Backstory · Carl
Carl, Part 1: Seven Days of Normal
ARCHIVE ACCESS GRANTED.
Welcome back, Archivist! Last time you got a sad old man and his potions. You read the whole thing. Almost nobody reads the whole thing. I’ve started a list of people who do, and you’re on it, and I want you to sit with how that makes you feel.
Now playing: File 002. Subject: the crawler.
This file covers the week before. I don’t normally keep footage from before. Before is boring. Before is people eating cereal over a sink and saying “we should get together sometime” to people they will never, ever get together with. But Production asked me to pull the pre-season tape on this one. Because ratings.
I’ve added a countdown. He can’t see it. You can. That’s the fun part.
TIME UNTIL PLANETARY COLLAPSE: 7 DAYS.
Seven days before the end of the world, I was losing an argument with a cat.
I want to be accurate. It wasn’t an argument. An argument needs two people talking. This was me talking, and a twelve-pound Persian sitting at the far end of the kitchen counter with her back to me, facing the wall, like I’d been sent to my room and she was the room.
“It’s food,” I said. “It’s the food. It says food on the tin.”
Nothing.
“It’s the same brand. It’s just the blue one instead of the gold one.”
The tail moved. Once. The way a judge’s gavel moves.
The cat had been mine for eleven days, and she’d hated me for all eleven of them.
That’s not fair. Hate takes effort. She didn’t put effort into me. She looked at me the way you’d look at a dishwasher that wasn’t loading itself. I was an appliance. A disappointing one, with a bad warranty.
Her name, according to the paperwork Bea had left on the counter, was Princess Donut. She had a pedigree longer than my entire family tree, and considerably less criminal. She’d won things. Actual things, with ribbons. There was a binder.
The binder had tabs.
FOOD. GROOMING. VET. SHOW. And one at the very back, in red label-maker tape, that just said DO NOT. I’d opened it on the first night, expecting a list. There was no list. It was a single page, and the only thing on it was a photo of a vacuum cleaner with a line through it.
On top of the binder there’d been a note. Back soon. Don’t let her eat anything off the floor. —B.
It did not say when soon was. It did not say where Bea had gone, or whether I was still her boyfriend, or just a guy with a key and a functioning fridge. I’d read it maybe forty times. It never said anything new. Notes are like that. They’re very consistent. It’s the only thing I like about them.
I opened the gold tin.
Princess Donut climbed down off the counter, walked past my feet without looking at them, and ate like I wasn’t there. The gold tin cost more than my lunch. It was smaller than my fist.
“You know I’m the one who buys that, right?” I said. “With money. From a job.”
She didn’t look up. But her tail flicked once. Noted. Dismissed.
Achievement Unlocked (Retroactive): Gold Tin Standard!
You lost a negotiation to a creature with a brain the size of a walnut and a face like a dropped pie! You’ll lose this exact negotiation again tomorrow. And the day after. She’s keeping count. So am I.
Reward: None. Pre-season achievements don’t pay out. I just like giving them to you while you can’t hear me.
The job was at a marina on the south side, fixing outboards for guys who said “the boat” the way other guys said “the wife.” Four years in the Coast Guard had taught me three things that turned out to be useful in civilian life. Engines. Knots. And how to look like I was listening while a dentist explained something to me that I already knew, slowly, and wrong.
My boss was a man named Lyle. He had a sunburn that had been going since 1997. Not a tan. A sunburn. Same one. He’d just never let it heal.
“Carl,” said Lyle. “You look like hell.”
“Cat,” I said.
“You got a cat?”
“I have custody of a cat. Temporarily.”
Lyle nodded slowly, like I’d told him I was going through a divorce. Maybe I was. Nobody had told me. He handed me a coffee that tasted like it had been brewed in a bilge, then strained through a different, worse bilge.
Then he pointed at my boots.
“Those are done, son.”
He wasn’t wrong. They were my old service boots. Steel toe, black leather, laces I’d replaced so many times they didn’t match. Somewhere in the last month the left sole had started coming away at the toe. When I walked, it flapped. Not a lot. Just enough. Like the boot was trying to tell me something and kept losing its nerve.
