Chapter Text
Fiddleford Hadron McGucket’s one and only son was not born in a drought, even though he was born in California, which was one of the main things Fiddleford had known about California before moving out there. Growing up in Hickory Springs, California was spoken of rarely, and only as soft whispers of temptation. As a boy, he’d known it was Hollywood and it was the Gold Rush and it was Death Valley. His mama hated the place, though she’d never been, and said all the droughts and scorching heat were because California was the closest thing to hell that their country had, that it would tempt you out west with shiny dreams of fame and silver screens and then drag you into debauchery and free love and sin. It took Fiddleford a little while to understand that her bitterness towards the Golden State was precisely because she’d never been and she would never get to; if singin’ in Nashville was far-fetched for her, well, the record companies and bright lights of Los Angeles were just like college was to Fiddleford; another planet. But Fiddleford had done it, had rocketed up away and planted the family’s flag on the surface of a four-year university. And his mother would never forgive him for it.
He had come home after school, back to the farm to help out and figure out what he was gonna do next. Hickory Springs was different. Or rather, Hickory Springs was the same, and he was different. Nobody called him Twang anymore. They called him College Boy. Or New York. Or City Boy, despite the fact that Backupsmore was most certainly not in a city. An’ it wasn’t a compliment, those new names. There was a sort of defensiveness to just about everybody Fiddleford interacted with, at the market and at church and by the quarry, an immediate assumption that he was lookin’ down on them since he’d been to college. Too big for his britches is what folk were saying about him, even though he didn’t behave like anything other than the polite, anxious kid they’d always known. The kids who used to sing songs about him having been born in a bucket were sarcastically callin’ him yer highness in the checkout aisle. The idea of Fiddleford McGucket bein’ too cosmopolitan, too sophisticated, woulda made anybody from the last four years of his life bust a rib from laughing. It was a funny little trick; too country for the city and too city for the country. He fit nowhere at all, same as ever.
It wasn’t that Fiddleford felt superior to the folk of his town, he knew where and what he came from, but he did feel that his eyes were open. He’d always known that his family was poor, that Hickory Springs was poor, and eventually, that Appalachia was poor. But college had helped him understand some of the why. And he knew that until they had access to the same resources as the university towns and the cities, they’d stay that way. This was when he started to get to thinkin’ about personal computers. About every person having a machine, a little one, with all of the books in Backupsmore’s libraries, or West Coast Tech’s. Appalachia needed a way to connect and communicate with the world, with the important conversations happening and the ideas being shared. ‘Cause otherwise the future would move right along without them and they would stagnate, left behind. No investments, no big businessmen setting up shop in Tennessee, everything shipped in from overseas and their roads and infrastructure crumbling, any kid with half a brain in his head fleeing north or west to the cities as quick as he could. Self-sustaining cycle of givin’ nothing and gettin’ nothing.
He believed in the project. And he knew he was capable of it. But it wouldn’t happen in Hickory Springs. There just weren’t people doin’ that kind of work there yet, no basis for him to build off. But Palo Alto, that was where the future of technology was. Where companies hired bright young visionaries for their think tanks. That was where the energy was. So that was where he had to go. Fiddleford loved his mama, loved his siblings, but he was under no pretense that they enjoyed having him around at home. Still, they took it hard, like some personal slight or some terrible betrayal.
Bad enough you turned traitor for the Yanks his brother Dicey had said, sitting in the same exact collapsing plastic lawn chair he had been the day that Fiddleford had left, as if he’d spent the last four years frozen in time. Now yer heading out for Calee-fornication. ‘Slike you caint get away from Blue Ridge fast enough.
It wasn’t true, of course, but Fiddleford had long since given up on trying to be understood by his family. The real surprise for him was that Emma-May was comin’ with him. They’d picked up where they had left off the minute she found out he was back in town. She hadn’t exactly waited for him, per say, but she cut things off with Oren Beck by the time he’d crossed o’er the Mason-Dixon line. He jus’ wasn’t smart like Fiddleford was, she’d said to him, and he didn’t listen to her like Fiddleford did and she was ready to see more of the world than Hickory Springs.
