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 time sleep approached, somewhere in the corridor between awake and not-awake, something in his brain said towels, and something else in his brain, something below the level of reason or control, responded to this with a scream.

He stared at his ceiling.

The ceiling said nothing. The ceiling was not a towel.

He closed his eyes carefully, experimentally, like someone approaching a thing that had bitten them before.

He got close.

His brain said towels.

He screamed.

He sat up.

He said, out loud, to nobody: "Why towels."

Nobody answered because it was 5:34 AM and he was alone.

---

He texted DumbDird at 5:45 AM because DumbDird was awake, DumbDird was always awake, DumbDird had beaten Thinking Space II three hours ago and had jumped into a sandwich and was almost certainly still in a state of sustained celebration.

"I can't sleep"

DumbDird responded in four seconds.

"DURR TALLY!! ME NEITHER!! DURR WHY CAN'T YOU SLEEP"

Tealy looked at his phone.

Looked at the ceiling.

Typed: "Towels."

A pause. Longer than DumbDird's usual response time, which meant he was reading it multiple times.

"DURR"

"DURR TALLY"

"DURR WHAT ABOUT TOWELS"

"I don't know," Tealy typed. "Every time I get close to sleeping I think about towels and then I scream."

"DURR YOU SCREAM"

"Yes."

"DURR OUT LOUD"

"Yes, DumbDird, out loud, I scream out loud."

"DURR TALLY THAT'S REALLY FUNNY"

"It's not funny."

"DURR IT'S A LITTLE FUNNY TALLY"

Tealy put his phone down.

Picked it back up.

"Why towels," he typed. "Why is it towels."

"DURR TALLY WHAT DID YOU DO WITH A TOWEL RECENTLY"

Tealy thought about this.

He had used a towel after his shower yesterday. It had been a normal towel interaction. Nothing had happened. The towel had performed its function without incident and had been hung back up on the rack and had not done anything that would warrant this.

"Nothing," he typed. "I just used one normally."

"DURR MAYBE YOUR BRAIN IS JUST THINKING ABOUT TOWELS TALLY"

"I KNOW MY BRAIN IS THINKING ABOUT TOWELS, THAT'S THE PROBLEM—"

"DURR NO TALLY I MEAN LIKE DURR. SOMETIMES YOUR BRAIN JUST PICKS A THING."

Tealy stared at this.

"It picked towels," he typed.

"DURR YEAH"

"Out of everything."

"DURR YEAH"

"Towels."

"DURR TALLY YOUR BRAIN PICKED TOWELS AND NOW YOU SCREAM"

"Yes."

"DURR THAT'S VERY TALLY OF YOU"

That's very Tally of you. The phrase DumbDird had coined during the copy paste button incident. Applied now to screaming about towels at 5:45 AM.

Tealy lay in his bed and looked at his phone and felt something that was either the beginning of sleep or the beginning of genuine derangement from sleep deprivation.

"Go celebrate your top 1," he typed. "Stop talking to me about towels."

"DURR OKAY TALLY"

"DURR TALLY"

"DURR DON'T THINK ABOUT TOWELS"

Tealy read don't think about towels and immediately and completely thought about towels.

He screamed.

---

At 6 AM he was still awake.

He had tried everything.

He had tried lying very still. He had tried lying on his back, then his side, then briefly his stomach which he hated. He had tried controlling his breathing in the specific way he'd read about once that was supposed to help, which had not helped. He had tried thinking about nothing, actively, which was the sleep equivalent of trying very hard to relax. He had tried thinking about something other than towels, which was, it turned out, an instruction his brain received as think about towels.

Every approach had the same endpoint.

Towels.

Scream.

Awake.

He called Greeny at 6:15 AM because Greeny was the kind of person who was probably already awake and would have a framework for this.

Greeny answered on the second ring.

"You're awake," Greeny said. Not a question.

"Every time I get close to sleep I think about towels and scream," Tealy said. He had decided to lead with the full information.

A pause of approximately four seconds, which for Greeny meant he was either processing or had processed and was choosing his words, both of which were the same length of pause.

"Towels specifically," Greeny said.

"Specifically towels."

"Not any other object."

"Just towels."

Another pause.

"How many times have you screamed."

"Eight."

"Since when."

"4 AM."

Greeny was quiet for a moment.

"Your brain has associated the hypnagogic state with towels," he said, in the tone of someone who had looked at a thing and named it. "The association is causing an involuntary alarm response. The more you try to sleep, the more the association activates, which prevents sleep, which creates the conditions for the association to activate again."

Tealy stared at his ceiling.

"So I'm stuck in a loop," he said.

"Yes."

"About towels."

"About towels," Greeny confirmed.

"How do I get out."

"Stop trying to sleep. Do something else for an hour. The association should weaken without the repeated activation."

Tealy sat up.

"That's it?"

"Probably."

"I've been lying here screaming about towels for two hours and the answer is just get up."

"Yes."

Tealy sat on the edge of his bed.

"Why towels," he said.

"I don't know," said Greeny. "The brain picks things. It doesn't always have a reason."

Sometimes your brain just picks a thing, DumbDird had said, at 5:45 AM, in between Durr messages.

Greeny and DumbDird had arrived at the same conclusion through entirely different cognitive routes.

Tealy sat with this.

"Thanks Greeny," he said.

"Get up," Greeny said. "Don't look at towels."

"Right."

"Or think about them."

"Greeny—"

"I know. Don't."

Greeny hung up.

Tealy stood up.

He walked to his kitchen without looking at his bathroom, where a towel was hung on a rack in the normal way towels were hung, doing nothing, being a towel, entirely uninvolved in the situation it had somehow become central to.

He got a Banana Nacho gummy.

He sat at his kitchen table.

He ate the gummy.

He did not think about towels for approximately forty seconds, which was a personal record for the last two hours.

Then he thought about towels.

He did not scream this time.

Progress.

---

He posted in the group chat at 6:30 AM, because the only thing to do with an experience like this was to put it somewhere.

"I screamed about towels eight times between 4 AM and 6 AM and couldn't sleep. Not scared of towels. My brain just picked towels. I'm fine."

Dird reacted with 👍

DumbDird sent: "DURR TALLY I TOLD YOU YOUR BRAIN JUST PICKS A THING"

Beric sent: "Have you recently had a negative towel experience."

"No."

"Interesting."

Blara sent a photo of a towel.

Tealy stared at the towel photo for a long time. It was a white towel folded on what appeared to be a shelf. Clean. Neatly folded. Completely normal. Doing nothing.

He screamed slightly.

Not a full scream. A small scream. A scream that was mostly involuntary and partly exhaustion and partly the specific absurdity of being shown a towel photo at 6:30 AM after two hours of towel-related sleep disruption.

He typed: "Blara."

Blara sent another towel photo.

Different towel. Blue this time.

Dird reacted to the blue towel with 👍

Tealy put his phone face down.

Left it there.

Thought about towels.

Did not scream.

Got another Banana Nacho gummy.

Outside, the sun was coming up over Orlando.

It was going to be a long day.

The towel on his bathroom rack remained exactly where it was, hung in the normal way, performing no actions, existing quietly and without malice, somehow at the center of everything.