Part 1: Character Creation / Chapter 5

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Despite my concerns about my brain, I left the hospital and headed to work.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to finagle a CT scan on the spot, unless maybe I bribed a shady radiologist. And I’m not the bribing type. Also, I didn’t want a person who played fast and loose with regulations putting my head in a radiation jacuzzi.

Bottom line, I’d have to go through normal channels. So I spent my drive to work on the phone, talking to my insurance provider and various doctors’ offices. For the time being, I just said I’d been having headaches because I didn’t want to get into the whole “dolls trying to stab me” story with the various receptionists and schedulers.

When it was all said and done, it’d be three days before I was able to see a neurologist. Oh well. I could use the time to figure out how to talk about what was really going on. I was convinced I wasn’t crazy. Well, I was crazy—obviously. At some point I’d gotten my forearms covered in tattoos and had no recollection of it. I’d definitely gone bonkers. But I was aware that I was bonkers, so I wasn’t funny-farm-bonkers, I was brain-tumor-bonkers. I just needed a doctor to agree with me and order up a battery of tests. Then I could understand exactly what was going on and deal with it.

Optimistic words like “benign” and “operative” ran through my head as I pulled into my office parking lot. I had to think positive. I needed to be okay—for me, for Margaret, for Robbie. That’s why I’d headed to the office, as always. A guy who was okay didn’t call in sick. So I activated full denial mode and got into character for the office.

The obviously-hallucinated incarnation of Nancy’s mom had implied that my choice of professions wasn’t one known for its integrity. And while I hadn’t given said hallucination the satisfaction of saying as much, I actually agreed.

I didn’t really know how I’d ended up in the gig or why I’d kept at it. For a while, I’d tried to convince myself that I was part of some misunderstood, but ultimately redeemable fraternity. I’d even binged the first season of the TV show Mad Men to connect with my professional roots. But that one season was all I could get through. From the jump, I’d thought, Man, I’d hate to be a woman in that office. The misogyny was on full tilt on every episode—depicting the 1960s with ruthless authenticity. But it was more than the sexism that soured me on the series. It was the pervasive rot of the soul. Whenever I thought of the show, all I could picture were hands—grubby, manicured little account executive hands, always grasping for more: more bourbon, more cigarettes, more poor, unsuspecting secretaries’ back sides.

Of course, things had changed a lot since the era portrayed by Mad Men. Many agencies were doing genuine good in the world, severing all ties to that loathsome legacy. Unfortunately, the agency I worked for wasn’t one of them. It was a hack shop, serving bottom-of-the-barrel clientele, with an office at a crappy industrial park. And we actually had to go to that office. Every day.

By in large, the Covid pandemic had rewritten the rules for advertising agencies a few years earlier. Most of the industry had gone into remote or hybrid work mode and quickly realized that there was no reason to ever return to the traditional onsite model. But we were an exception. We managed mostly automotive accounts. Not national, or even regional automotive accounts. Local automotive accounts. We dealt with the people who actually moved the merchandise. Pejoratively known as “car guys,” they spent their days worshipping at the altar of upsells and add-ons. And when your business is pressure-selling people into cars they don’t want and can’t afford, it’s all about being in the room with your mark—reading their body language and sensing the exact moment when you’ve fleeced them for their final nickel. The point being, world-wide plague or not, our clients were used to doing business in-person and didn’t trust anybody who didn’t follow suit. So here I was.

I got out of the car and headed for the office, taking the walk to consciously compartmentalize my troubles and prime myself to handle business as usual. Reaching the front of the building, I found Kimberly, one of the agency’s other account managers. She was standing very still, peering over at a small wooded area to the left of the entrance. She and I had some history and I wished I could just walk on by, but that would have been too awkward.

“What are we looking at?” I asked.

“That,” she said, pointing to the base of one of the trees.

Then I saw it: a pointy little face, peeking out from behind the tree trunk. Most people wouldn’t have recognized what they were looking at. But I did.

“Is that a . . . weasel?” Kimberly asked.

“Ferret,” I replied, mystified by the creature’s incongruous presence.

“It shouldn’t be here,” I said.

“Says who?”

“They’re not found in the wild and they’re illegal in California.”

“It’s cute,” she said.

“It’s filthy, vicious scum of the earth,” I countered matter-of-factly.

Kimberly frowned at me.

“Neighbors had two of them when I was a kid,” I explained. “They got out and attacked my beagle.”

My mother and I had arrived on the scene just in time. She had descended upon the nasty little creatures like an avenging angel, plucking them off our Beagle, Bilbo, and hurling them back over the backyard fence, as she unleashed a stream of profanity at the ferrets’ owner, Mrs. Johnson. The episode took place years before my mother’s emotional breakdown and desertion had cast a pall over most of my memories of her. So it had survived in my mind as a truly heroic moment.

“Oh,” Kimberly said. “Well, it’s good to know I’m not the only adorable creature you hate.”

“Kimberly, you know—”

“Yes, I know,” she cut me off. “We work together and you don’t want to ‘intermingle’ because it’ll just end badly and complicate things at work.”

