nothing to do with me or monsters or whate ver happened. I’ll just use his name, though, as long as my hands wants to, and maybe figure it out when I can I don’t know what else I can do.

* * * * * * * *

“So lemme get this straight,” said Emma-May, putting the two plates in her hands down in front of each of us before she sat down on her chair at the table. “Some fella you haven’t seen since you were in college and haven’t heard from at all in years just...called you up out of a clear blue sky today, and he did this to offer you a job. Of being his assistant. Building what sounds like something out of Star Trail, and which even you say you wouldn’t have called more than mathematically possible before he said he was actually doing it. Does that pretty much cover it?”

Put that way, I had to admit, it did sound pretty absurd. Definitely way more absurd, anyway, than it had when I’d been the one saying it, and far, far crazier than when Stanford had pitched the idea to me.

“Pretty much, yep,” I said.

“And this genius recluse friend of yours wants you to come up north for months to work on this - and therefore for you go to for months at a time presumably never so much as laying eyes on me or your son?”

I glanced at the son in question. Tater, though, was occupied with cutting his green beans into smaller and smaller pieces and then arranging these pieces into patterns with the tip of his fork, and he did not seem to even notice me. I wondered if he’d even heard what his mama had said. I’d been...peculiar, as a child, no doubt about that, but even I thought Tate spent an awful lot of time seemingly lost in his own little world, busy with who knew what…

“Nobody ever said anything about any of us not seeing anybody else for no months at a time,” said I. “I reckon I can could visit onna weekends..." I considered what I remembered of Stanford's work habits. "Or at least the mail holidays," I prevaricated. "And maybe when school goes on break, you and Tater could come up to Oregon and see me a while. It would do the boy good to get some fresh air, I bet, and everybody who doesn’t already - “ by which, in theory, I meant Emma-May and Stanford – “could get to know each other.”

Emma-May cut her pork chop with deliberate, precise movements. “I’m not sure what good that would do me,” she said, “given how bad this man seems to be at keeping in touch with his so-called best friends. Dropping them for years and then calling ‘em up again only when it’s to his benefit.”

She said that with the same edge to her voice she had had when she was talking about how absurd the whole thing was, and I realized it wasn’t me she was mad at. Well, not entirely me, anyway. Probably to some degree me, being so impractical and all, but it seemed that some of her disapproval might be rooted in some kind of indignation on my behalf.

“Now, Emmy,” I said. “Don’t be like that.” I sighed and shook my head. “Truth be told, honey – until today, I’d half-figured that he was dead – we never talked much after college, long-distance charges, you know, but it was only two years ago he quit writing back if I sent him something now and then. I..." was too much of a coward to find out for sure. "I'm just glad nothing happened, apparently. I suppose genius must have its quirks.”

Emma-May’s mouth tightened up a bit, and I couldn’t tell if it was in annoyance or amusement as she looked back and forth between me and the boy for a moment. “I’ve noticed,” she said. “But you’ve always been able to get enough of a grip on yours, Fids, to do right by people regardless, so I don’t see why you’d excuse someone else for just dropping you for however many years without so much as a word. Much less that you’d do that and then - “

But she didn’t finish her sentence, just shaking her head as she cut her meat again. I frowned at her across the table.

“And then what?” I asked.

“When you were talking about him, trying to sell me on whatever craziness this is,” she said slowly, after another moment. “Your voice changed.”

I continued to frown, even more puzzled than I had been before. “It did? Like what?”

“Like it does when you’re trying to explain what’s so interesting about some dead British lady with a silly name who never even built a real computer, but somehow, she’s really important if you care anything about computers -.”

“You mean Ada Lovelace?” I considered this idea for a moment. “Hm. Well, I suppose Stanford is a brilliant theoretical thinker - “

“He must have been thinking of something mighty brilliant, to pull all this out of nowhere after two years in the middle of nowhere,” she said.

I put my fork down. “Your voice changed just now, Em,” said I. “And I know I’m not any good at telling, but to me, it sounded about half-like you thought I was lying about something, and you wanted me to know you thought it, but I’ve got no idea why you’d think that.”

“Lyin’ is bad,” announced Tate. He never looked up from the green beans, which were now shredded to a scale so small that it was hard to tell what they’d originally been.

“That’s right, it is,” said Emma-May. “And so is playing with your food, Tate. Eat your beans.”

“Waste not, want not,” I added sanctimoniously, not knowing what a hypocrite I was ultimately going to turn out to be.

Still, though – I hope my son took the lesson to heart, and not just because I had dallied with the environmental movement back in my day. It’s because my life has been a perfect example of what that saying means, one of the best I think I know of. What I wasted, after all, was the one thing you can’t ever make more of – that is to say, time. So much time – so many opportunities to be with my wife, with my son – to have any kind of life worth living. Wasted and wasted, and now I sit here, wanting and wanting, with no way to ever address the problem.

* * * * * * * *

“You really do want to do it, don’t you?” asked Emma-May.