“Ain’t no way your mama is gonna let you move out to California with me unless we’re married,” Fiddleford had told her.
“So let’s get married,” she’d responded, simple as anything, and they had, eloping in the very church where Emma-May used to sing every Sunday.
Palo Alto was cooler in temperature than Fiddleford had thought California was supposed to be. Emma-May liked it well enough, she taught music at the local high school and decorated their house and had her book club girlfriends over every Tuesday, even though they made fun of her accent. On Fiddleford’s end, he did engineering work on Health and Safety Inspection for a big automation equipment company, and tinkered with his project in his garage and got software advice from colleagues and forums and developer meet-ups any free moment he had. It was harder to fall back into that despondent, distant going-through-the-motions now that he knew what it could feel like. But he did.
In the weeks leading up to Emma-May’s due date, Fiddleford had been plagued by debilitating anxiety spirals. He’d seen and helped with enough births on the farm growing up to be familiar with a myriad of ways the process could go wrong. In a biology class he had taken at Backupsmore, they’d used fetal pigs for dissections because it was the closest to human fetuses. Those two elements combined and associated in his mind were enough to have him thrust every terrible way he’d seen a hog live birth go wrong upon his unborn child. Strangled by the umbilical cord or stuck in the birth canal. Granted, a lotta the dangers of farrowing weren’t particularly applicable to Emma-May’s situation; they didn’t have to worry about the runt not being taken to or the piglets accidentally gettin’ crushed by the sow. But it wasn’t just pigs that he’d seen birthed. Imprinted on his little mind forever had been the instance in which his sister Wyona had brought him with her to her friend Putnam Miller’s farm and they’d watched his father reach into a cow and push a breech calf back into birthing position. It was some horrifying stuff.
The thing he came back to again and again was stillbirth. There wasn’t any reason to think it was likely, no history of issues in either of their families that Fiddleford knew of, but he couldn’t stop picturing a pink fleshy body wrapped in a blanket, the way he’d try to rub some life back into the newborn creature, to get its little heart goin’ again, how quickly the warmth of the mother’s fluids encasing it would fade, leaving it cold and stiff and its skin taut with death. He’d see it clear as day in his head, playing on repeat for hours, and he’d beg his mind to release him, wind his hand into his hair and yank, as if he could pull the evil thoughts right out of his brain. By the time Tate was actually born, three days before the due date, Fiddleford looked ‘bout as tired and worn as Emma-May did, even though she was the one of them who’d been creating a human being inside of her body for nine months.
The hospital folks hadn’t let him be in the delivery room, so he sat in a wooden-backed waiting room chair for the eighteen hours of labor, dozing uncomfortably or occasionally pacing the hall. When they’d finally called him in, his legs were so stiff that they’d locked up, and he stumbled and fell to the ground, catching himself harshly on his palms.
Fiddleford walked into the recovery room, bruised and twitching from exhaustion, and there he was, swaddled in Emma-May’s arms. There he was. For a moment, all Fiddleford saw was fabric and pink flesh and he was frozen, his awful imaginings a premonition that had doomed his child. And then the tiny thing started to wail, high and shockingly loud and the most beautiful noise Fiddleford had ever heard. He rushed forward, kissed Emma-May on the forehead, and took his son into his arms. The infant’s little face was all red and scrunched with his screaming, and Fiddleford laughed, but it was a very watery, choked thing, relief and joy and terror all mixed up inside of him. This fragile bundle of bones and blood and beating heart pressed up against his chest was his son. It was his son, the baby he was holding was his son, he was this boy’s father, and he would be until the very last day he drew breath. What a blessing. What a burden.
As they left the hospital, just at dusk, the low, cool fog and cloud cover that had hung over Palo Alto all week broke open, and it started to rain.
