On Angels and the Law of Unintended Consequences (125)

PSI-4

Calliope’s door rattled with a series of sharp knocks. Mordecai answered it with a smile — which faded somewhat, but that was more embarrassment than irritation. “Oh. Yes?”

“Erik drank a whole bottle of absinthe and he’s passed out in the alley and I don’t know what to do,” Maggie said, twisting her hands in front of her.

Mordecai’s smile faded further but did not entirely vanish. This sounded like some kind of prank, although not a very nice one. “Why would Erik do something like that?”

Maggie canted her head away. “…I ‘unno.”

Mordecai frowned thunderously. He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Erik didn’t drink a whole bottle of absinthe, did he, Magnificent?”

“No. Not really,” Maggie said.

He snatched her by the arm and dragged her across the dining room towards the kitchen. Under the circumstances, she let him.

Calliope got off her bed and trailed a few paces after them, “Em…?”

“What were you trying to do?” Mordecai demanded.

“We had him a bird for a little, he’s fine!” Maggie said. She pulled back slightly. “I mean, as far as I can tell…”

“Mad Bartholomew,” Mordecai said. “Mad Bartholomew?” he asked her.

She nodded.

Mordecai paused and looked down at her. He snarled and slammed a hand on the back door. “God damn it, you showed him the whole bottle, didn’t you? He’ll work for a glass, but if you show him the bottle, he’ll have the whole thing!”

She nodded.

“How long ago?”

“Like, right now.”

He abandoned her and barreled down the back stairs, head up and looking around. “Where…?”

Erik was lying face down amidst the bombed out remains of the warehouse behind them, lightly sugared with snow — a strange confection. At first Mordecai parsed him as a soldier who’d been shot trying to get back to the wall, then the image of Erik’s ruined head lying in a puddle of blood recurred and he cried out and clapped both hands over his eyes.

God damn it, tamp that shit down. God damn it. I am not going to flip out. Erik has alcohol poisoning. I am going to fix it. I am going to keep it together and I am going to fix it. God damn it.

He drew a deep breath and ended coughing it all out into his cupped hands, which he stuffed into his pockets so he wouldn’t get any obvious stains on anything.

Erik kicked himself onto his back and curled his arms over his head. “Aw, man,” he said softly. “Mud in my eye…”

Mordecai was on him like a shot and dragging him to his feet. He did not bother to put together any kind of coherent strategy for carrying Erik comfortably, he just hefted him under both arms and began dragging him to the house.

“Did you throw up?” Mordecai said.

“Pretty sure no…” Erik drawled. His metal eye was making an irritated whir and was either having a look at the puzzle pieces on the side of the house or trying to rub itself clean.

“Can you?”

“I’d kinda like to…”

“Maggie, get out of the damn way!” Mordecai said.

Maggie stepped aside and held open the door for him. Mordecai staggered past her and deposited Erik in one of the kitchen chairs. The green boy slumped forward and rolled his cheek and then his entire face against the cold surface of the table. “Oh, I’m s’posed to write a haiku,” he said, muffled.

“Em, what’s going on?” Calliope said weakly, as Erik shed snow into puddles on the kitchen floor.

“Damage control,” Mordecai replied. “Calliope, shut up. I need brain cells. I can’t… process!”

Calliope turned and wandered out of the foyer doorway, which Mordecai appreciated. Now if only he could ask the two hash brownies to leave.

He would have to settle for politely ejecting the absinthe and then go from there.

Hyacinth’s doctor bag was in view on the countertop and he focused on that and tore into it.

Ipecac, ipecac… He trailed off and stared at one of the cabinets with no door on it. Or is that a brand name…?

He growled and banged his head three times on the countertop in sharp succession. Stupid intellect! I know you’re in there! Don’t hide!

“Uncle Mordecai…” Maggie said.

He darted a finger at her. “You don’t help me! You’ve helped enough!” He began taking bottles out of Hyacinth’s bag by the handful and trying to decipher her handwriting on most of them. Anything that says vomit… Or what’s ‘doctor’ for that? Enuresis? No, that’s bedwetting…

“Emesis!” he said aloud.

Hyacinth entered, being pushed from behind by Calliope, with Milo hesitantly following them about ten paces back and invisible.

“Brain cells,” Calliope said.

