Tealy and the Crew

It had started subtly. Tealy had been on the couch at 9 PM, new blankets courtesy of Beric's place, the thermostat set to a reasonable 72 degrees, everything normal, everything fine, the week's events receding into the background where they belonged. He had glanced at the thermostat at 9:14 PM. He looked at it. He had set it to 72. He had definitely set it to 72. He had set it to 72 with the specific intentionality of someone who had recently slept under bathroom towels and was not going to let that happen again and had therefore ensured the temperature situation was handled. He got up. Set it back to 72. Sat down. Looked at it at 9:15 PM. He set it back to 72. Watched it. It held for a while. He watched it the way you watch something you don't trust, with the peripheral attention of a person who is doing something else but is also monitoring. He made it to 9:21 PM before he checked again. It had skipped one. Or he had missed 71 while watching his ph...

The blankets had been a casualty of Tuesday. Tealy did not want to talk about Tuesday. Tuesday had involved DumbDird, a level of enthusiasm that in retrospect should have been identified as a structural risk, and a sequence of events that had ended with every blanket Tealy owned being in a condition that could not be described as usable. The details were not important. The outcome was: no blankets. He had done laundry. The blankets had not survived laundry. This happened sometimes when things had been through what the blankets had been through, which again, was not being discussed. He had gone to bed on Wednesday night with a sheet, which was fine, which was manageable, which was not a problem. Then it had gotten cold. Not dramatically cold. Not emergency cold. Just the specific cold of a Florida night that had decided to actually be a night for once, the kind of cold that a sheet managed adequately during normal circumstances and did not manage adequately when you were already ti...

It had started three days after the breakfast incident. DumbDird had been in the middle of a conversation with Tealy about episode five — the bigger catapult episode, the one that had been on the agenda since the first production meeting, the one DumbDird had been gesturing toward with increasing excitement for several weeks — when he had said: "DURR, TALLY, FOR DURR...HUH? EPISODE FIVE—" Tealy looked up from his phone. "What did you call it." "DURR, DURR...HUH?—" "The show." "DURR, YEAH—" "What's it called." DumbDird opened his mouth. Closed it. The expression on his face was the expression of someone reaching for something that was not where they expected it to be. A hand going to a pocket and finding it empty. A confident step onto a stair that wasn't there. "Durr," said DumbDird. "Dumb...Huh?," said Tealy. "DURR, YEAH, DUMB...HUH?—" "You said Durr...Huh?" ...

DumbDird was already in the kitchen when Tealy came downstairs. This was not surprising. DumbDird had a key, or more accurately DumbDird did not need a key because the door was unlocked, and DumbDird's relationship with the concept of a home he wasn't supposed to be in had always been flexible. He was standing at the counter with the posture of someone who had been there for a while and had been productive in that time, which with DumbDird meant something had either been fixed or broken or both. "DURR, TALLY," he said, turning around with an expression of enormous pride. "DURR, I MADE BREAKFAST." Tealy looked at the counter. There was a bowl. In the bowl was cereal. It was not good cereal. It was not the cereal of someone who had gone through a pantry and selected the best available option. It was the cereal that lived at the back of the shelf behind everything else, the cereal that was purchased occasionally by people who had read something about fibe...

The night was normal. That was the first thing, and the strangest thing, and the thing that took the longest to process. The night was just normal. Dark, quiet, the ordinary texture of a bedroom at night, no ambient dread, no hypnagogic ambush, no object or number materializing in the corridor between awake and asleep. Tealy lay there. Waited. Nothing. He waited more specifically, actively, the waiting of someone who had been ambushed three nights in a row and had developed a defensive posture about the approach of sleep. He lay with his eyes closed and catalogued everything in the room mentally, waiting for one of them to suddenly become significant. The lamp. The dresser. The window. The closet, now shut, containing clothes hangers that were just clothes hangers. Nothing. He drifted slightly toward sleep. His brain, apparently, recognized the pattern. It screamed. Not about anything. There was no object this time, no number, no specific intrusive content. Just the scream, t...