Fiddleford had been in such a rut, banging his head against the same stupid wall with his computer project, that he’d been thrilled for the ring of the phone as a distraction. He had already been indulging in another distraction, picking out a melody on his banjo, which he normally preferred to save as a reward or a break when his work was going well. It felt too much like laziness when he played while his work was in a bad way. But he’d felt his hands starting to shake, and he figured it was better for his fingers to be pluckin’ at strings than pullin’ out his hair. He had answered the phone with his business, cause it was his shop line bein’ rung rather than the house number. And probably the very moment he heard the halting, low voice that responded, the moment he recognized Stanford’s gravely bass crackling over the phone line, he was done for.
Certainly he was done for the minute that voice started sayin’ things like there’s no one else who has the mechanical expertise for this project and it would be so wonderful to work together again like we used to back in school and I need you, Fiddleford.
He didn’t tell Emma-May until his ticket to Oregon was booked and paid for, because he was a coward, which of course he’d already known about himself. When he told her, he made sure it wasn’t asking, just tellin’ her what he was doing, his eyes flitting everywhere but her. He hated fighting with Emma-May, not in the least because he was terrible at it. He couldn’t yell, and his throat always closed up and he just hated confrontation so much that he found it much easier to simply not do things that would make them fight, to just do what Emma-May told him to. She yelled, certainly, and asked a million questions about the timeline and rationality of the decision and if he was getting a research sabbatical or quitting his job outright, none of which Fiddleford had an answer for, just insisted over and over that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and he had to take it.
He went into Tate’s room to tell him the news. Tate was sitting on the floor, meticulously lining up all of his toy cars by size. Fiddleford sat next to him on the shag carpet and placed a gentle hand on his mop of dark curls.
“Hey, buddy, can ya listen to me?” he asked his son quietly, feeling the head his hand was resting upon move beneath him in a nod. “Now, I’m gonna tell you about somethin’ important, and you don’t gotta talk at all, but I do need you to give me some sort of sign at the end that you understand what I’m telling ya.”
Tate had been a late talker, but not by much. He had said “mama” and “dada” and “tree” and “fish” and a few others by one and a half, so they’d known that he could speak. But he didn’t, much, and that hadn’t changed as he had grown. Emma-May had worried awfully, had talked to his preschool teachers and all of her book club friends and bought child-rearing books, trying to figure out why Tate didn’t talk. Fiddleford hadn’t been too bothered by it. He hadn’t remembered bein’ a very talkative child either, but that was mostly ‘cause nobody cared what he’d had to say, which he hoped wasn’t what Tate felt. He’d acquiesced when Emma-May had decided they would take Tate to a speech pathologist, which was the kinda thing that you’d never find in Hickory Springs, and if you had suggested one to anybody in that county, they would’ve told you it was liberal hokum, including Emma-May. The speech pathologist lady had told them that there was nothing preventing Tate from talking; no lisp or stutter, no difficulties forming certain sounds or using certain parts of the mouth, nothing physically stopping him. She had suggested that it was a psychological block, maybe selective mutism.
On the car ride home, from the back seat Tate has said, “I ain’t sele-tive mute. I jus’ don’t wanna talk a lot.”
Fiddleford had chuckled, “Well, I guess you are selectively mute, only that you’re the one doin’ the selecting.”
And that had been that. If his son didn’t want to speak, Fiddleford certainly wouldn’t make him. There were other ways of communicating, and plenty could be said in silence.
Fiddleford explained plainly that he would be leaving to go to work on an important science project, and while he was working on it, he wouldn’t live in the house with Tate and Momma, he would live somewhere else. He would talk to Tate on the phone and he would miss him very much and he would be thinking of him all the time. It would be hard for Tate, and he might miss him a lot, but Fiddleford wasn’t leaving forever, just for a little while, did that make sense?
Tate tapped the floor once with his hand. It was a method they tended to use a lot; once for yes, two for no.
“It’ll probably be about two months, and then I’ll be right back home with you,” Fiddleford told his son.