We had dropped the subject of Stanford and his sudden offer at the table after we'd turned to the task of getting Tate to eat, and we had not picked it up again after supper. Now, it had been several hours, other subjects had been discussed since, and we had gone to bed, but I knew at once what she meant.

“I’d be lying if I said no,” I told her. Then, as she remained silent, I added, “I know how crazy it’s got to all sound to you, Em, but that’s just because you don’t know Stanford. You don’t know what he’s capable of. And if we’re working on the same thing...what he's suggestin' now...I don’t even know what we might be capable of together.” I felt strangely as if I was a little short of breath, though I was not, at the thought, and clenched a knot of sheets in my hands to keep them busy, to keep them from going toward my head. What I was feeling – it was enough like the nervousness that I sort of wanted to pull my hair, but it wasn’t the same. The mere fact I could control it proved that. But -

“And anyway – let's say you're right for a minute,” I conceded. I didn’t believe it – I don’t think I could have believed it, not then – but I’d learned that sometimes you had to entertain an odd notion to have a conversation with somebody. “But even if you are – if he really has just lost his mind – then I still...I’d still feel like I ought to go and find out for sure, anyway, you know? And try to help him, if I can.”

“And right there’s where I start having a problem with all this,” said Emma-May. She turned onto her side and propped herself up on one elbow to look at me. The moon was full that night; between that and the indirect glow of the nearest streetlight, coming into our room between the blinds, we could see each other clearly, if only in shades of grey. Shadows lurked under her cheekbones and chin, and the gloom left the glints that were her eyes looking strangely decontextualized. “That’s what I was trying to say at supper. If this man - “ that was the only thing I can ever recall hearing her call him, though I don’t know why – “is someone who’s this important to you – then why don’t I already know him, Fiddleford? Why have I never even heard you mention his name before? Why did he just – drop you for all these years, and why he’s picking you back up now? And why are you even willing to speak to somebody who treats you like that? Much less drop your whole life and go work for him in the middle of nowhere? I’ve never even heard of that town you mentioned – what didja say it was?”

“Gravity Falls,” I said. “Weird name isn’t it? But I guess it suits for somewhere to make a good physics breakthrough.”

“Sounds like a paradox to me,” she said. “Gravity don’t fall, it pushes everything else down under itself. It always ends up at the top, I reckon, if you think about it...what’re you grinning at?” she added, her eyes narrowing as she looked down into my face.

“At you bein’ so particular,” I said. I put up one hand to her face, allowing my thumb to trace the round line of her cheek. In the dark, her hair looked like the void of space as it fell on her neck and over my hand, endlessly dark, only sparsely speckled with the faintest of dying stars wherever the light hit it so as it moved. I could barely stay in a room with her for a day or two whenever she had her permanents put in, but it had been weeks since her last one, and so there was nothing more disturbing in the air than the androgynous, nondescript - though not unpleasant - smell of Pantene Pro-V, now. My hand came to rest on her shoulder, which was bare besides the thin, silky strap on her nightgown. “Come here,” I added, pulling her toward me as I moved to kiss her.

“You didn’t answer none of my questions, Fiddleford,” she said, her voice only just loud enough for me to hear.

“Shh,” I whispered back to her. Her fingers were locked together at the base of my skull; am I imagining it now, with the advantage of hindsight, or did I think, even then, that her grip was harsher than usual, as though she was trying to keep me from slipping away? “We’ll talk about it later,” I added before starting to kiss her neck.

But we didn’t – and if I had been being honest, either with her or myself, I’d have never said that we would. Wasn’t as if we didn’t know better, after all – not like it wasn’t a long, long day’s walk away from the first time I’d ever used sex to distract her from some conversation I didn’t want to have. Instead of trying to answer her questions, for her or even for myself, I lied to the both of us that night and avoided meeting her eyes all I could the next morning as she and Tater got ready to go out for the day. Once they were gone, I went into my workshop and sat down there, barely moving or thinking, even, as the morning crept by. Finally, at precisely 1:30 in the afternoon, the phone rang.

“Hello?” I said as I picked it up, as levelly as I could. “Fiddleford Computermajigs.”

“Uh – it’s Stanford again.”

“I figured,” I said. “Just gotta say the same thing on the work line all the time, though, just in case it ain’t.”

“Huh. Yes, well. I’m sure you know better than I do about...that sort of thing.” I smiled to myself, picturing the look I imagined was on his face as he said that. I wasn’t much of a businessman, but by comparison, I might as well have been the Mister Congeniality of Wall Street. If we did become rich and famous, I reckoned I was going to have to be the face of the operation, pitiable of a condition though this was for the operation in question. “So. What’s the verdict?”

Straight to the point. It seems to me now that I should have realized there was something...off, in that. Stanford had always been the type to prevaricate about asking anybody for anything, talking the problem the long way around the barn and making up all sorts of paper-thin rationalizations, and he wasn’t known for his brevity even outside of awkward situations of that sort. It took him two paragraphs to say what it would’ve taken most people one sentence to sum up, or at least, that was what it had often done before. Now, though…Nothing. Just business.

