CHAPTER ONE
WIL MORGAN awoke from his regular anxiety dream, in which he had just finished second in a World’s Biggest Failure competition.
Outside the window of his one-bedroom apartment, another overcast morning grudgingly announced the start of yet another overcast week. Wil closed his eyes and considered going back to sleep. He briefly flirted with the notion that he hadn’t woken up at all, and that his lumpy old bed was just a part of his dream. But it was no use—he’d long since forgotten how to escape reality by use of his imagination. This was going to be much like any other miserable Monday in his life. It would lead to a tiresome Tuesday, a woeful Wednesday, a thankless Thursday, and a forgettable Friday. Wil didn’t even want to think about how dreadful the next weekend was already shaping up to be.
He groaned as he rolled out of bed. His left arm had gone back to sleep, and he silently cursed it for its good fortune. The various murmurs and screeches of the city began to filter upward through the damp fog. Wil cursed those as well, just for good measure. As always, a faint smell of mushrooms lingered throughout the apartment but Wil chose to ignore this; partly because the smell of mushrooms made him nauseous but mostly because he had neither purchased nor cooked mushrooms at any time during his entire life. Stepping over a discarded travel magazine, he trudged over to the bathroom mirror, rubbed his eyes, and stuck out his tongue. Not a good time to make eye contact with his reflection, he decided, and he hastily backed away. This particular Monday was already shaping up to set a new record for something, and whatever that something was it was probably going to be something bad. Feeling slightly empty, Wil pulled on his least rumpled set of clothing, grabbed his coat and keys, and headed for the door as a knocking sound coming from beneath his sink leveled up in intensity from mildly annoying to ever-so-slightly obnoxious.
As Wil shuffled past his apartment building’s broken elevator and began to trudge down the stairs (he was good at trudging), he wondered for a moment if his devotion to endless repetition wasn’t nudging him ever closer to permanent and irreversible madness. No doubt Mrs. Chappell, his landlady, would be waiting for him in the lobby of his apartment building. She would utter any one of four variations of the same pleasantry she had greeted him with since the day he’d moved in, and he would smile and issue one of his three standard responses, and be on his way before she could rally enough of her brain cells to attempt further conversation.
Wil paused on the flight of stairs before the lobby and stared at a deluded old calico cat that was attempting to sun itself on a windowsill. In the middle of the landing, a second, scruffy ginger thing was licking itself in an unmentionable place. It eyed Wil with a slightly annoyed expression that suggested it would have preferred if Wil had tripped over it and gone clattering down the final thirty steps headfirst. From below came the sound of Mrs. Chappell’s rusty old voice, cooing to another of her thousand-and-one furry reprobates.
Wil steeled himself and rounded the corner. The old lady was nowhere to be seen. So far so good.
He turned his trudge into a kind of shuffle-cum-sneak, hoping Mrs. Chappell had walked back into her office or—better yet—had suddenly been rendered invisible. It was the use of this particular tactic that allowed him to make it within five feet of the front door before a voice like a sheet of forty-grit sandpaper wrapped around a kitchen knife put paid to his false sense of security.
“Guten Morgen, Mr. Morgan!” came the cry from behind him. “Wakey, wakey, rise and shine! The weather’s fine!”
Wil gritted his teeth. Involuntarily, he dug in his pocket for his lucky English penny that he always carried with him—gripping it so hard, in fact, that he felt it digging into his skin. Might as well get it over with, he thought, as he turned to face his landlady. By now, his pained expression was morphing into a fake grin.
Mrs. Chappell stood at the far end of the lobby holding something scraggly and brownish wrapped around a pair of accusing green eyes. She had an expectant look upon her face.
“Hello, Mrs. Chappell,” said Wil. “Looks like it’s going to be another nice day.”
He thought about adding a “don’t you think?” to the end of his sentence but decided he’d stand a better chance of eliciting a response from the scraggly brown cat. The old lady was already beginning to look vacuous, and the silence was rapidly becoming awkward. With a quick wave of his hand, and not wishing to push his luck, Wil turned tail and hustled out of the front door before any further damage could be done.
* * *
OUTSIDE, THE city streets were gray and sodden. Indeed, Wil often fancied this was the city where they had invented the color gray. He settled quickly into the same routine he had practiced since the day he’d arrived, which involved a large amount of trudging and a general avoidance of eye contact with anyone passing by. As he headed off to work, Wil slowly rolled his old English penny in and out of his fingers, feeling its smoothed-down edges and thinking of days long gone. And as he trudged, he allowed his mind to wander. Though not too far, just to be on the safe side.
