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10.03.2017
005 Down the hall
Summary: Anna is having trouble sleeping.
TRANSCRIPT
Walter lay on the twin bed in his new room at the end of the hall, watching the ceiling fan wobble back and forth. For all his knowledge of scientific facts and figures and his impressive engineering degrees, he could not seem to grasp the basics of household repairs. So, he let the ceiling fan tick on and on, the two pull chains swinging wildly back and forth with every rotation, in a kind of Earth/Venus solar tango.
This is a useful hypnosis charm, he thought, as he followed the pull knobs with his eyes. He focused hard, measuring his breaths and his oxygen exchange rate, until his pulse slowed to 55 beats per minute. He could turn the fan off, he thought. He could buy a noise machine instead. Walter was good with solutions. A timid knock. Walter bolted from his bed and rushed to open the door.
Little Anna stood there in the dark clutching her hedgehog, Bumpkin."I can't sleep," she said, staring down at her toes. "Do you want some hot chocolate," he asked, "a peanut butter sandwich?" Anna looked up at him, eyes filled with tears.
10.03.2017
006 chrissy m.
Summary: Walter understood about lonely.
TRANSCRIPT
Walter preferred binary rejection. Something concrete that he could measure. Because in his mind, a woman was either there or she wasn't, after all, and the varying and unpredictable styles of retreat left him puzzled. It was as if women were in sync with the technological age, becoming more and more efficient with the art of the exit.
Their maneuvers were stealth, leaving him always in a fog of bewilderment, like the feeling one gets when losing five dollars. Which is a very specific feeling. It's enough of a loss to notice, but not enough of one to cause alarm.
And of course, no matter how deftly these women drifted out of his life, it did not go unnoticed. And there was nothing--nothing--that Walter did not notice.
In recent years, he began taking what he knew were elaborate precautions to safeguard his own heart. He chose instead, as an example, to enjoy from a safe distance, the ineffable sound of Chrissy M's. laughter. A sensation that he had decided felt like champagne, or like delicate finger taps on a leather drum. It filled the air with sparkly things, causing him to close his eyes and smile as if bathing in the new sunlight of spring.
It was positively heartbreaking the way he avoided her, busily distracting himself with his receipt while passing by Express Lane 3, so as not to appear rude, but simply preoccupied with his financial affairs.
He could feel her eyes upon him. And sometimes she would call his name and this would send his heart racing. He exhaled sharply and left the syllables behind him as he pushed his cart through the sliding glass door.
Nothing to be done, Walter thought. Nothing to be done.
Walter leaned down and pulled her into his arms. And for the first time in all the months she'd been living with him, she did not resist. She wrapped her arms around his neck and sobbed her aching heart out. Now they were both crying, rocking back and forth. They sunk to the floor in a heap, the three of them... Anna, Walter, Bumpkin... and emptied out all of the tears. "Guess how much I love you," Walter asked. And, as was their ritual, the moment Anna opened her mouth to answer, her father shot back, "Nope! More than that!" Anna laughed. And their little game went on for a while.
And then there was quiet. And then, the ticking of the ceiling fan lulled them off to dreamland, right there in the hallway. And that is where they slept. Soundly. For 5 whole hours.
Walter understood about lonely. It was a constant, more reliable than anything else in his life, and as a matter of precaution, he managed elaborate risk assessments in his head, which allowed him to head off potentially dangerous social interactions before they became problematic.
He knew for example, that the attractive cashier ("Chrissy M.," as her name tag suggested) who had once laughed at something he said--some unintentional joke--asked his name, and then wanted to know what he did for a living, was on duty at the nearby Safeway fairly reliably every Thursday at 4 pm. The prospect of further entanglement with Chrissy M. made him so nervous that he began taking deep calming breaths before entering the store and then he made a point of always standing in a different lane with his 9-12 items.
