Of course I remember the first time it happened. You don’t just forget an event like that, you know – why, the very fact that I’m telling you all this is sheer proof of how its effects reverberated throughout my entire life! If I grow senile – well, much MORE senile – that will be the very last thing to go, I assure you.
I was nine years old and my big brother asked me to look through a crack in the wall, so that I could ‘look at her titties.’
Well, of course I had no real interest in such things yet, but who was I to deny such a moment of fraternal unity? I stepped to the wall, jumped up on a rock to give me the extra three-inch height I needed, and found myself staring at the small of the back of an extremely hideous woman, bloated, warted, and strongly resembling some manner of dinosaur rather than a human. I stared long and hard, until I saw a twitch at her scalp and realized that instead of hair, she was crowned with a wriggling mass of small but lively snakes. So I did what later years of mythological reading would teach me was the best thing possible, and lurched backwards in a blind panic.
My brother asked me if I’d seen her titties. I told him no, and he gave me a noogie without pity. I strongly suspect that this was what led to our lifetime estrangement. Oh well.
Now, you might expect that the little incident would’ve put me off peering through cracks in walls, and you would be right! As a matter of fact I stayed away from walls entirely for the next four years. My parents took me to three different specialists, but thankfully they were squeamish and opted not to follow through with a lobotomy. Those were quite fashionable at the time, you know. But it would’ve cost money they didn’t have, so instead they settled for shutting me up with distractions when company was over, and covering most of my walls with bookcases so I didn’t have to look at them. Never took to reading much, though.
So it was a while and I got most of the way through puberty and things and then I started to discard all that silly nonsense I’d believed when I was a child. Stepping on cracks snapping my mother’s back? Nonsense! Buttercups telling you if you liked butter? Bunkum! Monsters under the bed? Balderdash! All of it was discredited poppycock, and that’s why when I was wondering down a street late at night throwing rocks at people’s doors and saw that a garage door had been left carelessly unlatched (but was anyone home?), I stepped right up and put my peeper to a crack in its siding without hesitation.
Inside, I saw the most marvelous thing – a cavern filled with an endless sea of golden treasure, glittering through the smoky haze emitted from the forty torches carried in the forty left hands of forty bearded, hairy, smelly men, each more bearded, hairier, and smellier than the last. In their forty right hands they carried forty sacks of plundered loot, which they spilt about willy-nilly in the boisterousness of their passage.
Naturally, I did the sensible thing and jimmed the door open an inch, hoping to seize a single scoop of pilfered valuables for myself. My hand reached in and closed into a fist – were those jewels in my grasp, gleaming and precious? Alas no, it was the infant young of a raccoon, which bit me. My screaming hysterics soon brought down the wrath of the slumbering homeowners upon me, and following a most cruel batterment by rake and a swift trial I was put to juvie hall, where I spent my time avoiding all of the walls. Especially the cracked ones.
My little stint in our great nation’s legal halls, corridors, and cells had a great impact on me. Mostly the cells, especially when my cellmate was a testy fellow. But I persevered, and by the tender young age of twenty-two I’d put all that trouble behind me to work as a simple, honest door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, the last of my kind in the nation. I got the idea when my father passed away and left me his encyclopedia set as a quick and clean-cut way to make a modest afternoon’s living before my landlord struck me from his good books and my possessions from his property. I’d not had much luck after the first nine streets, but here I stood upon the sixtieth house of the tenth, massive, weight briefcase in one hand and a carefree grin in the other, listening to the wheezing, gasping shuffle of geriatric feet approaching from the other side of a well-painted upscale home. Alas, as their owner reached the apex of his ascent, the shuffling was replaced with a single drawn-out wail that ended in a tremendous, bone-rattling thud, followed by the silence of the cardiacly stricken. I am an upstanding citizen, and that is why I did what I did next: I peered through a crack in the otherwise impenetrable glazed glass of the door-window to make sure everything was all right and that I hadn’t fallen for some hilarious elderly prank.