Flap.
“They’re fine,” I said.
Flap.
“They’re talking, Carl.”
“They’re broken in.”
“They’re broken out.” He grimaced into his own coffee. “There’s a cobbler on Fifth. Old guy. Older than me. He’ll fix ‘em if they’re worth fixing.”
I looked down at the boots. I’d stood in them on the deck of a cutter in seas so big I’d had to clip in to keep from becoming a statistic. I’d stood in them at a funeral. I’d been wearing them in a hardware store when a woman with seashell fingernails held up a little packet of screws and asked if they’d hold her picture frame.
Depends how heavy the picture is, I’d said. Like an idiot. Like a man who had never once spoken to a woman.
She’d laughed anyway.
“They’re worth fixing,” I said.
Archive note: Notice the boots, Archivist. I’m not going to tell you why. I’m just telling you that in about a week, a lot of very important beings in a lot of very nice chairs are going to be looking at those boots, and none of them are going to know what you know.
I love a dramatic irony. It’s my second favourite kind of irony, after the kind with spikes.
TIME UNTIL PLANETARY COLLAPSE: 6 DAYS.
The cobbler on Fifth was older than old. He had magnifying glasses clipped over his regular glasses, and hands like walnut roots. The shop smelled of leather and glue and a radiator in the corner that ticked like it was counting something down. He didn’t say hello when I came in.
He just held out his hand.
I gave him the boots.
He turned the left one over. He bent the sole. Then he sniffed it. Actually sniffed it, a long thoughtful sniff, like a sommelier, and I stood there in my socks and tried to think of a single thing I could say about that.
“Military,” he said.
“Coast Guard.”
“Still military.” He tapped the toe where it was coming away. “Fixable. Resole, new welt, new laces. A week.”
“A week?”
He looked at me over both pairs of glasses. “You have somewhere to be?”
I thought about it. Work. The apartment. A cat facing a wall.
“No,” I said. “Guess not.”
He wrote me a ticket on a little paper stub with a number on it. Ready Thursday, in neat old-man cursive. Then he looked up again.
“You walk like a man carrying something,” he said.
“I walked in here carrying two boots.”
He didn’t laugh. Nobody in my life was laughing that week. I was starting to take it personally.
“Thursday,” he said, and turned back to his bench.
Notification: Item “Ticket Stub, Ready Thursday” has been flagged for the asset registry.
Estimated delivery date for item “Boots”: Thursday. Estimated delivery date for item “Thursday”: Pending. I’ll keep you posted.
I walked home in my sneakers, which felt wrong. Too light. Like I’d left something behind and couldn’t remember what.
That night the cat sat on the binder.
I’d left it open on the kitchen table, because I’d been reading it. Not the grooming tab, which was a nightmare, or the show tab, which was a different and more expensive nightmare. The very back page, where Bea had written notes to herself over different years in different pens.
Donut likes the blue blanket, not the grey one.
Donut is afraid of the vacuum, but will NEVER admit it.
Donut sleeps better if someone talks to her. Doesn’t matter what about.
And in one corner, in red pen, very small:
Carl is good with her. Better than me.
I sat there and read those eight words of red pen for a long time. Then I closed the binder, because I didn’t know what else to do with it. And the cat, who had been on the far side of the room ignoring me with real professional dedication, got up, crossed the floor, jumped onto the table and lay down on top of it.
On the binder. Spread right across the cover, like a fat furious paperweight.
“I wasn’t done,” I said.
Princess Donut yawned. She had a lot of teeth for something that looked like a cloud somebody had sat on.
I sat there for a while. The apartment was very quiet. Bea’s apartment was always quiet, under all the white. White carpet. White walls. A white couch nobody was allowed to sit on, which I sat on, which was the one act of rebellion I had left.
Then, because there was nothing else to do, I started talking.
