For the next five days, Walter slept.
That was all.
He got up on occasion to use the restroom or to drink some water, maybe eat a piece of toast.
Other than that, he just slept.
Veronica knew how he liked both his water and his toast, so often times he would call to her from bed for assistance and she would answer, sometimes from the next room and sometimes from the bed, right beside him.
Walter noticed her response time gradually increasing, especially and counterintuitively when she happened to be lying right next to him.
On several occasions, Veronica attempted to remind Walter that the doctor had recommended he resume regular, low-impact activities immediately to help with the healing process.
Walter insisted that sleep was as low impact as it could get.
Veronica had observed this bitter shade to Walter’s personality not so gradually expanding over the years, a deeply resigned and depressive side to him that was, in its worst throes, stubbornly resistant to any and all positive stimuli. But in the past she had never seen it last more than a day or two at a stretch, most typically centering around specific topics or circumstances but flowing and ebbing at a moment’s notice. But when the alarm clock finally went off on the Monday morning of Walter’s planned return to work, the bitterness was still so deeply there and in full bloom that Walter could not force himself out of bed, which was odd considering all of the sleeping he had done since the surgery.
When he woke up again, he was already an hour late for work.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Sheprick,” Walter muttered into the phone, still lying beneath the covers of his lately all-too-familiar bed. “There have been unforeseen complications. I’ll need a little more time.”
“How much time is a little more time?” Mr. Sheprick shot back.
“Probably the rest of this week.”
“The rest? The week has only now begun. You mean five days, then?”
“I have some healing to do. As it turns out, I had a very large tumor removed. At least fifty pounds.” Somewhere amidst his varied and plentiful sleep states of the last week, Walter had pored through countless scenarios before deeming this one the most effective and direct explanation for his sudden change in appearance. It was admittedly quite gross. But it was far less demeaning than were he to have had liposuction. And it was certainly far less demeaning and horrifying than the actual truth. Not to mention profoundly simpler.
“That’s impossible,” Mr. Sheprick replied, panicking Walter a touch since this was the first time he had tried out his painstakingly deliberated-over explanation.
“It’s quite possible, actually,” Walter defended, “inasmuch as it happened. The doctors did not anticipate as prolonged a recovery time. But as it turns out it’s going to take longer than…”
“Where was this fifty pound tumor hiding?”
“My abdomen. Turns out I wasn’t fat.” Just as Walter had anticipated, it felt exhilaratingly wonderful to be acquitted of the perception that the strains, stresses, and ravages of mundane existence had degraded his self-respect and concurrent life choices into a resultant caloric intake and sedentary lifestyle that had turned him considerably fat.
“So you had liposuction?” Mr. Sheprick replied, instantaneously sucking the air out of Walter’s newfound pride and replacing it with the stubborn truth that correcting such erroneous presuppositions about his mostly fictionalized explanation of his medical circumstance would be far more difficult than he had anticipated.
“I did not,” Walter fired back. “I had a tumor removed.”
“Whatever you say,” Mr. Sheprick offered. “This week it is, then. Be back next week. The machine must keep churning.”
“Thank you for your understanding.”
“I’m doing what the law mandates,” answered Mr. Sheprick without so much as a tinge of irony.
“Well…” Walter fumbled, “thank you for your compliance, then.”
“Yup,” said Mr. Sheprick, and hung up the phone.
Walter rolled over and closed his eyes.
He eventually fought his way back to sleep, wrestling first with the lingering guilt of having gained the weight that he had never really gained at all.
“Walter?” a gravelly squeak of a voice prodded Walter from his sleep.
Walter opened his eyes to find the twin at eye level and maybe a foot from his face. The twin was not crouching. Rather, this was his natural height.
Walter suddenly realized that the single thing he had been enjoying most about sleep lately was its ability to create pockets of time wherein the twin and everything involving the twin, for all practical purposes, did not really exist.
The twin smiled, giving the outward appearance of deep suffering.