Hyacinth lifted her goggles to her forehead and planted both hands on her hips. She took in the scene of medicine being heaped on the counter, Erik’s face on the table, and Maggie doing a nervous dance in the corner. “All right, Mordecai. You wanna tell me what the hell’s going on? Because I don’t think Calliope actually knows.”

“Erik needs to throw up right now,” Mordecai said, without turning. “This’ll work, won’t it?” He held up a small vial of silvery substance with a handwritten label.

“No!” shrieked Hyacinth, causing Milo to retreat to the basement again. She barreled across the kitchen and knocked the vial to the floor. “No,” she told Mordecai, pointing a finger. She brushed past him and retrieved a jelly-glass from the cabinet. She filled this with water and visited the spice rack for the powdered mustard. Two heaping spoons went into the glass and she stirred it up. “Here, Erik, drink this.” She crouched down, holding the glass.

“Hyacinth, what did I almost do?” Mordecai said. His hand was still floating where it had been when she slapped the vial away.

“…And puke in this,” she said, depositing a large glass pot on the table.

“Uhhh,” Erik said miserably.

“Hyacinth, what did I almost do?” cried Mordecai.

“You almost killed him, Mordecai,” said Hyacinth. “Sit down.”

He did. On the floor.

Erik puked in the pot. It was bright green. He paused and groaned and then did it again.

———

An hour later, the household had rearranged itself to deal with these new circumstances and calmed down somewhat. Erik was lying in Calliope’s bed with a rinsed-out glass pot beside him. Calliope was looking after him, and Ann was looking after both of them, and Lucy. She considered herself competent adult supervision, she had not taken any drugs, and she was able to make a start on cleaning out Erik’s eye with Milo’s assistance. Maggie was upstairs being court-martialed, or whatever the General considered appropriate in this situation.

In the kitchen, Mordecai was sitting at the table with his head in his hands and Hyacinth was being uncharacteristically methodical in reorganizing her doctor bag at the counter.

“I was going to make him a bracelet, like an epileptic,” Hyacinth said. “Or someone who’s allergic to bees. But I figured I’d use the damn thing, like poor Mister Hellmouth, Version Two.” She nodded at the toy monkey, although Mordecai was not looking at her and in fact had not moved at all for quite some time. Mister Hellmouth had survived intact through a couple minor medical emergencies, but she expected he would be sacrificed to the project in the basement at some point in the near future. Milo’s designs were getting a little out of hand. She was proud of him.

“…And then I forgot,” she said. “What we need is some kind of non-metal solution, but I’m not very good at those. I suppose you’ve noticed.” She turned and glared at the back of his head, trying to activate his brain with any latent psychic ability she might possess.

“Tartar emetic is antimony,” Mordecai said.

“I am aware,” Hyacinth said dryly.

He thudded his head on the table and did not lift it again. “Tartar emetic is antimony.”

“Yes,” she said. “And instead of puking it out, his body would’ve tried to incorporate it, because his head is an alloy. We’ve been over this, Mordecai.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I suppose you’re thinking of killing yourself,” she said.

“No,” he said, muffled.

“…You’re doing it with words instead of a gun because you think I’ll let you get away with that if you don’t say anything out loud,” she said.

“It’s not killing,” he said.

“Torture,” Hyacinth said. “Mutilation. Self-harm.” She pulled out a chair, flipped it around in an unladylike fashion and sat down. “We need to have a serious conversation about the hash brownies,” she said.

He picked up his head and slumped against the back of his chair, but he did not look at her. “Yes,” he said. Something about responsibility and being a generally worthless and weak person, he expected, before they got into whether or not he was a fit parent. Perhaps Calliope would adopt Erik. Or Ann.

“Mordecai, don’t you dare stop doing drugs because of what happened today,” Hyacinth said.

He rattled his head and stared at her. “What? I’m still high…”

“Like hell you are,” she said. “I am telling you not to bludgeon yourself over the head with this until you cease to function. You need drugs to function. You need them like David needed to drink… Not exactly like him, because he was an asshole, but sometimes it was either switch off his brain or jump off a building and we always helped him choose the right one. You are better since Calliope came here and gave you a safe place and an excuse to go crazy for a couple hours every once in a while. Sometimes I think you’re almost human.”

“Hyacinth, I almost killed him!” Mordecai cried.

She folded her arms across her chest and sat back, “Yeah, you almost killed him when you took him out to play violin with you too.”

He made a soft sound like she’d stabbed him in the back. He shuddered and turned away. He couldn’t stand.