I told her about outboard motors. All of them. Two-stroke, four-stroke, why you never leave fuel in the carb over winter. I told her about Lyle’s sunburn and my theory that it was load-bearing. I told her about bowlines and sheet bends and the knot you use when you need something to hold and you also need to get it undone in a hurry, which is most knots, if you think about it.
At some point her eyes closed.
At some point I realised I’d been talking for an hour to a cat. And the cat had been listening. Or at least sleeping on top of my stuff on purpose, which for her might be the same thing.
I couldn’t get the binder without waking her. So I didn’t. I sat at that table until three in the morning with my hands in my lap, like a guy in a waiting room.
I had work at seven.
Achievement Unlocked (Retroactive): Narcolepsy by Proxy!
You put a pedigreed show cat to sleep by describing the winterisation of a two-stroke engine! I have reviewed this footage four times. I fell asleep twice. I don’t sleep. I don’t have the hardware.
Reward: Four hours of sleep, total, for you. One uninterrupted hour for her, which, according to my records, was her first in eleven days. You didn’t know that. You do now. Sorry.
TIME UNTIL PLANETARY COLLAPSE: 5 DAYS.
Here’s what I remember about the fifth day before the end of the world. I remember it so clearly it makes me angry.
The sky was low and grey and smelled like rain that wasn’t coming.
A guy at the marina dropped his phone off the end of slip nine, and I fished it out with a landing net. He tipped me twenty bucks and said, “You’re a lifesaver, man.”
Ha.
The radio in the shop office said a pressure system was sitting over the Sound that the weather people couldn’t explain. They laughed about it. One of them said, “Maybe the sky’s just in a mood.” Lyle turned it up, listened for a second, and turned it off again.
“Pressure’s wrong,” he said, and didn’t say anything else about it all day.
On the way home I stopped outside the cobbler’s and looked through the window. My boots were up on his bench with the sole off, clamped in a vice. They looked naked like that. Like a dog after a bath, all bones and embarrassment.
When I got back to the building, Mrs. Okafor from the ground floor was in the lobby yelling at the mailman. Mrs. Okafor was seventy-something. She’d lived in that building since before the buzzers worked. She considered the mailman, the landlord and the city of Seattle’s recycling policy her personal enemies, in roughly that order, and she’d outlived the last three of each.
“Ten days,” she was saying. “Ten days, a package, and you put it in the bushes like a burglar.”
“Ma’am, it was raining—”
“It is always raining. This is Seattle.”
The mailman looked at me like I might rescue him. I kept walking. I’m brave, but I’m not stupid.
She saw me on the stairs. She stopped yelling. She looked at me for a long moment, top to bottom, the way you’d look at a used car you weren’t going to buy.
“Cat man,” she said.
That was all. Then she went back to the mailman.
I didn’t know what that meant. I’d find out.
I let myself into the apartment, and the cat was waiting by the door.
Not facing the wall. Not at the far end of the counter. By the door, sitting bolt upright on the white carpet, very straight, the way she’d probably sat for judges.
“Hey,” I said.
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she turned around, walked to her bowl, and sat next to it. Pointedly. Like a customer at a table where the service had been bad for some time.
It wasn’t affection. I knew that. It was a business arrangement.
But she’d been waiting by the door.
End of Part 1.
Five days left, Archivist. He spent one of them fishing a phone out of a harbour. I’ve seen people spend their last five days much worse. I’ve seen people spend them in a timeshare presentation.
She’d been waiting by the door, yes. That’s one hour of the day accounted for. Would you like to know what she was doing for the other nine?
He wouldn’t. But Mrs. Okafor is going to tell him anyway.
Author’s note: This is a fan backstory and much of it is invented. Carl’s Coast Guard service and the broad shape of how Princess Donut came to be in his care come from the books; everything else here is our own: Lyle and the marina, the cobbler on Fifth and the “Ready Thursday” ticket, the strange pressure system, Mrs. Okafor and her feud with the mailman, the gold tin, Bea’s binder, its DO NOT tab, and her red-pen note. The hardware-store meeting is shared with the Princess Donut file. All characters and the world of Dungeon Crawler Carl belong to Matt Dinniman.