“What?” Walter begrudged.
“Shouldn’t you be getting up?” the twin gently suggested more than asked, really.
“Why?” Walter demurred more than asked.
“For work,” the twin replied innocently. “Or just for life.”
“I’m healing. And you don’t need to look after me.”
“It’s been more than a week now, since the procedure.”
“I know my body. It needs more rest.”
“Let’s take a walk, at least. Or see some sights. The doctor said activity would be good. For both of us.”
“What sights? I’ve seen this city’s sights.”
“Everything is a sight to me,” the twin said as his eyes widened, the excitement in his tone made Walter want to sleep forever.
“Twin, I don’t want to do anything. Other than this. Minus the talking to you part.”
The twin took in a small gasp of air and his face contorted into his version of hurt, which was more of a startled, joyous expression but with a clearly wounded and sad quality in the eyes. The twin did his best, which was not very convincing at all, to hide his emotions as he shrugged his lower-hanging shoulder and turned to walk his choppy, violent steps out of the bedroom. Walter listened to the awkward, stabbing, arrhythmic gait make its way down the hall and back into the second bedroom that was supposed to be an office but had never made it past a storage room. Until now, anyway.
Walter rolled over and closed his eyes.
Yet again, he eventually fought his way back to sleep, wrestling this time with the guilt of having hurt the infuriatingly innocent, sweet, and delicate thing that now lived just one door down the hall from him.
Walter awoke shortly after sundown to an awful, shrill, violent honking sound assaulting its way up the hallway and into the bedroom, forcing Walter bolt upright, heart pounding.
“Veronica?” he yelled out.
Suddenly the aural assault stopped.
All was silent but for some whispers and some shooshing.
“Veronica?” he yelled again.
“What?” she called back, seemingly angry.
Walter did not appreciate her tone. He forced the covers back anyway and dragged himself out of bed. “Are you okay?” he asked, certainly angry, as he inched his way cautiously along the hall.
“Of course. I’m here with Twin.”
Walter eased his way into the living room to find exactly what Veronica described: she and Twin. They were discordantly calm in light of the heinous din of terror that had just fog-horned throughout the apartment. So calm that Walter considered it wholly plausible that someone might be hiding with a gun or a knife behind the couch, having instructed everyone to act normally or he would kill them all.
“What,” Walter asked, knowing his words might well trigger assassins to attack from hiding spaces he had never even realized existed in his own living room, “was that sound?”
“I’m sorry,” Twin offered up coyly, his skin turning pale, which Walter inferred was his version of blushing. “Veronica was making me laugh.”
Walter gave it a moment, but no trained killers struck. So he had no choice but to take this explanation at face value. It took a moment for this to process, though…
“That was a laugh?” Walter insisted before looking to Veronica and repeating himself. “That was laughing?”
Veronica looked to Twin, who was unsure of what to say or do, although his discordant facial expression suggested more of a suspicious leer than anything else.
“We were just having fun,” Veronica defended Twin sharply.
“Well, you scared the shit out of me,” Walter fired back.
“I don’t make fun of how you laugh!” Veronica snapped. She was sure that her anger was about more than just a laugh, but she nevertheless felt deeply justified in her response.
“I don’t laugh like the primal battle cry of a wounded boar!”
“Stop it right now, Walter!” Veronica shot to full volume. “You need to start being more considerate of others.”
“You’re the ones waking up a man recovering from surgery!” Walter yelled right back at her.
“The doctors say you’ve recovered just fine!”
“Fuck the doctors!”
“They saved your twin brother’s life!”
“Can I please have just one Goddamn thing that is what I say it is?!” Walter demanded. Then he started back down the hall and hurled himself back into bed and under the covers. He wasn’t sure how this rhetorical question directly related to the conversation they had been having, but asking it nevertheless felt deeply gratifying, as though perhaps it carried with it a deeper, poetic truth he had been unable to articulate until now, even if he still didn’t know what it meant.
