Blue Stew (Second Edition)

by Woodland, Nathaniel

  Walter wondered if Nigel, as a result, might’ve covertly said something—via a quick text, maybe—to Henry before he got there. When Henry pulled in around six, the closest he got to the topic of Walter’s near-death experience was, when they first saw each other, he shook his head and said, “Wow, Walter. I’m so glad you’re okay.”

  While that day (at least the portion of it that found Walter conscious) had been considerably warmer and brighter than the one before, the days overall still were getting shorter fast, and it seemed like the four of them hadn’t been lounging in the living room long at all before Walter noticed that it was near-black outside. It might’ve had something to do with how his brain had been through such dramatic movement and rearrangement that an old, neglected memory got dislodged. With Nigel and Henry and himself sitting in front of the TV, casually chatting as night fell, Walter was reminded of a time when they’d all hang out at Nigel’s parent’s house after school, surround the TV in their similarly clean and spotless living room, and, as night fell outside, they would play—

  “Zelda!” Walter finished the thought out loud.

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t you have the old Zelda on your Wii? Let’s play it—we never finished it, did we?”

  “No,” replied Nigel, “because you bought that dumb boxing game before we could, and then bullied us all into playing that instead,” but Nigel was already on his feet, moving towards the shelf with the Nintendo.

  “Sorry. Really, I am.”

  Nigel snickered as he grabbed a remote.

  They played Ocarina of Time for nearly two hours, trading off control of Link freely throughout—though, Nigel took charge of the majority of the trickier sections, just as it’d been done back in the day. Walter allowed himself to become even more engrossed in the classic videogame than he had when they’d played it as open-minded, imaginative middle schoolers. When Nigel put two frozen pepperoni pizzas into the oven and pulled a case of root beer out of the fridge, it was then ensured that that night would be every bit as good as the short but lovely afternoon.

  Initially everyone was alarmed when Walter declared that he wanted to go home, especially because it wasn’t very late at the time (for a Friday night). This reaction was tempered after they all internally acknowledged that none of them had seen Walter in such light spirits in a long time—none of his usual danger signs were on display, such as Nigel and Jamie had witnessed on the drive back from the party last night. When Walter reasoned his declaration out loud, the unease shifted to guarded optimism.

  “I just want to clean up some of my shit before winter hits, you know—I got a lot of shit to throw out, too . . .”

  “Yeah, I can drive you,” Henry said. “I’ve been meaning to do some cleaning, too.”

  “You guys do live like slobs,” Nigel remarked.

  “Well you can water your pretty flowers while we’re out, you sally,” said Henry, giving the ferns hanging above them a sarcastic look.

  • • •

  Henry tapped on his horn as he pulled away.

  Walter, stamping over the yellowing grass that had overtaken what at one time had been a woodchip walkway, raised a hand in acknowledgement.

  The house Walter rented was one small step above a trailer, and he had no doubt that it had been brought here initially by a tractor-trailer, surely escorted by a pair or flashing cars warning of the “Wide Load.”

  His house was one of eight identical ones scattered about a small patch of land that held no advantage over a trailer park, except that one could call it a “housing community,” which sounds nicer. The housing community was owned and operated by a businessman from out of town who Walter knew only as Steve. Walter paid Steve two-fifty a month plus utilities, and even at that price, in the handful of years he’d lived there, never more than half of the houses had been occupied.

  Walter took the three steps up to his front door with little enthusiasm, keyed the locks mechanically, and then opened the door with an audible sigh.

  The walls inside were paneled with dark, plastic imitation wood, and the floors were carpeted with a hard, cheap something that would’ve been more fitting on a mini-golf course—it was even colored dark green.

  The place didn’t need any help looking unattractive. Still, Walter’s recent lifestyle had obliterated the boundaries of mere unattractiveness, dragging the place deep into the realm of disgusting.

  The hallway he now walked down was caked with dirt tracked in from negligent shoes, and on the floor, generally below a row of coat hooks, was a collection of muddy sweaters and odorous socks discarded after work. The living room was far worse; Walter might’ve attempted to avert his eyes from all the filth as he waded through it, but only if there had been anywhere safe to look: Countless trays of multi-week-old microwavable dinners and paper napkins were tossed about the coffee table, over the sofa, and many, many more had fallen unheeded to the floor, mingled with lopsided stacks of dirty plates and cups and utensils.

