3.

Dennis Milk woke up at 2:00 a.m. every morning and sprayed copious amounts of air freshener over his head on his way to and from the bathroom to pee. This would inevitably wake Walter up since he was sleeping on Dennis Milk’s living room couch. The hiss of the spray can and the gradual descent of the wall of faux-flower aroma were a one-two punch against the stillness Walter needed to maintain the gentle calm that is sleep.

At first, Walter found Dennis’ behavior strange.

But after three or four nights, he found it fucking strange.

He thought about mentioning it to Dennis. Considering, however, that Walter paid only ten dollars a week to sleep on the aforementioned couch and to inhabit a corner of the living room, he could not bring himself to make waves. If he could keep this unthinkably meager housing budget in place, Walter would not need to touch his savings for more than two years. He considered this a significant amount of time to invest in his development as a musical artist, facilitated in part by a living situation that was more than a steal. Walter was fairly certain that no man had ever secured a better rental agreement in the history of modern habitation.

And Dennis wasn’t a bad guy. Best Walter could tell so far and from the classified ad he had responded to, Dennis just didn’t like living alone. Although he also certainly didn’t care to participate in the basic niceties that one might typically associate with a desire for company, such as conversation or demonstrations of even superficial interest in other people.

Dennis lived in what appeared to be a semi-condemned building. Walter considered it probable that Dennis didn’t even pay rent himself but instead had asserted some sort of squatter’s rights.

He seemed to have nothing at all going on in his life.

No friends, no family, no work. No ambition, either, it seemed.

Dennis always said he was looking for a job, but there didn’t seem to be any discernible evidence to that end. No resumes, no job searches, no anecdotes of job interviews gone awry.

He seemed uninterested in most everything, really. In love, in accomplishments, in stature. In money, in success, in joy or contentment. Even in meaning.

His sole and profound interest was in watching his TV shows. There were four to five of them each night that were built into a nightly hopscotch-esque viewing plan to which the man was downright professional in his commitment, never missing a single frame of his shows. He even kept detailed notes about the key plot points in a tattered, yellowing binder. He would review these plot points intently prior to each week’s new episode. Reruns did not bother Dennis either. He would simply use them as an opportunity to revise his notes, refining them to more astutely render the key goings-on within the worlds of the stories. He watched his TV in real time, too. Walter presumed this was the result of lacking the requisite resources necessary to acquire a DVR, but figured it might also just as well be because Dennis simply had not been exposed to enough of the outside world to have come into contact with the information that DVRs existed. It might also have something to do with the fact that the cable was probably illegally obtained in the first place. No matter the explanation, it was a bit of a throwback, really, watching Dennis. He’d time his trips to the bathroom with the commercial breaks. He’d keep all conversations concise and safely within those same time windows. He wouldn’t answer the ringing phone during show hours. He’d deliberate over snack plans and bring more than needed to the couch just in case. He’d schedule all plans and projects before or after the viewing blocks. Walter would even get commercial jingles stuck in his head for days since Dennis couldn’t fast forward through them.

Dennis made it clear that Walter was not to speak to him during the show segments. It was also recommended but not required that Walter stay in his corner of the room during viewing hours since Dennis would require use of the couch at these times. Moreover, while Walter could use other parts of the living space, it was requested that he do so in complete silence. After each evening’s shows were over, Dennis would retire to his bedroom, allowing Walter to reclaim the couch for the night.

Walter’s daily routines had shifted since moving in. He found himself staying up until three or 4:00 a.m. each night to write and rewrite his lyrics in these post-TV quiet hours. Then he’d sleep until noon, at which time he’d get up and go for a walk or sit with a cup of coffee down on the corner or just stare out the window for a while. At 6:00 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays and at 3:00 p.m. on Saturdays, Walter would show up at Klaus’ dual-purpose space for rehearsal. Klaus on guitar, Walter on vocals, and Richard Pope, a fat pizza delivery guy and longtime friend of Klaus’, on drums. For the time being, they focused on playing covers. But once a week Klaus would ask about “The Monster Song.”

“It’s not a monster song,” Walter would correct Klaus, since the point of the song was much larger than just the first line that referenced a mutant. Also, he wasn’t really saying that Wallace was a mutant. “It’s poetic license,” he made sure to clarify further before reassuring mostly himself, “but I’m working on it.” Walter was eager for the band to take on his original material.

Over time and as Walter’s ear sharpened a bit, he came to see that Klaus was a pretty bad guitar player at best. And Richard Pope was a piss-poor drummer. And Walter still hadn’t really heard himself sing, so for all he knew he was an even worse singer than Richard was a drummer. But Walter still believed that they could grow into something really good. Their hearts were in the right place and their passion was true. Eventually, they would record themselves and at that point they would be faced with the reality of their actual sound. But until then, they were content to make their music and to search for their truest sound, a topic upon which Klaus was full of ideals.