Walter awoke in some indiscriminate part of the day, this time to the smell of bacon.
Veronica never made bacon.
Or eggs.
Or breakfast.
Or meals at all, for that matter.
But this was unmistakably bacon.
Walter looked to the clock, which read 6:12 a.m.
Veronica was never up at 6:12 a.m.
Or at any hour adjacent to it.
Walter wondered, as he pulled himself from bed, whether Twin had perhaps read some sort of history of the culinary arts.
In the kitchen, however, what Walter found was unthinkable. Veronica in an apron at the stove with Twin standing on both a step stool and his tip-toes, straining to watch the contents of a frying pan cook with the fervor of a child at a hole in a circus tent.
“You don’t cook,” Walter could not help but inform Veronica as he took a breath and swallowed the unexpected frustration surging up from his gut.
Contrary to his every impulse, Walter pulled a chair from the table for Twin to stand on so as to gain a higher and better vantage point. Twin defied the physics of balance and motion and somehow managed himself violently and totteringly atop the chair, where he relished his now bird’s-eye view of what Walter confirmed was bacon cooking in the pan.
“I can cook,” Veronica replied, her feelings clearly hurt.
“I didn’t say you couldn’t,” Walter did not retreat. “I said you don’t.”
“Why are you being such a fucking jerk lately, Walter?” Veronica groused.
Walter did not respond. He had nothing to say on this topic.
He sat down at the table.
“Would you like to go for a walk today, Walter?” asked Twin, just momentarily glancing away from the wonder of the cooking animal flesh.
“I’m good,” Walter shot back.
“Or maybe we could play a board game, the three of us?”
“We don’t have any board games,” stated Walter, flatly.
“Of course we do,” answered Veronica.
“We have never played a board game in this apartment.”
“Well,” Twin tried to intercede sunnily, “we could start today.”
“We most certainly have,” Veronica corrected, all but cutting Twin off altogether.
Walter just waved a hand in dismissal, which merely stoked the flames of Veronica’s burgeoning furor.
“You know, Walter,” she could not stop herself, “you have become a petulant infant about this whole situation.”
“About board games?”
“You know what I’m talking about! You know what I mean!”
“I’m the same person I was eight years ago, Veronica. You’re the one…” Walter started but decided to let his thought trail off…
“I’m the one what?”
But Walter remained silent. Mostly because he knew that whatever he might say right now would only escalate Veronica’s ire. But also because he knew that his silence on its own would prove sufficient to further escalate Veronica’s ire.
“Just say what you want to say, Walter!” Veronica barked, locking her stare smack onto the apathetic gaze of her boyfriend of many years.
By now, the bacon in the frying pan was done and Twin desperately wanted to tell Veronica so, but he dared not interrupt what was clearly an important moment for her. So he took a fork in his jagged hand and mimicked what he had seen her do with the previous strips once cooked. It took multiple efforts and all of his concentration to wrangle the meat onto the prongs of the utensil and to gently maneuver it over a plate with paper towels on it, but eventually he dropped the crisp strip atop several others. He then poked the fork at the strip further, gradually aligning this piece perfectly such that an untrained eye wouldn’t be able to differentiate his strip from all the others. Twin could not help but smile his pained grimace at this admittedly small but nevertheless gratifying accomplishment. He then pulled another strip from the uncooked hunk on the counter and dropped it into the frying pan. The sizzle it made sent a tinge of joy through Twin’s undoubtedly malformed but nevertheless apparently reliably functioning heart.
Walter had decided to vary his routine and took his post-bacon nap on the living room couch since Veronica and Twin had decided to go out for a walk. When he woke, he noticed the sun sneaking in around the edges of the drawn blinds, suggesting that it was mid-day already. But he did not move.
He had been lying there for some time still when he heard Twin’s awful bellow mixing with Veronica’s staccato chuckle out on the street. He listened to these same sounds grow gradually louder as the two came into the building and up to the apartment. A few feet from the door, Veronica and Twin seemed to make a concerted effort to stifle their laughter before opening the door and coming in.
