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The Clicky Archives

In March of that year Pat Freestone acquired a roommate. Within a week he had formed a theory about the roommate's upbringing, and within a fortnight he had begun a course of independent study in order to be equal to it. What follows is the complete run, which is the longest thing he ever wrote and the only one that is not a countdown.

The reader should be warned that Pat's theory is wrong. The reader should also be warned that this makes no difference whatsoever to what happens next.

March 19

I had a long conversation last night with Clicky about his life and what he hopes to do with it. Since Clicky was raised by termites, he has had to do without the kind of things you and I take for granted, like human affection, spoken language, and daylight. Thus he is somewhat shy and skittish. But once you get past the stammering, the odd body language and the general reluctance to be looked at directly, he is just another young man from the Bronx.

Clicky grew up in a crawl space under a brownstone.

That is as far as we got.

Intrigued,
Pat Freestone

March 22

In hopes of better understanding my roommate, I have spent the weekend at the library studying the habits, life cycle and social organisation of the termite. Fascinating.

Did you know, for instance, that termites are not ants? They are not even close to ants. Ants are wasps that gave up. Termites are cockroaches that got organised, and they got organised somewhere in the region of a hundred and fifty million years ago, which is a long time to be doing anything without a break.

Did you know that a termite colony is divided into castes, and that the great majority of its members are workers who will never reproduce, and who will spend the entirety of their lives labouring for the benefit of a queen they will very likely never see?

A grown individual, with no offspring, no prospects and no purpose in life except to labour away in a video store.

I mean a dead tree.

Man. How sad.

Fondly,
Pat Freestone

March 23

The principal conduit of conversation for the termite, as for many highly social insects, is the pheromone. A trail is laid down; the trail is followed; nobody has to be told anything twice. I have thought about this a great deal in relation to the schedule at the store, which is laminated, and which is ignored.

Termites also communicate by vibration. When a soldier detects a breach it will strike its head rapidly against the tunnel wall, and the alarm travels through the wood to the rest of the colony faster than any of them could carry it on foot. Entire families of termites are, in effect, shouting at each other through the furniture.

I suppose this is how Clicky earned his nickname.

He learned English, as far as I can establish, by listening to a television through a floor. Day and night, in the dark, for years, a voice from another world describing a life he could hear but not attend. He told me once that his favourite programme was the one set on the boat.

“One day,” he said, “I am going to find that boat.”

I told him the boat is not real. He said he knew that. He said that was not the point and that I had missed it.

Pat Freestone

March 24

It must have been difficult for Clicky as a child. It is hard to imagine growing up confined to a dark and dusty crawl space, separated from human contact, and dealing with the fact that you are a great many times smaller than your own mother, who is also a piece of furniture.

A situation like that would have driven me to distraction. Except for the part about the mother. That part I would have managed.

I am beginning to feel there is some strange destiny at work between Clicky and myself. An unspoken bond. I recognise his mistrust of the world, his suppressed anxieties, his underdeveloped sense of connection to his fellow man. I am drawn to it. I am moved to help him escape the memory of his upbringing and realise his full human potential.

Now, as I sit here alone in my kitchen at three in the morning, I realise I must assume the role of mentor.

Right after I assume the role of finding out who has been at my cereal.

Sincerely,
Pat Freestone

March 25

I have drawn up a curriculum. It has four units. I will not be sharing the fourth unit yet as it depends on the first three and on the weather.

Unit One: Daylight. Twenty minutes, increasing weekly, on the fire escape. Clicky did not care for this and produced a note.

Unit Two: Spoken language. We are working from the television, which is what he knows, but I am selecting the programmes now rather than leaving it to chance, which is what went wrong the first time.

Unit Three: Human affection. I have not begun this unit. I have read three books about it. I am confident that the reading is the hard part.

Mark my words,
Pat Freestone

March 29

An update on the curriculum.

Unit One is going well, in that Clicky now goes out onto the fire escape without being asked, and stays there, and does not come in when I call.

Unit Two has been suspended by mutual agreement.

On Unit Three I have made an observation which I will set down here because I do not have anywhere else to set it down. It is this. I began this course of study in order to teach a young man how to be among people. I have spent three weeks in a library on my own, four nights a week behind a counter on my own, and every evening since in a kitchen on my own, reading about a species that has solved the problem of living together so completely that no individual member of it is ever alone for a single hour of its life.

I do not know what to do with that observation. I am going to leave it here and go to work.

Yours,
Pat Freestone

March 31

Clicky has moved out. He left a note, which I will not be reproducing, and which was kind.

The curriculum is retired. Unit Four was going to be about the boat.

Fondly, and that is the end of it,
Pat Freestone

Editors' note