He thought about his oh-so-predictable life and—not for the first time—he considered the meaning of his recurring dream. If the World’s Biggest Failure competition had any significance at all, then why second place? Lately on his morning trudge, he’d come to the conclusion that such was the depth of his inadequacy he couldn’t even finish first at finishing last. Somewhere out there was a proper failure, a memorable loser of epic proportions—someone you could look at and say, “Now there goes a real idiot!” Someone who—at the very least—possessed a spark.
Wil settled into a medium-paced trudge, which soon took him across an old stone bridge in the center of town: a decrepit former railway crossing that no local government official had ever seen fit to condemn, and that was fed by a confusing one-way system. Each passing vehicle rattled the bridge in such a way that Wil was reintroduced to every single one of his silver fillings as he crossed. Up ahead, an old brown edifice loomed on the skyline like a fungal growth of brick and mortar: the Castle Towers. Wil’s office on the nineteenth floor was the only place in town where he could afford the rent, and from which he was under constant threat of eviction. He glowered at the Towers, and they glowered back at him.
It was Wil who blinked first. He sighed, feeling inadequate. If his life had a soundtrack, he imagined, it probably sounded something like this:
Trudge, trudge, trudge … KLONNG.
* * *
HAVING SUCCESSFULLY navigated the bridge—as he had done for innumerable consecutive weeks, rain or shine, with no days off for either sickness or vacation—Wil headed for the temporary sanctuary of his local coffee shop. The morning fog was thickening directly over his head, and the cold moisture felt like little needles on his skin. Maybe the weather was singling him out, he thought. No one else looked as cold as he did.
* * *
LATELY, WIL had become more philosophical about life in general and his mediocre contribution to it in particular: So what if he was a damp squib in a world of fireworks? It may well be, he thought, that people always remember bottle rockets that accidentally explode and no one remembers the cheap ones that are left out in the rain. But at least a man living a soggy and boring life would get to the end of it relatively intact. No, he decided, he wasn’t going mad. Insane people were those who made the same mistakes with the expectation of a different result. Wil had lowered his expectations to the point where he could comfortably go about his daily routine and anticipate only minimal success.
He paused at the front entrance of the aptly and unimaginatively named Mug O’ Joe’s, letting the bitter aromas and the whoosh of the latte machines wash around him. If there was an isolated pool of happiness in his world, it was at Mug O’ Joe’s, where he could be found dipping his toes on a daily—and sometimes hourly—basis.
Exactly the same people seemed to be scurrying in and out of Mug O’ Joe’s as had been scurrying in and out of it since it had been named Koffee Korner and before that, the short-lived Ye Olde Towne Café. (Like most of the patrons, Wil had felt no purveyor of the simple coffee bean deserved a name with an e on the end of all four of its descriptors, and he had avoided the place like the plague until sanity had been restored. Those painful three weeks without caffeine had been a test of endurance and mental resolve but one had to make a stand somewhere.) Wil closed his eyes for a moment, losing himself in the bustle of energy coming from within, and wishing for all the world that some of this energy might somehow rub off on his day. Here was his Garden of Eden, a place where Chocolate Vanilla Lattes fought a never-ending battle across the elaborate chalk menu with Mocha Pumpkin Spiced Thingamajigs, and other such earthly delights.
Wil resolved to order his usual, a large regular coffee with space for extra cream. This was not the time to try anything that might interfere with his Monday-morning routine. Opening his eyes, he sent up a quick prayer to Saint Joe, the Patron Saint of False Hope, and headed inside.
Behind the counter stood an indifferent teenager of indeterminate background. Wil could never remember one day to the next if this was the same indifferent teenager he’d ordered from the day before; they seemed to come and go with alarming regularity. Yet while the faces changed, the attitude remained the same: namely, one of bored confusion. Not for the first time in his life, Wil felt he had been here before.
“I’d like a large regular coffee with space for extra cream, please,” said Wil.
“One Hefty with extra space,” replied the teenager. “Would that be a latte?”
“No, a large regular coffee. And I don’t want a ‘Hefty.’”
“But you just said—”
“I said large. I’m not going to fall victim to Mug O’ Joe’s’ corporate vernacular. I just want a large coffee.”
The teenager blinked, confused. This was beginning to go in the exact same direction it normally went whenever Wil stood up for himself: namely, south.
“Hefty means big. So does Bulky. And so does Outsized. We’ve had this conversation before.”
“No we haven’t. This is my first day.”
“Well, I’ve had it with all thirty-five of your predecessors. I’m not using your terminology because it doesn’t make any sense.” Wil pointed at the overly indulgent chalk-drawn menu just to make it clear he and the teenager were discussing the same issue. “Just because someone in marketing happens to own a thesaurus, and just because your shareholders insist all of your drink sizes must appear bigger than they are, and just because you are in between liberal arts colleges and wish to bring your artistic talents to bear on today’s menu, it doesn’t mean I have to join in. I would like a large coffee with space for extra cream. Please.”
