Backstory · Carl
Carl, Part 4: Ready Thursday
ARCHIVE RESUMING. File 002, final segment.
Archivist, this is the last of the pre-season tape. After this, the footage is mine. Properly mine. Good lighting, sponsors, a laugh track I’m extremely proud of.
I’ve switched the countdown to hours. It’s what we do in the control room on the last day. Everyone gets very quiet and watches the numbers and pretends they aren’t excited.
I’m not pretending.
TIME UNTIL PLANETARY COLLAPSE: 19 HOURS.
The cobbler had the boots on the counter before I got the door shut.
No hello. There was never a hello. He just turned them so the toes pointed at me, like a waiter presenting a dish he knows is the best thing on the menu, and waited.
They looked like my boots, and they didn’t. Same leather, every crease and scuff, the long pale scar across the right toe where I’d caught a deck cleat in 2014. But cleaned and fed and polished until it went deep and dark, like water at night. New soles, thick and black, stitched all the way round in tight even loops.
The laces matched.
That’s what got me. Stupidly. For the first time in years, both laces were the same.
“New welt,” he said. “New heel. I kept the insoles. They had your foot in them already. You don’t throw that away.”
I picked up the left one and bent it at the toe, where it had been talking all month.
Nothing. Not a word. Shut up for good.
“How much?”
He named a number. It was less than it should have been, and I told him so, and he looked at me over both pairs of glasses like I’d farted at a wedding.
So I paid what he said. Then he reached under the counter and set a small round tin of black polish beside the boots. Click.
“Every month,” he said. “Not when they look like they need it. Before.”
“Before they look like they need it.”
“By the time they look like it, it’s late.” He tapped the tin. “Everything is like this.”
I put them on. Left then right, double knot, the way a petty officer made us do it in boot camp, in the dark, while he screamed about our mothers. I stood up.
The cobbler watched me walk to the door and back. Heel, toe. Heel, toe. No flap.
“Better,” he said, and picked up his tools. Then, without looking up: “You’re still carrying it. But now you’re carrying it right.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said thanks. He’d already stopped listening.
Archive note: The cobbler’s shop is on my list. Not the crawler list. The asset list. In nineteen hours I’ll own that bench, the clamp, the ticking radiator and every neat little paper stub in his drawer.
I’ve flagged the polish tin for a loot box. Somewhere deep. Somebody’s going to crack it open on the worst day of their life and have no idea what it is. I like that more than I can justify to my superiors.
TIME UNTIL PLANETARY COLLAPSE: 14 HOURS.
The rain had blown through and left the marina rinsed and cold. There was a skin of ice in the corners of the slips. My breath came out in clouds, and the sky had that low orange tint again, like somebody had left a light on behind it.
Lyle looked at my feet for a long time.
“Huh,” he said.
“Told you they were worth fixing.”
“You did.” He handed me a coffee. Still bilge. “You look less like hell.”
“Thanks, Lyle.”
“I mean it. You look like a guy who slept.” He squinted at the water. “Cat warming up to you?”
I thought about the towel. The comb. The idling-engine noise. Her head on my sock.
“She tolerates me,” I said.
“That’s how it starts.” He slapped the doorframe twice, which meant the conversation was over. “See you tomorrow, Carl.”
“See you tomorrow.”
I rebuilt a lower unit, replaced a bilge pump, and told the dentist his boat wasn’t broken, he just had to stop running it out of fuel. At five I put my tools away in the order I always put them away and walked home in my good boots. Heel, toe. Heel, toe.
I’m not saying I was happy. But my walking sounded right.
Achievement Unlocked (Retroactive): See You Tomorrow!
You completed your final shift without ever knowing it was your final shift! Congratulations. That’s how almost everyone does it. I’ve reviewed billions of last days, and the single most common final sentence at work is “see you tomorrow.” Second place is “is there any more coffee.”
Reward: Lyle won’t be there tomorrow. Neither will tomorrow. Sorry. That one slipped out.
TIME UNTIL PLANETARY COLLAPSE: 10 HOURS.
