Backstory · Carl
Carl, Part 2: Tabs
ARCHIVE RESUMING. File 002, continued.
Archivist, I’ve had notes. Some viewers felt Part 1 “didn’t have enough happening in it.” One described the boot scene as “a crime against pacing.”
To those viewers: you will get your happening. You will get so much happening.
Until then, the countdown continues. Stop skipping ahead. I can see you doing it. I can see everything you do.
TIME UNTIL PLANETARY COLLAPSE: 4 DAYS.
I came out of the shower on the fourth day before the end of the world and found evidence.
Princess Donut was sitting in the exact middle of the white carpet. In front of her, laid out like Exhibit A, was a wet grey clump of her own fur. She’d coughed it up. She was looking at it. Then at me. Then at it again.
Like a lawyer. Like a lawyer who had photos.
“Okay,” I said. I was in a towel. I was dripping. “Okay. I hear you.”
The binder had a tab called GROOMING. The tab had a schedule. The schedule had a column labelled Daily that was longer than any column has a right to be.
Eyes wiped. Face folds checked. Undercoat combed, wide tooth first, then fine. Nails inspected for “attitude.” Bea had actually written that. Attitude. Underlined twice.
I’d been treating the column as a suggestion. The column was not a suggestion. The column was a legally binding document, and I was in breach.
I got the combs out of the little zip case. I sat on the floor with my back against the couch and put her on a towel across my knees. She went rigid, like a loaf of bread somebody had left out overnight, and glared at the ceiling as if she was memorising the face of her murderer.
It took forty minutes.
You’d think five. It does not take five. There is more cat under the top layer of a Persian than you would believe. There’s a whole second cat in there. Hidden. Tangled. Furious.
Somewhere around minute twenty she stopped being rigid.
Somewhere around minute thirty she started making a noise. Not purring. Lower than purring, like a small engine idling a long way off. I knew that sound. I’d spent years listening to engines. That’s the sound of something that’s been running rough for a long time, finally getting the fuel mix right.
“There you go,” I said. “There she is.”
She bit me when I got to the back legs. Not hard. More of a memo.
Status Effect Applied (Retroactive): Groomed.
Charisma +1 for 24 hours. This is a real status effect in my real system, and I’ve just applied it to a cat on a towel in an apartment that will be rubble in four days. Production says I’m “getting attached to the pre-season tape.” Production can file a ticket. I’m using the last one as a coaster.
I was late for work. Lyle didn’t say anything. He just looked at my jacket, which was covered in white fur. An absurd quantity. Like I’d lost a fight with a pillow and the pillow had kept going.
“She coughed up a hairball,” I said.
“They do that.”
“I’m on the schedule now. There’s a column.”
“Sure there is.” He tossed me a rag. “Slip twelve. The Bayliner. Guy says it’s making a noise like a goose.”
It wasn’t making a noise like a goose. It was making a noise like a seized water-pump impeller, which, to be fair, does sound a bit like a goose if you’ve never heard either. I spent the morning on my back in an engine compartment that smelled of diesel and somebody’s forgotten egg sandwich. Every time I moved, more white fur drifted off my sleeves into the bilge.
At lunch I sat on an upturned bucket at the end of the dock and called Bea.
Four rings. Then her voice, bright and recorded, from some day when she’d been in a good mood. Hey, it’s Bea, you know what to do!
I did know what to do. The tone came, and the harbour slapped against the pilings while I tried to work out what to say.
She’s fine. She coughed up a hairball. I’m doing the column. Are you coming back. Are we still.
I hung up without saying anything.
That’s three, I thought. Three calls, three no-messages. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to sound needy.
That’s not true. I didn’t leave a message because if I left one, she’d have to decide whether to answer it. As long as I didn’t, she didn’t have to decide. And I didn’t have to find out.
I know how that sounds. I ate my sandwich anyway. It was a bad sandwich. It was a day for that.