I peered through utmost gloom (this house’s lighting was a travesty!) and saw before me a yawning expanse fit to make eyes pop – if this was a cavern, it was one whose scope dwarfed the Sistine Chapel! Dark stalagmites the size of skyscrapers lurked in the far-above ceiling; miles below me, magma sluggishly oozed at depths that would sicken bedrock. And in the center of the chamber lay a slab that could’ve birthed mountains, across which was trussed and chained a man whose size astounds mere description save to say that each of his fingernails would’ve made high-quality low-cost waterproof roofing for an entire football field.
I was staggered and astonished, naturally. My brain took a holiday and let my eyeballs please themselves, twitching at every impossible sight. Drawn to motion as they were, it wasn’t long before the venom dripping from above caught my eye: a snake that could’ve swallowed a hundred subway cars hung from the ceiling, twisted in the roots of an impossible tree, its open mouth filling and spilling with poisonous liquids that were landing right inside the poor old bastard’s eyelids. I winced, and at that moment of wincing the snake and I locked eyes – oh my, the evil in those little eyes the size of houses! I don’t want to know what could’ve happened to me if it weren’t for the chained man and his howling at the pain; he shivered and shook and spasmed and moaned and gave such a shaking that I was bowled clean off my feet just as the snake made to slide closer to me. I hopped to my feet, turned tail, and was off home at a sprint, leaving my encyclopedia behind me in exchange for a faster flight.
Anyways, after I got back to my apartment I locked myself up, threw all the furniture in front of the door, and curled in a ball until four in the morning, when the police busted down my door and arrested me for unlawful squatting and suspicion of murder. Apparently the poor old thing had popped his clogs clean off and a neighbour had spotted my getaway. The whole lot got cleared up after I’d spent a few years in high-security, though, so no use fussing about it.
Now, I spent my time wisely in the big box that go-around. I studied architecture, and learned all about how to make safe, secure, structurally sound walls with no cracks whatsoever in them. I did quite well, if I do say so myself, and if you go to any modern penitentiary built within the last twenty years I’ll wager dollars to dufflebags full of heroin that I had a hand in building it. They copied my notes, you see, not that I ever saw so much as a single red cent oh dearie me no, couldn’t be seen taking inspiration from a COVICT now, could we. The gall!
I lost my train of thought, where was I? Oh yes.
Right, so after I left jail again about a decade after that first time I left jail a decade before, around ten years back, my first priority was to live somewhere nice, with firm, well-founded buildings that were brand new and spic and span with no cracks whatsoever. I chose to move to Tokyo on the wings of a plane ticket that was obtained through blackmail, but the entirely acceptable and cosy familial kind where you threaten to tell your brother’s wife and kids about what he did when he was seven. Japan was lovely – I stayed in a nice neighborhood with beautiful skyscrapers, even the alleyway I lived in was so new and fresh you could eat your dinner off it, and good thing, too. Yes sir, those were the finest six days of my life, right up until the earthquake hit and I tripped and landed facefirst on the sidewalk right as it cracked open and almost sucked my entire head in.
This time what I saw I…can’t really recall. There were five suns, each lasting an age, and fire, and storms, and blood, and for some reason an enormous quantity of jaguars.
There may also have been monkeys.
All I know is that by the time I came to my senses I’d been deported and barred from entering Japan ever again, along with anyone of closer relation to me than a second cousin. Quite puzzling and altogether disturbing, especially when I found a little heart belonging to a small snake in my left pants pocket. I have no idea how the police missed it. I’ll show you; I’ve got it in a box somewhere.
After that I went and lived in the woods, which isn’t as bad as it sounds if you plaster all of your tiny hermit shack’s walls with lots of mud and replaster them again every season. Then there’s not a crack to be found! Twenty-nine years out here eating twigs and roots and VERY odd mushrooms without so much as a crevice to peer into and I’ve been happy and fine and fit as a fiddle. All until, oh, five minutes ago when I carelessly hit my head on the wall and glanced the wrong way and locked your eyes with mine.
I must say, you’re a very good listener. Especially without any ears. Do you listen through your eyes? Because there are an awful lot of them. Each charming in their very own way, of course.
Would you like to come in? The place is a dreadful mess these days, but I’m sure we could make a shot at tidying it up.