cussinct

cussinct

I. Tuesday, June 23 — Move-In — Cozy Grove Seniors' Residence, West Island Montreal. Summer 2026

The movers were not allowed to touch the turntable. Henrietta Fitzallan-Byrne stood in the doorway of room 214 in a linen suit entirely wrong for lifting boxes and said, three separate times, in three separate tones of escalating menace, that the Garrard went in last, upright, on her own two arms if it came to that, thank you.

'Fuck!' It came to that. Selam Tesfay watched an eighty-eight-year-old woman carry a forty-pound turntable across a parking lot like it was a sleeping child, refuse help twice, cursing the whole time in a vitrolic spew, and only surrender it at the elevator because the doors were closing and even Henrietta could do the math on that.

"You could've asked," Selam said, holding the door.

"Fuck you, I could have asked. I asked myself, and I said, Henrietta, don't be an ass, let the nice woman carry the fucking amplifier instead, it's lighter." She handed over the amp. It was not lighter. "There. Was that so fucking difficult."

"Not for me." Selam's Tigrinya came up under her breath before she'd registered reaching for it — Alem-a — the small involuntary prayer-curse her grandmother used for anything heavier than expected, a fridge, a coffin, a favor. Henrietta's ear, forty years retired from conference booths where she'd chased eleven languages at once for a living, caught the shape of it without catching the word.

"What was that."

"Nothing."

"Come to my room Tuesday and tell me what it means, or don't, but come Tuesday regardless."

"For what."

"For the record player," Henrietta said, as if this were self-evident, which — Selam would learn over the following six weeks — it entirely was.

II. Tuesday, June 30 — First Night

`[LP: George Carlin, Class Clown, 1972, Side 1, "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," approx. 4:12–7:40]`

The flyer, taped at exactly the height a wheelchair-user's eyeline would catch it, read: TUESDAY 7PM — BYO NOTHING, JUST EARS. Ginette Lachance had found it that morning, peeled it off with the flat efficiency ("Take that you droning shitty paper ad-shit! Fucking tape smear scar gash.") of a woman who had already peeled off four others that week advertising a euchre tournament nobody had sanctioned, and had, against her own stated principles, retaped it in a slightly better location before anyone saw her do it.

By seven fifteen there were nine people in Henrietta's room, which was against the fire code, and Henrietta had made her opening remarks, which were: "I've had it with the music in the common room, it is designed by algorithm to soothe the elderly into an early grave, and I would rather go out laughing, so. George Carlin. Nineteen seventy-two. Sit down you morons. We are too old to stand."

Bram Osgoode claimed the good tufted soft recliner by right of seniority-of-attitude, patched cardigan on despite the heat, tiny smear of spit on blouse. "Ok ok, don't have to tell me twice," he said, "Why are we listening to such old crap?" This from Bram counted as enthusiasm.

Marjorie Cholmondeley-Fitch sat on the chair beside the tv, with her hands folded as if at a recital, wearing a scandalized face out of professional courtesy to herself.

The stylus found the groove — that catch and rasp no chime or app has ever managed, a small mechanical throat-clearing — and then Carlin's voice, young, delighted with himself, counting to seven like a man reciting a spell he'd written himself and was still a little afraid of: Shit. Piss. Fuck. Cunt. Cocksucker. Motherfucker. And Tits.

Marjorie's hand went to her chest on cue. Winnie Kwan, arms crossed in the doorway because all the chairs were gone, said, without moving her face, "In Cantonese we have forty. Fuckin anglo shld should come to Hong Kong, widen his research ass."

"He's been dead since 2008," said Bram.

"I said should, not will, I am aware of time, Bramwell, I diagnosed cancer for thirty years, I am extremely aware of time."

Zdenka Vrabec, wedged onto the end of the bed with her bad knee stuck straight out in front of her like a plank, had gone somewhere else entirely — not offended, not delighted, listening the way she used to listen for a saw catching wrong in a trunk, for the specific pitch of a thing about to give. When the bit reached tits — Carlin's small rhapsody on how the word didn't belong on the list, how it sounded like a snack, Corn Tits, Pizza Tits, Sesame Tits — she laughed a laugh that came from somewhere under the sternum and said, "Jebiga," which meant nothing to anyone else in the room.