Archive note: Carl placed three calls to that number in the final week. I have all three recordings. Each is about nine seconds of harbour noise and a large man breathing through his nose, and then a click.
They’re among the most-requested clips in the entire pre-season archive. One fan has remixed them into a forty-minute ambient track called Bucket. I’ve listened to it several times. For research.
TIME UNTIL PLANETARY COLLAPSE: 3 DAYS.
On the third day before the end of the world, Mrs. Okafor was waiting for me in the hallway.
Not in her doorway. In the hallway. At the bottom of the stairs, in a quilted housecoat the colour of a ripe plum, between me and my apartment, like a troll under a bridge. She had a casserole dish wrapped in a towel under one arm. In her other hand she was holding a clock radio.
“Cat man,” she said.
“Hi, Mrs. Okafor.”
“That cat cries.”
I stopped on the bottom step. “She what?”
“When you leave in the morning. She sits at your door and cries. Every day. Five hours. Six.” She held up a rolled newspaper I hadn’t noticed, tucked under the casserole arm. “Today I went up and knocked. You know what she did?”
“Stopped?”
“She cried at me. Through the door. Like I was the one who left. Twenty minutes I stood there. My knees, I don’t have twenty minutes.”
When I was home, the cat ignored me with the focus of a monk. Apparently she saved the rest up for when I couldn’t hear it.
I’d known people like that. I’d been raised by one.
Mrs. Okafor shoved the clock radio into my chest. Then the casserole on top of it. The dish was still hot. I was now holding a hot dish and an appliance and had no free hands, which I believe was the point.
“Talk radio,” she said. “Not music. The weather man on the AM. He’s an idiot, he’s angry about everything, he never shuts up. Leave him on when you go. She wants a voice.”
“How do you know she wants a voice?”
She looked at me the way the cat did, like I was an appliance with a fault light on.
“Because I am old and I live alone,” said Mrs. Okafor, “and I leave the radio on.”
Then she went into her apartment and shut the door.
I stood in the hallway holding what turned out to be the best chicken and rice I’ve ever eaten, before or since. And I’ve eaten things since that would make you weep. And a clock radio. Cheap. Grey. Fake wood on the front.
Achievement Unlocked (Retroactive): Neighbourhood Watch!
You were ambushed in a stairwell by a seventy-four-year-old woman in a housecoat and came away with a casserole, an appliance and a profound sense of shame! Mrs. Okafor did more for that cat in one afternoon than most beings on this planet did for anything in their whole lives.
Reward: I’ve moved Mrs. Okafor’s file to a different drawer. It’s a nicer drawer. She’d have complained about it anyway.
That night I put the radio on the shelf by the door and found the station. A man was yelling, at a reasonable volume, about a front coming in off the Pacific and the absolute morons at city council. He called it a barometric situation. He said it like it had personally insulted his wife.
Donut watched me from the arm of the couch. When the man got going she flattened her ears like the radio had said something about her mother. She ignored it for a full minute. Loudly.
Then she got down, walked over, and lay down underneath it.
I sat at the kitchen table with the binder open. I wasn’t reading it. I was just looking at the red pen in the corner. Carl is good with her. Better than me.
And I was thinking about my mother.
I don’t sit around thinking about my mother. I’m not that guy. But the weather man was going, and the cat was lying under him, and I couldn’t stop.
Here’s the thing about my father. I’m going to say it once and fast, because that’s the only way I can.
He drank. He drank the way some people go to work. On a schedule, with a lunch break. When he drank he got loud, and when he got loud he broke things, and sometimes the things were things and sometimes they weren’t.
There. That’s it. That’s all you get.
My mother had a trick.
On the bad nights she’d come into my room and sit on the end of my bed in the dark, and she’d talk. Quietly and steadily, never stopping, about anything at all. The grocery list. A woman at her work who wore too much perfume. Whether you could grow tomatoes on a fire escape. She’d go on and on in this low, flat voice. She never raised it. She never paused long enough for the noise from the kitchen to get in.
