aFireFist
Cameos in The Big Bang Theory
Chapter 10 - Part 3
Raj set down his crust. "So what's the new version."
Sheldon adjusted his glasses. "We did not leave him in a motel. We brought him here."
Leonard stared at him. "No. Absolutely not."
"It is the only remaining consistent endpoint. A man in his condition can be persuaded to change location. He cannot be persuaded to resume institutional treatment after one conversation in Long Beach. Therefore he is here."
Howard laughed once. "You want to invent a body now."
"I want the story to survive contact with Penny in the morning."
Leonard stood up. "There is no cousin. There is no motel. There is no decay. You cannot put a fictional person in my kitchen."
Sheldon looked at him as if the objection were a rounding error. "I can put a person in the kitchen who will answer to the name. I have already contacted a candidate."
The room went quiet in a different way.
Leonard's voice dropped. "You what."
"Toby Loobenfeld. Research assistant. Particle physics group. Double major, physics and theater, MIT. He responded to my message at seven-fourteen. He will arrive in the morning. He will eat breakfast in this apartment and answer to Eustace. Penny will meet him. The narrative will acquire a physical referent."
Howard sat forward. "You hired a guy."
"I requested assistance from a colleague with relevant secondary training."
Raj looked between them. "He's coming here. To live. As your cousin."
"Temporarily," Sheldon said. "Long enough to complete the arc."
Leonard walked to the kitchen, came back, and sat down again because there was nowhere else to put the anger. "You keep adding rooms to a house that should not exist."
"I am preventing collapse."
"You're building a play in my living room so we don't have to watch hers."
Sheldon did not deny it.
They argued until the pizza boxes were stacked and Howard started putting on his jacket. Raj followed. At the door Howard looked back.
"If a stranger is eating cereal in here tomorrow, I'm taking a picture," he said. "For the group chat. And for evidence."
"Good night, Howard," Sheldon said.
After they left, Leonard stood in the middle of the room and listened to the building. Still no sound from across the hall. Penny's show would be ending soon. Or it had ended. He did not know which was worse.
"I'm going to bed," he said. "If you wake me up at two again I'm changing the locks."
"I will not wake you at two," Sheldon said. "The remaining work is logistical."
Leonard slept badly anyway.
Sunday morning started with the smell of coffee that was not theirs and the sound of a spoon against a bowl.
Leonard came out in yesterday's shirt, hair flattened on one side, and stopped in the kitchen doorway.
A man sat at the table eating cereal like he paid rent. Late twenties. Lean through the shoulders. Dark hair that looked like it had been slept on and then decided not to care. He wore a faded T-shirt and jeans. His bare feet were hooked on the rung of the chair. He looked up, chewed, and lifted the spoon in a small greeting.
"Morning. You must be Leonard."
Leonard did not move. "Who are you."
"Eustace," the man said. Then he shrugged, almost apologetic. "Or Toby, if we're off-script. Sheldon said stay on-script unless we're alone. I figured the cereal made us alone."
Sheldon appeared from the hallway already dressed, already precise. "You are not off-script. You are Eustace Loobenfeld. You will remain Eustace until Penny has accepted the current endpoint of the story."
Toby—Eustace—ate another spoonful. "Got it. Fatigue. Poor impulse control. Lucid stretches. Middle child. Left treatment in February. Did not go back last night. Now I live on your couch until the narrative says otherwise." He glanced at Leonard. "He's fun at parties, huh."
Leonard looked at Sheldon. "Get him out."
"Penny will be here this morning," Sheldon said. "If he is not here, the story fails. If he is here, the story holds."
"The story should fail. The story is a lie."
Eustace pointed at the cereal box with his spoon. "For what it's worth, I told him this was a lot. He offered me two weeks of covering my shift analysis and a written recommendation that makes me sound like I understand people. I don't, but I can pretend for a morning."
Leonard rubbed his face. "You're a research assistant."
"And I did Company in a black box in Cambridge that seated forty. So. Range." Eustace smiled a little. "I'll keep it small. No big speeches. Sheldon already hates the speeches I wanted."
"You will follow the profile," Sheldon said.
"I'll follow the profile until the profile is boring," Eustace said. "Boring is how people get caught."
Leonard poured coffee and did not sit. "If she asks medical questions—"
"I get foggy," Eustace said. "I change the subject. I look at her like I'm trying to be better than I am. That part's not hard."
Sheldon's mouth tightened. "Do not improvise etiology."
"I won't invent a priest unless I have to."
"You will not invent a priest at all."
Leonard almost laughed. It came out as air. "I cannot believe this is my kitchen."
The knock came before anyone had a better plan.
Penny did not wait long. She never did. She walked in with a bakery bag and the leftover brightness of a night that had gone better than she had expected, or at least better than she was willing to call a disaster out loud. Her hair was down. She had on a soft shirt that hugged her tits and sat short enough at the hem to show a strip of stomach when she lifted the bag onto the counter. The jeans were tight through her thighs and ass. She looked tired in a good way.
