Sesquicentennial, Milo Simpson ’20

Milo Simpson ’20

Sesquicentennial

Teddy Rooke has A Problem. It’s a tiny little thing, he swears, and no harm’ll come of it.

(His head buzzes with an endless procession of one-five-zero is divisible by one two three five six ten—it’s normal. It’s all quite routine.)

There’s nothing to be done, so why waste effort trying to change things? They’re just numbers, and Teddy likes numbers, those ones especially. He has community college to attend (and a major to actually decide on), and a job to pay for the rent and schooling. He doesn’t have time to worry about trivial things like numbers. Not a big deal.

The apartment he’s looking at near campus has two bedrooms and a living room–kitchenette combo immediately upon entry through the front door. Its windows look out on an intersection and a brick wall on either side of the building, which is all right, Teddy supposes. The view isn’t ideal, but the kitchen comes furnished with a modest set of appliances, which are fairly nice and recent to boot.

The lowest the landlord is willing to go for rent, however, is a full fifteen hundred dollars a month. As nice as that number is—divisible by one-fivezero—that’s too much for Teddy to afford by himself.

His brother’s a freshly promoted detective making a full sixty grand yearly, and he lives in his partner’s house, which was paid off in full something like a decade ago—so, discounting his half of the grocery and utility budgets, Bryan has plenty of money to spare. He’s always fussing about Teddy’s health, despite having the more dangerous career. He’s always taken up a bit of a parenting role, Teddy supposes. He’d consequently be perfectly glad to pitch in on the cost of the apartment for his little brother, but the idea of that leaves a sour taste in Teddy’s mouth. It hardly seems fair to just take that kind of money, even if it’s from his mother-henning brother.

So he does what any college student in need of an apartment within a reasonable distance from campus would do: he calls for a roommate to split the rent, and, to his surprise, he actually gets responses to the ad he posted on the school’s message board. The third candidate catches his eye. Mikey’s a nice guy who doesn’t seem to do much, so they move in without much fuss and get along just fine.

For a while, anyway.

Teddy is acutely aware of the dishes when Mikey puts them away. He likes to do dishes while listening to audiobooks; he finds it relaxing, so Teddy can’t feel too bad about making his roommate do all of the kitchen chores, but he does feel bad about something, and for the longest time he can’t figure out what, until it hits him.

The little dish rack next to the sink can fit their seven plates, stacked on top of each other, and four bowls. Four? Seven? They are Bad Numbers, obviously. They Do Not Fit, and it shreds Teddy’s nerves to a nest of trembling wires, all tangled around his head like an iron band and squeezing. Eleven is Not Good either, but that’s easily remedied. It’s all fine.

If Teddy’s a little extra clumsy just before spring semester begins, it’s just because his allergies are acting up. It’s nothing to worry about. Mikey leaves antihistamines on the bathroom counter, and they speak of it no further.

He breaks two plates in the space of a week, then buys another bowl, and feels the tension he hadn’t even realized was there bleed away at the sight of five plates stacked up all neatly beside five bowls. That looks Good, five and five is ten, which is practical but also a divisor of The Number one-fivezero that screeches through his brain.

It scratches the little itch that crawls beneath his skin, makes it sing and soothes him instead, and nobody’s been harmed by it. So they’re short a few plates? It’s no big deal. The net stress of the household is lower, so it’s actually good in the end.

He forgets about it after that, for a little while. Everybody has a quirk or two, a little idiosyncrasy that makes them special. It’s a good thing. Like how Mikey always draws on the napkins when they go out to eat, or how his brother, at thirty, will squeal and coo at every dog on the street like it’s the first one he’s ever seen. It’s normal.

Biology notes are written in fractured haikus, stanzas of five and ten and fifteen lines that keep him focused, even though they waste paper. He sits in the fifth seat in the fifth row of the lecture hall.

“Mind gettin’ pizza tonight?” asks Mikey on Thursday, looking up from his essay for probably the first time that week. “I’ll do the shopping tomorrow, but we got nothing right now, man.”

“Okay, that’s all right,” Teddy replies. He taps his fingers on his thigh exactly five times, then three, then six, three, five again. It’s a new sequence he’s testing out, and it’s perfect, symmetrical. It soothes his racing nerves, a balm that no drug can possibly replicate. “I’ll order?”

Mikey looks at him strangely for just a moment, pale eyes flitting down to Teddy’s hands folded in his lap, but his bewildered expression shutters and falls away as quickly as it came. “Sure,” he says, but hesitates. “You all right, dude? You’ve been acting kinda jittery lately.”

“I’ll get us half onion, if that’s fine.” Teddy bulldozes right over the question, leaning to retrieve his cellphone from where he keeps it in his bag. “Any objections?” He orders the pizza at Mikey’s neutral shrug and feels relaxed, but his roommate keeps stealing glances for the rest of the night.

Everything is okay.

Two weeks later, Teddy panics in the living room. Mikey is in class, so he’s alone in the apartment.