This helped to avoid Express Lane 3 most days, but there was little he could do to predict the days that Chrissy M. might catch him standing in the longer line and direct him to her lane instead. He even took great pains to add 5-8 items, putting him well above the margin of allowance for express service, but on at least one occasion, Chrissy M. had instead ushered him through her lane with a wink and a nod, despite his protestations.
Her personal attention to him... her sweet, endearing ways, this was not something Walter would ever get used to--would ever 'allow' himself to get used to. And it was a private thing never shared with anyone, a shame so deep, he could barely think on it much himself, but he knew that the reason had to do with self-preservation. No woman who had ever sought out his affection had stuck around for more than a month or two. She would find some reason to put him in the friend zone or quietly drift from his life in order to avoid hurt feelings.
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10.03.2017
002 the wave
Summary: Walter understood about lonely.
TRANSCRIPT
Walter stood at the window of his unfurnished living room and watched his daughter saunter off toward the grouping on the corner. Each day he kept count. Would she turn and wave this time? It depended on her mood, he had deduced. Except that sometimes between the time she bounded down the stairs and reached her crowd of adoring fans on the corner, her mood would somehow miraculously lift.
He chose to accept this as a random occurrence vs. growing indifference and was determined to not take it personally. Because after 6 months of her now living with him full-time and him worrying sick (when he never had to worry sick before), he knew that she knew that it comforted him when she made a point to look back over her shoulder. She knew he would be standing there because he was always standing there and no matter the importance of other things or distractions that might threaten this ritual, until the bus rolled out of site, he would still be standing there because he never wanted her to make the point of looking back only to see him not standing there.
It was a strange paradox and the logic tripped him up at times. In order to see her disappointment, he’d have to be standing there to witness it. And if he was standing there to witness it, then the disappointment of him not being there would be a non-issue.
And so it was his overly active imagination about things involving the breaking points of a 7-year-old girl that kept him awake at night.
The thing he knew for sure, was that if one of them were to have a broken heart, it should be him, because -- and not to insult her experience level, definitely not -- when it came to broken hearts, he’d simply had way more practice at it. So, he had decided that it didn’t even matter if she smiled or stared plainly at him from the corner or even from the bus window: so long as there was ‘something,’ it would be enough.
And if, by some measure of good fortune, she were to also wave at him in the process, he would sail all the way through lunch (this last calculation was one that he intentionally kept to himself).
In fact…when he really sat and thought about it… it was remarkable how little he would settle for. These days.
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09.17.2017
003 the room
Summary: Walter makes a new room for Anna.
TRANSCRIPT
When little Anna had lived with Walter for about a month, he decided to surprise her after school one day. He watched her board the school bus and then he got busy moving her things into the master bedroom.
He transferred his things into the spare room down the hall. It was right to give her this space, he thought, with the enormous windows and the private bath. He wanted her to feel at home here. He wanted her to feel special. And he didn't mind the small room anyway. It was easier to think in there.
He carefully arranged her stuffed animals along the hope chest and hung her clothes in the enormous walk-in closet. This made him happy. It made him sad too, to think he'd missed so much of her life. He remembered mountains and mountains of tiny white things in the days before Anna's arrival. Diapers and onesies, paper thin nightgowns and marshmallow rows of cotton socks. Her clothes now, he thought -- now that she was old enough to have some opinions on the matter -- seemed like an act of defiance.
He carefully matched each garment with the appropriate hanger. Boldly patterned sundresses, a purple trench coat, zebra printed leggings, red overalls, green velvet pants, and a bright yellow slicker. With every item being its own unique size and length, he could find no logical way of sorting them -- a discovery that vexed him to no end -- and so he decided to go with the only rational solution. He arranged them by hue. This seemed right. And for a moment, her things were hanging up right beside his own, which, curatorially speaking, ran the entire spectrum...a staggeringly comprehensive and formidably inert study... of the color brown.