“I never said—”

“That you’re hiding behind the HR excuse because you’re a big chicken who’s afraid of intimacy?” she cut me off again. “You didn’t have to.”

I shrugged, because while that wasn’t exactly how I’d have put it, it wasn’t inaccurate. We worked together a lot and we worked together well. Folks had taken to referring to us as “work spouses,” and there was enough flirtation to warrant it. On the face of it, it seemed like something was bound to happen between us. But despite the fact that she was a trim, witty red head that could pull just about any guy, when she’d suggested dinner and a movie, my aversion to dating had flared up and I’d yanked the ripcord. There were two people in the world I was close to, and I didn’t know if I was capable of adding a third.

I’d kept one eye on the ferret, and I noticed it scurrying back into the darkness. Before it went, I could have sworn it glared back at me menacingly, but I thought that had to be my imagination. I refocused on the conversation at hand.

“Kimberly, I’m . . . sorry I—”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Whatever,” she cut me off yet again as she turned and entered the office. I followed.

“What happened to your face?” she asked, less out of interest and more as a signal flare that she was done with the previous topic.

“Oh,” I said running a couple fingers over my band-aided temple. “Uh, rough morning.”

Stupid response. It could easily illicit follow-up questions that would force an uncomfortable outright lie or admission that I was hallucinating doll attacks while slicing up my own face. But to my relief, Kimberly’s disinterest held.

“Hi Lela,” she said to our plucky brunette receptionist/office manager as we reached her desk.

“Hi Kimberly,” Lela replied as Kimberly peeled off without another word.

“Hey Henry, did you vote yet?” Lela asked, turning her attention to me.

“Huh?”

“Did you vote?” she repeated. “It’s today.”

She waved a voting guide at me, which she was studying intently. She was working her way through school as a poli-sci major, so she cared about voting and world affairs and such.

“I’m trying to pick between this gun-toting whackadoo and this liberal clown for the city council,” she elaborated. “And by clown, I mean he’s an actual clown—like in the circus.”

“Really?” I said.

“My professor says we’re living in a world gone mad.”

That sounded true enough to me. My myriad personal crises and possible brain tumor aside, there was no question that the world was super messed up—from a generation-wide addiction to screens and anti-depressants to AI taking everyone’s jobs to dictators sprouting up across the land. I wondered if things were really deteriorating faster than ever, or if I’d just started paying more attention to the news.

“Maybe flip a coin,” I advised Lela, weakly.

“Thanks,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Oh—Mr. Malomar is here.”

“Already?”

“I put him in the conference room.”

I hurried past her and into the office’s cubicle-infested interior, then took a right into our tiny, dimly-lit conference room. Marty Malomar was seated and waiting. He was a stout, balding man who could easily be mistaken for a fire hydrant from a distance. These days, car guys came in all shapes and sizes—some car guys were even women—but Marty was the classic model.

He’d recently been promoted to sales and marketing manager at Malomar Motors. However, despite his last name, he’d had to earn the job. His dad, Skip Malomar, wanted him to learn the business from the ground up. Eventually, he would be responsible for the family’s dozen dealerships. But he’d have to sell, sell, sell to get there.

“Henry! I hope you got something good for me!” he said.

“You bet, Marty,” I responded with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.

He didn’t ask about the cut on my face. He didn’t care about the cut on my face. Unless it could somehow sell a car for him.

I flipped open my tablet’s leather cover, syncing my presentation to an overhead projector, which threw a giant version of my screen up on the wall at the front of the conference room. Then I opened a spreadsheet, detailing a media plan.

“We think you ought to run a lot of digital and social as always, but we’re thinking of mixing it up this quarter with some radio.”

“Radio?” he said, frowning. “Nobody listens to the radio.”

“Right you are,” I responded. “Which makes it very, very cheap. You can saturate the landscape—be a big fish in a small pond.”

“Ooh. I like being a big fish!” He said, warming to the idea immediately. “We can lead with an offer on the new hatchback! Sixty-nine, ninety-nine! Zero down! Zero interest!”

“Can you really afford to do that?”

“No,” he answered dismissively. “We gotta get at least twelve grand for those crap boxes. But once we get people through the door, we’ll just cram the sedan down their throats.”

“But somebody is going to insist on that hatchback at that price on those terms, and legally—"

“Yeah, yeah, we can have one sacrificial lamb. We’ll one-at-this-price it. Just have your radio guy say that part real quiet, and real fast. Like, ‘onathsprice’!”

“Okay,” I said, lamenting again the moral depravity of car guys. From the fake promotions to the “let me check with my manager” role-playing crap, they really were the bane of my existence. But putting up with their breed was how I made my bread.

Suffice it to say, the meeting was going like every meeting. Until my tablet picked up an incoming video call from my phone. I scrambled to decline it, but accidentally accepted it.

“Mr. Hubble? Mr. Hubble!” a Czech-accented voice cried.

Paulina Novotny’s pale face appeared on my tablet screen and then on the wall. Paulina was with the cleaning service I used. I suddenly realized it was Thursday. Paulina came on Thursday.

