Loudermilk maintains that this is totally normal. That’s the Loudermilk line and Loudermilk, since he is Loudermilk, will not be dissuaded. Loudermilk says that it’s probably a phase. He says that there is nothing so remarkable about Harry’s voice anyhow, once you get used to it. It’s a bit unique is all, a little in between and out of bounds of normal registers.

But the thing Loudermilk does not realize, the finer detail that is somehow constantly lost on him, is that when Harry speaks what comes out of his mouth sounds nothing like what he hears in his own head. So the voice is ugly and sometimes shrill and sometimes bass and otherwise ludicrous and very incongruous and unpleasant, but the major thing about it is that it is not even his. And this makes all the difference.

The need to communicate on some rudimentary level necessitates a friendship of the kind he shares with Loudermilk. Things have been a lot easier, since.

However, why or how Loudermilk manages to comprehend as much of Harry’s condition as he does remains something of an enigma. Loudermilk’s decisions about when and where to exercise his limited capacity for empathy are cipher-like at best and often resemble the whims of an oversexed, nihilist god.

Loudermilk’s own freedom is remarkable. It’s brilliant, irresistible. Proprieties, doubts, fears, and so forth are simply not part of his makeup. If Loudermilk is constrained by anything, it’s by the lack of any sense of limit on his agency. Loudermilk believes that he is capable of anything and that, pursuantly, anything he is capable of is pretty much permitted.

Given his looks plus blinding self-regard, Loudermilk has to actively choose and/or struggle not to glide along the path of least resistance. As a person with a surfeit of emancipation, he has no fear of being labeled lazy and will only consent to make any kind of effort at all if he can be sure that the whole endeavor will take the form of an enormous obscene joke cum high school science experiment.

“Hello?” Loudermilk is demanding.

Harry stares at Loudermilk, taking in for a moment his friend’s inhumanly symmetrical features, shaded by the hot-pink novelty trucker hat.

“Dude, can you please not go in your weird hidey-hole? Remember what I just told our adolescent friend: You, Harry, are studying something no one else can understand and you’re the fucking boss of that. If anyone wants to have a problem with you or anything associated with you, they can take that up with yours truly, which, trust me, nobody in this weak scene is going to have the cojones to even think about. And pardon my asking so soon but, riddle me this, has everything not totally worked out thus far?”

Harry lets Loudermilk know that he plans to reevaluate their lifestyle come winter but for now, sure, living in a two-bedroom shit house seems fine.