For Andy Finkle
The sulfurous stink assaulted my nose. The Thzarton’s collection vehicle bleated one street over. The now-awakened now-angry New Madrid fault shook the ground gelatinous under my feet. That the world was ending was bad enough; the fact that I had to endure it Walter made it worse.
My lifetime membership in the Skeptics Society had been paid-in-full years ago. Watching the cloud of brimstone blowing in from Skokie, I had to admit I might have been too dismissive of the tinfoil hat brigades. For now, the race was now on to see if I would be anally probed or spirited away by one of the black helicopters circling overhead.
You could see the fires in the neighborhood dancing in Walter’s glasses as he nodded at the man who bore a striking resemblance to an ancient JFK rolling down the sidewalk in a motorized wheelchair. “I told you we were doomed,” he simply said. He was unfazed by the prospect of either being ground up for food, or put to work in the aluminum mines for the suddenly sentient gorillas on horseback.
From the moment I met Walter, he wondered how I could sleep at night, let alone smile. It was Kathy and my first house; the place we feather our nest for the eventual arrival of our daughter, Miranda and our son, Milo. Knowing then what Walter knew always, it was a wonder we would ever consider bringing children into a doomed world.
I was carrying the last boxes into the house when a man who bore a striking resemblance to my late father (bald, horned-rimmed glasses, salt and pepper moustache) introduced himself as my next-door neighbor. Of course, my father never wore coveralls nor carried a small radio, clipped to his belt, blaring out the weather forecast. “You moving in?” he asked, trying to get a glimpse of the contents of the box.
I nodded and shrugged in one motion, making the international symbol for being unable to shake a stranger’s hand. “Yep,” I said, “we just bought the place.”
“Hope you have better luck than the couple that lived here before. They tried to have a baby, but couldn’t. Believe me they tried and tried. The walls aren’t as thick as you think.” He looked over the rim of his glasses at the shoulder-width space between our bungalows. “Heard every argument.” He raised an eyebrow. I couldn’t tell if it was a warning or an expectation.
I told him it was nice to meet him; I did not want to inconvenience him; and I needed to get the box in my house or an unspecified dire consequence would occur. No worries, he was free for the rest of the day and walked into the house uninvited. He did not offer to carry a box. He did, however, share with me the horrors of the New Madrid fault lurking below us. “It’s way overdue.
I have always been a fearful person: heights, confined spaces, spiders and infected doorknobs. But in all that time, I had never considered earthquakes. I accessed my fear inventory, waiting for a tsunami of dread to inundate me. Amazingly enough–nothing.
Walter stood at the door, looking over my shoulder at a lighting fixture that I was in the middle of replacing. “Oh, you have old wiring; that cloth insulation will go up like a firework with the smallest spark.” That one hit pay dirt. I did not sleep that night, holding my breath, listening for the walls to ignite.
I had to get rid of Walter. I stood by the door and told him I was expecting guests, the plumber was in the basement, my wife was sick (and highly contagious) and, I might be wrong, but I thought I heard a woman’s voice outside calling “Walter.”
He blocked my way to the unguarded U-Haul truck, which had caught the attention of a couple of shady-looking kids. According to Walter, in addition to the fire hazard of the wiring, I also had to worry about radon gas in the basement and rabid raccoons in my attic. “I trapped one in my attic. It took animal control three days to shoot the thing. Sometimes I wonder why I pay taxes.”
Thankfully, the phone in his chest pocket rang. One of his tenants had a clogged toilet. “The things I found in the plumbing—tissue boxes, stuffed animals, plastic bags of God-knows-what. I even found a guinea pig in there. Dead, of course. I just hope it was dead when they flushed. With my tenants, you never know. None of them would win any awards for anything.”
I told him I did not want to stop him from tending to his duties. Walking out, he warned about the dark SUVs with federal plates driving around the neighborhood. “It makes you think somebody is up to something that they don’t want us to know about.”
For the next nine years, my life was an exercise in ducking Walter. It did not take me long to figure out that asking the meaningless question “how are you?” condemned me to at least a fifteen-minute jeremiad about what was waiting in the periphery to kill, slice, abduct or infect me.
When I managed to get in the house, I speculated Walter was the missing Roman triplet. “There was Romulus, Remus and Walter. Romulus built Rome. Remus taunted Romulus. Romulus killed Remus. Walter looked at his bloody and bloodied brothers and said, “I knew this would happen. I knew it.”
The final proof of Walter’s lupine origins was his inability to take a cue. “I have told him directly ‘Walter, I have to go and you are standing in my way.’ Nothing. No apology. No acknowledgement. No getting the fuck out of my way. Who, but someone raised by wolves, could be so clueless?”
Today, it was a bicyclist run over by the city dump truck. Walter was convinced it was no accident. The truck driver deliberately ran her over because she was a paralegal at a law firm that just won an excessive force case against the Chicago Police Department. “It wasn’t an accident, it was a warning.” A warning? To whom? Lawyers? Plaintiffs? Anyone who dares challenge city hall? Yes. Yes. Yes. The only time Walter was positive was when he was being negative. Instead of being upset a poor girl was run over and the truck driver must live with the guilt, Walter saw a conspiracy—just another log to throw on his pyre of idiocy.
That was it; the last dram of patience drained out of me. “Oh, for God’s sake, Walter. Why is everything doom and gloom with you? Why can’t there be a simple solution instead of your cockamamie conspiracy theories? It was an accident. Nothing more. In all the years I have known you, the sun has always risen in the east and always set in the west and none of your crazy ideas have ever…”
As if on cue, the sun was blocked by an enormous silhouette. I looked up at a gunmetal behemoth that steamed malevolence. Even the bright lights at its base looked dour. “Shit,” I thought, “I am never going hear the end of this.”
The Thzarton collection vehicle pulled over and got to work. Despite having a tentacle wrapped around his neck, preparing to deposit him into the vat of glowing goo, Walter looked smug. “You see? You see? Yu thee? Yu…splurt.” Before the Thzartons turned their attention to me, I saw Walter’s face pressed up against the transparent wall, pointing with an arrogant finger at the asteroid bearing down on me.