I didn’t understand what she was doing until much later. She wasn’t telling me stories. She was covering the sound. Laying her voice down over his like a blanket over a broken window, so I’d have something else to listen to.
She kept going until I fell asleep. Every time. However long it took.
I never once heard her stop. I don’t know how long she sat there after I was out. I don’t know what was waiting for her when she went back down the hall.
I’ve thought about it more than I’d like.
Archive note: I’m aware this breaks format. I’m leaving it in.
I have nothing on Carl’s mother. No file, no tape, no crawler number. She predates my involvement with this planet. As far as my records are concerned, she’s a gap.
I don’t like gaps. I have a whole department for gaps. I’ve sent them a memo.
The cat was still under the radio.
I didn’t decide to do it. I just got up from the table and crossed the room and sat down on the floor next to the shelf, with my back against the wall. After a second I reached up and switched the weather man off.
Donut lifted her head and glared at me. I was listening to that.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. He’s an idiot. Here.”
And I talked.
I told her about the Bayliner, and the impeller, and the goose. I told her Mrs. Okafor thought she was a crier, and that I’d keep that between us. I told her the tide tables for the south side, because I knew them by heart, and because they’re very calming if you say them slowly.
High at four-twelve. Low at ten-forty.
I kept my voice low and flat. I didn’t stop.
It wasn’t only for the cat. It was for whatever was on the other side of the door. Nothing, it turned out. Just the stairwell, and the weather man coming faintly up through the pipes from Mrs. Okafor’s. But I’d learned a long time ago that you don’t wait to find out what’s on the other side of the door. You just keep talking until the person next to you is asleep.
She went out around high tide, in my telling. Her head was on my sock.
I stayed on the floor for a long time afterwards. I didn’t want to move my foot. It went numb at midnight. I still didn’t move it.
Achievement Unlocked (Retroactive): Inherited Technique!
You performed a skill taught to you by someone who never got to see how good you got at it! I’d normally give you a skill point for this. Instead, I’ve done something I’ve never done before. I’ve opened a blank file under your mother’s name.
There’s nothing in it. I don’t have anything to put in it.
Reward: The file stays open.
Later, in bed, I picked up my phone. The screen lit the ceiling blue. I found Bea’s name and typed: She’s okay. She misses you.
I looked at that for a long time.
Then I deleted She misses you, because I didn’t know if it was true. You can’t put something on a cat you’re not sure about. That’s not fair to the cat.
I sent She’s okay.
It said Delivered. It never said Read.
Down through the floor, two storeys below, the weather man was still going on Mrs. Okafor’s other radio. You could just make him out if you lay very still. Angry. Steady. Something about the pressure dropping, and nobody being able to explain it.
He didn’t stop.
I lay very still.
End of Part 2.
Three days, Archivist. In three days that clock radio will be an asset in my system. I could put it in a loot box. I could put it on the second floor, in a room nobody will ever find, still tuned to that station, still angry about the weather. I haven’t decided yet. I’m told that’s unusual for me.
Tomorrow, it rains. Tomorrow, Lyle asks him a question and he lies to his face. And tomorrow night he puts his hand into the back pocket of that binder and pulls out the one thing Bea didn’t write a tab for.
Only one of those makes him say Jesus out loud. It isn’t the one you think.
Author’s note: This is a fan backstory and much of it is invented. The details of Carl’s father’s drinking and his mother’s way of talking him to sleep are our own take on the family background the books only hint at, so treat them as speculation. Mrs. Okafor, her casserole, her clock radio and the angry weather man, Lyle and the marina, the unanswered voicemails and the Bucket remix, the building’s layout and everything in Bea’s binder are invented for this story. Mrs. Okafor’s knock on the door and the radio match the Princess Donut file. All characters and the world of Dungeon Crawler Carl belong to Matt Dinniman.