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“If you’re going to make a mess, clean it up.”
“I’m sorry. Nothing in your home suggested you cared about tidiness.”
Coming from anybody else that would have been a sassy read. But Mort didn’t have any attitude. He was simply telling the truth as he saw it.
“Me making a mess is one thing. You making a mess is rude.”
“Oh,” Mort said. “Then I should clean up.”
Tristan was going to tell him not to bother, but there was so much of a mess he couldn’t even get to his morning breakfast beer.
“Why did you go through my family albums?” He asked the question as he attempted to pick his way through the loose piles of garbage and treasured family heirlooms.
“I was curious.”
“About what?”
Mort looked at him simply. “About you.”
“You can just ask me questions.”
“You were asleep. Actually, you were unconscious from alcohol, and then you fell asleep.”
Again, no judgement. Just bald statements of fact.
There was something insulting yet charming about Mort. Tristan knew he should probably be kicking this guy out of his house, but he didn’t have the urge to actually do it.
“It’s pretty rude and creepy to go through people’s things.”
“Is it? I suppose that makes sense.”
Tristan leaned back against the countertop, upon which all the spoons in the house had been laid out with an odd specificity. Having reached the beer, his mood improved considerably. There was no sound like the sound of a tab being pulled in the morning. Or maybe afternoon. Hard to tell what time of day it really was. That sort of thing had stopped mattering quite a while ago.
“I was looking for clues as to why you see demons.”
“I don’t think you’re going to find any clues here,” Tristan said.
“Maybe not. Maybe I will find clues in what is not here.”
Tristan drank half his beer while Mort began to tidy things up again, slowly but efficiently. He turned to Tristan with a plate that had been used a good month ago, if not longer.
“Where would you like your mold-covered pasta to go?”
“Throw it out, I guess.”
Mort had never intended on tidying the house, but it seemed to be the natural progression of putting things back together.
“I’ll do the dishes,” Tristan said, giving voice to the phrase with a certain amount of self-surprise. “Haven’t done them in about three months.”
“I’ll dry,” Mort said. “I’ve always wanted to try that.”
“God, you’re fucking weird,” Tristan laughed.
Mort wondered vaguely how he might appear more normal, but he was truly not too worried about it. Tristan appeared delighted by his oddities, and Mort was not worried about anybody else’s opinion.
The house was still filthy when they were done, but one part of it was a different kind of dirty. The kitchen counters were clear and had been wiped down, and the dishes that had festooned every inch of space were now stacked tidily in what had been empty cupboards.
The refrigerator had also been emptied and cleaned out. The jug that had held the rancid lemonade now sat upside down on the draining board, sparkling clean, if somewhat sudsy.
“So,” Tristan said. “Where are you headed?”
Mort misunderstood the intent of the question completely.
“I am here.” Mort said. “I could be anywhere, but I am here. People do not put enough thought into the oddness of the state of their circumstances. Why here and not there? Why now and not then?”
“People do think about that, but there are never any fucking answers,” Tristan said. “So they either pick an answer, accept that there is no answer they can know, or get very smug insisting that there’s no answer because it’s all random and nothing matters.”
He took another swig of his breakfast beer, which, given the hour of the day, was beginning to become his lunch beer.
“There is no food here,” Mort noticed. “We will need food.”
“So you’re staying?”
Mort fixed him with a determined glare. “I am staying until I understand why you can see demons.”
“Could be a while.”
“I have all the time in the universe.” Mort sat down at the kitchen table, which had not been completely cleared of all debris. A pair of Tristan’s boots sat in front of him, filthy with mud and oil. “Tell me about the first time you saw a demon.”
Tristan didn’t remember much about his early life, but he did remember that.
“I was seven years old. My mom had guests. One of them didn’t look like a person to me. I tried to tell her, but I wasn’t supposed to see the guests at all. She only invited them after I was asleep, and they never stayed longer than thirty minutes.”
“Very orderly,” Mort said, missing the point. He did that a lot. Whatever he’d been doing, and wherever he’d come from, it wasn’t anywhere like around here.
“She was selling her ass,” Tristan said bluntly. “To truckers, mostly. This place is right off the highway.”