The juxtaposition of his clothes against hers summed up his entire world, he thought, most notably as it pertained to women. His standing objective, after all, was of course to attain the slightest thread count known to man in the most highly forgettable tint. The combined strength of such an assemblage, at least in nearly all of his preliminary tests, rendered him utterly invisible to most women, asshole children, and door to door canvassers.
When Anna arrived home, he showed her to her new room.
"You did this?"
Walter replied with a smile. She looked all around and then up at her father.
"Leave my stuff alone!"
She slammed the door in his face. Walter stumbled backward. His shoulders slumped. He could hear items being thrown about and the sound of her crying.
There was nothing, he decided, nothing he could do to win with her.
He walked to the kitchen and filled a mason jar with whiskey.
Out on the porch, he could breathe. He opened his journal, the one he bought when she arrived. It was meant to help him remember the important things. And it felt good for a while, the notion that for the first time in his life, he actually had something worth writing about. But the pages had somehow filled with all of the ways he had failed her. And these were not words he needed to read twice.
He felt himself in that state of numbness... when the life is mostly drained out and in its place are fragments and torn off pieces of answerless questions, compressed into every crack and pocket of his body. "This is how I will die," he thought. "I will never be happier than I am in this moment." He stabbed at the journal with his pen until the sheets came loose.
The shot of whiskey felt alive like fire in his throat. He took the pages over to the grill, put a torch to them, and sent them off into the night.
09.28.2017
004 liquitex
Summary: Walter paints his trash can.
TRANSCRIPT
It occurred to Walter, that if he would simply write his house number on the side of his trash can -- along with a few choice expletives -- it would render the can far less desirable to poachers. And it was this thinking that had him standing outside in his bathrobe at 2 AM with a can of orange Liquitex.
"Five. Two. Seven. Maple." He counted aloud as he sprayed the uneven coats on the fresh new surface, the "seven" looking 10 times angrier than the "five." He had not guessed just how gratifying this angry painting would feel. He smiled, flipping the can with his slipper and painting the numbers again, this time calling down the street to whatever opportunist might be lurking in the bushes.
"Five. Two. SEVEN. MAPLE. Is this my trash can? IS THIS MY TRASH CAN?! If you steal my can, YOU'RE A DICK!"
His 7-year-old daughter stared down at him from the 2nd story window. She smacked at the glass, but Walter did not hear. He pressed on, his left slipper, now dusted orange from the overflow spray, flipping the can again, exposing side one, which was now badly smeared into something like an 80s nightmare font, and side two, its bloody rivulets dribbling down into the freshly cut Bermuda grass. Walter took half a step back to center himself, and then opened fire with a verbal scourge so loud it could be enjoyed from three blocks over:
"I'M A DICK!"
The declarative fit perfectly on side three, enclosed in a conjured rectangle of orange marching ants, or fire maybe, YES, FIRE ANTS – jumping robotic FIRE ANTS – waiting for some asshole to fuck with him now:
“Fire ants! ROBOTIC FIRE ANTS! You hear me, you little SHITS, you little shit stealing dick people!”
Walter lost his breath and stumbled back from the can. Now there was a great deal of moisture falling from his face. His orange paint-covered fingers reached up to touch the side of his cheek. He muttered softly as he slumped into the grass...
“Little shits.”
​
Walter lay there a long while, spooning with the trash can and thinking about his lonely life. About the man he had intended to be. About that pretty girl named Lara from Ms. Walsh’s homeroom class in third grade, the one with the long braids, who was always nice to him, maybe nicer to him than anyone since in his whole life, if he was being honest about it.
That was a long time ago.
The street lamp flickered on and off. Walter filled the can and dragged it to the street. And now, the flaw in his design. He sighed dejectedly at the realization and then slowly turned the can around so that side three was facing the house.
He whispered through the fog, “Yep. I’m a dick….” He looked over his shoulder to see his little girl staring down at the scene below. He smiled weakly and waved, “I’ll be right there, honey, just putting… just putting the trash out.”