“Well, pardon me…” Twin could not help but whisper from just inside the door, seemingly mimicking someone they had encountered on their outing, someone with an exaggerated, snide tone and a tendency to hang on certain syllables too long. Veronica burst out into uncontrollable laughter.
Walter had always enjoyed the sound of her laugh. It was actually one of his favorite things about her. Especially when he had been the one who had coaxed the laughter from her. Not three seconds into this gentle thought, Twin could no longer hold back his heinous guffaw. Veronica must have clamped her hands over Twin’s mouth, slightly muting the cacophony while exacerbating her own hysteria. When mixed with the mutant wail of Twin’s laughter, and all of the ways in which life seemed so irreconcilably different to Walter now, the very same sound that Walter loved now shot him through with piercing pangs of frustration and resentment that snapped taut nearly every muscle in his body, yanking him bolt upright.
“Hey,” he called out, somehow still groggy.
“Walter,” Twin started in as he pushed further into the room and hurried to the couch, “we had so much fun!”
Walter had nothing to say about this. He just sort of pursed his lips into what could be interpreted as a mild smile.
“The people, the food, the cars,” Twin went on, “the conversations, the architecture, the sounds, the smells, the stories. There’s a whole universe in just this one town.”
“You get used to it,” Walter insisted.
Walter looked to Veronica who was aglow with an exuberant smile that illuminated her face and bled into her eyes. A smile that made Walter feel equal parts sad and angry and unexpectedly prompted him to say…
“I might go for a walk myself.”
He placed his feet on the floor, then. But suddenly felt compelled to qualify, “For the exercise.”
Veronica and Twin, or some combination of the two anyway, seemed to gasp with approval.
Walter could not sleep anymore, anyway. Nor could he stand the thought of hearing any more of this laughter. Or seeing any more smiles, particularly ones like Veronica’s, which he remembered well but had not seen in years.
So Walter stood up.
“You should,” Veronica replied, shifting her broad, warm smile into a different kind of smile, a more pointed and intentional one.
“Would you like company?” Twin offered. “My legs and joints are tired, what with them being so malformed and all. But I would gladly endure any discomfort just to keep you company.”
Walter said nothing in response. He just pulled on his shoes and left, heading towards the one place in the universe he knew full well he absolutely should not go.
“Walter?” Eleanor asked from the doorway of her apartment. “How did you know where…?” she trailed off as her eyes locked upon Walter’s frame, comparatively emaciated since the last time she had seen him and causing her to ask a different question altogether. “What happened to you?”
“I had surgery,” Walter explained.
“Liposuction?”
“No,” Walter tensed up. “I wasn’t fat. It was a benign tumor.”
Eleanor’s eyes narrowed as she took this information in.
And then she asked a follow-up question that Walter had not even come close to anticipating throughout all of his worry over and analysis of this sensitive topic…
“Can I see?”
“Can…? The…? You want to…? “ Walter’s impulse to respond overrode his ability to make sense, resulting in a rambling babble of sorts. “Are you asking…? So, about the…? My scar…you’re saying?”
Eleanor took Walter’s yammering as an affirmative response, taking his right forearm in her left hand and stepping back from the thin rectangle of space in between the door and the doorframe in which she had been standing. She drew the door to her apartment further open and pulled Walter inside and past her. Once she closed the door, Eleanor reached immediately down and lifted up Walter’s shirt.
“Oooh,” she replied, wide-eyed and looking to Walter for permission to keep going.
Walter wasn’t sure what, specifically, he was being asked to permit, but he found himself silently granting it with a nod. And before he knew it, Eleanor had started to finger the sutures still tightly cinching his gradually healing incision.
“Did you keep it?” Eleanor asked.
“What?” Walter replied.
“The tumor.”
“Oh. No,” answered Walter with more than a modicum of alarm in his tone.
