11 Armand Drunkenly Converses With Fish

July 17th - Twenty-nine days until the convention

I woke in the late afternoon, prickling with unease. The more I thought about it, the more troubled I was by Finch's lack of chatter on the drive home the night before. At the time, I had appreciated the reprieve, but now I couldn't help noting its strangeness. The boy hadn't looked too healthy either.

Oh well, chalk it up to ... something. God knew I'd been a mess during my brief stint at uni. Finch appeared rather more sheltered than I'd been at that age, but that hardly seemed likely to inoculate him from stupidity. In my time, the poison du jour had been a toxic relationship with an older man who aided access to binge-drinking and a variety of exciting new party drugs. What did American teenagers use to harm themselves these days? And why was my head now filled with scenes from American Graffiti and Footloose? Harrison Ford in a cowboy hat dancing arthritically with Kevin Bacon in Small-Town America—

Time for coffee.

I levered myself up and out of bed, found a pair of crumpled yet clean pants, and officially rejoined the ranks of humanity. I had temporarily exiled myself the night before on account of my first teaching experience, with the aid of Californian Whiskey and a bath. Evidently, I'd grown and evolved, and now planned my binge-drinking ahead of time. My friend and old colleague Sam had always had a thing or two to say about my choice to combine alcohol and slippery wet surfaces such as porcelain tubs, but they were an ocean away now, and my current flatmate appeared to be completely nonexistent, so they hadn't a say in the matter either.

The hangover hadn't kicked in yet, so I must have still maintained an inoffensive amount of blood in my alcohol system, but pre-emptive measures never hurt anyone, as far as hair of the dog was concerned. Coffee was necessary, yes, and if it was a little Irish, none would be the wiser.

I made it to the living room and glared at the bright bloody sunlight streaming in through the huge curtain-bare window at the front of the room. I stumbled toward it blindly and managed to wrench the curtains closed with only the minor injuries of a banged shin and a stubbed toe. Once the apartment was habitable again, I opened my eyes and tried to blink away some of the hangover headache ... and bite back the hangover nausea awakened by the light.

Right, yes, yes, there you are, Consequences. I was expecting you.

It had been a while since I'd indulged to this extent. After all, I'd been so very good this year. However, I'd been correct in my surmise that I could either exist in the outside world or maintain my sobriety, but not both. I sat down heavily on the couch for a moment, waiting for my body to start working with me again. Once its anger subsided somewhat, I pulled myself to my feet and headed toward the kitchen and caffeine. I boiled water in the kettle and was rewarded in my search by a substance resembling instant coffee.

However, once I turned toward the fridge for cream, I came up against something square and yellow. I squinted at it for a few moments before realizing it was, in fact, a note.

Written in a sprawling cursive a bit too loopy for its own good was a block of text that took me several read-throughs to fully comprehend:

Hello, Armand!

I would've preferred to meet in person, but it's pretty clear our schedules don't overlap, to say the least. So I decided I might as well introduce myself! I'm truly looking forward to getting to know you, and I believe this will be a beneficial and educational experience for us both. Have a wonderful day! Hope to meet you soon.

P.S. Help yourself to any of the fruits and veggies I put in the fridge. Oh. Except the avocados, I want to make dip. And leave the spinach leaves too—for salads.

P.S.S. Say hi to Gaston and LeFou! They're in the living room.

"‘Beneficial and educational experience'?"

Who was this person? And how did they know my name?! I eventually managed to decipher the enormous scrawl as: Lucas Anthony Barclay.

Wait a minute—Lucas?

I blinked at the name again. Perhaps Finch had mentioned him? This is what you get for giving the paperwork nary the briefest of glances, Demetrio.

Lucas, eh?

Lucas with enough hair and skin products to serve multiple pre-bachelorette spa outings, Lucas with floral-print furniture coverings and unicorn magnets, Lucas who was going to make avocado dip and was apparently not a woman in her roaring forties. Served me right for making assumptions—the aforementioned Sam (and honestly Lakshmi, Craig, or any of my other friends) would have hit me, called me a tosser, and reminded me once again that "patriarchy is a chronic condition."

I leaned one arm against the refrigerator and clenched a hand in my hair, staring down at the note in consternation. I would have been perfectly all right never encountering my obviously somewhat pedantic and finicky flatmate, but it seemed Lucas was not going to let that happen.

Something was nagging at me though; I squinted down at the second postscript ... Gaston and LeFou? I looked up—I'd just come from the living room; there hadn't been anyone in there ...

Right?

I peeked around the corner tentatively. Should I perhaps have put on some more clothes before venturing forth from the bedroom? For all I knew, there were two traumatized Frenchmen sitting in my living room at this very moment.

But the living room was empty.

Who the hell were Gaston and LeFou? Was Lucas the type of person to name the furniture?

... Bet he was.

But then I noticed something in the corner. Something that glittered in the few rays of sunlight that were still making it past the curtains. Something made of glass ... I stepped closer and realized there was movement behind that glass—fish.

There were fish in a fish tank.

With a little sticky note against the side that said: Hi, we're Gaston and LeFou!

I stared at them for a few moments, and they stared back.