“How many sleeps is that?” the little boy asked, the first words he’d spoken since the conversation had begun, and Fiddleford felt his heart lurch painfully.
“It’s…it’s a lot of sleeps, sweetheart.” His voice was thin and tense. “Maybe too high for you to count. Too many to count on fingers.”
“I can count real high,” Tate insisted. “I’m smart.”
“I know you are, Tater, you are so very smart,” Fiddleford assured him. “It’s just that I dunno exactly how long it’ll be so I don’t want to give you a number that might not be true.”
Tate looked at him for a long moment, something in his eyes that Fiddleford didn’t quite know how to name. Confusion, maybe? Calculation? Then he turned back to his matchbox cars, waving to the door absentmindedly to signal that the conversation was over.
Fiddleford left for Gravity Falls a few days later. It was the early morning, the dark of night still clinging in the house’s corners and the crickets softly singing the blues. He moved as silently as he could from his bedroom, careful not to wake his wife beside him. He went into his son’s room and kissed the crown of his head, the boy sleeping and unaware. He picked up his suitcases and closed the front door as slowly as he could so that it wouldn’t creak. He left the house like a bandit, like a ghost.
Fiddleford Hadron McGucket wasn’t sure if he was a wicked man, or just a very, very weak one.
It was exactly as good as Fiddleford remembered. As easy, and reciprocal and thrilling and electric. Working with Stanford Pines was a head rush in a way that no other work could compare to, not even his passion project. Stanford’s energy and excitement about the interdimensional portal was palpable and contagious, and Fiddleford found himself waking up each day marveling at how he was doing work that would shape history. Being around Ford all the time was exactly as wonderful and painful as it had always been.
When Fiddleford had arrived on the doorstep of the rustic little cabin in the woods, the man who had opened the door had been overcome with delight at seeing him, uncharacteristically expressive in his affection and gratitude. Stanford had pulled Fiddleford into a sweeping hug that had made his breath catch and his heart do a little stutter-stop. He was as broad and barrel-chested as Fiddleford remembered, but fieldwork had clearly been doing some favors for his muscle definition. A five o’clock shadow adorned his face and his hair was long, curls unkempt and all in all he just looked so masculine and handsome it was almost unfair. Some things certainly hadn’t changed, every available flat surface was covered with papers and equations and all that was in the fridge was a half empty carton of eggs and milk a week expired, so clearly Fiddleford would be stocking the kitchen and doing the cooking. But Stanford was so happy to have him there; he had enthused about some of the anomalies he’d been studying and shown Fiddleford all around the cabin where they’d be living together for the project’s duration, and surprised Fiddleford that evening with a gift of banjo strings and microchips, a gesture so thoughtful that Fiddleford wondered if Stanford hadn’t experienced some Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type personality switch. It wasn’t that Stanford was unkind, but he wasn’t particularly considerate or observant of things or people outside of his very narrow spectrum of interest. Personalized gifts like that were very much not his style. But this new Ford was so invigorated by living in Gravity Falls, so ecstatic to share his new home and its wonders with Fiddleford. It was a joy to see him that way. And it was fascinating for Fiddleford too, obviously, as they were supposedly journeying to pillage a downed alien spacecraft.
He only wished it were a less strenuous hike.
Fiddleford’s hands were well accustomed to all kinds of knots from growing up on a farm, but watching Stanford set up the bear hang, which he called “the multibear hang”, he was surprised to see that the other man’s much thicker fingers were swiftly forming a taut-line hitch pretty enough to rival one of his own.
“That’s pretty good for a Jersey boy,” Fiddleford told him, nodding his head towards Stanford’s handiwork. “You were a Boy Scout?”
Stanford chuckled, that low, rumbling sound that sent tingles up Fiddleford’s spine exactly the same as it had since the first day they’d met. “No, our father wouldn’t pay the fee for it. But we would go camping with him sometimes, and he would stand over our shoulders and make us redo knots over and over until he was satisfied with them.”