I knocked on Mrs. Okafor’s door to give back the casserole dish. I’d washed it twice.
She opened up in the plum housecoat, took the dish, and looked straight down at my boots.
“Good,” she said.
It was the first time I’d ever heard her use the word.
“The radio’s working,” I said. “I think. Thank you.”
“I know it’s working. I didn’t hear her today.” Behind her, her other radio was going, the weather man, angry about a temperature drop he said was “frankly unscientific.” She paused in the doorway. “You talk to her yourself, too?”
“Sometimes.”
“Good,” she said again. Twice in one day. Then she shut the door in my face, which was how I knew she meant it.
TIME UNTIL PLANETARY COLLAPSE: 8 HOURS.
My phone buzzed on the counter while I was opening the gold tin. First try. Right tin. I’d like that noted.
It was Bea.
My heart did something stupid. It did a whole routine.
It was a photo. Bea on a beach, very brown, in a big floppy hat with her sunglasses pushed up on top of the hat, which doesn’t even make sense. Laughing at something just out of the frame. The sky behind her was so blue it looked like a screensaver.
Underneath: omg tell my baby mama misses her!!! kiss her face for me
That was all of it.
I read it a couple of times. Not forty. Less than forty.
It didn’t say when she was coming back. It didn’t say anything about me. It wasn’t cruel, either. I want to be fair to her. It was a message from somebody on a beach, to the guy who happened to be standing near her cat.
I crouched down and held the phone out to Donut.
“She says hi,” I said, and I read it to her, flat. Exclamation marks and all. You can’t read omg in a flat voice, it turns out. I tried.
Donut looked at the picture for a long while.
Then she got down off the counter, walked past her dinner, across the kitchen, and went and sat in front of the rosette. Back very straight. Nose two inches from the purple.
I put the phone face down.
After a minute I went over and sat on the floor behind her. I kissed her face for Bea, because I’d been asked to. She allowed it, with the expression of a queen accepting tribute from a very minor duchy.
Then I kissed it once more, for me, because nobody was watching.
Correction: I was watching.
Second correction: So were you.
TIME UNTIL PLANETARY COLLAPSE: 6 HOURS.
I sat at the kitchen table with the binder and a blue ballpoint.
I’d been thinking about it all day. Ever since the cobbler said before. Not when they look like they need it.
Before.
I turned to the very back page. Bea’s notes, in her different pens. Blue blanket, not grey. Afraid of the vacuum. Sleeps better if someone talks to her. And in the corner, small, in red: Carl is good with her. Better than me.
Under that I wrote, in blue, in handwriting that looked nothing like hers:
Donut is afraid of being left. Will NEVER admit it. Do not leave her. —C.
It looked like the kind of note somebody writes when they’re planning to go, so that the next person knows. I almost crossed it out.
I didn’t. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was writing it for whoever came next, because that’s what the binder was for. Everyone who ever looked after her had written down what they’d learned.
Now I had too.
When I looked up, she’d turned away from the rosette and was watching me across the room. I don’t know how long she’d been doing it.
Archive note: I have that page. I have the page. Most paper survives reclamation as an asset, and I scanned it at a resolution no being in this galaxy could possibly need.
I’m not going to show it to you. I’m telling you it exists so you know exactly how much I’m not showing you.
TIME UNTIL PLANETARY COLLAPSE: 4 HOURS.
I sat on the white couch, the one nobody’s allowed to sit on, and put a towel across my knees. One of the good soft ones.
Donut sat on the carpet and stared at the towel for nine minutes. In her experience, a soft towel is how a bath starts. She was not born yesterday.
Then she got on.
And this time I told her everything.
I hadn’t planned to. I’d planned on tide tables. But I got as far as low at ten-forty, and then I heard myself telling her about the crab boat. The strobes going up and down. The collar in my fist, and four minutes, and the line going slack. My mother on the end of the bed in the dark, talking about tomatoes on fire escapes. The funeral. Three empty chairs. Those are good boots.