“Why would you do this?” she demanded, her Eastern European voice cracking.

She was hysterical, tears running down her face.

“The blood, the bodies!” she wailed.

Some deeply ingrained instinct for politeness prevented me from hanging up immediately, as Paulina swung her phone’s camera around my apartment, revealing the grizzly scene.

“The baby dolls—you make them look dead!”

I hadn’t had time to clean up as I’d gotten dressed that morning and rushed out the door to the E.R. And I’d since convinced myself that what I thought had happened was merely a hallucination. Alas, the giant image splashed across the conference room wall begged to differ:

The bloated doll corpse floating in the sink.

The blood-soaked goose feathers adhering to every surface.

A second doll staked to the floor beside a wadded-up ball of comforter, leaking a pulpy substance that could only be described as doll jelly.

“This . . . I cannot clean this!” Paulina sobbed.

“Paulina, I . . . I’ll have to call you back,” I stuttered, fumbling ineffectually with my tablet to disconnect the call.

“Did you . . . stab that doll with a steak knife?” Marty asked.

“I . . . it’s . . . ” I didn’t know exactly where to start and I still couldn’t get the stupid tablet shut down.

“Is this insides of animal?” Paulina cried from the still-active feed as she peered into the exposed innards of one of the dolls. “Why? Why you put insides of animal . . . in dolls!”

I started slapping the tablet in a panic, desperately hoping to get shed of the call. The picture finally shuddered and went dark. But just before it did, I could swear I’d caught a glimpse of the weird-ass code I’d seen in my dream: the endless scrolling string of gibberish and emojis. I looked over at Marty to see if he’d seen it, but then things got weirder.

His face had gone totally blank—a creepy serenity settling over it. Not what you’d expect after Paulina, and the dolls, and the alleged pig guts.

“Marty?”

His face didn’t change. He just looked at me and said, “Loading . . .”

“Ooh,” I heard someone croon from behind me and turned to see Nancy’s mom standing there.

“What the hell?” I cried. “Where’d you come from?”

“Thought I’d pop in for the inexplicable and wildly premature showdown you’ve just triggered.”

“I triggered? How’d I trigger it?”

“You know I wondered the same thing?”

“What?”

“But I’d be less worried about who triggered what and more worried about all of this,” she said, nodding pointedly at Marty who was staring dead-eyed, directly at me.

Then he suddenly vaulted to his feet, knocking his chair backward into the wall.

“What is happening right now?” I cried.

“What’s happening is . . . ”

She paused dramatically as the conference room projector flickered and began displaying an image sent from I don’t know where. Huge, glowing purple type stretched across the wall and Nancy’s mom pulled a megaphone from out of nowhere, depressing the trigger.

“Car Guy! Scourge of the auto mall!” she bellowed, reading the projected type aloud in a monster truck show announcer voice.

Marty also pulled something from nowhere. It was two stainless steel rods welded together in the form of a plus sign.

“Is that a tire iron?” I squeaked.

“That is the Cross of Closing,” Nancy’s mom said, keeping up the monster truck show schtick. “Car Guy’s trusty tool for closing deals!”

I was struggling to metabolize just how stupid that was as Marty grabbed hold of the conference room table with his free hand and shunted it aside, clearing the space between us.

Then he barked in a sing song-y voice, “Bend over, ‘cause here come the title and doc fees!”

“Huh?” I replied helplessly.

“And it is on like Donkey Kong!” Nancy’s mom bellowed through the megaphone.

“No! No, no it is not on like Donkey Kong!” I rebutted, forcefully jutting out an open palm to Marty—the international gesture for “stop right there.”

“It isn’t on at all! Because . . . no thank you!”

Marty stared at me, confused. Then he looked over at Nancy’s mom, as if seeking a ruling from the ref.

She shrugged at me in mock regret.

“He’s already said his catch phrase,” she said. “You can’t really un-ring that bell. There’s no going back at this point.”

“Says you!” I replied.

She furrowed her brow, not taking my meaning.

Until I sprinted for the hallway.

Marty’s confusion gave me just enough of a head start to get through the door, slam it, and prop a chair under the knob before he leaped into action. The door rattled and shook as he collided with it, then began hammering at it, letting fly with a savage, inhuman scream. Nancy’s mom was trapped in there with him, but if things got ugly, I figured she could just disappear as she was wont to do. Or maybe she’d be a tragic victim of collateral damage. At this point, I was cool with either possibility.

As he continued to assault the blockaded conference room door, Marty yelled, “I’m gonna beat you like I beat MSRP!”

From the metallic clanking, I had to assume he was putting the Cross of Closing to work. The door was real wood—quite substantial. But just the same, it was beginning to come apart. As I staggered back, I banged into Lela’s desk, and turned to find her staring at me in shock.

“What’s happening in there?” She asked. “Did he . . . not like the media plan?”

“Actually, he did,” I answered, leaving her to question how he would have reacted if he hadn’t, as I spun and ran.