“Thanks for the tea. Now go away.”
“I’m never going away. You’re stuck with me until that murder-suicide pact I mentioned the other day. I don’t want to live without you, and I’m just going to assume you feel the same way.”
“Look, just let me finish this, OK?”
Henry leaned in closer again, read the following under the heading “Boyfriend Funny du Jour”:
* * *
Henry: Check out this video with a deer kicking the shit out of a hunter.
Faye: [watches video] That’s awesome! Too funny.
Henry: I’m going to post it on the Facebooks. Ummm…
Faye: Yeah?
Henry: Uh… do deer have hooves?
Faye: [laughing] Yes. Yes they do.
Henry: What? I just wanted to make sure.
Faye: I am seriously booking a zoo visit.
* * *
“Animals are hard,” Henry said. “I’m taking that tea back, meanface.”
“Are girls hard, too?”
“Oh, the one after we ate at Roy Rogers? Classic Kyllo right there.”
* * *
Henry: Who was Roy Rogers, anyway?
Faye: An American movie cowboy.
Henry: Oh.
Faye: With his sidekick Dale Evans. Who was a girl.
Henry: Who was a what?
Faye: A girl.
Henry: Oh! I thought you said a robot.
Faye: Yes, that sounds a lot like “girl.”
* * *
“You know what’s fun,” Henry said. “Not this, that’s what. How many of these do you have written down, anyway?”
“Pages and pages,” Faye said. “And I’m going to show them to our kids one day, show them that Daddy can’t tell the difference between a lemur and a meerkat. Or a tiger and a lion.” Faye turned in her chair, looked up at Henry pointedly. “A hippopotamus and a pig!”
“The hippos were pink. No fair.”
Faye laughed, turned back to her screen, read the next one out loud:
* * *
Henry: Monkeys are better than gorillas.
Faye: That’s because monkeys have tails. Apes don’t have tails. Like gorillas and… orang-utangs… and… are baboons apes?
Henry: Ha ha ha ha ha!
Faye: Why is that funny?
Henry: I thought you said “legumes” instead of “baboons.”
Faye: Yes, legumes are apes.
Henry: Legumes are the apes of the bean world.
* * *
“This right here. This is why I love you, Henry.” Faye pushed her chair back, stood up, hugged Henry where he stood pretending to be hurt, his face turned away from her.
“You don’t even have my favorite one in there,” he said, smirking.
“Which one’s that?” she said playfully, slapping his butt.
“The one where I called a ski mask a face cozy.”
“Ha! Forgot about that one. I also loved when you couldn’t remember who Batman’s partner was. You said it was ‘Batman and Robert.’ I thought I was gonna die laughing.”
“Speaking of dying, I think it might be murder-suicide o’clock if you keep this up.”
Faye kissed Henry’s face gently, said, “You are the best of all possible boyfriends.”
“I can think of better,” Henry said. “I can certainly think of better girlfriends.”
“Haha. Hardly. Wait, okay, one more. Honest!”
* * *
Henry: Look at the T-Rex on that poster over there.
Faye: It’s a frog.
Henry: Oh man. I just keep walking into these things. Well, at least it’s a lizard.
Faye: No.
Henry: Oh, right. A reptile.
Faye: No.
Henry: What?
Faye: An amphibian.
Henry: Oh. It’s amazing I passed science.
Faye: It’s amazing you haven’t been eaten by an animal.
Henry: Yeah! I'd go "Oh, look at the nice kitty" and it would be, like, a werewolf.
Faye: A werewolf!
Henry: No! I meant, like, a really big wolf. A wolf-wolf.
* * *
Faye pulled away, smacked his butt again, said, “We’re adorable. Let’s go eat.”
They went downstairs together, decided they were both too tired to cook, ordered pizza, drank wine, watched some TV, and generally had a night like any other.
Neither of them with the slightest inkling of what was to come.
F I V E
Henry stumbled out of his apartment and into the hallway, a dark blot well over six feet tall, still shifting, changing shape. In flux. Milo stayed well back from Henry, but kept him in sight. The ghost of a man following the ghost of something perhaps more than a man. Perhaps nothing like a man at all.
Henry crashed down the stairs, bumping into a woman, knocking her flat. The man the woman was with narrowly sidestepped Henry’s blundering descent, turning and opening his mouth, thinking about saying something. But the man had no way of rationalizing what he’d just witnessed, so he closed his mouth, bent to help his girlfriend off the ground.