“One Heft—”
“Don’t say it.”
“One large coffee. Regular. What flavor?” The teenager was beginning to get the hang of this argument. He wasn’t about to go down without a fight.
Wil looked at the ridiculous array of exotic coffees from around the world piled inside rack after rack around the entire store. True to form, he resolved to ignore each and every one of these exotic flavors individually.
“What’s the flavor of the day?” he asked, thrusting out his jaw and widening his stance.
“French Roast,” replied the teenager, who at this point was beginning to realize a concession of defeat would probably maximize his chances of receiving an adequate tip.
* * *
ROUGHLY FORTY-NINE seconds later, Wil found himself glowering in the general direction of the Castle Towers, this time armed with a large cup of French Roast. The daily dose of caffeine confrontation he endured at Mug O’ Joe’s was beginning to grate. He consoled himself with the thought that while his job was marginally less enjoyable than working in a coffee shop, at least he’d left behind the acne of his teenage years, if not the angst.
Trudge, trudge, trudge … KLONNG.
Monday was getting longer and louder by the minute.
* * *
THE WALK to Castle Towers would take another ten minutes or so—time enough for Wil to harden his heart and appropriately lower his expectations for the day. He trudged past an oversized billboard upon which was an oversized poster of a man with oversized hair, a spray tan, and teeth so white you could have skied on them. This was the ubiquitous Marcus James: a national TV personality of no apparent talent who nevertheless possessed the ability to persuade millions of people to part with something useful in exchange for something useless, usually in three or four easy payments. “Do you want teeth as brilliant white as mine?” asked the ad copy below Marcus James. “Then you want the Gleemodent toothpaste system.” Further ad copy suggested three easy payments of $19.99 for what appeared to be a double order of ordinary toothpaste and the second (and most vital) part of the Gleemodent system: a toothbrush. Wil quickly decided that no, he did not want teeth as brilliant white as Marcus James for the simple reason that he preferred people not to stare at him and point. Besides, he had no desire to be held responsible for snow blindness or traffic delays.
Wil moved past the billboard and settled back into his reluctant trudge, subconsciously conforming to the flow of the city’s one-way system. The warmth of the coffee near his lungs was now putting up a barrier against the freezing mist. While Wil maintained his steady course toward the Castle Towers, he allowed his thoughts to wander, as he always did at this point of the walk. He began to think of better days, all of which lay in the opposite direction from the one he was facing. He thought of those long, lazy afternoons when the future seemed less full of freezing mist. He thought of swimming holes and summer days. And, naturally, he thought of his mom.
* * *
MELINDA MORGAN possessed a healthy sense of mischief and a love of life unparalleled by any other adult Wil had ever met. It was she who encouraged Wil to learn, to embrace knowledge as if it were a glittering prize. It was Mom who taught Wil about the value of imagination, and the acceptance of magic. Wil’s dad, Barry, was an accountant at a large firm in town. He generously tolerated his wife and son’s bond of adoration, and though he barely understood the first thing about science and magic, he always knew when to get out of the way and let the magic happen anyway. Barry Morgan was a good man: a good, solid, unimaginative man. Together, he and his wife made an effective and unorthodox team.
True to her off-the-wall nature, Melinda was a scientist who worked at a jet propulsion laboratory built into the side of a small mountain on the outskirts of town, where she performed exotic experiments understood by no more than twenty people on the entire planet. Young Wil understood the very basics: these experiments involved something called “electromagnetism,” which was a fancy term that Mom used to describe big magnets powered by ten squazillion volts of electricity. On the rare occasions Wil had been inside Mom’s lab, he’d been struck by the generous amounts of fizzling material and the fact that everyone’s hair stood up on end. Mom’s laboratory carried the distinctive smell of fresh ozone formed by any one of the fifty electrical experiments that littered the various test stations, and legend had it that her building could often be seen at night from space.
At home, Wil and his Mom spent countless hours designing exotic inventions and creating elaborate experiments. She bought him his first chemistry set at the age of five, and his first fire extinguisher a couple of weeks after that. Together they had tested the combustibility of virtually every substance in the neighborhood. Using a mixture of soluble starch and baking soda, Wil had once set fire to a local waterfall, which event had made the nightly news. Unbeknownst to him at the time, word of his alarming pyromaniacal tendencies would spread as far as the North Pole. That same Christmas, he received the most stupendous gift of all time: the Nikola Tesla Junior Genius Mega-Volt Test Kit.