While he was significantly disturbed by this question, he was simultaneously delighted that Eleanor seemed to fully accept, perhaps even embrace, his fabricated explanation of his medical circumstance. “I didn’t want a reminder of…” His speech faculties siphoned instantly off as Eleanor wrapped her right hand around his cock.
Her left hand remained on his abdomen, her fingers grazing the surface of his scar.
“Can I lick it?” Eleanor asked.
Of Walter’s two body parts currently in Eleanor’s dominion, Walter presumed that really only one of them necessitated overt permission to be licked in circumstances such as those currently transpiring. Thus, as indecipherable as such a desire seemed to Walter, he was left to deduce that Eleanor was asking her question not of his genitalia but of his scar.
In regards to answering this question, however, he suddenly found himself paralyzed even beyond his current stuttering state. The question was a funny one, made up, as he saw it, of several strands. There was the medical component, regarding which he presumed that proceeding in the affirmative was not a good idea, even though he had technically not been given any explicit guidelines per se regarding the wound being licked. He had received directives regarding keeping the wound clean of bacteria but, not being a doctor or even a particularly attentive student during his high school Biology classes, Walter could not be certain whether or not the mouth presented a bacterial threat to a healing wound. While he innately imagined so, he had often heard it said that a dog’s mouth was the cleanest part of its body. As far as he knew the same was true of human beings.
There was also, however, the sexual component of the question, regarding which Walter had no frame of reference at all as to the best way to answer. In truth, he could not remember having been asked these exact words within the context of any sexual circumstance before, or within the context of any non-sexual circumstance, either. So he really had nothing to go by.
Fortunately or unfortunately, and Walter truly was dead split on which, before he could further struggle to conjure some sort of criteria by which to make a decision, Eleanor started running her tongue along the agitated line that marred his abdomen. Even as the alternately warm and cold but consistently wet sensation of a very attractive woman flicking her tongue along his week-and-a-half-healed surgical wound was washing over him in all of its unfamiliarity, Walter still could not come to a definitive stance on whether or not he enjoyed this unexpected act and, in turn, on whether or not it would be more prudent to answer this question in the affirmative or the negative should he ever be asked it again.
And then Eleanor moaned.
A heavy, guttural, densely felt moan. An involuntary and deeply erotic moan. In the nineteen years that Walter had been officially having sex with women, not bothering to count the earlier dry hump, petting, fumbling phases, he had never once heard a woman quite so…
Walter did not know how to describe it.
Not that Veronica hadn’t moaned before.
Or Walter’s handful of other partners.
But this moan wasn’t like those moans. Those moans seemed, to Walter, to be intended as positive feedback. And Walter appreciated the open communication, he honestly did. But this moan. This one seemed spontaneous, as though it just escaped. This one seemed unaware of its audience. This moan seemed like it would have sounded like this even if Eleanor were alone in this room.
This moan also prompted Eleanor to remove her fingers from Walter’s wound, placing her hand instead underneath her skirt and in between her legs where she began quite aggressively playing with herself. Had Walter not known any better, he might have thought that Eleanor was punishing herself.
Even more troubling than the violence of this act, however, was the undeniable fact that Walter was so turned on right now that it suddenly required all of his earnest concentration not to finish.
He held as still as he could, flexing not a single muscle.
He tried to think about food, since nothing made him feel less sexy than eating food. Garlic and cumin and vegetables and protein.
But Eleanor’s moan turned into several more moans, unpredictably erratic in character, duration, and volume. And at some point, she clawed her right breast out of the cup of her bra and over the plunging collar of her blouse. It was bouncing and swaying to its own rhythm now, seemingly independent of the moan and the sharp, violent grind of her hips. And Walter could not help it. He flexed the tiniest muscle. Somewhere in his back. Because he knew it would feel so fucking good just to press himself, even if ever so slightly, into the unpredictable symphony that was Eleanor right here and right now, perhaps never to happen quite like this ever again. And suddenly Walter was nowhere but here, completely present. Everything swelled and surged and hovered and held…
And then everything turned sharp. Her moan, her motion, her grip took on an edge.