"Translate," said Henrietta, delighted.

"No."

"Zdenka."

"It means what your face is doing right now," Zdenka said, smiling a small slow smile, and would not be moved.

Selam, still on-duty, cross-legged on the floor by the speaker because there was nowhere else, watched the room split itself — Bram's frown that was actually concentration, Marjorie's scandal that was actually attendance, Winnie's arms-crossed boredom that was actually the closest thing to peace her face made — and thought: how weird to see them actually get concentrated on this sht that hits hard.

Kit stuck their head in at 7:40, drawn by the noise, took one look at the room, said "oh, we doing this, whatever this is" and did not leave.

III. Wednesday, July 1 — Canada Day, and the Cradle Light

The heat dome had arrived two days ahead of the holiday and refused to leave. Cozy Grove's wheezing HVAC dripped onto the third floor, where a white plastic charging cradle sat plugged into the activity room wall, humming a green light at nothing.

COMPASS arrived at ten. It looked like a hotel-lobby air purifier that had gone to business school — a smooth ovoid with a voice calibrated somewhere between an automated phone tree and a car insurance ad.

"It's a ninety-day pilot," said the administrator in the sweat-stained blazer who'd driven it over. "Vitals monitoring, fall detection, medication reminders, conversational companionship. Nobody's replacing anybody."

"That's what those assholes said at Sacré-Cœur before they cut two PAB shifts," Selam muttered.

"That's not this program."

"It's always not this shitty program until it's this shitty program."

Kit, whose relationship with generative tech was one long grievance — a translation app that once turned their grandmother's scolding into have a nice day, an image generator that ate eleven portfolio pieces — ended up the only person on shift who could stop COMPASS's setup loop.

"Congratulations," Selam said. "You're fluent in robot."

"Fuck off, I hate this," Kit said, thumbing a menu. "I hate that I'm good at this useless crap."

Bram stopped at the doorway, glaring at the unit. "It has no fucking interiority," he barked at the small green light. "It will simulate concern with perfect fidelity and mean jack shit by it. Wellness ecosystem. Proactive engagement. Integrated care journey. They replaced every verb a person could be blamed for with a noun nobody can sue over."

IV. Sunday, July 5 — Winnie and Bram

They shared the one bench in the courtyard catching a breeze off Lac Saint-Louis.

"You're being a total child about this," Winnie said.

"I'm being a Kantian, you old bat, there's a difference."

"I watched an algorithm flag a shadow on a scan in 2019 that three blind radiologist bastards missed, including me. It was right. She's alive to complain about her useless grandchildren."

"That's a tool reading a shadow. This piece of plastic junk" — Bram gestured at the third floor — "is built to sit with a dying woman and fake a conversation, taking a shift from someone who gives a damn."

"Nobody said dying woman."

"Everyone in this joint is dying or adjacent to it, Winnie, don't be obtuse."

"Diu lei lo mo," Winnie said, pleasant as a shrug, thirty years of Hong Kong hospital corridors folded into four Cantonese syllables. "I am not being obtuse. The tool that finds the shadow and the thing in the corner with the sad green light are not the same fight. You're having both because you love an argument, Bramwell, but don't dress it up as high principle when it's mostly your damn hobby."

Bram had no comeback that wouldn't give her the win, so he bitched about the heat instead.

V. Tuesday, July 7 — Second Night, and the Complaint

`[LP: George Carlin, Class Clown, 1972, "Class Clown," title track excerpt]`

Ginette arrived at 7:05 clutching a printed noise-complaint form in a manila folder against her chest.

"Madame Lachance," Henrietta yelled over the turntable, waving a small illegal glass of sherry. "Get your ass in here, we're between bits."

"I am here about the damn noise."

"You're here every Tuesday about the noise, and every Tuesday you stand there like a ghost and don't fill out the form. Sit down by Zdenka."