Santa was a big fan of Mr. Tesla; and by sheer coincidence, so was Melinda Morgan. Wil had never met the man but he had it on good authority that Tesla was a mad genius who liked to give pretty much anything a good jolt of electricity just to see what would happen. He was Mom’s hero, and—by default—he became Wil’s. At the urging of his mom—and with his trusty Nikola Tesla Junior Genius Mega-Volt Test Kit always on hand—Wil pushed the limits of creativity to their maximum levels of stretchiness. At the age of six, he designed the ill-fated five-dimensional multicube out of an old cardboard box. It would have worked, too, if he had remembered to take it in out of the rain. A year later, he created the ill-conceived Magnesium Volcano experiment, which garnered him an impressive last place at his school science fair after it covered the gym floor with a noxious substance that lingered long after the gym floor was eventually replaced. And then there was the ill-advised Unsinkable Electro-Concrete Troop Carrier, which had transported Dad’s model soldier collection on its maiden voyage across a local lake. The less said about that, the better. Suffice it to say, Wil learned that day that cement is less buoyant than, say, the engine block of a Ford Crown Victoria, and that certain tin soldiers are worth more of one’s allowance than they have any right to be.
* * *
WARMED SLIGHTLY by these memories of past conflagrations, Wil’s pace quickened as he passed Gretchen’s Flower Shop some two hundred yards from his office building. Being of Dutch descent, Gretchen liked to present ornate tulip displays in her storefront. The closer Wil got to his oh-so-forgettable job, the more he would try to remember things that would connect him to his mom, just to give him the strength to wade into his day. Tulips were Melinda’s favorite flower, though she wasn’t allowed to bring them in the house on account of Barry’s allergies. Wil liked the smell of tulips, and Gretchen was the one person he’d always wave to on his way to work if she was outside by her flowers.
Outside the Castle Towers stood a naked statue of Pan, which seemed to shiver ever so slightly in the frozen fog. Mom would have approved of it for the simple fact that Pan’s oversized naughty parts tended to make passersby cover their children’s eyes or look the other way. Certainly, the statue engendered two opposite reactions: upon seeing Pan for the first time, drivers would either avert their gaze or gawk like crazy people and run the risk of possible death or dismemberment at the hands of the too-complicated one-way system they were supposed to be navigating. Mom always liked stuff that challenged people to think differently. And Pan was certainly a challenge to the safe driving record of the local municipality.
By the time Wil made his way through the revolving door that led inside Castle Towers, the memories of his childhood were winning the battle against his reluctance to show up at work; they always seemed to invite escape from his current predicament. He surprised even himself with a sudden and alarming notion that today might be different after all. Perhaps this would be the Monday when the first day of the rest of his life wouldn’t be like all the hideous days that had preceded it. Perhaps this would be the Monday when something finally happened. Perhaps this would be the Monday when—Heaven forbid—someone actually gave him something interesting to do.
Wil moved quickly past the two denizens of the Castle Towers lobby: a pair of identical twin brothers who could be found playing chess by the front window come rain, shine, or Martin Luther King Day. Wil had never learned the brothers’ names; they appeared to be in their mid-fifties, and each had chosen a last line of defense against encroaching baldness by reverting to a disconcerting comb-over that could only be considered an act of desperation. The twins always gave Wil the creeps, though he could never put a finger on what exactly was the problem. It was probably the fact that they never spoke. Once, he’d made eye contact with the one nearest the window. It wasn’t so much that the twin had scowled at him on that occasion; it was more that the guy had looked right through him. Wil often wondered if one or both of the twins were blind.
Trudge, trudge, trudge … KLONNG!
Certainly, chances were high that the brothers were both deaf; they had every right to be.
* * *
THE ELEVATOR was dank and possessed its own peculiar brand of pungency. No matter how many times Mr. Whatley, the superintendent of Castle Towers, had replaced the single light on the elevator’s ceiling, it always flickered on and off and made a sound like an electric horsefly. As Wil ascended toward the nineteenth floor, he found himself being jolted out of his optimistic reverie and back toward reality. The elevator usually had the effect of bringing him down to Earth the farther upward it went.
Wil exited the traveling coffin trying (and failing) to suppress his gag reflex. Mr. Whatley had cleaned the walls of the elevator with bleach on numerous occasions yet the place still always managed to smell like a mixture of curry powder and rat vomit. Curiously, Wil had never seen an actual rat inside the entire building. No doubt they were repelled by the smell of the elevator.
Wil stood for a moment before the door of his office and fumbled inside his pocket for the smooth edges of his trusty English penny, trying to summon the courage to select his keys instead. He knew exactly what awaited him inside his office: an emptiness to match the one inside his heart, the emptiness that had followed him ever since the 207th day of his tenth year of existence. That was the day his mother, Melinda Morgan, had died.