Walter admired Klaus’ ideals.

He also found them incredibly annoying.

Oftentimes in equal measure.

The snare should be sloppier. The vocal should have a more spontaneous feel. The song wasn’t meant to sound so “math-y.” Not that Walter didn’t respect the desire to be better. And not that Klaus wasn’t sometimes correct. But he was always obnoxious.

Richard Pope, on the other hand, literally never said a word, not a grunt or an eloquent musing or anything in between. In fact, he never even acknowledged other people’s words. Not a nod, not a sigh, not a sound. He just started hitting his drums when the song started and he stopped hitting them when the song ended.

This was their process.

Klaus talked a lot, then they’d play a song. Klaus would talk a lot more. And then they’d play another song.

Walter would be home by midnight and he would resume work on what he had started referring to as “The Not Monster Song.”

This was Walter’s rock ’n’ roll life.

It was, to him and in its own way, completely remarkable.

He was daresay happy, or at least the happiest he could remember himself being in decades.

He was laser focused. He felt no extraneous weight. He was unconcerned with anything else. And life afforded him the circumstances to be exactly these things.

For three months, anyway.

“You got some mail here,” Dennis announced bitterly as Walter came in one night after band practice and during a commercial break.

Inasmuch as the mail was not in Dennis’ hand nor was his hand pointing anywhere, Walter deduced that Dennis’ use of the word “here” was meant to suggest that the very delivery itself of the mail to this address was the objectionable content of this occurrence.

“No one knows I’m here,” Walter explained, as much to himself as to Dennis.

But Dennis just shrugged.

So Walter simply returned the shrug.

“It’s on the counter,” said Dennis, a distinct recrimination in his voice.

Walter headed to the kitchen, which was in its usual state of relative uselessness, a static wasteland littered with clustered colonies of torn and discarded food packaging distributed about all flat, open surfaces. This evening, however, a small, pale gray rectangle stood out as an unexpectedly elegant flourish amongst the distributed heaps of garbage. As Walter neared the geometric shape, he confirmed it was indeed an envelope. As he drew even nearer still, he spied two gorgeously embossed initials in the top left corner: W. B. These initials quickly betrayed beneath them the presence of Walter’s former address.

Walter did not touch the envelope.

Instead, he simply considered it for a good full moment, parsing through what the words inside might intend to convey. But any possible missive he could posit failed to pique his interest enough that he was willing to risk the weight, the tangle, or the superfluity of the content therein. Walter just wanted to stay focused on his music.

So he decided not to open the envelope.

He backed away from it.

Then he backed himself out of the kitchen and sat down in a chair in his corner of the living room. He would have bothered wondering how Wallace had found him here, but he knew that the little savant could all but effortlessly accomplish anything at all to which he set his mutant mind.

As Walter began sorting through possible topics to ponder by way of not thinking about the envelope and its contents, he found his mind instead settling squarely upon the topic of the envelope and its contents. Rather than resurfacing his deep-seated ire, however, Walter was surprised to find that the mere gesture of the letter having been sent, irrespective of whatever the words inside might or might not say, actually fostered in him a strange and unexpected modicum of comfort. Walter could not help but wonder if maybe he didn’t hate his little bastard of a twin nearly as much as he thought he did.

“Loosen up, Walt. You gotta just let it go,” Klaus waxed exceedingly moronic at band practice the following Thursday. “Singing’s all about the pop and the—” he made some whooshing/phlegm-y noise “—and the whoowap and the boom.”

Walter stopped listening at that point.

For the past two days, he’d been having trouble focusing on anything other than the still unopened letter sitting on Dennis Milk’s filthy and cluttered kitchen counter. The fatigue of so fixating had, in turn, rotted away any belief in the intended generosity and beneficence of the letter, replacing it instead with a bitter certitude that Wallace somehow possessed a downright effortless ability to completely upend any sense of normalcy that Walter might ever manage to find in his life. Also over the span of those same past two days, and perhaps in a related capacity, although Walter could not be sure, whatever he had once considered Klaus Klein’s charm had summarily evaporated.

Walter just wanted to sing some songs. And he wanted the space and time and solace that came along with singing those songs. And he wanted to stay there for a while. He did not want any of the other ancillary things that came with singing those songs. No diatribes, no windbag opinions, no disagreements, no waxing faux-philosophic, no pointless theories, no insistence that Walter do things differently, no demands that Walter be some way other than how he was.