She did, and she pointed a finger at him, “Listen, stupid, you’re trying to twist this situation around somehow so it’s your fault. So if we remove the you from this equation it’ll all straighten itself out and everything will be safe and fine. That is not how anything works! We are all a half-step away from falling off this planet at any time. The only reason we’re not too terrified of dying to live is we all fake like someone’s going to catch us when we do, and if not put us back then at least put us somewhere. We’ve got angels looking after us, and if we don’t we’d better keep our heads down and pretend like hell we do. That’s the only religion that matters, fuck Elvis and the Beatles.”

He didn’t say anything.

She growled softly and plowed onwards, “They took advantage of you. You’re aware of that, aren’t you? Those two little hellions are neither stupid nor innocent; they saw a weakness and they took advantage of it for personal gain. This is a complex, multi-stage plan we were dealing with here. Do you think if any of us had found out about it at any…” She reversed and plowed over herself without pause, “Okay, I’m sure Barnaby already knew and Calliope would’ve bought them the absinthe and done sketches of Erik as a bird, but anybody else! Those kids did an end run around the entire house, not just you, but they made sure you were out of the game first, because you are the smart one who notices things. You were extra dumb when this happened today because they waited for it. And that’s not on you, that’s on them.”

“Hyacinth, they’re children!” he said. “You can’t expect them to…”

“Not to screw over their own family when it suits them?” she said. “The hell I can’t. If they’re smart enough to do this, they’re smart enough to know why they shouldn’t, and they went ahead anyway. If I were in charge of Erik I’d wake him up and punch him!” She shook her head at his horrified expression. “And that’s why it’s a good job I’m not, because you’re smarter than me. Except about stupid shit like this. Then I’m the fool in the back row who has to stand up and go, ‘Excuse me, Monsieur Emperor, you’re walking around naked again.’”

“I never let him have any fun!” Mordecai said. “The reason he does these things is I never let him have any fun! He closes me out because he knows I’m going to tell him ‘no,’ or ‘wait,’ or ‘you can’t,’ every single time…”

“Oh, he knows you won’t let him summon a god into his extremely fragile and tiny body and change it into a completely different species so he can do an aerial survey of San Rosille unsupervised for an hour and then slam an entire bottle of liquor?” Hyacinth said. “I suspect he also knows you won’t let him light up sticks of dynamite or drive a car on the sidewalk, and yet he manages not to endanger himself most of the time. You’re intelligent and responsible and he is also fairly intelligent and responsible, so you trust the little shit,” she spat. “The reason he feels it appropriate to hang by his heels from the tightrope of life sometimes is he thinks he’s got angels, and I’m not sure he’s wrong about that. It just hasn’t penetrated into his tiny tin skull that even when they catch him, he still hurts other people.”

“He is extremely aware that he hurts me, Hyacinth!” said Mordecai. “He hides things from me because he’s trying to protect me! I’m supposed to take care of him! When I’m hurt and I can’t it’s like… It’s got to be like the end of the world for him!”

Hyacinth leaned back against the counter and folded her arms with a smirk. “I mean, you have noticed that’s exactly the way you treat him? Right up to acting like the world’s ending. Where in the hell do you think he gets it from?”

Mordecai brought up both hands and fisted them, but there was nothing to hit. “I am fifty-seven years old! He is not supposed to take care of me!” he cried.

“He cares about you, you moron,” said Hyacinth. “What do you want him to do about the world ending, sit there and eat popcorn? He’s managing you because you manage him, and everybody else. He’s copying your diseased behavior. Every day you go around showing him that when you care about someone you take responsibility for every bad thing that happens to that person and bend over backwards trying to fix it. Love means never having to say ‘it wasn’t my fault.’”

Mordecai thudded both elbows on the table and raked his fingers back through his hair. The sudden alteration, plus the cartoonish expression of dismay, gave one the impression that his eyes were about to tumble out of his head. “Oh, my gods, Erik knows about the vending machines… Am I that damn obvious?” he demanded of Hyacinth, or possibly the table top.

“What?” she said.

“I know where all the buttons are and I’m trying to get people to kick out a bag of chips — It doesn’t even matter!” he snapped. “How about the part where I’m an unfit parent? How about the part where if I don’t poison his body, I’ll poison his brain? Why don’t we talk about that?”

“You know, I’ve got a hammer in the basement,” Hyacinth said. “Would you just like to hit yourself in the head with it? Or we could always nail you to something.”