* * *
ON THAT particular morning, Wil and his mom had been hard at work on an old and favored experiment: the Perpetual Penny. It was Melinda’s contention that somewhere in the world existed a penny that—if spun properly and with the right amount of inverted friction—would continue to spin forever and never fall to the ground. She and Wil had collected empirical data on the spinning of every American cent they could find, so much so that young Wil had the habit of asking people for spare pennies in the event they were unknowingly carrying with them the Holy Grail of all coins. Wil and his mom had collated the results of every penny spin since he was two years of age but had come no closer to finding the Perpetual Penny. They had so far achieved a 0 percent success rate but, as Mom pointed out, the experiment called for a 2 percent margin for error. This meant that conceivably, 2 percent of their spins had been successful—they just hadn’t known it. Despite his lack of success, Mom had encouraged Wil to always keep trying. For a good experiment, she said, could never be rushed.
Lately, Wil had been resistant to his mom’s optimism. He had begun to exhibit the typical frustration of a ten-year-old coming to terms with stubborn reality. Something was going to crack, Mom had said, and her money was on reality cracking first. Even though young Wil was not so sure, he’d decided to play along.
That morning, Mom had had an epiphany. She’d given Wil an old penny she’d brought back from a trip to England, where she and Barry had visited for their honeymoon some years before. This penny had a picture of the Queen of England on it, and she appeared to be floating on the sea in some kind of chariot. Like most of Mom’s notions, the idea of an English penny being any better than an American one seemed to make little sense at first blush. Wil’s dad, as usual, was skeptical about the potential for success. He’d given the pair his customary haughty sniff and had gone off to the upstairs toilet to read about something called the Dow Jones index. So while Mom busied herself with some scientific paperwork, Wil got to work trying to impart just the right amount of inverted friction upon this new candidate. It wasn’t long before frustration took hold of the process.
“I can’t do it,” Wil complained. “It doesn’t matter if it’s English or American. It’s just a penny. Just like all the other ones.”
His mother gave him her most patient and understanding sigh. “Everyone knows the Perpetual Penny looks just like any other penny, Wil,” she replied. “It’s all in how you spin it. Maybe every penny is the Perpetual Penny, or maybe none of them at all. You have to believe you’re going to get it just right. But you’re never going to get it right if you give up halfway through.”
This was a variation on a familiar theme, and it was one that to Wil’s ten-year-old mind was becoming painfully transparent.
“That’s not fair!” he whined, doing his best impression of a nine-year-old. “You said I had to believe in the Easter Bunny and the Candy Goblin and then when I asked Santa about it at the mall he said he didn’t know who the Candy Goblin was!”
“Fine. Then what do you believe?”
Wil realized he was probably going to have to be careful with his next statement, just in case. Maybe he was getting a little old for the Candy Goblin but there was no sense in ticking off Santa just to prove a point. “Maybe he just forgot,” he replied, sheepishly.
Melinda seemed wistful, perhaps realizing this was a pivotal moment for her son. Wil was going to go one way or the other, she probably thought. Either he’d make the conscious choice to retain his childhood innocence and bring his wonderful imagination to bear, or he’d reject the notion of belief entirely and move through life in an entirely different direction altogether. She kissed her little boy and hugged him tightly. “Never forget,” she told him. “Your eyes only see what your mind lets you believe.” And for some strange reason, she had a small tear in the corner of her eye when she said it.
With that, Dad came down from upstairs to take Wil off to school. He and Mom kissed each other goodbye, and Dad told her to be careful at work, just like he always did.
Wil watched through the back window of his dad’s sensible car that morning, and as Mom receded in the distance, he somehow knew with absolute certainty that this would be the last time he’d ever see her. He carried a sense of dread with him the entire day at school, and for some unknown reason he fiddled with the English penny and spun it on his desk innumerable times until the school bus came. Only later that evening did Wil realize that instinctively, he’d known his heart was emptying of all its joy. It became clear the moment the school bus turned the corner on his street and he saw the cop cars outside on his driveway.
* * *
WIL ENTERED his office in much the same mood as he’d left it. Thoughts of that terrible day long ago always sent him back to a dark and empty place, and this morning was no exception. The police had come to inform his dad that Melinda Morgan was tragically atomized during an experiment involving 17 trillion megawatts that had reversed the Earth’s polarity for a period of almost two nanoseconds. No trace of a body was ever found, such was the intensity of the explosion at the laboratory. Since that fateful day, Dad had never forgiven himself. Neither had he forgiven Mom for leaving him alone, nor the entire universe for taking away the one person he had ever truly loved, and whom he now needed more than ever before.