That we bein’ referenced was surely the same we that haunted all of Stanford’s once-in-a-blue-moon childhood stories, his estranged twin brother, Stanley. Not for the first time, Fiddleford longed to ask about this ghostly other half of his best friend, if Stanford knew where he was now, what had happened between them, what it was like to miss a twin. But Stanford talking about even innocuous parts of his growing up was so rare that Fiddleford couldn’t bring himself to disturb it, like it was some fluttering bird that had come to perch on his finger and if he moved even an inch, off it would go.
“It was very hard to keep a steady hand with Pa glaring over you like that, but we still really loved camping. We kept a kosher kitchen because otherwise Ma’s parents wouldn’t eat at our house, but we got to eat bacon on camping trips, so it was the most exciting thing ever to us.”
Fiddleford shook his head in disbelief. “I know you lot are the Lord’s chosen, but I might ask Him to pick somebody else if he told me I couldn’t eat bacon.”
“I’d imagine it was your first food after you were weaned,” Stanford said with that glint in his eye and the turned up corner of his mouth that he always got when he was teasing Fiddleford about how he’d grown up.
“Not the very first, but it couldn’t have been long after,” Fiddleford replied goodnaturedly. “It's a fact of life on the farm. I used to git in trouble for crying when one of my favorite hogs was set to be kilt.”
“I can imagine that,” Stanford said quietly, pausing in his action to look over at Fiddleford for a moment. “You’re…sensitive.”
Fiddleford felt his whole face heat with a flush. It was certainly something he’d been told about himself before, but never the way that Stanford had just spoken it. It was usually meant a bad way, and the word tended to be a lot less kind than sensitive, tended to be somethin’ like pansy or sissy. But Stanford said it gentle, a bit bemused, but undeniably fond. It made him feel seen and cared for and maybe a little bit condescended to and all of those things combined into something warm and knee-weakening that he definitely didn't mind none.
They finished setting up camp in companionable silence. Fiddleford got a fire going and Stanford wrote in his journal. They laid beside each other on their backs, looking up at the stars clear and bright and vast above them. Stanford pointed out his favorite constellations, and Fiddleford described in detail the horrible, sexually violent, and fatal fates of each, because that was pretty much a requirement for gettin’ put up in the stars in Greek mythology.
“...So Hera turns Callisto into a bear, and then her son is about to kill her ‘cause he don’t know it’s her, and at the last second Zeus, whose overactive pecker and lack of respect for consent are the reasons for this whole mess, mind you, throws them both up into the sky as bear constellations, the biggun and the littlun.”
“That is a very disturbing story,” Stanford said, but he was laughing while he said it so he couldn’t be that upset. “A disturbing story rendered unintentionally hilarious by your delivery and unique vocabulary.”
Fiddleford glanced over at him, firelight reflecting off of his glasses and cradling his face as he gazed up at the cosmos. It was moments like this, close and dim and so separate from the rest of the world, that Fiddleford thought seriously about doing it. When the constant, underlying thrum of yearning that he carried with him every day built up so much he could hear it pulsing in his ears like a heartbeat. That’s when he was tempted. To reach over just a few inches and interlace his fingers with Stanford’s. To tell the brilliant man at his side, to say something like I hope you know that I entirely adore you. Most of the time Fiddleford was just fine to silently tend to the love in his chest, to offer it up to Stanford in little acts that he would never see for what they were, to simply be glad he got to be in his presence and let that be enough. But sometimes, times like this, he let himself imagine more, convinced himself that there was a possibility. It was dangerous. The longing was hunger. The hope was bein’ gutshot, all his inside stuff hanging out vulnerable for anyone to see.