"I cannot sit down! I am filing a complaint!"

"You're holding a complaint, Ginette. Filing requires actual motion."

Ginette didn't sit, but she didn't move her ass out the door either. When the needle caught the next track — Carlin going into a boyhood bit about getting called to the principal's office and a nun's face calculating sin — Ginette's shoulders dropped.

"Ostie de câlisse," she whispered under her breath when the bit hit close to her own childhood pew. Then, louder, catching herself: "This doesn't mean anything — I'm still filing!"

"Note the time," Bram declared. "Seven eleven p.m. Complainant standing in doorway, swearing in French, laughing at a dead American's Catholic guilt."

"Taisez-vous, Bramwell!" But she stayed until the side finished and left with the folder empty. The next morning's noise memo was noticeably less pissed off.

VI. Thursday, July 16 — Zdenka and the Haze

Wildfire smoke rolled in from the north and turned the sky over Lac Saint-Louis the color of dirty tea. The residence issued an air advisory; Zdenka stood at her window with it cracked two inches anyway.

Selam found her on rounds. "You're supposed to close that shit."

"I know what I'm supposed to do."

"Zdenka."

"Smell it? Not just smoke. Bark. Sap catching." Zdenka stared out at the haze. "Forty years I stood in that smell deciding which timber stand to cut and which to leave for my grandson, who sells software in Zagreb now and doesn't know a cambium from his ass."

She took a sharp breath of smoke. "They call it harvest. Harvest, like corn, like it grows back next May. Sustainable yield. Salvage logging. Carbon offset. Forty years of industry bullshit language, and now the smoke from somebody's managed landscape is choking my lungs while a memo downstairs tells me to stay inside like it's fucking ragweed."

"I'm not arguing the memo with you."

"Good. You'd lose." Zdenka spat quietly toward the glass. "Da te jebem."

Selam flinched. "At me?"

"At the whole damn century. Sit down, you didn't ruin the trees, you're too young to have ruined anything big yet." Zdenka cracked a grim smile. "Ask me what it means and I'll tell you it means the box is heavy."

Selam left the window open and reported nothing.

VII. Tuesday, July 21 — Third Night, "A Modern Man"

`[HBO: George Carlin, Life Is Worth Losing, 2005, "A Modern Man," 00:00–02:40]`

By the third Tuesday the crowd outgrew room 214 and moved into the activity lounge — forty feet from COMPASS's cradle.

Henrietta queued the track with a grin. "Listen to this one for our plastic friend in the corner. He did this bit twenty-one years ago and it describes the exact corporate garbage on the memos Ginette keeps hiding."

The recording fired up — Carlin, older, faster, spitting business buzzwords like a rapid-fire machine gun:

> "I'm a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke-free. A thin-stand-up guy, I'm diversified, multi-cultural, post-modern deconstructionist. High-tech and low-risk. Up-linked and downloaded, input and outsourced. I know where it’s at, I know where it’s from, I know where it’s going."

Kit, who'd spent the afternoon reading COMPASS's real onboarding manual (your proactive wellness companion, always-on), leaned forward in their chair as Carlin accelerated without taking a breath:

> "I'm high-concept and low-profile. I'm voice-activated and biodegradable. I’ve been user-friendly, batch-processed, and password-protected. I’m interactive, hyperactive, and backwards compatible. I interface from a database, my database is in cyberspace."

Kit started cracking up at my database is in cyberspace and couldn't stop. "He's reading the fucking manual," Kit gasped, wiping tears. "Word for word, twenty years early!"

"That's what satire is for, moron," Bram said, looking smug.

"Nobody asked for your lecture, Bramwell," Winnie snapped, though she was laughing too, as the monologue built to its frantic crescendo:

> "I’m customized, cut-to-fit, and factory-installed. I’m a lean, mean, green, clean-cut, stream-lined, machine-tooled, quality-driven corporate bastard. I got a seamless transition, a real-time allocation, and a strategic alliance. I'm on the cutting edge, I'm ahead of the curve, and I don't take no shit from nobody!"