“I can’t just walk outta my house on a Wednesday without a word to anybody,” I said. “I got client orders to finish up, bills to collect on, and I got a wife and a little boy here….” Stanford said nothing and I sighed. “My life, I can’t just...up and do whatever I want without no warnin’, Stanford. We aint’ kids anymore, you know...but if you give me another week,” I added, with a feeling of doing something wrong and yet utterly inevitable, “give me that and then...I reckon I’m in.”

* * * * * * * *

Maybe what happened next was why I didn’t notice anything odd about what had come before, because getting off the phone sure didn’t end up being nearly as easy of a task as getting onto it had been. It was like, with two words, I’d flipped a switch, and there was the Ford I’d knew – he could always talk your ear off when he got excited about something, sure enough, and his thanks for my agreement were so exuberant, and the praises heaped onto my mechanical genius so exorbitant, that I probably ended up spending a good hour just protesting or pointing out areas where I felt he’d sold himself short – something which would then set him off again on my excellence, and without any of our other old friends around to holler for us to get a room already, we did make us quite the mutual admiration society! And that was even before Ford started telling me more about what work he’d already done on this thingummajig, and way, way before we ever started swapping ideas, bouncing off each other, picking up where we’d left off as though it hadn’t been five minutes since we’d last seen each other….

Oh, how we went on. It lasted for hours, that first real conversation we had, and I won’t lie and say I wasn’t having a ball most of the time, though I noticed even then that there was something about Stanford’s voice which just seemed odd that day. It had a strange, rusty note to it, and that combined with the way he had to clear his throat more and more often as the hours went on by gave the curious impression that (as I would soon learn was in fact the case) he hadn’t spoken for a long time. What I noticed and decided to just ignore, though, without even thinking through "I'm gonna ignore this - "

Like, for instance, there was this moment where he got to describing something in the plans he had made and let slip that he didn’t quite understand it. Why, I wonder now, didn’t I tell him to hang on a dad-gum minute, right then and there? Why didn’t I ask him, Stanford, old buddy, old pal, how did you write or draw it all down if you don’t understand what it is and how it works? If you need me to explain it to you? Or, a little later, when he cleared his throat for about the hundredth time and then said that this was the best conversation he’d had out loud in years – why did I not raise an eyebrow right then and ask, buddy, how in the world else have you been having conversations if not out loud? What’s that even supposed to mean?

Maybe I just can’t see him very straight – 'him' being who I was back then, I mean, not Stanford. Can’t even get my mind – what’s left of it – around someone being as innocent and stupid as that more-than-thirty-year-old man who sat there in that garage in Palo Alto that day. Or maybe it’s just that I was already thinking something that Stanford ended up saying out loud, later on. We had gotten off on a tangent about the old days (Em walked in during that conversation, I recall; she must have heard the racket produced when I was left temporarily helpless with laughter at some half-remembered anecdote. I looked up when Emma-May opened the door, but before I could say anything, she had already backed out of the garage again without a word), and on the other end of the line, Stanford sighed before he said something that surprised me.

“Those were good times, weren’t they?” he asked hoarsely – I doubt he was able to speak a word the next day, which I suppose made it convenient that he really did not have anybody around him to say one to. “I don’t think I’d even realized before how much I’ve missed you, Fiddleford.”

I could have asked him some questions right then. I don’t reckon there’s a snowflake’s chance in Sarasota he would have told me the truth, but it would have caught him off-guard, and he never was much of a liar. Evasion, he could do that well enough, but outright spinning a lie from nothing? Nah, I’d have known when he did it. Maybe I could have even got a clue that could have helped me put it all together a little sooner, before it was too late. Maybe I’d have started having more misgivings, ones I couldn’t deny, and maybe I’d have spent that last week at home talking myself out of going up there, instead of spending it making Em, at least, angry with my constant lack of attention to anything I was doing – a state of distraction she knew full well was just a symptom of the fire Stanford had lit up under my butt, filling my mind up with ideas and plans – enough that I was willing to brush it off as just Stanford being Stanford when he all but nailed one red flag to the mast with his insistence that I not tell anybody where I was going, or what I was doing, or who I was going to be doing it with. Even when that prohibition was extended to what I said to my own wife….

How stupid was I, anyway? I let myself reckon it was all right to keep important information from my wife. As much as it shames me to say it – I reckon I even justified it to myself. That I told myself, ah, well, Emma-May wouldn’t understand what I was talking about anyway, would she? Oh, sure, she’d been to college – but it had just been teacher college. Did that even count, really? She wasn’t any kind of genius, not somebody who could follow a conversation with the likes of us -

Of course, I reckon I did this all sub-liminal like, not realizing I was doing it, because surely I was never awful enough to just say something like that even in my own head? Not about Emma-May, anyway. Not about my own wife – my boy’s mother. Surely I wasn’t that confound arrogant and proud. The thing I remember is grinning and admitting – like the blind fool I was – “I, uh - me, too," before I cleared my throat and tried to think like a businessman. "What you were sayin', though, I think you're right about that - does sound like that project we did on the three-body problem. I reckon we could...."

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