"I brought extra in case you guys didn't eat after Long Beach," she said. Then she saw the third man at the table and stopped.
Eustace stood up. Not fast. Not theatrical. Just a man getting out of a chair.
"You must be Penny."
Penny looked at Leonard, then at Sheldon, then back at him. "You're Eustace."
"That's the name they're using, yeah." He held out a hand. She took it. His grip was warm and brief. "Sorry I'm in your morning. They talked me into the couch instead of the motel. I think that's supposed to count as progress."
Penny's face changed. The performance energy dropped out of it. What replaced it was simpler. "Hey. I'm glad you're here instead of there. Long Beach motels are depressing even when nobody's falling apart."
"They are," Eustace said. "The wallpaper alone could put you back in treatment."
Sheldon inhaled to correct the unauthorized detail. Leonard stepped on his foot under the table's line of sight and missed, but the look did the same job. Sheldon closed his mouth.
Penny set the bag down and leaned her hip against the counter. The jeans pulled across her ass when she shifted. "How do you feel."
Eustace considered the question like it deserved an actual answer. "Like I slept in a room that isn't mine and I haven't decided if that's better. The cereal helps. Your neighbors are intense."
"You get used to it," Penny said. "Or you don't, and you live across the hall anyway." She glanced at Leonard. "Intervention go as bad as he looks."
"It went like those things go," Eustace said before Leonard could invent a timeline. "Lots of sentences that start with 'we just want.' I didn't get in a car back to a facility. I got in a car here. That's the version that happened."
Penny nodded. "Okay. That's honest, at least."
Leonard felt the sentence land in his stomach.
Sheldon folded his hands. "The failure to re-enter treatment is consistent with the expected response pattern."
Penny looked at him. "Maybe don't say it like that in front of him."
"It is an accurate description."
"It's a cold description." She turned back to Eustace. "You want real food or are you committed to the cereal."
"I could eat real food."
"Good. Because I bought too much and if I take it home I'll eat all of it standing up." She started pulling pastries out of the bag. The shirt lifted with her arms. The underside of her tits moved under the fabric. Eustace noticed. He did not make a show of noticing. Leonard noticed him noticing and hated that he noticed that too.
They ended up around the table because there was no clean way to avoid it. Penny asked ordinary questions and Eustace answered most of them like a person instead of a file. He let some questions die. He rubbed the back of his neck when the medical ones came close. He smiled when she talked about the workshop, then asked what it felt like to be on a stage with lights on her and a song she was still fighting.
"Terrifying," Penny said. "And then the terrifying part gets boring and you just try not to trip."
"Did you trip."
"Almost. The guy playing Roger stepped on my line and I stepped on his foot. Mutual destruction." She laughed, then pointed at Leonard. "You missed it. You're watching the tape. I'm not asking."
Leonard opened his mouth. "Penny—"
"Nope. You missed my show to drag a grown man out of a motel. The least you can do is sit on my couch later and suffer through the camera-phone version."
Eustace looked at Leonard over the rim of his mug. There was no mockery in it. There was something worse. Understanding.
"That's fair," Eustace said.
Sheldon attempted to steer. "The tape is optional."
"The tape is happening," Penny said.
They ate. The conversation moved. Sheldon tried twice to lock Eustace back onto the prepared symptoms. Eustace let him have one of them and ignored the other. Penny watched that exchange the way she watched arguments she was not going to enter until she had to.
When she stood to leave, she touched Eustace's shoulder. Brief. Friendly. The kind of contact she handed out without thinking.
"If you need air that isn't this apartment, knock across the hall," she said. "I have a couch that doesn't come with a lecture."
"I might," Eustace said.
She looked at Leonard. "Tape. Tonight. Don't make me drag you."
"I'll come over."
"Good."
She left. The door clicked. The bakery smell stayed.
Leonard turned on both of them.
"You," he said to Eustace, "are not going across the hall."
Eustace raised his hands. "I knocked on this door because he asked me to. I'm not hunting a second apartment."
"And you," Leonard said to Sheldon, "hired a person. A person Penny just invited into her living room."
Sheldon picked up the notebook. "The story held. She did not ask for a symposium schedule. She did not ask why the departmental calendar is empty. She accepted the physical presence of Eustace as proof of the intervention's outcome. That is success."
"That is a man eating my cereal."
Eustace stood and carried his bowl to the sink. He rinsed it. He set it in the rack. The ordinary competence of it made the whole arrangement feel worse.
"I'll stay out of the way," he said. "If she comes back, I'll be the tired cousin on the couch. If she doesn't, I'll leave when Sheldon says the arc is over. I'm not trying to make this your whole week."
Leonard looked at him and saw why Penny had bought it. He was not slick. He was not performing sadness. He looked like someone who had slept in his clothes and was trying to be fine in a kitchen that was not his.
"Don't get comfortable," Leonard said.
"Too late," Eustace said. "The cereal was pretty good."
Sheldon made a note. Leonard did not ask what it said.
Across the hall, Penny turned on music. Not Rent. Something lower. The wall carried it just enough to prove she was home.
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