?2018?
Several miles to the north, the sun gazed into Isaac Falcone’s bedroom as it climbed the heavens two hours ahead of schedule. The unwelcome ultraviolet, meeting little resistance in the window, assaulted the thick blanket held up by thumbtacks on the inside. The blanket, a memento of its owner’s childhood, bore the fuzzy but faded likenesses of the Avengers and a vague smell of marijuana. The sun pierced through Isaac’s lifelong protectors and landed on a grey tabby cat who had been sprawled across her human’s neck and shoulders.
Sensing it was time to rise, the cat leapt from her human, leaving small scratches on his right shoulder. The shock pulled him, rather rudely he thought, from a dead sleep. The cat, uninterested in Isaac’s annoyance, began meowing incessantly for him to open the door.
Isaac groaned and, with an enormous amount of effort, opened one eye. He aimed it directly at the invading sunlight, and his eye lost the fight.
Though it was rare that he went a night without awakening several times, 7:59 AM had been his time to give up and leave his bed since early childhood when his mother used to wake him for school. Though he fell off the routine in high school, it became a habit once again after he entered his twenties. This had been his daily life in the two years since he moved out of Uncle Vic’s house on his own, and instinctively he knew that something about having his already-poor eyes assaulted by space fire this early, in late December no less, was incorrect.
Isaac dug his collapsed right arm from under his torso and flung it toward his side table in search of his cracked cell phone. He yanked the phone from its charger and pressed the home key; nothing happened. He pressed it again, this time a bit harder. The screen lit up with white static and froze in that state. He must have been listening to the Talking Heads the night before, because the device kept repeating the middle section of the song on a modulated, annoying loop. Isaac swore, admitting defeat to the early sun and busted technology.
Though a phantom sore patch between his shoulder blades and spanning up around his neck protested, he pushed himself to the edge of his bed and promptly swung his right big toe into the metal leg of the desk beside it. The jolt knocked a glass pipe designed to look like a mythological cyclops over the edge and into Isaac’s hastily extended hand. Another assortment of colourful language escaped his mouth.
“See what kind of trouble you get me into, Gamora?” he asked the still-meowing cat.
She scratched the door as if to tell him, “I can’t reach the shiny thing; you must aid me in my escape. I believe there is food on the other side, so your petty misfortunes are no concern of mine.”
Isaac grabbed a t-shirt from a loose pile on the floor. A black one with the Ravenclaw banner printed on the front was among the handful with the least offensive odour, so he pulled that one on and stumbled across his room, kicking a path through the scattered piles of old clothing, wrinkled and torn sheets of paper, and empty medication bottles. His lack of care resulted in a small paper cut on his left foot from a pale green sheet with notes from Doctor Williams, repeating past notes that said not much could be done for Isaac’s anxiety disorder and sleeping difficulties except continuing with his current medications.
Isaac finally reached the door without further injury and forced it open against the overflow at his feet. He took a quick peek up and down the hall and through the open door of the neighbouring bedroom to make sure Chloe, the other tenant in the apartment and Isaac’s younger sister, couldn’t see behind his door. She would have him out on the street if she saw the state of it, despite it technically being his apartment still, with her having seized control from the moment she moved into the larger of the two rooms in order to save money while she studied computer engineering at the nearby university.
Chloe’s space was free of all clutter, with a freshly made bed perfectly parallel with the far corner. The floor and walls were nearly bare, with posters of each Star Trek series’ commanding officer lining one wall in chronological order. Each had been hung so perfectly straight, with two inches precisely between each one that it could have been done by a machine.
The machine in question—Chloe herself—was not present. Isaac pulled his door shut behind him and took a few sluggish steps out into the land of the living.
I can’t concentrate with the mess you leave around here! Isaac remembered Chloe snapping at him after the first few tense weeks of them getting used to living together without the rest of their family present as mediators. She had then proceeded to slam a stack of worksheets down on the living room table in a fit of frustration then began collecting laundry and trash from the floor while muttering a string of curses under her breath.
The apartment proper was a sequel to the empty bedroom, with everything in its right place and not a spot of dirt to be seen. The off-grey carpet had a light-and-dark striped quality from a meticulous vacuum job.
Chloe must have been cleaning all night… Something must be wrong, Isaac thought worriedly. He scanned the apartment, hoping to see his sister. A pair of lime green bookshelves stood on either side of the balcony door; perpendicular to these was a shabby maroon sofa that sat facing a scratched television on a plastic stand and a simple wooden coffee table. Behind the television, a row of posters featuring nouns Isaac liked including, but not limited to, the Beatles, Justice League, Cthulhu, and a map of Skyrim hung on the wall. The layout and decorations of the living room were some of the few things left unchanged when Chloe began her occupation.
On the screen, Matt Smith’s Doctor was facing off with an astronaut who had just emerged from a lake. Isaac assumed that Chloe had popped in a DVD from his box set.