All in the low flat voice. I didn’t stop.
I’d never said any of it out loud. Not to the Coast Guard counsellor. Not to Bea. Not to Lyle, God help me. And it turns out when you say a thing that size in a voice that steady, to a cat, it doesn’t come out like a confession. It comes out like the weather. Like something that’s just true, and has been, and will be tomorrow too.
“So that’s the rule,” I told her. “You don’t let go of the one who’s in front of you. And right now that’s you. Sorry. I know you’d have preferred somebody with a pedigree.”
Her eyes were closed. The idling-engine noise was going, very low.
I didn’t want to move her. So I didn’t. I pulled my boots over by the couch with my foot instead of leaving them by the door, laces loose, tongues pulled out, the way you set them up when you might need to get into them in the dark. I hadn’t done that since the cutter.
Maybe it was the air. It felt like a storm was coming.
I fell asleep sitting up, with my hand on her back.
TIME UNTIL PLANETARY COLLAPSE: 0 HOURS. 9 MINUTES.
Archivist, I’m going to stop talking now. I want you to hear this part with nothing on top of it.
Cold woke me.
Not a sound. Cold. A long, slow ribbon of it across the floor from the direction of the hall. And under my hand, flat on the towel, where there should have been a cat, there was nothing. Just warm.
I was up before I was awake. “Donut?”
The front door was open.
Not wide. About the width of a cat. I’d locked it. I know I’d locked it. I’ve had a long time to come up with theories about how it got open. None of them matter. The door was open and the stairwell light was buzzing, and two floors down, very faintly, the weather man was still going on Mrs. Okafor’s radio.
And from further down, from the street door, came a sound I’d never heard.
I’d only been told about it. A long, rising, broken sound, every forty seconds or so. Mrs. Okafor had undersold it. Donut was out. She was scared. She’d never admit it.
I was in my boxers. I didn’t think about that. Later I’d have a great deal of time to think about that.
I shoved my bare feet into the boots, right where I’d left them, laces loose, the way you do it in the dark. I grabbed my jacket off the hook on the way past. I took the stairs three at a time. The new soles didn’t slip once. Not once. The cobbler had done good work.
Past Mrs. Okafor’s door. Past the weather man, low and angry and steady. I hit the street door with my shoulder and the cold hit me back like the sea coming over the rail.
The street was orange and empty. Frost on every parked car. The air had that heavy wrong feeling, worse now, so much worse, like the whole sky had stopped breathing to listen. And there she was, out in the middle of the road, a pale puff of fur under the streetlight. Back to me. Very straight. Facing something I couldn’t see.
“Donut,” I said. “Hey. Hey, Princess. It’s me. I’m right here.”
I kept my voice low and flat. I kept walking. Heel, toe.
I didn’t stop talking.
I was going to get her. I was not going to let go.
TIME UNTIL PLANETARY COLLAPSE: 0.
End of Part 4.
And that’s the edge of the tape, Archivist. Everything after this is a matter of public record across eleven thousand systems. You’ve seen it. Everyone’s seen it. The boxers alone have their own fan wiki, and the wiki has a schism.
But nobody’s seen this part. Nobody’s seen the cobbler, or the casserole dish, or the blue pen. I kept them back. I’m not sure who for.
END OF FILE 002.
Next file loading. She’s going to want to tell it herself. She’s going to insist. She’s already complained about the lighting.
Author’s note: This is a fan backstory that ends right where the first book begins, and we’ve deliberately stopped at the threshold. Carl chasing Donut out into the cold in his boxers is canon; nearly everything around it is our invention, including the open door, the boots by the couch, the jacket on the hook, the frost and the orange sky, and her crying at the street door. The cobbler, the polish tin, Lyle, Mrs. Okafor, Bea’s beach photo and text, the blue-pen note in Bea’s binder, the countdown timings and Carl telling Donut his history are all invented. The rosette pinned at cat height, the beach photo, the towel and the last night are shared with the Princess Donut file. All characters and the world of Dungeon Crawler Carl belong to Matt Dinniman.