“What the hell do you want out of me, Hyacinth?” he said. “You think if you argue me into a corner I’ll stop having feelings and straighten myself out — Oh, my gods, this is how I made Seth feel. No wonder we were always having to get him out of cupboards!”

“What?”

He stood and accused her with pointed finger, “This is a horrible thing to do to a person and you’re not even any good at it! If I tried to cram myself under the sink to get away from you, you’d just stand there and scream at me until I had some kind of episode!”

“What do you call what you’re having now?” she snarled.

“Unwanted epiphanies!”

“You’ve got words for everything,” she muttered. “You give it a name and then it’s in its own little box and you don’t have to deal with it.”

He swung away from her, pressed both hands on the counter and shouted at the wall, “Oh, my gods, will you stop hitting me for two seconds so I can think?”

“No,” she replied dully. “I can see the gears turning and they’re still not working right. I can’t get in there with a screwdriver and take you apart, all I can do is keep smacking you on the case and try to get the dust out of your tubes.”

“You overly-simplistic bitch, I do not have tubes!”

“What the hell are you two doing in here?” Ann hissed from the dining room doorway. She had Erik’s eye and a toothbrush clutched in one hand. Her lavender gown was still drifting airily around her ankles. She snarled softly through clenched teeth, like a street dog unearthed from a pile of trash, “You live in a house with other people who can hear you. You’re going to wake Erik. What are you screaming about?”

Mordecai pointed a frantic finger. She started it, Ma! “She’s trying to fix me, Ann! I cannot be fixed!”

“No,” Ann said reasonably. “No, he cannot be fixed. He is missing several essential functions and he doesn’t even have the gears for them, so you’re not going to accomplish anything by whacking him on the case, Hyacinth. That sort of behavior is just to make you feel better.” She frowned. “Milo is disappointed in you… from a technological standpoint.” She sighed and shook her head. “All right, all right, and an emotional one, for what it’s worth.”

Now Hyacinth pointed, “So I’m supposed to let him break down? You know how that goes, Ann! He strips all his gears and he limps around the house dripping oil on everything for weeks!”

“Can we please have a different metaphor for me?” said Mordecai.

“No,” said Hyacinth.

“Shh,” said Ann. She put up her hand and shut her eyes. She shook her head. “Milo… Milo thinks this is like when he put the magic on the stairs and that man told Hyacinth the house was going to burn down. It didn’t, but it could have, and he wanted to beat himself up about that, but we had to go do something about the school.” She opened her eyes. “Is that what we’re doing here? Only Hyacinth can’t put you in a dress and make you stop?”

“Oh, my gods,” Mordecai said. He thumped down at the table again and put his face in his hands. It was like the magic on the stairs, but he wasn’t being Milo, he was being Erik.

IF I’D BEEN IN THE BASEMENT LIKE I SHOULD HAVE THAT WOULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED.

If I’d been sober, like I should have, that wouldn’t have happened.

Oh, gods, Erik, please do as I say and not as I do. Please.

“Mordecai, you are a victim of the Law of Unintended Consequences,” Ann said. “Which basically says that there always are some, and no amount of analysis is going to stop them, before or after the fact. It’s like that awful game at the arcade where the little raisin-creatures keep popping up.” She made the gesture of pressing their smooth, bald heads down into the console, with both hands.

“Raisin…?” Mordecai said.

“Ann, those are supposed to be moles,” Hyacinth said.

“Well, they’re very badly-designed in that case,” Ann said. “Why are they purple?”

“Raisins aren’t purple,” Mordecai said.

“I’m still hung up on how they didn’t notice it was called ‘Whack-A-Mole,’” Hyacinth said, blinking.

“They might just as well be made-up animals, because there isn’t any kind of ‘mole’ that acts like that!” Ann went on. “And Milo and I have been to the Natural History Museum, so there!” She nodded firmly. “They have pins in their ugly little bodies that trigger the switches. Like grenades.” Milo never had a chance to play with any of those, thank goodness, but it seemed like a good analogy under the circumstances. “As soon as you push one down, another pops up. It’s built into the mechanism. And the machine invites you to do that again and again. It is incredibly stressful. Nevertheless, people like you and Milo just can’t seem to help yourselves.” She was still a little annoyed with him for making her feed more coins into it so he could figure out how it worked, even though it was upsetting him. “Do you know what it means to ‘kill’ a ‘process,’ Mordecai?”

