The Mad King

© Porsche Brosseau, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

DARCIE WAS RUNNING OUT OF FLIRTATION TECHNIQUES. Cyril wasn’t that interested in the shit in her purse, in third-wave feminism, in extended eye contact, but then—then!—he brushed back his hair, and that seemed to dislodge something in his frontal lobe. He offered a sexy asymmetrical smile. He wanted to talk about her job suddenly, about how she taught computer programming.

So she was off.

A computer program was a set of instructions. A programming language, say C++, got translated into machine language, which was all digits, all binary numbers, just zeroes and ones, either/or, but Cyril started to get confused when Darcie got into that, so she backtracked. It was like a recipe or a very careful to-do list. If you went to the store and bought milk, then you should drive home to put the milk in the refrigerator. If the computer got milk, then it knew the next step, and you programmed in a series of steps after those steps. There were possibilities and then routes for each possibility. But Cyril wasn’t the kind of person who worried about milk spoiling. He might drive around with it in the trunk of his car until it started to smell, even after it smelled. He wasn’t big on directions. Then he brought up binary systems again. “All zeroes and ones?” he asked.

Cyril was actually really smart, but his brain hadn’t congealed right. Someone shook it out of the Jell-O mold before it had set. Darcie pictured lime green with chunks of canned pineapple.

He said and did stupid things. He destroyed her favorite chair. He didn’t delete his browsing history.

He googled things like “What happens if you do laundry without detergent?” He once googled “How can you tell if a girl likes you?” And this was after they had lived together for a year.

That programming discussion wasn’t the end of their relationship—it had happened when they first met—but to Darcie, it was the soundtrack of the end.

He was a zero, and she was a one.

DARCIE STILL SOMETIMES DYED HER HAIR with Kool-Aid, and she sometimes shaved the sides of her head with plastic Bic razors, the white kind with the yellow caps. Her favorite Kool-Aid hair was black cherry. She never drank it. You should never drink something that can stain your hair for a span of weeks. Coca-Cola could turn rust to a hard black shell. She drank it anyway. Her insides weren’t rusty.

Sometimes she thought she shouldn’t act this way; she was twenty-seven years old. But she was Weerd Girl, and her life was bent in that direction, toward weerdness. She leaned into the curve of it. She had traded the i for the extra e a long time ago. She practiced a fish-eye stare. She blimped her way through life: she was full of flammable gas. She wore short skirts made out of plastic, shirts made out of skirts, bracelets made out of bottle caps, pieces of sea glass, once even fingernail clippings.

The weerdness brought on a mania—a mania of toughness. She could kill someone in a faculty meeting if she really needed to. She felt capable of this. She would do it and do it well. She had two things in her purse that would maim, three that would break the skin, four that would embarrass, one that would squirt a stream of gin from the plastic shape of a gun.

“I’M MOVING BACK IN, MOM,” Cyril had said, and then he had cried a little, and his mom hadn’t said much at all. She patted him on the back, like she had when he was little. She didn’t yell at him.

The Internet connection at his mom’s house sucked, but he watched for signs of Weerd Girl. Cyril used to be the first one to see everything she did: the animations and the games...