Entry Two

I laid the picture back down on top of the casket.  Yeah, so what if it’s a little odd that my dead wife found her final resting place in my basement.  It’s underground and up to code, so technically it counts a mausoleum.

“You know, you could really pimp this place out if you get rid of the body.”  David said as he paced under one of the basement’s few operational lights nursing his beer.  

I shot him a glare.  “Don’t you have any respect for the dead?”

“Yeah, but come on, you need to move on.”

“It’s not like she’s in the middle of the living room…”  I slammed the rest of my beer and tossed the bottle into a tin trash can left by the construction crews.  “Besides, she has her own room and no one has to know.  Don’t think I haven’t considered the possibilities this floor has for partying.  I mean, we’ re about twenty five feet underground, and there’s about five feet of solid concrete between us and the underside of the house.  Plus, the crawlspace floor in between is a natural noise dampener.  Can you imagine how loud the music could get before you could even hear it in the house?  Much less the neighbors, who most likely wouldn’t give a f**k even if they could.”

“And in the middle of all that you’ve got a dead body…”  I cut him off.

“In a casket; in its own room, with its own lock and its own key.”

“It wasn’t locked when I came down here.”  With that I walked over to the door of the last room she would ever occupy and shut the door.  I pulled a secure key on a chain out from under my shirt and locked the door.  I turned back to David, tucked the key inside my shirt and spoke.

“Problem solved.”  The doctor said as he handed me the small glass bottle.  He said it would reboot me, fix my problems, if I took it.  I didn’t ask any questions, I just took the bottle of thick black fluid and just went home. 

Home was like a frat house for go nowhere drug addicts with playful personalities and a lot of friends.  Who the hell knows why I’m there anymore.  A friend had invited me in a few years back, I set up shop and when he died I took his room.  I’m not even sure who really belongs here and who’s just hanging around.  The place seems to be like a magnet for the deadwood of society.  Once they get too close they get sucked in and don’t leave.  My room is an absolute mess.  I can’t seem to keep a damn thing straight anymore.  Still, it happens to be about the cleanest area of the house so I keep it under lock and key.  Not that I ever go out.

I guess I get so much freedom there because everyone thinks I’m such a hard case.  I don’t talk to anyone, as a rule.  Ever.  Not a grunt, not a hello, all of my language skills have long since deteriorated from going unused for so long.  That whole trip started about five years ago as my life started to fall apart.  I just one day decided not to talk on principal.  I had become fairly withdrawn anyway, not talking to students, then not even teachers.  If anyone asked me a question at first I would write a concise answer on paper and that was it.  After a while, that got old, and people thought I would just write my end of a conversation without realizing I just didn’t even want to interact with them.  It only took about a month to get used to it.  After that I knew how to react in most situations without speaking.

In a sick sort of way, it actually opened some doors for me.  People thought I was handicapped, and eventually deaf.  I got special treatment sometimes and occasionally in pretty big ways.  I heard things didn’t want me to hear, didn’t think I could hear.  When you go completely without expression for long enough, and people start meeting you that way, you become furniture in their eyes.  They forget you’re there, and when they bump into you that don’t say a word because they know that even if they did, they know you wouldn’t care or respond, they think you don’t even know.  They have all the compassion for you that they would have for a vegetable.  Either kind, take your pick.

I learned a lot of things about people that most people will never know, even about themselves.  I was a walking social experiment.  Did you know that even the most sincere people don’t say their sorry because they feel sorry, but because they want you to know that they feel sorry.  I know this because Even the kind of person that has to be the first person in a room to say “bless you” when someone sneezes could knock me over in the hall and though I saw that look in her eyes, she didn’t say a word.  After, all there was no reason to.  This was about two years into my silence.  At this point I didn’t turn when people called my name.  At this point, I no longer laughed, smiled or frowned.  I had no perceivable facial expressions or body language.  And about the most emotion I ever showed was when I cried.

I never meant to, and it wasn’t that I really knew why I was crying.  I just was.  It could happen at any time.  I have known it to stop classes.  Apparently, there is very little more disturbing than when a man with no emotion or affect bursts into silent tears.  Even then, I retained my inexpressive face, and did nothing to wipe the tears away or ever acknowledge that I was crying.  I just continued to stare straight ahead, apparently catatonic.  Some people thought I was the walking dead.  My teachers, though most were afraid of me to some degree, thought I was a genius.  The truth was that this approach to life allowed me to hone in on whatever I wanted to.

The only problem I ever really had was ordering food, which actually consists of an order.  It took me three months to develop an unexpressive method of doing this.  I ordered a laminating machine off the internet and used it to make laminate cards for my favorite dishes.  I decided what I wanted to eat in the morning and carried those cards with me during the day.  In a restaurant I simply slid the server the card with my desired food on it without so much as making eye contact or any form of direct confirmation.  I simply waited until the server got the message and brought me my food.  To try new things required that I see them on a menu and then make a laminate card for them.  After two years I had nearly a hundred cards corresponding to about fifteen restaurants and fast food places.

I was just beginning my second year of college when I saw her face in the crowd.  She had always said she would be here at this school eventually and when I saw her I was overjoyed.  For the first time in years I smiled and tried to shout out to her.  I stood there, mouth agape, trying to find the words; trying to remember how to move my tongue and lips in tandem to make the sounds of the English language.  I couldn’t even manage a “uh”.  From that point on my life had a purpose, finding her before she found me and avoiding her.  I tried so desperately not to allow myself to make eye contact but for the first time in years, I found it hard.

Once, she saw me.  I watched her face light up with joy and try and part the crowd to get to me.  I ignored her advance and walked the other way, losing myself in the twists and turns of the school halls, and when I was finally sure she could no longer find me I sat against a wall and cried.  I even let the pain buried deep inside shine straight through my face.

I think that might’ve been even scarier to the passersby that knew me than my silent tears.  But now that they had had a look inside, I couldn’t face them any longer.  

Later, that afternoon I placed a card on the desk at the registration office.  It read, “I want to transfer.”