He probed cautiously, brought the conversation to the future, asked Stanford if he would ever settle down and start a family. Ford’s response of actually laughing aloud at the suggestion brought him firmly back down to earth. It was something Fiddleford had already known, that Stanford didn’t think about these things, not just in regards to him, but to anyone, that it simply wasn’t how he was wired. It was better like that, probably; without the possibility there he would never succumb to temptation and act upon the sin. But the conversation had also confirmed something else Fiddleford had already suspected; that Stanford was glad to have him there. That he wanted Fiddleford to accompany him on the road he was traveling. It was just as before. Fiddleford would follow where Stanford led as long as he was allowed.
Fiddleford had been spinning out about the attack for three straight days by the time Stanford essentially told him to pull himself together and get back to work. He’d slept fitfully, constantly waking from nightmares of the same confused, violent images of what he’d seen in the creature’s eyes. He couldn’t do much during the day, either, every noise making him jump violently, so on edge his muscles were aching from being constantly tensed up. Any time he was alone for more than a few moments, he’d start to hear shuffling noises, swear he could see the poisonous yellow light of the monster’s gaze glowing in the corner of his peripheral vision.
He’d had similar episodes throughout his life, all the way back to childhood. Times he would be gripped with unrelenting terror of burning in hell, when he would hide in the barn and rock back and forth with his knees pulled up to his chest, reciting a psalm over and over until his voice was shot. Times at Backupsmore where he would redo the exact same equation for a project again and again, convinced he’d missed something somewhere, pulling at his hair, and Stanford would walk over to his desk and gently pry his fingers out of their vice-like grip. The whole thing with Tate’s birth. Bad thoughts that he would get so fixated on, self-perpetuating cycles of fear that he didn’t know how to escape. But nothing like this.
True, in this case his life had been legitimately in danger, for the first time ever. But it was over. It was over and he was safe and healed up, so why were his brain and body so darn convinced otherwise? Why was he still burning with phantom pain, why when he looked down at his forearm did he expect to see it pierced through with venomous quills? Why was he frozen with fear at the sound of the wind or the sight of the trees or any teeny fucking thing? This mortal terror that had gripped him since the attack was quite literally incapacitating him. He couldn’t work, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even solve his silly toy, he couldn’t do anything.
He was completely useless like this, and he could feel Stanford losing his patience with Fiddleford’s neuroses. That morning he had said something along the lines of “You’re really struggling to deal with this whole Gremloblin situation, huh?”, almost like some sort of realization, and Fiddleford was thrown by the similarities to an incident a few months prior.
Emma-May had gone out of town for a few days, a girls trip to Venice Beach, leaving Fiddleford with a daily task that hadn’t fallen to him before, brushing Tate’s riotous dark curls, the same ones that adorned his wife’s visage. But every time he tried, Tate would scream like he was bein’ tortured on the devil’s rack, so loud and desperate and genuine that Fiddleford couldn’t help but believe he was truly hurting his boy something terrible. Tate would wail and sob and sometimes beg for his father to stop, and Fiddleford didn’t know how anyone could expect a body to hear that and be able to carry on doing whatever was tormenting that child so badly. He’d given up after two tries, and when Emma-May had returned, Tater’s loose, chocolate locks were tangled and matted beyond saving, and to the little boy’s devastation, they’d had to buzz the whole thing down.
Emma-May had been furious, had spent a good long while berating him for succumbing to the emotional manipulation tactics of a four-year-old, for being unwilling to make Tate endure a little pain in the present to do what was best for the future, for not having a firm enough hand as a father and making her be the parent to enforce discipline and probably confusing their son about the proper roles for men and women. Fiddleford had done what he always did when he was getting chewed out by Emma-May; fixed his gaze on the space just above her left shoulder and twisted his hands together as he waited for it to be over.
“Lord’s sake, Fiddleford, you’re a grown man and you need your toddler’s approval so badly you caint make yourself comb his hair?”