09.17.2017
001 the crying
Summary: Series Intro.
TRANSCRIPT
Walter was a man of science. He knew how to repair space modules and calculate the speeds of solar winds. But terrestrial conundrums were alien to him. Still, he believed that if he could learn the reasons for crying he might eventually find a moment of actual peace. But today was not that day.
She scowled at him in the mirror with her senile hair and resisted all attempts by him to subdue it with comb or brush or other implement of torture. She said I hate you. She said you don't do it right, what are you doing. She said where's mom. She said she said she said she said.
Anna stomped away, leaving him faced with himself in the powder room mirror, which was only a fraction larger than the ones on the new telescope, except this one was dusty and everyone knows there's no dust in space. He heard the front door slam. Then quiet. And then a most extraordinary idea. That one day a woman would see him. And not cry. Or maybe only at happy things like babies and puppies. And that she would stay..The staying part was key, he thought.
11.23.2017
007 vanishing
Summary: Walter visits the DMV.
TRANSCRIPT
Walter sat at the DMV tapping his expired driver's license against the side of his seat. He thought back to four years ago when he was here last to have his license renewed.
It was at this moment he realized he was wearing the exact same regrettable tan-colored button down as the one from before. He looked up to see a young woman staring at him. Had she read his mind? Was it that obvious? "That shirt? Again? Really?" He smiled at her, weakly, but her expression did not change, and he understood that she was not, in fact, staring, but simply lost in thought.
He tried to reconcile the opposing logic. At once, the confusing idea that a woman would chose his face for any activity at all, passive or otherwise, and the all-affirming observation that she had chosen his face as the stopping off point for a daydream about something so flatly uninteresting that she'd forgotten she was staring in the first place. His life. In a nutshell. He may as well be wallpaper.
He wanted to snap his fingers. Had she fallen asleep? Into a coma? He cleared his throat. The woman startled and looked off in the direction of the overhead display to see if her number had been called. She looked down again at her ticket, breathed another heavy sigh and then closed her eyes. "39," a voice called from a nearby workstation.
Walter went and sat in front of the white wall. He handed the clerk his old license and paperwork. He straightened his back and raised his chin as instructed. The clerk focused the camera and clicked twice. Silence.
"Do you see me?" Walter asked.
"Sit over there," the clerk said, "we'll call you when it's ready."
Walter stared at the clerk, who had now moved on to laminating the license from the previous customer.
"Thank you," he said.
She did not look up. Walter moved to the nearby bench to wait for his card.
​
To feel utterly insignificant, he knew of no place better than the Department of Motor Vehicles. Here you could be ignored in all sorts of ways, with new ones being invented all the time. He looked around at all the sad empty faces. Not a single person was happy here. Except... for one. Walter smiled at the little boy across from him who was scissoring his legs wildly, sucking on a tootsie roll pop.
"Do 'you' see me?" Walter asked.
"I see you!" the boy replied. "You look like the UPS man!"
The little boy hopped off with his mother, shouting
"UPS! UPS!"
Out in his car, Walter sat slumped in the driver's seat, staring at his new license and its impressive anti-counterfeit detail. Polycarbonate card body. Laser engraving. Tactile text. The previous color headshot now replaced with black and white, somehow rendering him, if possible, even more invisible than four years prior. He imagined the long queue of people standing in line to steal his identity, only to politely "pass" upon further scrutiny. He ran his finger over the photograph...
"Vanishing..."
Walter slipped the card into his wallet and looked up at his reflection in the rear view mirror. Was there ever a time when he wanted to be seen? Third grade, he thought. Ms. Tipton. How pretty she was in her long linen skirts and cardigan sweaters. He never knew the scent she wore, but he'd decided it was roses. He would raise his hand for any reason and sometimes for no reason at all. And she would look at him and smile.
"Yes, Walter?"
"Nothing," he would say, "I forgot the question."