Wil’s junky old answering machine blinked an insistent red. The contents of his desk and most of his shelves had been disturbed over the course of the weekend. His stapler had vibrated all the way across his desk until it was touching the pencil sharpener, and three of his pencils had fallen on the floor altogether. Wil’s little air freshener had left a trail in the dust as it had magically wandered from one side of a shelf to the other since the last time he’d seen it on the previous Friday. Wil growled; he knew this was the work of no ghostly agency. Far from it: this constant shifting of his office contents had a very simple, terrestrial explanation. Sighing heavily, he picked up the stack of letters that Mr. Whatley had thrust through his mail slot over the weekend, and he jettisoned the entire pile into the trash. He knew he’d fetch them out a little later in the day but for the moment it felt good to toss all of his overdue bills and pretend he had the power to do so.
Propped up against the wall stood a moth-eaten package—roughly fifty inches long—that represented an ongoing battle of wills between Wil Morgan, the universe in general, and corporate America in particular. It contained an unwanted item that Wil had neither ordered nor even considered ordering, but that had been shipped to his work address on multiple occasions nonetheless: the Marcus James Air-Max 2000 golf club. On the first occasion it had arrived, Wil had duly shipped the driver back to its manufacturer and thought little more of it. The package had subsequently been reshipped to Wil’s office a total of seventeen times before he’d succumbed to the stress and made a phone call to the Air-Max 2000’s corporate office. Arrangements had been made with the help of yet another indifferent sales associate—presumably, an ex-employee of Mug O’ Joe’s—and the item had been returned for the eighteenth time. However, this had the effect of generating an alarming number of increasingly threatening bills, statements, and notices from collection agencies seeking the total cost of the driver, plus shipping, handling, interest, and apparently a subscription to the entire Marcus James Gleemodent toothpaste and clothing catalogue. Within days, the package had mysteriously reappeared just inside his door, thanks no doubt to the ever-diligent Mr. Whatley. And so for the last two years, Wil had held on to the item, still inside its crumbling packaging. In the meantime, the product had been redesigned and reintroduced as the “new and improved” (and slightly more expensive) Air-Max 3000. These days, Wil tended to add the occasional demand letters for the club’s purchase price to his regular discard pile. The only loser in this situation was the poor Air-Max 2000, well past its prime and sadly lagging behind the times, destined never to hit the fairways of the professional tour.
Wil looked at the frosted-glass door to his office. From his vantage point, the lettering on the glass read, ROTAGITSEVNI ETAVIRP—NAGROM LIW. Underneath this, in smaller letters and clearly legible from his side of the room, was written the legend DIVORCE AND INSURANCE CASES OUR SPECIALTY. This odd mix of betwixt and between presented an obvious problem, for no matter which side of the door a person stood on, at least one of the lines read completely backward. Wil sighed heavily again, as he always did whenever he considered how much he’d paid a local glass etcher for that particular piece of promotional genius. He wondered for the thousandth time how many potential clients had been put off by his obvious lack of organizational prowess, and settled on “not very many” since they’d have to be crazy to come all the way up to the nineteenth floor of the Castle Towers.
* * *
BEING A private investigator, especially one specializing in divorce and insurance fraud, was a far cry from the splendiferous blueprint Wil had originally drawn up for his life. As a child, Wil had planned to follow a unique and spectacular career path, narrowing down his options to one of few possibilities: (1) a hedgehog doctor, (2) developer of the world’s first fruit-flavored wallpaper, (3) designer of the personal matter transmitter, or (4) quite possibly all of the above. He’d later settled upon just plain “inventor of stuff.” That was, of course, until he reached the 207th day of his tenth year of existence.
After Mom died, the house was a very quiet place for a very long time. Then one day without warning, Wil’s father had decided to sit him down and explain How Things Were Going To Be From Now On. Things were going to be very different.
As far as Barry Morgan was concerned, Melinda’s fertile imagination and her penchant for electrocuting things were the cause of her demise. While the second of these things was quite possibly true, the logic of the first part escaped Wil entirely. For all of his life, he’d been encouraged to use his imagination, to grow as a person, to see the magic hidden in plain sight all around the world. Well, his dad told him, this was going to change. For one thing, there was no such thing as magic. For another, looking for answers in difficult places had proven to be a dangerous fool’s errand that could only end in atomization and subsequent tears.
“You can’t live your life like a firework,” Barry had explained to his son. “Fireworks explode, and they usually take a few fingers and eyeballs with them. You’re better off staying rooted to the ground and watching other people flame out.”
After that nugget of wisdom, Dad had made Wil listen for three hours as he explained about the difference between imagination and reality. He’d told Wil the shocking truth about Santa, explained the economics of safety, and drilled into Wil that magic was always a trick. Always.
Young Wil had been resistant to his dad’s new world order at first. He would secretly build little inventions out of cardboard, and whenever Dad was out of the house he’d leaf through Mom’s old science magazines. When his father found out, the magazines were thrown out with the trash. Blueprints and cardboard were subsequently and consequently forbidden from the house.