“Walt?” Klaus asked.

“What?” said Walter, annoyed with either Klaus or the letter—which, in some odd way, might actually have been the same thing.

“Can you do that?” Klaus asked, clearly repeating a question that Walter had not heard.

“Yes,” said Walter, simply to do his small part to at least momentarily stymie the additional torrent of words that would otherwise undoubtedly have spewed from Klaus’ mouth. “Of course.”

“Then let’s do it!” Klaus scream-yelled, cueing Richard Pope to start pounding sloppily on his drums. And Klaus started playing lazy notes that quickly descended into an indiscernible mess before reviving into something still just barely shy of recognizable.

“Go! Go! Go!” Klaus was suddenly yelling at Walter.

But Walter made no sound.

So the cacophony melted to a halt.

“What’s the problem, Walt?” Klaus barked.

Richard Pope looked on, void of reaction per usual.

“What are we playing?” Walter asked.

At which point, Klaus threw his guitar down and stomped out of the apartment/rehearsal space, filling the ample square footage with feedback from his still-hot amplifier, a swelling, shrieking pulse of sound that was strangely somehow comforting inasmuch as it was at least filling up what would otherwise have been an empty silence in which Walter’s mind would have undoubtedly turned right back to the letter on Dennis Milk’s kitchen counter. Walter stared affectionately at Klaus’ guitar as it emanated its cloud of sound while maintaining the appearance of complete stillness.

Walter sat down on one of the threadbare couches.

He closed his eyes.

He relaxed into the noise.

Richard Pope remained slovenly perched at his drum kit, seemingly unaware that anything out of the ordinary had happened and ready to start playing again just as soon as someone counted him off.

Walter took a breath and let the sound melt his thoughts, reducing all theory, conjecture, and thought down to a graceful, fluid rubble as only the grammar of sound could.

When the second letter arrived a week later, the only thing that kept Walter from flipping the fuck out was the rock ’n’ roll persona he had established and defined over the last few days, a character whom he had dubbed simply Rock ’N’ Roll Walter.

Rock ’N’ Roll Walter did not care about things.

Certainly not things like letters.

Or what time it was.

Or when he’d last worn a particular outfit.

Or people’s indirect intentions.

Or retirement accounts.

Or sales quotas.

Or when he’d last eaten.

Things like marriage. Or fidelity. Or respecting marriages and fidelity.

Things like family. Or exercise.

Or bourgeois comforts.

Oil changes, good posture, lawns, dress socks, cell phone data plans, coupons, steamed vegetables, umbrellas, house plants, interest rates, human interest stories, home renovations, legalese, five-day weather forecasts, carpool lanes, different colored jeans, facial scrubs, imported sodas, bus stop advertisements, foodies, deadlines, moisture-wicking socks, comparative pricing, general professional competence, colorful or patterned straws, Krav Maga, real estate brokers, golf, fedoras, odd little men with the uncanny ability to easily uproot their sibling’s whole existence with the simplest of actions… Rock ’N’ Roll Walter stayed focused on whatever was present. And damn the rest.

Rock ’N’ Roll Walter, for example, had just that morning decided to add a sort of grumble into his vocals at rehearsal that night, sort of a light Tom Waits touch. Regular Walter would never have even thought to just cavalierly do something so bold, but Rock ’N’ Roll Walter thought the idea had edge.

As Rock ’N’ Roll Walter left the kitchen that evening, orphaning the second letter on the counter, it did happen to dawn on Regular Walter that the first letter was, for some reason, no longer on that counter.

As Regular Walter stopped to think about it, he realized that it hadn’t been there for several days now. Admittedly, it wasn’t very rock ’n’ roll to worry about the first letter, even if he wasn’t worrying about the second letter.

In truth, Walter just really wasn’t all that rock ’n’ roll yet. In moments, sure, but not in any sustained manner that could be construed as a general attitude let alone as a life philosophy of sorts.

Regular Walter considered inquiring of Dennis as to the first letter’s whereabouts, but neither Regular nor Rock ’N’ Roll Walter were willing to engage in a full-fledged conversation with Dennis. So Walter just left the apartment for band practice without mentioning either letter, or anything at all for that matter, to Dennis.

“What are you doing, man?” Klaus asked condescendingly and after waving his hands at Richard Pope not thirty seconds into their first song of the evening, turning everything but Walter silent.

“I’m singing,” Walter replied.

“That noise. What’s that noise? That raspy noise.”

“I’m experimenting with our sound.”

“You should just sing what you’ve been singing. I’ll handle our sound.”

“I thought our sound was about passion,” Walter explained. “And I really feel this.”