  Walter knew the kitchen was still worse than all this, and in this case he could avert his eyes as he walked past the kitchen door. Unfortunately, he didn’t think to hold his breath, and the stink emanating from the room had him gagging and quick stepping onwards, slipping comically over a mound of junk mail as he fled.

  He would tackle the kitchen second, he vowed.

  First, though, there was the bedroom.

  Walter kicked open the door and stood in the doorway for a lingering second.

  The floor way layered with dirty laundry, yes, but—speaking relatively—the bedroom didn’t appear so horrible, owing to the fact that he was least active in it.

  However, under his bedside drawer, sealed in a Ziploc bag, were things that weighed infinitely more heavily on Walter’s consciousness than whatever was rotting in the kitchen.

  He stepped over the soft, lumpy floor towards the drawer. His head swam as he visualized his intentions: upending the bag’s entire contents into the toilet, pulling the lever, and watching as the twisting water strips him of his life’s chemical crutches.

  Chapter 12 – Victim Number Two

  Walter woke a little past noon the next day to the ringing of his landline phone. His eyes flipped open reluctantly and then fell shut again over the span of three full tones before the noise was registered. He sat upright, but it was as though his consciousness had been left behind on the pillow; he just stared at the wall at the foot of his bed, vacant. When the phone rang again he came to his senses and swiveled out of bed and onto his feet.

  At first, old reflexes had him high-stepping over his floor—like someone wading through a shallow swamp—but then he remembered that nothing was there; all his clothes were either folded back in their drawers or were stuffed into the overloaded laundry hamper.

  Walter only made it to the door as the sixth and final ring rang out. Still, he staggered into the living room and plopped himself down on the couch, next to the recently uncovered side-table, which was home to the one functional phone in the house (no cell-phone service reached the housing community). He figured if it’d been at all important, the caller would try again soon.

  Then he remembered: At one point last night he had discovered five messages on his answering machine from local media stations, all requesting comments or compensated interviews relating to his “terrible discovery” and his “heroic escape from Timothy Glass.” Most likely, Walter now realized, it’d been another media outlet that had just called.

  Still utterly uninterested in the prospect of subjecting himself to an interview, Walter thought about shuffling back to bed.

  It seemed like too much work at that moment, though.

  He rubbed and picked at his gunky, tired eyes. He raised his head and blinked, testing his eyesight.

  Evidently his handiwork hadn’t sunk in over the short night of sleep, as it was almost like rediscovering his living room, seeing it now. A slow wave of deep satisfaction filled Walter’s chest as he saw with fresh eyes what he had don
e last night.

  There was not a spot of trash or a misplaced possession to be seen. No mountains of microwavable, disposable food containers, or crumpled napkins, or never-to-be-read junk magazines or letters. No stacks of abandoned plates or cups, or any of the startling variety of other things that he’d discovered muddled into the mess, working so very late into the night.

  It really did look like a brand new living room. Well over half of the visible surface area had been liberated. All that lingered were a few stubborn food stains on the couch and the rug, and a musky odor that already seemed to have thinned-out from the time last night when he had collapsed onto his bed.

  The phone sounded again, making Walter snap out of his self-congratulatory daze.

  Tired reflexes won over his recent conclusion that it’d probably been a media rep calling moments ago, and so he picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Good morning, bud,” it was Nigel, anyways. “I know you said you weren’t interested, but you have got to see this. Turn on channel 8 right now.”

  Walter reached for the remote on his sparkling-clean coffee table, “Why?”

  “Victim Number Two is alive. He’s being interviewed right now.”

  “What?”

  “The dude was seriously messed up, mentally. He’s been in hiding all this time—turn on your damn TV!”

  Walter pressed the power button, and the big, boxy television on the far wall whined to life. The next two buttons pressed were 0 and 8, and, after a moment’s delay, a grainy, warped image appeared.

  “Fuck. I gotta fuck with the rabbit ears. I’ll call you back.”

  “Okay. Hurry!”

  Walter put down the phone and the remote and hastened across the empty room. He grabbed the portable antennas on top of the TV and rotated them until he heard a voice speaking below him.