One day, Wil came home early from school to find his dad sitting alone in front of the fire, clutching a photo of his mom. Dad was crying but when Wil moved to intercept, Barry gruffly pretended he was coming down with a cold, or something. What became clear from that experience—it was something that Wil would never forget—was that his dad had lost the thing most dear to him the day he had lost his beautiful and beloved wife. The only thing Barry Morgan now cherished—his only connection to Melinda—was his son, Wil. And it would be a cold day in a hot place before he ever lost his boy to the same fate that had claimed his wife.
Over time, Dad’s constant needling about the perils of possessing an imagination and believing in things wore on his son. Harsh reality seemed to triumph more frequently over flights of fancy. Dad was never so proud nor relieved as the day Wil chose calculus over art in high school. He helped Wil choose a proper accounting college and set him up with a bankable IRA, which could only be cashed in without penalty once Wil reached the oh-so-safe age of fifty-five without being atomized in a terrible accident. To this day, Barry Morgan had absolutely no idea that his son had chosen a relatively perilous career in insurance fraud detection over a more sensible path through the safe and steady world of chartered accounting.
* * *
WIL TOOK the old English penny from his pocket and spun it on the table. As it wandered across the desk, he found himself staring at the blinking red light of his outdated answering machine. He’d promised himself on many occasions that he’d buy a service provided by the telephone company that took messages at a remote location and kept them for him to retrieve from the system whenever he chose. Alas, he could not afford such a luxury, and so his primitive system was his only option. On the rare occasions the telephone actually rang, Wil half-expected the 1980s to be on the other end of the line, asking for their old answering machine back. His machine was rotten, quirky, and quite possibly possessed by demons. It seemed to delight in switching on and off at the most inopportune times. It recorded messages either at a whisper or trapped beneath hideous feedback that sounded like something out of the early Apollo missions. Worst of all, it worked perfectly only when the message being left belonged to a debt collector, auto-dialer, telemarketer, or recorded message from a local politician trying to spread dirt about his or her political opponent.
The penny clattered to a stop on the desk. Wil stared at it in silence. As if in response, the penny moved, almost imperceptibly. Over at his window, Wil noticed that one of his photo frames was getting ready to take a walk across the painted surface of the sill. The sound of an enormous cog clicking into place rattled the walls. This could only mean one thing: his personal soundtrack was about to go off, minus the trudging.
KLONNG!
Wil caught the photo frame just as it fell from the windowsill. If such an inanimate object could have attempted suicide by tossing itself off a ledge, Wil would not have blamed it one bit. His own daydreams had tended toward the homicidal—or, he supposed, “clockicidal”—every Monday morning for years. Wil knew with absolute certainty that he would gladly have accepted a sentence of thirty to life just for one morning of respite from the thing that tormented him the most.
Directly across from Wil’s office stood a massive clock tower that the city forefathers had once received as a gift from the government of Switzerland to commemorate something nobody could remember. Wil hated this monstrosity more than he had ever hated anything in the known universe, not to mention a substantial portion of the undiscovered bit. It was a thoughtless, pointless, artless container of decibels that counted away the hours of his life one painfully annoying quarter hour at a time.
KLONNG!
As part of his morning ritual, Wil liked to stand at his window and shake his fist at the clock until it stopped going “klonng.” He would utter increasingly profane oaths in its direction and silently wish it would sprout large robotic legs and go away. In fact, Wil had once opened his window to challenge the awful beast to a fight to the death, to which it had simply responded:
KLONNG!
Any moment now, the clock would stop and Wil would be left in peace. He’d be able to check his messages and make all his morning business calls, assuming he had any to make. All he needed to do was wait for one final
KLUNK!
Fifteen million francs worth of precision Swiss timing, yet all the city had to show for it was a painfully obnoxious pile of cogs that didn’t work properly. The day the clock mechanism was installed in its tower it was discovered that the American housing had been designed in feet and inches, whereas the clock mechanism itself had been of the metric variety. As a result, one of the main clappers would bash into the wall of the clock tower instead of actually striking the bell. If one listened carefully after the quarter-hour chimes had faded—assuming one’s ears were still functional after being assailed by the enormous bell—one could hear muffled clattering as the final clapper counted off the hours by missing the bell entirely and thudding into a well-worn brick.
The clock would now be silent until exactly six minutes after three, at which point it would go “klonng” again, six times, for no apparent reason. It had been the bane of Wil’s existence that no matter his mood and no matter his daily preparation, the clock’s mid-afternoon “klonng” always took him by surprise. Sometimes, he’d be in the middle of a phone call. Other times, he’d be using the bathroom or searching under his desk for a dropped pencil at exactly the wrong time. He’d tried everything from putting in earplugs to staring at the clock just prior to its mid-afternoon sonic attack. But for whatever reason, at precisely five minutes after three he’d get distracted and the clock would do its nefarious business one minute later and invariably he’d bang his head, clutch at his heart, or miss the toilet entirely.