Then she had said, as if it were some kinda revelation, “You’re a pushover and you’re a coward”, and he’d felt something cut through the numbness, the floating-outside-his-own-body part; he felt a flash of annoyance, something even building towards anger, because yes, of course he was. He had never pretended to be anything else. And that was the reason they were together, wasn’t it? Because Emma-May always knew what she wanted from Fiddleford and he put up no resistance. And now it was suddenly a problem? It was completely unfair for her to expect him to be an entirely different person out of nowhere. Didn't she know what she was getting into, who she was marrying? Were they operating under different pretenses? Different awarenesses of who and what he was?
With Stanford, this moment of clarity to the truth of Fiddleford’s cowardice was inspiring an entirely different reaction in him. He wanted to be the person that Ford had clearly mistaken him for, the person who was cool in the face of danger, who was steadfast and reliable, who could stare down yellow-eyed demon creatures and alien security pods without flinching. He wanted more than anything to be what Stanford needed him to be. But he wasn’t. He was sitting in the corner of his room with his back to the wall, his eyes locked on the door, waiting for anything that might come through, shaking violently like a small dog.
He thought of Emma-May’s book club friend, Gretchen, and her spastic little Jack Russle Terrier, Sparky, who trembled and barked in the car and around strangers and during storms, to the point where Gretchen had sedatives that she gave him for his constant anxiety. He imagined calling up Emma-May with a request, hey darlin’, for your next care package, could you pilfer some dog benzos from your book club friend for me? That would go over just wonderfully.
In fact, how was he supposed to go back to Palo Alto like this? To be around their couple friends?
I noticed you’ve got shell-shock, where in Vietnam were you stationed? What was your unit?
Oh, I wasn’t in the army, I was attacked by an unholy demonic nightmare creature that my employer slash research partner slash unrequited love named the Gremloblin.
Not viable. But it would happen if he kept up like this. Stanford was getting fed up with his little sick leave. He could hear it in his frustrated scoffs, in the cajoling tone he used when asking Fiddleford to try and sit still at the table a while, he could see it in the sidelong glances he shot at Fiddleford’s half-finished equations or unsolved Cubic’s Cube. It was the most unbearable feeling, watching someone you loved get sick of you as it was happening. To know that you were driving them away but not to be able to stop, for the thing that repulsed them from you to be fixed deep inside you unchangeable. An echo of the frantic terror that had gripped him with Rusty in the time leading up to the break between them. If he didn’t move past this, and soon, Stanford would send him running home, barefoot and trembling.
But just like the clinging, cloying, wanting thing that had corroded his childhood friendship, this churning, spiraling fear was innate to Fiddleford, and wasn’t something he knew how to cut out of himself. Benzodiazepines were a possibility, in terms of releasing a neurotransmitter that would lower stress response. But it would also slow brain activity, make him less sharp, trade one interference with his work for another. Plus, there were new studies about negative effects of long-term dependency. It was a temporary solution.
If he could prevent the cortisol release, that would solve the problem. He knew that his reactions were irrational and entirely chemical. He wished he could do what Ford apparently could and just will away his fear through determination and confidence in his intellect. Stanford spent the morning attempting to lead him through meditation exercises and breathing tricks that wouldn’t have been out of place with the spiritual gurus and hippies in some of the circles in California, but that he seemed to consider entirely cerebral.
“Mind over matter, Fiddleford,” he had said, his chest moving slowly and intentionally with his patterned breathing. “You control your body, not the other way around. We’re men of science, our brains can overcome base physical instinct and evolutionary fear response.”
Ford did seem so steady, so sure. In complete control of himself, even when the situation was out of his ability to control. But whatever it was about him, Fiddleford didn’t have it. The fortitude, the constitution, the strength of will. He would never be able to outthink his uncontrollable body, to mentally brute-force through the twisting labyrinth of fears and anxieties that inhabited his brain. So he would have to get creative, to use what he did have; a mind for machines. He wouldn’t need to suppress a cortisol release if that release wasn’t triggered in his brain. And it wouldn’t be triggered if the event that caused that release was removed, impeded. Erased.
Fiddleford pulled himself out of fetal position, sat at his desk, and started drawing his own downfall.