The Roost Monologue

"Come read the rest of this, honey." His mother had joined him on the porch. "It's a trip." The torture chair looked normal in the hours before tea.

M adame poured a second cup of tea for herself, and offered to do the same for the visiting luminary.

"'Prish," he said.

Ledger already felt, perhaps irrationally, that this supposed genius, this self-conscious fop with his twinky airs, sorority girl locutions, and waggish opinions on topics he couldn't possibly know exhaustively, though he pretended to, was somehow his long-lost nemesis, come home to sabotage the roost. The ditzy abbreviations, some of which couldn't be parsed--"Splend!"; "Dand!"; "Mag!"; "Spec!"--offered an altogether noxious impression, just as Ledger predicted (no oracular

How peculiar! I hope you found the place okay. I've never tried Uber; is it worth it? Don't be nervous. I feel like you're not the type who gets nervous. You have an actor's aura. I noticed it from the moment you strutted down my driveway. I thought, 'Here's confidence.' Right this way. Ignore the mess. We'll be conversing on the porch. We have tea. Do you drink tea? I suppose we could brew a pot of coffee. I don't drink it myself because it wrecks my attention. Ledger drinks it when he's on one of his productive sprees. Ledger's a writer. He's my son; did I say that? I might have. Oh, well. Old brain. You can probably tell that this old brain doesn't need coffee. In here. That's Ledger. There's your seat." She gestured toward the torture

Pathetic was the word Ledger thought. Pathetic and rude. But he couldn't deny that it was a hairpin reticence, perhaps a studied one, especially after the show of gaiety that stormed the driveway only moments ago, and of course there was the additional fact that Ledger didn't know the guy at all, was only now aligning the person with the prose. Still, he wondered if perhaps Jessup were rallying, if the exertions on the driveway had been carefully saved-up for and had fairly drained him so that now he needed a moment to read the room and adjust himself proportionally. Ledger studied the rather ordinary face--was it handsome?--and the dark hair which, head-on, stylishly fanned out below the ears but, to the side, looked unkempt and feathery, like a mullet, and he tried to optically peel back the scalp to see the brain beneath, to ascertain whether those words, the impish ones in the prose and the amputated ones in the speech, roiled together and awaited discriminating conscription or segregated themselves into different registers