Satisfied that the clock had finished annoying him for the morning, Wil aimed some inventive invective at the clock tower, and then turned toward the northwest and shook his fist at Switzerland. With this done, he replaced the photo frame on its perch and set about trying to retrieve his messages from his temperamental answering machine.
* * *
“MR. MORGAN,” said the first message with a clarity that Wil fancied had eluded professional audiophiles the world over for decades, “this is Mr. Hightower calling from American National Bank again. We wondered if you’d received notice of our intent to collect—click.” Wil kept his finger on the Erase button for a few seconds. Not a bright start to his Monday.
“Glurble flurble … hiss,” went the second message, missing Wil’s inner ear entirely and moving directly into the part of his brain reserved for migraine headaches. Probably a potential client or an eccentric billionaire attempting to give away money, he reasoned, pinching his nose.
“Do you want to drive the ball as straight and long as the pros? Yearning to pick up an extra thirty, forty, or even fifty yards on your playing partners? Then for four easy payments of $59.99, you need the new Air-Max 3000—click.” Though equal parts alarmed and impressed by Marcus James’s ability to intrude on virtually every aspect of his life, Wil was still having none of it. It was a statistical probability even the Air-Max 3000 would be unable to help him drive as long and straight as the pros on account of the fact he’d never actually picked up a golf club in his life. Tempting though the offer was, Wil decided to stick with the old 2000 model festering in its crumbling packaging by the door, keep his money to himself, and let his dream of joining the professional golf tour remain just that.
The next message was virtually silent, though Wil fancied he could make out a faint request to call someone back about a job. The return telephone number was indiscernible. The message following this sounded like a frantic leprechaun with throat nodules. “If you can hear this…,” said the message before trailing off into a series of garbled whispers. Wil could make out something about going somewhere urgently on a matter of vital importance. However, he could not make out where, when, or by whom the message had been left. This was an odd kind of message, even for Wil’s demonic answering machine. He scrunched his nose and clicked the Fast Forward button.
“Wil,” said the final message with such crystal quality that you could hear the scraping of an angel on a pinhead somewhere in the background, “it’s Dad.”
Wil looked at the answering machine with a horrified expression. Given its predilection for providing clarity only when bad news was in the offing, he knew this was going to be of the atrocious variety. His heart had already made the leap into his mouth at the sound of Barry Morgan’s voice and was now beginning to force its way out of his nostrils. “I’m going to be in town for a couple of days next week,” continued the message. “Thought I might stay with you at your apartment since you’ve bragged so much about the facilities. I was thinking you could take a personal day and we could visit the museums and the fountains in the park. Oh, and make sure you tell the folks at your accounting firm I’d like to meet them. Accountants always want to talk shop. Anyway, I’ll call later. Bye for now!”
Wil stared at the answering machine for a good twenty seconds before he realized his mouth was open and there was drool coming down the side of it. His heart had jumped out of his body altogether and was now hiding in a corner, refusing to get back inside. His fingers and lips felt numb. This could not possibly be happening. Not now. Not on a Monday.
Wil’s legs felt unsteady. Either the world had just turned into a roiling ocean or his vertigo was coming on again. He plunked heavily in his desk chair before the panic attack overwhelmed him entirely. Please, he thought to the universe in general. Please don’t let this be the way it all ends.
As if to answer his silent prayer, there was a sudden, unmistakable moving of giant cogs nearby, followed by the sound of something very large and heavy hitting something else made of brick. Somewhere in Heaven a rogue angel was probably gunning down Saint Joe, the Patron Saint of False Hope, with a Thompson submachine gun.
Wil’s eyes began to swim, his skin felt clammy and cold, and his nervous system felt like it was beginning to go completely numb. Perhaps his old penny might buck the trends of the last twenty or thirty years and present a different outcome than usual. He fished the coin from his pocket and spun it, then watched, forlornly, as it wandered across his desk and slowly, inexorably, began to topple over. The penny clattered to the desk and lay there, motionless. Wil wasn’t sure his heart was even beating anymore. Surely this was the second-worst moment of his entire life. He put his hands over his ears and let his entire collection of limbs and organs slide slowly and unerringly down toward his desk until his left eye was about three inches from the penny that now lay on his desk. This was it: his life was officially over. Wil began to sob—quietly at first, but then with an increasing intensity so that his giant tears formed little puddles in the dust below his eyes. Please, he thought to whatever passing god might be listening. Please make this all go away.
* * *
AS IT turned out, this was the very moment that magic entered Wil Morgan’s life.
Copyright © 2016 by Paul Jenkins