And the room turned heavy, everything instantly and completely stripped of its odd romance in the span of some split-second the passing of which Walter had not even noticed.
It all just slammed to a stop.
The lights now were harsh.
The room was suffocating him.
And time itself must have skipped as it was suddenly achingly slow.
Eleanor was lying supine now, perhaps finished on the floor, deflated and limp in front of him. Her arm was still propped up, her hand still wrapped around Walter’s now-flaccid genital. Her hand had grown cold and heavy, as though setting in the hardening, cold viscosity randomly spattered about parts of Walter’s groin.
Walter looked down at Eleanor.
She looked just about like any woman drifting off to sleep on any floor might. Beautiful in her own right, but whatever burning adoration or desire had brought him here had severely receded if not vanished. And he was not proud of that.
A swell of anxiety overtook his faculties.
Walter could not help but wonder, as the anxiety plumed and shifted into a cold, black, hollow shame settling into his every synapse and fiber, whether he was a man who could truly be trusted to love any human being at all.
Walter let this feeling wash over him as there was nothing else he could figure to do with his shame.
He considered sneaking out of the apartment, but that required some sort of impulse to avoid this really shitty feeling, which he figured was likely the very least he could feel on Veronica’s behalf right about now.
On top of this, Walter simply could not be sure that whatever had just transpired here was not actually a business transaction and he could not bear the thought of adding theft to his list of questionable acts right now, should he up and leave without a word.
At the same time, he felt uncomfortable stirring Eleanor, even with a gentle comment about how much he had enjoyed himself. This felt far too intimate and vulnerable for two people that just did whatever it was that they had just done. He would not, for example and after all, tell a check-out clerk upon the purchase of some groceries, “That was incredible. Did you enjoy it, too?”
He also did not feel right, however, simply asking for his bill at the risk of reducing whatever had just transpired into nothing more than a mere conversation with a grocery clerk. There was, after all, the distinct possibility that Eleanor viewed this encounter as entirely separate from her business practices, as something much, much more than just that. Or even just moderately more than that. But she still might very well have done whatever she had just done simply because she felt like doing it.
Or, even more so, perhaps whatever just occurred really meant something to her. Perhaps she felt the same longing that Walter had felt, building, tugging, and looming.
To this end, Walter considered saying absolutely nothing at all right now, instead simply waiting for her to awaken on her own. And then to see what happened. Granted, this was, by default, precisely what he was already doing, but he was now considering doing so deliberately instead.
Whatever his next move, however, Walter’s tenacious shame made one thing readily apparent to him: whatever it was that had just happened here today was absolutely and entirely untenable. And while he clearly could not completely eliminate the last hour of his life from existence altogether, he was nevertheless best to figure out a way to make it seem as though the last hour of his life had been eliminated from existence altogether. Especially to anyone that knew him.
Just then Eleanor stirred, rolling onto her side and, at long last, releasing Walter.
She settled right back into repose, exhaling and easing off toward slumber again.
“Hello there,” Walter coughed up before instantly deriding such a ridiculous choice of words given the moment and the circumstance. But he had to say something because returning to the moment he had just been in would be absolutely more than any human being with even a semblance of a heart could possibly bear. And he was precisely such a human being at the very least.
Eleanor inhaled sharply and her eyes popped open.
She let out a sigh.
Then she reached up onto the nearby coffee table and retrieved a pair of glasses which Walter had not noticed until now.
He had never even known that Eleanor wore glasses.
He had always had a thing for women in glasses.
Not all women in glasses. But certain women in certain glasses.
And as Eleanor pushed her hair back out of her face, making room for her frames before sliding them on and looking up at Walter with a smile, it became insurmountably clear to Walter that this woman and these glasses both fell squarely within the realm of the thing he had always had.
And just like that, Walter wanted Eleanor all over again.