He shook his head.

“I am not in the least bit surprised,” Hyacinth said acidly. “Do you know that joke?” She spoke out of the side of her mouth, “‘Oh, doctor, it hurts when I do this!’” She waggled an arm, then she slammed her hand down on the table, “‘Well stop doing that!’”

Ann rubbed the bridge of her nose where Milo’s glasses usually sat. “Cin, we don’t hit our friends. For gods’ sakes.” She sighed again. “I can’t make you, and I very much doubt I can teach you. Do you have any sort of, of — I’m sorry, I need the metaphor again — some sort of internal mechanism for stopping something that’s hurting you?”

“I only know how to stop everything,” he said.

“That’s a reset,” Ann said. “How do you do that?”

He looked away. “I was doing that when Maggie came in and told me Erik was passed out in the alley.”

“I see,” Ann said.

Ann, why are you mad at him? I do that too.

I’m mad because he does it badly, Milo. He does it badly and Erik depends on him, it’s not like you and me.

She turned her attention to Hyacinth, “Cin, there is a large and obvious line between trying to fix an object and punishing it for being broken. I would like to make you aware that this line exists in the hope that you will stay on one side of it.”

“I just want him to admit he’s wrong!” Hyacinth burst out. “He does these things to himself and it’s completely stupid!”

“That will accomplish nothing but making him feel wrong and stupid,” Ann said. “And he already does, so well done, you.” She shook her head and clicked her tongue. “Human beings cannot be brute forced, that just makes them dig in harder. You have to be…” She framed her face with both hands and smiled. “Nice!”

Hyacinth rolled back her whole head with a groan.

Mordecai choked out a laugh. “Nice!”

“You might do better if you had a nice person in there to be patient with you too,” Ann said. “You have a vicious nature and it’s not doing you any favors. More flies with honey than vinegar.”

“Use balsamic,” Hyacinth said sourly.

Ann sniffed. “Hyacinth, you are not going to eel your way out of this with facts and logic, so just stop…”

Calliope came up behind and touched Ann on the shoulder. Supporting Lucy against her chest, she then leaned past doubtfully to examine Hyacinth and Mordecai. All things considered, she decided to address this issue to the person who hadn’t been yelling a couple minutes ago, “Ann, he woke up. He’s really unhappy and he can’t talk to me.” She glanced into the kitchen again. “He knows stuff. And he’s probably hung over…”

Mordecai shot to his feet and pushed past both of them.

“Oh, gods, there he goes again,” said Hyacinth. She flung a dramatic gesture at Mordecai’s absence. “Like Mister Hellmouth playing ‘Send in the Clowns.’ Wind him up, watch him go!”

“Well, you don’t get mad at Mister Hellmouth, Version Two for doing what he’s made for, do you?” Ann said.

“Mister Hellmouth, Version Two doesn’t have kids!”

Ann narrowed her eyes at the closed door of Room 103. “We’re just going to have to do our best to raise Erik when he’s not looking.”

Ann! Don’t be mean like that!

Milo, don’t be stupid like that.

Calliope frowned. “Em’s a good dad,” she said. She bounced Lucy gently “It’s not his fault you label things all doctory, Cin. He didn’t mean anything.”

———

Mordecai emerged perhaps half an hour later and closed the door behind him as quietly as possible. Hyacinth, Ann, and Calliope were sitting in the front room, waiting. Lucy was lying on a clean blanket on the floor and appeared terribly interested in the mage lights stuck to the ceiling. He informed all of them, “Erik wants soda crackers.”

He breathed a weak laugh and slid down the closed door with a hand over his eyes. “Also he drove a car on the sidewalk. Hyacinth, weren’t you just saying he was smart enough not to do that? Were you teasing me?”

Hyacinth stood up. “What?”

“Cool!” Calliope said eagerly.

“I’m sorry. He said he told you about how he can see gods, I guess I just assumed. And Soup tried to teach him to shoplift, but he couldn’t do it. I don’t mind that as much. I told him it was okay. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this information.”

“Obviously we’re going to break his little legs so he can’t get away from us when we’re trying to watch him!” Hyacinth said.

“No we are not, Hyacinth!” Ann cried.

But Mordecai was laughing. “The kid’s got angels, that’s what it is. Angels with senses of humor. I don’t trust the little wingéd bastards.

“But it’s nice to have the help!”