“Right,” Klaus spat, extremely annoyed. “What does passion have to do with what you feel?”

“Well…” Walter paused to offer this question fair consideration before answering it, “…everything. By definition.”

“That’s such an unexamined view, man,” Klaus scoffed to Richard Pope, feigning an aside.

“I just think that…” Walter began only to be interrupted by Klaus’ proclamation…

“It’s just not a good fit.”

“The raspy grumble?”

“With our aesthetic.”

“We have an aesthetic?”

Klaus was so offended by this question that he steadied himself for a moment, calming a deep, smoldering outrage churning inside of him. Then he looked over to Richard Pope, who looked disinterested as ever.

“Fuck you guys,” Rock ’N’ Roll Walter demanded. “I’m a part of this sound, too.”

“I am the sound!” Klaus screamed like a maniac.

Before Rock ’N’ Roll Walter could answer Klaus’ irreverence with some lunacy of his own, Richard Pope cleared his throat. It was a small sound, but one so unexpected that it all but shook the walls. Juxtaposed against Richard’s heretofore immaculate stoicism and placed at precisely this instant in time, Walter couldn’t help but at least wonder whether Richard Pope was laying claim to some part of the sound himself.

“And Richard is, too,” Klaus added, clearly suspecting the same thing.

“But I’m the voice,” Walter insisted.

“And the voice needs to fit the sound!” Klaus yelled.

“I fit!” Rock ’N’ Roll Walter yelled right back as he suddenly, unexpectedly, and violently rocket-launched the microphone in his hand across the room. As his arm sprang forward and released the mic, he felt an almost perfect satisfaction, as though this action completely expressed the very emotion it had come into existence to convey, as though there was much more truth to this simple, emphatic declaration than he even knew. What he had not anticipated at the time that he was firing the mic across the room, however, was that it would eventually collide with the poorly hung wall opposite him and that the union of these two things would result in an eardrum-bursting boom that caused Klaus and Richard to recoil just as the piece of equipment shattered into four splintered pieces and fell to the floor. But Rock ’N’ Roll Walter was somehow so committed to his outburst that he managed not to react to the violent sound at all, nor to the broken equipment, nor, and perhaps most importantly, to the ire of either of his bandmates.

“What the fuck, man?” Klaus yelled, both because he was upset and because his hearing was now at least temporarily shot. “You’re buying me a new microphone.”

Walter loved seeing Klaus adopt such a not rock ’n’ roll tone.

He looked over to Richard Pope, too, who was rubbing his ears semi-ferociously in an also not terribly blasé move.

Regular Walter knew that any moment now he would feel terribly about his behavior. So before that happened, Rock ’N’ Roll Walter walked over to the tattered microphone parts and violently stomped on each cluster of wires, sensors, plastic, and metal, bitterly mashing everything to a shredded, dented, unfixable pile of rubbish.

“I fit,” Rock ’N’ Roll Walter repeated with an almost cautionary overtone.

Then he did the only other thing he could think to do: he turned and walked calmly out of the apartment/rehearsal space/multi-purpose space.

A few blocks down the sidewalk, Walter came to the realization that he did not care one bit for the added rasp in his vocals. In fact, he wasn’t even sure why he thought it would have sounded good in the first place.

A few blocks after that, he found himself thinking about the gray envelopes again.

“Dennis, if more gray envelopes come to this house addressed to me, I want you to throw them away,” Walter waited until 11:01 p.m., after Dennis’ daily TV viewing ended, to insist of his roommate and/or landlord, “and do not tell me about them.”

Dennis’ face soured with worry before he explained, “That’s an awful lot to ask of someone.”

“I was actually thinking of it as a relatively small task,” Walter replied, confused. “You’re already getting the mail, yes? And disposing of some of it, presumably?

“I can’t pay attention to what color the mail is,” Dennis spat indignantly before escalating his point, “and then sort it in different ways only if certain colors are addressed to you.”

“It would just be the one color,” Walter explained.

“There are countless shades of gray,” Dennis insisted.

“Well, then,” Walter adjusted strategies, “let’s forget about colors. Any piece of mail that comes to this house that is addressed to me, just throw it out. I don’t want it.”

“What if it’s an important letter?”

“There is no such thing as far as I’m concerned. In fact, I hate mail. I resent it deeply and it would be a great kindness to me if you would help me keep all mail out of my life.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s illegal for me to tamper with your mail,” Dennis demanded.

“It’s not tampering if you just throw it away.”

“I think throwing it away is tampering.”

“No, just…” Walter took a moment, and then redirected. “Dennis, think of the trash can as though it were the counter.”

“What?”

