“I think there’s a game on,” Timmy says.
“And isn’t there always, of a Sunday afternoon, and being verily in possession of cable, a game on?”
“Yeah!”
“God bless us all.”
The screen blinks. A ninety-second montage follows: Tommy and Timmy watching football on a large-screen TV, passing a bowl of chips back and forth. Timmy removing a bottle of Old Style beer from a garage refrigerator, popping the top off, looking over his shoulder, smelling the beer, shrugging, taking a sip. Timmy handing the beer to Tommy, back in the living room, in front of the television. Tommy squinting at the beer, weighing it in his hand, playfully throwing a handful of chips at Timmy. Timmy throwing a couple of the chips back at Tommy. Tommy reaching over, putting Timmy in a headlock, setting the beer on the coffee table, noogieing Timmy. Timmy swatting at the noogie-hand and, shortly, breaking free of the headlock, red-faced, hair a mess, zinc oxide smeared, and frowning at Tommy. Tommy drinking beer. Both of them in front of a bathroom mirror, tubes of Zinka on the counter before them. Tommy patting Timmy’s head, giving him a side squeeze. Timmy chucking Tommy on the shoulder. Timmy reapplying orange Zinka to his nose. Tommy applying navy Zinka in stripes—two each—under his eyes. Timmy turning to Tommy, lower lip bulging in admiration. Tommy helping Timmy apply stripes of navy Zinka so the two of them match.
The screen blinks. Same tableau as before.
“So last time we did this,” Tommy says, “Timmy, here, had a little bit of a problem.”
“I was younger then,” Timmy says. “I wasn’t as mature.”
“It was only last month!”
“Still,” Timmy says. “I’m a month more mature, now.”
“Alright, go ahead,” Tommy says. “Stir the pot.”
Timmy, bearing a large wooden spoon in one hand, lifts the lid of the Crock-Pot with the other. We hear faint gurgling sounds, and perhaps—it’s so faint, it’s hard to really tell—a painsong, or two painsongs in harmony.
Timmy, looking down into the pot, drops the spoon and the lid and sticks both hands inside the Crock-Pot, near-instantly pulls his hands out and shrieks, starts falling back, swings his arms wildly, sends the Crock-Pot crashing to the floor.
“A month more mature my hairy freaking dupa!” says Tommy. “Ah jeez. What the hell. Might as well get this for the blooper reel, huh?”
The camera zooms in on Timmy, lying on the floor, sobbing a little in profile.
“So the irony of all of this, I guess,” says Tommy, offscreen, “is that suppose on the one hand we’d have set the temperature higher. The little robot set Timmy off would’ve been a corpse by the time Timmy pulled the lid off, and Timmy would not have gone into overload over some corpse, right? But it would’ve tasted bad. Well maybe not bad. But just not that good. At least a little bit sugary. So. What can you do?”
A cure on its side, its eyes clamped—perhaps melted—shut, its velvet patchy, and streaked with cayenne-red speckles, uses its tail—the only one of its limbs it appears able to control; the others are limp—to push itself into frame, just behind Timmy’s head. It sneezes softly, getting Timmy’s attention. Timmy turns onto his other cheek, takes the cure in a blistering fist, holds it up to the camera, and squeezes its head off.
CUT.
Tommy, Timmy, a red-haired, sunburnt, middle-aged woman, and a red-haired, sunburnt, adolescent girl, all of whom don stripes of zinc oxide on their noses and under their eyes, sit around a wooden patio table with a barbecue grill in the background.
“Well so we had a little bit of a comical mishap earlier, and Timmy’s got a couple blisters on the knucks of his throwing hand, took a knock on the head from the floor, too, but so, just have a look: we Kamanskis pulled together, as a family, and we came out alright. Donna thought she remembered we had a backup Crock-Pot down in the basement, Jenny went down to look, and by God she found that Crock-Pot. And it worked good as new! We were only able to salvage five of the six original cures, but hey, there’s only four of us, and so wouldn’t you know it, here we are together, about to enjoy what we’ve for so long been waiting to enjoy together. Get a load of it there now, would ya?”
Overhead zoom on the plate in the center of the table. Four cuts of grill-marked steak form a square in the center of which five black-and-red, crackly-skinned cures on spits—garnished with grill-marked green peppers, chunks of white onion, and cherry tomatoes wrapped in bacon—lie side by side.
“Dig in, guys!” Tommy says, offscreen.
Schrödinger’s Curio
Home Video
Early 2000s, USA
[9 minutes, 13 seconds]
Split screen.
On the right, a dozen popsicled Curios arranged in three rows of four in the middle of what appears to be a backyard sandbox writhe and painsing. One punches at its own head, others claw at their faces, grind their fists into their abdomens, slouch and straighten and squint and go pop-eyed.
On the left, Robbie, from the Popsicles video, goateed this time, perhaps a bit older, and clothed in khaki slacks and a navy blazer, a golden fraternity pin in one lapel, reads to the camera from a spiral notebook: “Before getting into my extra-credit project proper, Dr. Martin, I want you to know that I have done a lot of reflection about some of the things I have done this semester to probably deserve your canker, and I would like to explain myself to you about why that canker is maybe bigger than it would be if you knew me better in my heart and soul and what I stand for as a man, a member of your class, a brother of Beta Theta Epsilon Delta, and a fifth-year at this glorious and well-beloved university we get to share the privilege of being a part of together and using our minds in, and also of course as a citizen of these great United States, northside and southside both and also eastside and westside both. In order to begin with I have to tell you that I am in love with a certain girl I will not name and that the note you caught me passing and that you then so embarrassingly—for me, who deserved it I admit—read aloud in front of the classroom was because of that. That note was a note I was trying to pass to this girl I won’t name’s best friend who I thought I should be trying to make a good impression on because I’m in love with this girl I won’t name as I have said and I thought the friend would maybe help me in the noble cause of getting the girl I won’t name to fall in love with me mutually, and all I was trying to do was give the best friend a compliment that was not too obvious or cheesefisted but expressed to her that I held her in a lot of high steam, so when I wrote in that note, ‘I’m surprised you’re taking Physics for F-tards,’ pardon the language, I was not trying to say that you, Dr. Martin, were a person who could only teach physics to f-tards, pardon the language, or even that Remedial Physics is a class that is really and truly full of f-tards and designed for f-tards. I don’t even really think I believe in f-tards as a thing. I think everyone is special in his or her own way and I meant no disrespect to you or Remedial Physics or my fellow students in the classroom who I do not think are f-tards. All I was trying to do was to say to the best friend that she was someone who I thought was really, really intellectual, and that is not even a lie because I do think she is very intellectual, but I wanted to say that to her in a way that did not seem dorky or in any other kind of way unRobbie-like because then it would not sound like I really believed it, I didn’t think, and if it didn’t sound like I really believed it, then this best friend would not only not believe that I believed that she was really intellectual but she might even think I was making fun of her and saying the opposite of what I was saying. She might even think, I thought, that if I said in a more straight-up way that she was intellectual and that because she was so intellectual I was surprised to find that she was in a class with me, who is dumber—though I try very hard—she might think that I was making fun of her and telling her that actually I thought she was dumb and that my surprise was fake or that even worse my surprise was really real, but for the opposite reason, namely that I thought she was so dumb that I couldn’t believe she could even get into a Physics class that dumb old me was in. But I don’t think anyone’s an f-tard is what I’m trying to tell you. I was just doing the best that I could which was not good enough to try and receive love feelings that were perpendicular with my own love feelings from the girl I won’t name whose best friend was the intended receiver of that note you read out loud. I am sorry. Truly and from my heart and soul.