You just want more space to scatter your tools everywhere! The living room isn’t Dad’s garage! Isaac had fired back against Chloe’s assessment of his living habits. The memory continued to play through his mind as he looked around the living room.
Alright, whatever, Mom! Chloe responded before storming into her spotless room. Three days passed before the siblings spoke to each other again.
The bookcase nearest to the sofa was something Isaac believed should be considered a crime. Belonging to Chloe, it was identical to his in every way except for how its owner treated it. Science and engineering texts were either standing, resting sideways, or upside down and open to whatever page the reader stopped on. Piles of papers were tossed in between, pinned down by loose computer parts and tools. A well-used, partially stained paperback copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was left propped diagonally against the spine of an unnecessarily large school textbook.
My damn copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a distorted, aggressive version of Isaac’s own voice said in his ear, until he remembered that the damage was from years of his ownership, and not Chloe borrowing it. Rage, the simple name Isaac had assigned his hostile impulses in order to argue with them effectively, simmered down a bit. Still, Isaac felt it was a gross misuse of a perfectly good book, and he should have known better. He checked the novel to see where Chloe had last read and found it underneath the rear cover to indicate she was finished. He reclaimed the book and crossed the room to the other bookcase.
The other case, property of Isaac, was adoringly polished and arranged in proper Dewey Decimal style. A collection of books ranging from fantasy and sci-fi to musical biographies and Quantum Physics for Dummies, gathered more or less at random by Isaac since elementary school, had been carefully sorted by author and stacked spines-out, as well they should be. Little toys and trinkets decorated the empty shelf space in front of the books—Lego figurines of the fourteen Doctors and four Beatles, a wind-up TARDIS, Superman mid-flight, and a miniature statue of the Hulk grappling with the Thing. On the middle shelf, several bass guitar picks had been arranged in order from lightest to heaviest. He placed his book in a vacant spot on the top.
Isaac trudged blearily into the freshly scrubbed, postage stamp-sized kitchen. The first of three creaking wooden cabinets on the wall to his right had a thin white label stuck to the bottom which read ‘N.A-H’.
[For those curious, this was Isaac’s personal code for ‘Nutrition Section, shelves A through H’, where he alphabetised whatever non-perishable food and ingredients he or Chloe had purchased that week. Over time, they had learned to compromise their living styles, with her in charge of sanitising the apartment while he was responsible for sorting and organising everything in it.]
Isaac’s eyes widened as he turned his head to look behind him too quickly, barely avoiding temporary paralysis in his neck. For an instant he thought he could hear a distant echo of someone describing the household duties he and Chloe shared, but found only Gamora circling his feet, nuzzling her head into his ankles while waiting for him to find her breakfast.
With some quick assistance from the Narrator, Isaac forgot about the mysterious voice almost as suddenly as he had heard it. Finally, he found Gamora’s blue plastic bowl from the dishwasher and pulled a can of chicken-flavoured cat food from the top shelf in the cabinet, which was labelled A-B-C. He pried the metal lid from the can, emptied its contents into the bowl, and placed it on the floor for a grateful Gamora.
The one who could leave her own bookshelf such a mess while being compulsively neat with the rest of her surroundings was still nowhere to be seen. Chloe had left her favourite mug, one in the shape of Darth Vader’s helmet, full of fresh coffee on the postage stamp-sized table. It was carelessly left on the bare wood instead of on a coaster or napkin. Isaac began to worry and looked around the apartment for her.
Having not spotted Chloe in her room, the living room, or the kitchen, Isaac turned to the balcony. As he crossed back across the room a blurry, grey, humanoid shape not entirely unlike a shadow of his sister moved past him to the door. This was nothing new to him; it was the reason their mother made him start wearing glasses in middle school. Almost, but not quite, everyone he saw had a blurry doppelgänger mirroring their movements. What was unusual was that there was typically a physical person in view for the shape to be a shadow of, and Isaac saw no one nearby.
Isaac peeked through the curtain hanging from the door, and now the grey shape was nowhere to be seen. There was Chloe in a circular elastic net chair, sobbing as she held her tiny black kitten, Nikola. The cat rested at an awkward angle as though he had tried to escape the girl’s grip, only to give up and nuzzle his tiny head into his companion’s damp chin.
She hasn’t cried that hard since she was twelve, when we found out about… a shaky, reverberating clone of Isaac’s voice in his head pointed out, increasing its volume with every syllable until his brain was full of an overlapping cacophony threatening to finish describing a memory of their past losses that he would rather avoid confronting. He addressed this inner echo as Panic, completing his so-called ‘brain gang’ with Rage, and it wasn’t wrong.
“Chloe?” Isaac asked as he pulled the door open. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
Chloe jerked her head up to face him, the unexpected sound of Isaac’s voice giving her phantom chills. He saw that her eyes were swollen and red, with streams of tears covering her face. Strands of dark hair, a shade lighter than her brother’s and visibly cleaner where it hadn’t been cried on, got caught in the flood and stuck to the girl’s face. A few drops were starting to freeze in the late December air.
