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The kitten emerged from his hood and walked down his arm, sniffing at Tristan. It had eaten the remnants of Mort’s chimichanga and seemed satisfied now to curl up in the warmth of the man.
“You are miserable,” he said to the sleeping man. “But…” He extended his fingers, rendered skeletal by the moonlight coming through the filthy window, brushing them through Tristan’s rough, shorn locks. “You are also a mystery.”
Mort had not come expecting to become invested in any particular human. He was actually very bored of people, really, but they were everywhere. Mort’s very existence had been forged in service to these creatures. He was made for their ends.
If he had been working today, he would have waited for Tristan to finish what he was doing, and then he would have conducted the weeping shade to the hereafter. It would not have been his problem. It would have been his duty.
Instead, he sat and watched the young man snore, realizing he was going to have to put together information about him piece by piece.
There were family photos on the wall, and spaces where some of the photos seemed to have been moved after a long period of residence. Lighter wallpaper in squares and ovals. The ones that remained were pictures of an even younger Tristan, and his mother.
The woman was not a complete stranger. He recognized her face. He had conducted her somewhat recently, though not from this house. From a hospital in the nearest city, where she had been waiting for him, frail but ready. He did not think Tristan had not been there, but Mort would not have noticed him if he had been. When working, his focus was always entirely on his charge. The living were a vague blur of noise and movement.
He looked around the room. This seemed to be Tristan’s childhood room. There were little trappings of an immature past still present, a model car atop a cupboard, and a yellow-edged certificate for a spelling bee that took place in the late nineties. The closet was open, and a letterman’s jacket hung inside it. It didn’t look like it had belonged to Tristan. It didn’t look like it had been worn much at all.
Tristan himself was twenty-seven years old, he discovered when he found a half-completed college application from nine years ago. The papers were stuck inside a car magazine where they had been shoved and forgotten. He’d never gone, Mort gathered.
This was the room of a person who had stopped growing at eighteen and just gotten older. An adulthood existed but had never been claimed.
Mort shuffled further through the papers he found on what used to be Tristan’s homework desk. He found pictures, scribbles, really.
There was a note on one, written in the tense hand of a teacher.
“Unrealistic.”
Ironically, it was a near perfect sketch of a hellvore hound. But of course the teacher had never seen one, so she thought it nothing more than a poor rendering of a dog.
Mort looked around the room and saw squandered potential everywhere. Next to the bed, a pile of half-crushed beer cans demonstrated the numbing force of alcohol.
“You’re special,” Mort said. “And you’re beautiful. And you are alive.”
He spoke these truths to the insensate young man, who had begun snoring. The kitten started to purr, as if not wanting to be left out.
Satisfied that all were settled for the moment, Mort walked the entire house, peeked in every drawer, rifled through every family photo album. There was no indication anywhere of a father, but Mort knew how people were made and so surely there had to have been one, even if only for a few minutes.
Tristan awoke to his house more trashed than it usually was. It was as if a tornado had ripped through the trailer, throwing open every drawer and every cupboard and removing the contents. He found Mort in the kitchen, on hands and knees, looking under a chair.
“What the fuck did you do?”
Mort banged his head slightly as he got out from under the chair and stood up. He didn’t rub the spot he hit. He didn’t seem to register the pain at all.
The kitten was on the counter, licking something. Tristan didn’t want to even begin to guess what.
“What are you doing?” It was worth asking the question again. Every single item in the kitchen, like every item in the trailer, had been taken out and put on chaotic display.
“I am getting to know you,” Mort said.
“Dude. What the fuck is wrong with you?” Tristan’s head hurt. He was not a clean and tidy person, but just because he was okay with his own mess didn’t mean Mort was welcome to add to it.
“I don’t know,” Mort said with that charming simplicity. He wasn’t being an asshole. He was just absent of appropriateness.