It had started the same way. 4 AM. Eyes open. Brain running. The specific quality of darkness that existed at 4 AM, which was different from all other darknesses in that it had a texture of things-that-should-not-be-thought-about embedded in it. Tealy waited for the object. It came. He didn't scream this time, because screaming about a number felt structurally different from screaming about a household object, and also because he was tired of screaming, and also because somewhere outside DumbDird was probably already holding the pipe and he wanted to at least attempt to handle this one himself. He lay there and thought about 9902. He thought about it from multiple angles. 9902 was not a thing he had encountered recently. It was not a significant number in any context he could identify. It was not a year. It was not a measurement. It was not a score or a record or a count of anything. It was 9902, sitting in his brain at 4 AM like a piece of furniture that had been deliver...

The text came in at 4:23 AM. DumbDird saw it immediately because DumbDird was awake, DumbDird was always awake, and also because he had been sleeping with one eye metaphorically open since the towel incident on the reasonable suspicion that Tealy's brain was not done picking things. The text said: "clothes hangers" Just that. No context. No punctuation. No explanation. Just clothes hangers sent at 4:23 AM, which was all the context anyone needed. DumbDird picked up the pipe. "DURR TALLY I'M COMING" "Don't," Tealy typed back, from his bed, where he had just screamed about clothes hangers for the second time and was now lying very still with the specific defeated energy of a person whose brain had simply found a new thing. "DURR TALLY—" "I'm fine." "DURR TALLY YOU'RE NOT FINE YOU'RE THINKING ABOUT CLOTHES HANGERS—" "I can handle it—" "DURR TALLY LAST TIME YOU SAID THAT YOU SC...

Continued from  Towels At 7:15 AM, there was a knock at Tealy's door. Tealy, who was still at his kitchen table on his third Banana Nacho gummy, staring at nothing in particular and occasionally thinking about towels, got up and opened it. DumbDird was standing on the porch. He was still in his pajamas from the Thinking Space II completion. He was wearing the expression of a man who had a plan, which was an expression Tealy had learned to identify and which had historically preceded outcomes of variable quality. He was holding a metal pipe. Tealy looked at DumbDird. Looked at the metal pipe. Looked at DumbDird. "No," said Tealy. "DURR, TALLY—" "Absolutely not—" "DURR, TALLY, YOU NEED TO SLEEP—" "NOT LIKE THIS—" "DURR, IT'LL WORK TALLY—" "WHERE DID YOU GET A METAL PIPE—" "Durr, I had it—" "WHY DO YOU HAVE A METAL PIPE—" "DURR, TALLY, DO YOU WANT TO SLEEP OR NOT—" ...

It had started at 4 AM. Not with anything dramatic. Not with a nightmare or a loud noise or an external event of any kind. Just Tealy, lying in bed, eyes closed, drifting toward sleep in the normal way, and then: Towels. He screamed. Not a long scream. A short, sharp scream, the kind that comes from a place of sudden irrational urgency, the kind that exits the body before the brain has had any say in the matter. He sat up. He looked around. His room was normal. His room was dark and quiet and contained nothing of note, certainly nothing towel-related, and after a moment he lay back down. He closed his eyes. Drifted. Towels. He screamed again. By 5:30 AM he had screamed six times. He was not scared of towels. He wanted to be clear about that, at least internally, at least for his own records. Towels were not a fear. Towels had never been a fear. He had used towels his entire life without incident and had no documented negative history with towels of any kind. And yet. Every...

The completion happened at 2:47 AM. Nobody had been awake to watch it happen except DumbDird, who had been awake because DumbDird's relationship with sleep had always been flexible in the way that people who feel things very strongly sometimes have a flexible relationship with sleep, and because he had been close, genuinely close, the kind of close that makes sleep feel like a betrayal of the moment. Tealy found out the way he found out about everything, which was his phone going off at 2:47 AM with a frequency and volume that communicated, even through sleep, that something had happened. He looked at the screen. The group chat had forty-seven notifications. All of them were from DumbDird. None of them were words. The first message was: "DUUUUUUUUUURUURRUURUURUURUURURUURURUURURUURURRRRRRRR" Followed immediately, in a separate message, by: "YEEEEEEEAEAEAEAEAAAAEAAEAAEEAAEAEAAS" Tealy stared at YEEEEEEEAEAEAEAEAAAAEAAEAAEEAAEAEAAS for a long moment. ...