“Just a simple mental shift on your part, really.”

“Are you crazy? That makes no sense.”

“Right now you put my mail on the counter so I will find it. Henceforth, I would like you to place all of my mail in the trash can. And I will look there for it.”

“No,” Dennis demanded. “What if I take out the trash before you check your mail?”

“I will take out the trash instead of you. You don’t ever have to take out the trash again. I will do it. So that I can be sure to check my mail.”

“But why don’t I just leave it on the counter instead? It seems so much easier.”

“It’s just this weird thing that I have, Dennis. I like to get my mail in the trash.”

“But I thought you hate mail?”

Walter decided now that he hated Dennis Milk with every last fiber of his being.

But he had already come this far in what was surely the dumbest Goddamn conversation he had ever had in his life. Not even Rock ’N’ Roll Walter could let these lost precious moments turn into a complete waste of his existence.

“Receiving it in the trash can,” Walter pressed on, “makes me feel a bit better about mail.”

Dennis’ brow creased deeply with consternation as he attempted to take this in.

“Every piece of mail?” Dennis finally semi-conceded.

“Every single one,” Walter affirmed.

“I guess, man. But you are really fucking weird.”

Before Walter could either soak in the joy of this momentary, even if miniscule, victory or truly process the absurdity of Dennis Milk calling any other living person weird, there was a knock at the door.

Both men froze.

There was never a knock at the door.

So much so that neither man could be certain he had heard what he suspected he had heard.

So neither man did anything.

Until the knock sounded again.

“This is my home,” Dennis said.

Walter was not sure what, exactly, the man meant by this statement. But his tone seemed accusatory, as though the knock was the result of Walter having violated the sanctity of this space by speaking of its existence to members of the outside world.

But before Walter could conjure a suitable reply, Dennis stood up and headed toward the door.

Once there, he paused.

He took a good long look down at the ground surrounding his feet, seemingly thinking pretty hard about how next to proceed. After a stretch of several seconds, Dennis looked up at Walter and then back to the door, where he considered a moment longer before finally opening it.

Then Dennis Milk made a sound. It was an involuntary spew of a sound, a mixture of disparate elements hybridizing a shrill exclamation, a frightened yelp, a deeply infatuated gasp, a stupefied moan, a terrified low wail, and multiple elements incomprehensible. Impossible to truly define or comprehend what this odd sound might have been, it nevertheless made the identity of their visitor instantly and singularly clear to Walter, even though he could not see out the semi-open door from his current vantage point.

“Is Walter Braum in?” asked the unmistakable cracked squeal of Wallace Braum’s voice, confirming what Walter already knew and dropping his heart lower than his toes.

Dennis stood speechless and nearly motionless, managing only slow, stuttering shuffle-steps gradually backing him away from the open door. Eventually he pierced the awkward silence by muttering something that sounded loosely like, “I mean you no harm.”

Walter found himself walking over to the door and stepping in between Dennis and what seemed to be one of the man’s worst imaginable fears.

“I don’t want your letters,” Walter explained.

“I have things to say to you, Walter,” demanded Wallace, more assertive than Walter had ever heard his twin before.

“Well, I don’t want that, either.”

“Why did you disappear?” Wallace insisted.

“I’m perfectly visible, Wallace.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t care what you mean!”

“I can’t be blamed for things that just happen,” Wallace declared as tears started to spurt from his eyes. “I did not take anything from you that you had not already left behind! But you are taking away my brother!”

Dennis was starting to emit an increasingly panicked squeal-like noise that started soft but was building now to a distracting volume.

“Stop crying!” Walter yelled. “You can’t expect people to act in their own best interest if you’re always crying your weird tears all over the place.”

Walter slammed the door shut, which seemed to assuage whatever was causing Dennis’ wail.

And it was silent. But for the muffled crests of Wallace’s sobs that somehow snuck around and through the wood of the door.

Walter opened the door again to add…

“If I wanted to be found, I wouldn’t be hiding, now would I?”

But much to Walter’s surprise, Wallace was no longer there.

He stepped out into the hallway but saw no trace of the mutant there, either.

“Not that I’m really hiding,” Walter yelled out a small point of clarification. “It’s just a turn of phrase.”

This sudden disappearance after such a sudden reappearance of one of the very people he had been working so hard to avoid made Walter momentarily doubtful of his own faculties.

He turned to Dennis, whom Walter only now noticed was cowering against the wall, thunderstruck, stupefied, and bracing his turned head with an arm raised over his eyes. Walter nevertheless went ahead and asked what was surely a pointless question given Dennis’ current state…

“Was there a small, really odd looking man here a moment ago?”