Bryan’s an investigator first and muscle second, but that doesn’t mean he’s not going to be running perps down—and getting hurt. All Teddy hears is his brother’s partner saying, “He’s in the hospital—” before the phone slips from his fingers and his legs fold beneath him and everything is too fast and—

He throws a hand out blindly; his trembling fingers close around the smooth plastic body of a marker. In a single frenzied motion, every book and pen and loose sheet of paper is swept from the table. Teddy slams the felted tip of the pen down into the false glass surface with enough force for ink to splatter onto his wrist. He writes.

His hand moves without his input and he doesn’t look. He just carves characters into the table, with eyes squeezed shut and teeth cutting into his tongue. His head is screaming, crashing cumbersome and broken against the sonic whirlwind of everything else. Bryan is hurt and he’s in the hospital and there are so many ways this could go, no certainty, too many chances to go wrong.

Mikey’s things—the ones he threw all over—are disorganized. Teddy—he needs something but he doesn’t know what, can’t bring himself to move from the table, to stop writing again and again and again. The action is meant to be self-soothing but it only makes him feel weak and small.

He dropped the phone before any details could come through, but Teddy knows enough. Some serial carjacker got caught in the act and decided to put a bullet into him, and he has no idea— Did it puncture his lung? Could it’ve been hollow point? What about his heart? Teddy doesn’t know anything, and it’s killing him. His breaths come in wheezing gasps as his traitorous imagination conjures all the ways Bryan might be dying right now but he’s too much of a coward to listen and know for sure.

It feels like an eternity, but he must not be there for very long. It’s only a short time before he’s broken from his reverie by the soft jingle of a keyring and the telltale creak of the door swinging inwards. Mikey’s home from class.

“Holy shit!” The other man is on him in an instant, dropping his bag and skidding to his knees to be on Teddy’s level. “Rooke, dude? Oh, um, you’re having a panic attack.” Warm hands come up to cup his face, gently tipping his head up and away from the table. “Look at me, man.”

Mikey’s glasses are slipping, and his eyes are big and owlishly wide. “I need you to look at me, okay? Yeah, like that.”

Teddy does as he’s told, mirroring Mikey’s breaths when prompted, focusing on the reedy sound of his voice and how it cracks. “You’re okay,” Mikey promises. Teddy doesn’t quite know whether he believes him. He wants to say his brother’s name, to reach for the phone, but Mikey’s smaller hands belie his strength, and they pin Teddy’s wrists into his lap. “Don’t,” he orders, firm but gentle. “Just look at me. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

“I—” Teddy tries, but the word pinches in his throat and crumbles to silence. He keeps breathing with Mikey, screwing his eyes shut and focusing on the trembling hands wrapped around his own. He tries his hardest to ignore the staticky baritone that wafts faintly from his phone speaker, but his face must show that he can hear it.

Something about “graze” and “fine” and “okay” drifts in the air, and Teddy can’t move. Mikey frees one of his wrists in favor of picking up the phone and mumbling into it. The words pass through Teddy’s ears, utterly unprocessed, but he hasn’t the agency to care.

After that, it is silent.

It takes some time for things to become safe and still again, but they do. Mikey manages to coax Teddy back up onto the sofa, mostly silent and

palpably awkward, but trying hard to ensure he’s comfortable and calm. He puts some tea on, and he pushes some of the things knocked to the floor into little piles approximating neatness. He drapes his jacket over the coffee table, but Teddy hasn’t the courage to lift it and see what marks he made beneath it.

“Do you, uh, wanna talk about it?”

No, Teddy wants to say, but he also knows that’s childish and irresponsible. “My brother is hurt. I panicked. Everything’s okay now.”

Mikey levels him with a disbelieving glare. “Dude. We both know that’s bull. You don’t have to talk about it with me, because I honestly dunno how to help you, but I’m pretty sure this needs to get worked through.”

“It’s not a big deal,” he insists. “This was a fluke; that’s all. Everything can go right back to normal.”

Teddy watches as Mikey reaches over to the table, pulling his windbreaker from its place splayed across the top—and, okay—wow. His mouth goes slack, and hot tears prick at the corners of his eyes. All right. It’s a problem.

“1-5-0 1-5-0 1-5-0” is scribbled out over and over and over again, manic, like a motif from a horror movie. The numbers all overlap, utterly unplanned and chaotic, but Teddy thinks he can see divisors listed underneath some sets. It’s carved into the table like a religious symbol, occult and desperate and obsessive—unstable—and Teddy doesn’t think of himself as unstable.

“I know,” Mikey sighs, gently. “You didn’t even realize it, man? ‘Cause you’ve been acting funky for a while now, and I think you stressed yourself over the edge of something.”

“Yeah,” Teddy manages. His heart feels like it’s trying to crawl up his throat, but at the same time something buoys his chest, making him feel . . . relieved. “I’m gonna look for a therapist,” he says, numb.

Mikey nods. “Good plan.”

“It’s a start,” agrees Teddy, but he knows in his heart that the road ahead is long and painful. A thought occurs to him. He can’t help but laugh at its blatancy, not to mention its absurdity given the current circumstance; it’s a surprisingly fitting kind of irony. “Think I’ll major in psych, yeah?”