This felt exactly like being introduced by someone like Lucas to someone like the fish: we were all—sans Lucas—rather embarrassed by the whole affair. Despite myself, I felt an immediate kinship with Gaston and LeFou.

"Hello, lads." I waved at them. "I'm Armand, but I'm sure you'll come to know me as ‘the one who doesn't feed you.'"

They made tiny silent Os.

I finished making the coffee, spiked it, and settled down with my lapdesk on the floor across from Gaston and LeFou, finally set to ink the pages I'd drunkenly penciled the day before. Lakshmi had begged and borrowed me an extra week on this month's deadline, and there were only so many threatening emails the editors could send me. Despite holding the contract renewal over my head, they'd approved the anniversary-issue story and layout weeks ago; I'd finished penciling last night, so my work was all ink and sable brushes for the foreseeable future.

This was the part of the comic that demanded the most of my skill, and the least of my brain.

I tucked my hair behind my ears, settled my reading glasses firmly on my nose, and loosened my shoulders, getting ready for a good couple of hours of drudgery until I had to head back to the university and ... I swallowed back a shudder. A lot of grade-A whiskey had gone into blocking out my last teaching experience. It'd be a damn waste to dredge it all back up again.

I glanced up at Gaston and LeFou over the rims of my glasses. "Take it from me, lads, if your agent ever tells you something is a good idea, swim for the hills."

It hurt to admit, but even while in the throes of resentment, I knew Lakshmi had been right about this. The workshop wasn't only going to be good for the comic, it was going to be good for me. I'd isolated myself for so long that being forced to perform daily pedagogical acts of coherence in front of artistically inclined teenagers in a foreign land was almost a crash course in relearning how to person.

Perhaps I'd relearn how to person in time for Lucas not to detest me on sight.

I'd been working steadily for several hours when I realized my indulgence wasn't so much hair of the dog as an entire dog at this point. My Irish coffee was becoming increasingly Irish while its coffee-ness inevitably was becoming depleted. It was honestly quite depressing how predictable I was—but that was yet another topic I'd rather drown.

I would make sure I had time to shower and sober up before Finch came to collect me, but for the time being I had to finish these pages and explain certain realities to Gaston and LeFou.

"'S not that I don't like yer Lucas, lads—I'll bet he's an all-round upstanding citizen and pillar o' the community an' all—but I find ... you see, I find people like me more when th' haven't met me, y'know?" I took a deep breath and laid out another page to dry on the coffee table. The fish apprehended it without comment. I was nearly done—I'd spread five pages across the couch, floor, and table—and was honestly quite pleased with how quickly I'd managed to turn them out. Yes, I was drunk, but I'd always been a productive drunk. I wondered if the fish were at all impressed.

"I bet ... I bet if me and this Lucas never meet we'd end up best o' friends, but iffee ... if he meets me, he'll try to ... wisely try to pretend we never did. Meet. Y'follow?"

It appeared that they did.

"What's he like, anyway?" I directed this question at Gaston, who I'd assumed to be the larger one. "I mean, 'sides the clean-freakiness avocado-dip horses-horses-horses bit? Where is he all day?"

The fish didn't give much up, but I glanced around the room, trying to find some clue as to what my mysterious flatmate did for a living. I didn't know what I'd expected to find, but there was a tripod in the corner, leaning against a bookcase. The kind of tripod you mounted highly expensive cameras on. I glanced again at the many, many photographs of horses; he was pretty good too.

I also realized that I was bloody stupid. I found my phone, and a quick google of lucas barclay horses led me to a FotoBom account featuring, voilà, more pictures of horses. His socials included a few aesthetic photos of family and friends, and one or two which were allegedly of the man himself, but those were so heavily edited and filtered that he just looked like a catalog item. I could make out something in the eyes; they could hardly be that green, could they? But everything else reeked of airbrushing and carefully posed soullessness. They were all about a year out of date, as well. His professional photos were more recent; it seemed like he ran the account for an "equine retirement facility" that was—ah, there it was—owned by his family.

So money. Or at least middle class.

Frustratingly, there didn't seem to be any pictures of Lucas himself on the account, Vaseline-lensed or otherwise, but I couldn't help noting the photos really were quite good.

"So he's an artist, eh lads?" I muttered at the fish.

Gaston and LeFou turned their tails on me, seemingly to discourage this line of thought. I nodded at them. "I see, no, I see. He's rich and he makes art for fun. Aye, that's the type of person I'd definitely get on with ..." I sighed. "I dunno if y'lads can detect sarcasm, but that was it, right there. He's gonna think I'm a slob 'f a sellout ... which I am ..."

It had only been a year since I'd been doing the comic professionally. I hadn't even thought making comics like mine was something people did professionally—famous comics, aye, fancy graphic novels, I suppose, but not weird little indie comics like Surrogate Goose. You couldn't live on that ... but somehow, for the past year, I had. And the imposter syndrome was cumulative. I'd never felt this way when I was dancing—I didn't have to be myself on stage; I could lose myself in a character or an aesthetic.

That didn't work with Surrogate Goose. My self was required for use as raw material.

I glanced at the clock that hung on the wall just above the fish. "All right, time to sober up and go teach a generation of young hopefuls t' be me, eh?"

The fish appeared somewhat relieved as I left the room.