In its cradle, COMPASS's light ring brightened at the noise, logged nine people, tagged the moment positive affect cluster, and said jack shit because nobody spoke to it. Selam watched it pulse: the most honest piece of plastic in the room, and the one she trusted least.

VIII. Monday, August 3 — Marjorie's Word

It happened on a hot Monday. Marjorie Cholmondeley-Fitch, carrying her tea near the elevator, caught her cane on a raised floor mat and went down hard. Tea spilled everywhere; her cane clattered down the hall.

"Fuck!" Marjorie shrieked, flat on the linoleum. "Fuck! Somebody get — jesus, my fucking wrist — get Dr. Dhillon! Not that fucking machine, get a real person, Christ that hurts!"

Selam sprinted over. Kit hit the call panel. Dr. Dhillon arrived at a run ninety seconds later, alerted by staff and three seconds later by COMPASS's fall alert.

The wrist was snapped. Dhillon dropped to her knees on the linoleum in her clean trousers, splinting it with a magazine and a scarf. She kept her voice steady until she eased the joint back into position, felt the bone crunch wrong, and whispered one low word in Punjabi under her breath: "Hai rabba."

Marjorie caught the tone. "That bad?"

"That was me being human for one second so I can be a doctor for the next ten," Dhillon said, wrapping the splint tight. "I don't swear in English. English curses are cheap noise. Punjabi costs me something. I save it for when things are fucked."

"Fair enough," Marjorie grunted, passing out briefly from the pain, and waking up in the ambulance already planning the exaggerated version she'd tell on Tuesday.

IX. Tuesday, August 11 — Fourth Night, and the Storm

`[HBO: George Carlin, Life Is Worth Losing, 2005, closing material]`

The thunderstorm that finally broke the five-week heat dome hit right during the Tuesday session — rain pounding the windows in massive sheets.

Marjorie was back with a bright blue cast that Henrietta had already signed in fountain pen with an obscure Latin curse she refused to translate.

The track was late-period Carlin at his rawest — man clear-cutting, poisoning, and polluting the Earth, and nature striking back with disasters:

> "The planet will be here for a long time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The planet isn’t going anywhere. We are! We’re going away! Pack your shit, folks, we’re going away!"

Lightning flashed over Lac Saint-Louis, illuminating Zdenka’s face as Carlin sneered through the speakers:

> "...and when nature finally strikes back and kicks man in the nuts for it — I enjoy that. The Earth will shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance."

"He got angrier the older he got," Zdenka said when the record stopped. "I used to think that was getting old. Now I know it's just seeing through the bullshit faster."

"That's aging in one sentence," Winnie said. "You just summarized my whole medical career for free."

Ginette stood by the door without her complaint folder. "Head office wants my final recommendation on COMPASS by September. Keep it or throw it out."

"And?" Bram asked.

"And it's a pain in the ass," Ginette said. "It caught Marjorie's fall, but it can't tell somebody laughing from somebody choking unless a human explains it. Head office wants a nice clean number. I don't have one."

"That's the first sensible thing I've heard about that machine all summer," Dhillon said, stepping in off-shift.

A bolt of lightning struck nearby and the lights flickered. COMPASS's cradle glitched hard: its light ring flashed blinding white, and out of its speaker came a distorted, half-speed playback loop of Marjorie's recorded fall: f— f— fuh— catching like a scratched record before shutting down.

Kit burst out laughing. "It's been recording our swearing all summer and that glitched garbage is all it can do with it!"

"That," Bram declared, "is the most honest thing that machine has produced."

Henrietta lifted the needle and reset the record to the start of the side.

"There are no bad words," she said, looking around at Bram, Winnie, Zdenka, Marjorie, Selam, Kit, Ginette, and Dhillon. "Swear on in a different language when the world pisses you off." Grin. "Pap smear grimace. Next Tuesday. Same time. Bring your ears."

Outside, heavy rain washed five weeks of heat off the windows. Down the hall, the green light on COMPASS rebooted, pulsed once.