Therapeutic Intervention - Tealy and the Crew

-

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—"

Tealy opened his mouth.

He was very tired.

He had screamed about towels eight times.

The sun was up.

He had eaten three Banana Nacho gummies and had not slept and his brain was running on a frequency that was below normal cognition and above total shutdown and in that specific corridor, DumbDird standing on his porch with a metal pipe at 7:15 AM had a logic to it that a fully rested Tealy would not have entertained for even a fraction of a second.

He thought about towels.

"Fine," said Tealy.

It was immediate.

One moment Tealy was standing in his doorway.

The next moment Tealy was not standing anywhere because he was horizontal on his kitchen floor, asleep, in the clean and total way that people who have been awake since 4 AM screaming about towels and then been hit with a metal pipe are asleep.

No hypnagogic state.

No corridor between awake and not-awake.

No opportunity for his brain to say towels.

Just: asleep.

DumbDird looked at Tealy on the floor.

He clapped.

Not a long clap. Not a sustained applause. Two clean, satisfied claps, the clap of a person who had identified a problem, applied a solution, and observed the solution working.

He looked around the kitchen.

Picked up the remaining Banana Nacho gummies.

Put them in his pocket.

Stepped over Tealy.

Got himself a glass of water.

Stood in Tealy's kitchen at 7:16 AM drinking water with the serene energy of a man who had just beaten Thinking Space II, jumped into a sandwich, and solved his best friend's towel-related insomnia with a metal pipe, and for whom all of these things existed on the same plane of normal Tuesday morning activity.

He finished the water.

Rinsed the glass.

Set it on the drying rack.

Stepped over Tealy again.

Walked out.

Left the door slightly open because his hands were full with the pipe and the gummies.

Tealy's phone, still on the kitchen table, received several messages over the following hour that Tealy did not see because he was unconscious.

Greeny: "Did you sleep."

Beric: "Has the towel situation resolved."

Blara sent a third towel photo. A hand towel this time. Really committing to the bit.

Dird reacted to the hand towel with 👍

DumbDird sent, into the group chat, at 7:22 AM:

"DURR I PUT TALLY TO SLEEP"

"DURR HE'S GOOD NOW"

"DURR I CLAPPED"

Dird reacted with 👍

Beric replied: "How."

"DURR METAL PIPE"

A pause in the chat.

Beric: "Is he okay."

"DURR YEAH HE'S ON THE FLOOR"

"The kitchen floor."

"DURR YEAH"

"You left him on the kitchen floor."

"DURR BERIC HE'S ASLEEP HE'S FINE"

"Did you put anything under his head."

A longer pause.

"DURR HOLD ON"

The chat was quiet for four minutes.

Then: "DURR I PUT A TOWEL UNDER HIS HEAD"

The chat was quiet for a different reason.

Greeny replied first: "You put a towel under his head."

"DURR YEAH FOR COMFORT"

"The towels," Greeny typed. "Were the thing keeping him awake."

"DURR OH"

"You put a towel."

"DURR YEAH"

"Under the head."

"DURR YEAH GREENY"

"Of the person who was screaming about towels."

The longest pause yet.

"DURR"

"DURR SHOULD I MOVE IT"

"He's asleep," Greeny replied. "Leave it."

"DURR OKAY"

"DumbDird."

"DURR YEAH GREENY"

"Why do you have a metal pipe."

"DURR I JUST HAVE IT GREENY"

Greeny did not respond to this.

Dird reacted to the entire exchange with 👍

Blara posted a fourth towel photo.

Tealy slept for four hours on his kitchen floor with a towel under his head.

He did not dream about towels.

He did not dream about anything.

He just slept, clean and flat and completely, the sleep of someone who had been removed from consciousness by a metal pipe wielded by a person in pajamas who had beaten Thinking Space II six hours ago and still had gummy residue on his fingers from eating the Banana Nacho supply on the way out.

He woke up at 11:23 AM.

He was on the floor.

There was a towel under his head.

He looked at the towel.

He waited.

Nothing happened.

No scream. No involuntary alarm response. No hypnagogic towel association. Just a towel, under his head, being a towel, in the normal way.

He lay there for a moment.

Picked up his phone.

Forty-one notifications.

He scrolled through the chat. Read the whole sequence. The Greeny exchange. The towel under the head revelation. Blara's four towel photos. Dird's 👍 applied uniformly to all of it like a coat of paint over a crime scene.

He typed one message.

"I woke up. There was a towel under my head."

DumbDird responded in three seconds.

"DURR TALLY YOU'RE ALIVE"

"Why is there a towel under my head."

"DURR FOR COMFORT TALLY"

"You know what was keeping me awake."

"DURR YEAH BUT YOU WERE ALREADY ASLEEP TALLY SO IT WAS FINE"

Tealy looked at this logic.

It was wrong. It was completely wrong. It was also, given that he had in fact slept for four hours with a towel under his head without screaming once, empirically difficult to argue with.

"Did it work," DumbDird sent.

Tealy looked at the towel.

The towel looked back.

Nothing happened.

"Yeah," he typed. "It worked."

"DURR!!"

"Don't."

"DURR TALLY—"

"DumbDird."

"DURR YEAH"

"Thank you."

A pause.

"DURR"

"DURR OF COURSE TALLY"

"DURR THAT'S WHAT THE PIPE IS FOR"

Tealy sat up on his kitchen floor, towel in his lap, phone in his hand, sun coming through the window at 11:24 AM on what had been the longest and most structurally incoherent morning of recent memory.

He looked at the towel.

Folded it.

Set it on the table.

Got a Banana Nacho gummy.

Remembered DumbDird had taken them.

Sat in his kitchen with nothing.

"You took my gummies," he typed.

"DURR SORRY TALLY"

"DURR THEY WERE REALLY GOOD"

"DURR I'LL GET YOU MORE"

"DURR TALLY"

"What."

"DURR DO YOU WANT ME TO BRING THE PIPE BACK TONIGHT JUST IN CASE"

Tealy stared at this message for a long time.

He thought about towels.

Nothing happened.

"No," he typed. "I think I'm good."

He paused.

Added: "Keep it anyway."

Because at this point, honestly, it was just good to know it existed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

40 Degrees - 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...
Read »

Towels - Tealy and the Crew

-
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...
Read »

Dumb...Huh? - Tealy and the Crew

-
Nobody really knew how DumbDird had acquired a game show set. Tealy hadn't asked. Nobody had asked. There was a point with DumbDird where asking how he obtained large physical objects was simply not worth the damage to your own mental health. The set looked like someone had described a game show to a golden retriever and then given that golden retriever a construction budget. There was a stage. There were colorful lights that flickered slightly too much. There was a large, aggressively cheerful sign that read "DUMB...HUH?" in letters that were not all the same size. And front and center, gleaming under the wobbly spotlights like a medieval siege weapon that had gotten lost on the way to a war, was the catapult. It was a real catapult. A full, functional, wooden catapult. Tealy stood at the entrance and looked at it for a long time. "I'm not playing," he said immediately. "I'm just watching." "DURR, OKAY TALLY!" DumbDird hollered...
Read »