Chloe caught her brother’s eye first with immense shock, as if she didn’t think he should be there, but it faded within a heartbeat to utter confusion and mild embarrassment as she forgot why.
“I… don’t know,” she told her brother. He suspected that she was lying, but she genuinely had no clue.
Isaac helped her to her feet. Dark patches where tears had landed covered the various Iron Men on her t-shirt and fuzzy pyjamas. She wiped her face, swept her hair back from her face, and followed her brother back inside. Nikola, who jumped ship as soon as Chloe let him go, was attempting to play with a completely uninterested Gamora on the sofa. The program on TV was just reaching the end credits.
“What the hell?” Isaac said, annoyed. “The episode was just starting a few seconds ago.” He checked the Xbox often used as a DVD player, only to find it was unplugged all along and thus not a candidate for displaying a Doctor Who DVD; the program had indeed been coming from the television set. He shrugged in frustration and trudged off to prepare to face the day. Before he made it out of the room, he turned back and showed Chloe his phone.
“Hey, my phone turned up broken this morning. Any chance you could take a look at it?” Isaac asked her.
Without a word she took the device from him, moved a pair of thick plastic-framed glasses from her pocket to her face, and examined the device at all angles from about an inch away. She put it through the same tests Isaac had tried before—button press, slightly harder button press, rapid double and triple button press, hold home and lock button simultaneously—with no results. The phone defiantly displayed its screen of white static, though the speakers seemed to be running out of breath as the audio loop had all but disappeared.
“Yeah, I’ll see what I can do with it. If I can’t, maybe Sarah or Professor Oshiro can help later,” Chloe said as she placed the phone on a small plastic stand on the coffee table, then proceeded to gather a magnifying glass, a pair of tweezers, and a doll-sized screwdriver from her bookshelf.
Sarah Scott, Isaac knew, had been Chloe’s best friend since middle school. They began as academic rivals, eventually falling into a tradition of switching places at the top of any classes they shared. Though both mechanically inclined they diverged paths after enrolling in university, with Sarah studying medicine and Chloe remaining focused on computers under the mentorship of Professor Ken Oshiro. Still, they shared a single technical writing course in which their long-standing rivalry could continue.
“Not that it matters,” Chloe would claim each time Sarah moved ahead of her. “It’s not a competition.” Often, she would say this as she departed to put in extra study time in order to take the lead back.
Chloe no longer seemed to notice that her brother or the cats were still in the room. Those glasses meant she was in “work mode” and could not be distracted, regardless of how hard one might try. He had always suspected his sister was a machine herself—when he put on his glasses, it just meant he couldn’t see.
“Thanks, Chlobot,” Isaac said with a weary smile before departing back down the hallway. Chloe nodded wordlessly in his general direction, either not noticing or not caring about his use of her childhood nickname.
The following portion of Isaac Falcone’s daily routine is quite probably only interesting to the one participating. In order to offer an in-depth view into his life before it becomes overtaken by chaotic weirdness, while still maintaining a semblance of interest and decent pacing, it will be summarised here.
Isaac replaced his baggy plaid pyjama bottoms with slacks and faded Ravenclaw t-shirt with a purple sweater over a white button-down shirt, rolled the sleeves to his elbows, and added a thin silver necktie. He brushed his teeth—five brush strokes on each side, bottom left to right then top right to left—to the rhythm of Talking Heads’ ‘Once in A Lifetime’, then popped open an orange medicine canister full of blue capsules and threw one down his throat.
Isaac looked straight past the pale grey shape standing two inches to his left, fished a wristwatch featuring the face of Scooby Doo from the chaos of his room, and noticed the time: 10:00 AM.
“Fuck, I’m late!” Isaac exclaimed as he threw his black and grey backpack over his shoulder and bolted out of the apartment building, down three winding sets of creaking wooden stairs to the frozen parking lot. He got lucky this time and managed to get outside without running into any neighbours, and thus feeling obligated to fake his way through a bout of polite chitchat.
Directly across the lot, narrowly avoiding a chance encounter between the frigid ground and Isaac’s backside as his shoes skidded across a patch of black ice, he reached his battered, old, candy red PT Cruiser with an obnoxious blotch of yellow paint on the rear bumper, from one of several times he broke dad’s ‘Don’t Run in the Garage’ rule as a boy. While he attempted to regain his full balance, he covered the driver’s door window with fog from his rapid breaths. By the time he finally got his hand on the door, his cheeks stung, and he could barely operate his fingers.
After rubbing his hands together for warmth and starting the vehicle, which took three tries, almost always, Isaac attempted to connect his iPod to the stereo. It died with a pathetic, robotic whine. When the noise ended, the clock read out in lifeless, green numbers: 00:00 AM/PM.
Feeling the frustrations of the past two hours slide over him like a large bucket of molten lead, Isaac clenched his jaw and hurried off to work.
Same as it ever was, he thought.