  “That’s right,” the voice said, still tinged with fuzz.

  Walter backed away and looked down at the TV set. There was a face—also overlaid with negligible fuzz—the face of a man who appeared to be in the midst of a hunger strike. His cheeks were high and concave and showed the nicks of a recent, hasty shave, and his hair was long but thinning above his forehead. When Walter locked onto the man’s eyes, however, everything else fell into his periphery: they instantly brought Walter back to the night this all started, when he had seen those very eyes glinting as they were carried away with the high, raging river . . .

  “And you’ve been holed up here since then?” an even, practiced voice off-camera asked.

  “Yes, never left. I was aware that I was ahead on the rent, and that they wouldn’t know I was gone at work until they checked the books . . . but I did wonder why my brother or Dad didn’t call here after a few days . . . we’d been wrangling over family money . . .”

  “They both thought you were dead,” advised the off-camera man.

  “Yes, apparently.”

  “So why did you stop going to work?”

  “Well,” Victim Number Two appeared to lose himself in thought for a moment. “I was confused. It’s a powerful drug, that Blue Stew. But I didn’t . . . I didn’t know I had been on a drug, until the report came out last night. I believed I’d lost my mind. I’m not sure if I’ve found it yet, to be honest with you. I’m just getting comfortable again with the idea that maybe I’m not a lunatic . . .”

  “That’s another question. You say you had avoided all our coverage on what has been popularly dubbed ‘The Night of Horrors’? How?”

  “No offence Alex, but I’ve never been a fan of local news. Sensationalist rubbish, mostly. I never tune in purposefully. But, I was flipping the channels last night . . . and there was that face. Can’t forget a face like that. Timothy Glass.”

  “The man who slipped you and four other victims his homemade drug, by way of ordinary coffee, while on what seemed an ordinary one-time labor job.”

  “No, it didn’t seem very ordinary—but the pay was great.”

  “Turned out the pay was greater than you ever could’ve expected,” the off-screen voice supplemented significantly.

  Victim Number Two chuckled, and said sarcastically, “I see what you did there.”

  Walter, standing in his living room glued to his TV set, at that moment decided that he really enjoyed this man. He would’ve loved to see the presumably-affronted expression on the unseen interviewer’s face as a few off-beats passed by in silence.

  Still, he dove back into it smoothly enough, “And why do you think you were able to overcome the horrendous drug, when the four others weren’t?”

  Victim Number Two shrugged, “Dumb chance. I saw the river, and I imagined the high ice-water ripping me along, smashing me apart on the rocks . . . Dumb chance is the only reason I’m still here. I was channeled safely through the high, fast current, and I only got a few bruises; nothing severe. Probably hypothermia too, but when I eventually pulled myself out of the water, I was still in no place to be concerned about that kind of thing.”

  “From all we have learned of the night’s timeframe, the drug seemed to have worn off for you while some of the other victims were still suffering powerfully from it. Was there anything in your mind that pulled you back? Family? Loved-ones?”

  “No. Sorry, no uplifting wrinkle here. If anything, the ice-water might’ve had a blunting effect on the drug. Might’ve helped me sober-up quicker than the rest . . .”

  “So you sobered up while still hurtling down the river. That must’ve been terrifying. Tell us about that.”

  “No. It wasn’t terrifying at all. I didn’t sober up all the way. I reached this middling point where I started thinking, you know, maybe I should think about this more. And then, randomly, I caught on the shoreline, and I pulled myself out.”

  “Then what did you do, lost in the woods, alone and freezing?”

  Victim Number Two laughed quietly, and Walter laughed with him: The reporter didn’t know how not to sensationalize, even as Victim Two rebuffed him so entertainingly with his blithe words and tone. This was fast solidifying Walter’s choice to avoid giving any interviews himself, in fact.

  “I walked. I just walked. I didn’t mind the cold. I didn’t mind being lost, not in that sense. I was too lost mentally to care. I considered killing myself a few times . . . but I guess I never did. Then I reached the road, recognized where I was, and I walked through the night back here, to my apartment.”

  “You say you never tried to contact anyone. What have you done with yourself all week long?”

  “I slept. I slept so hard that it’s a wonder I ever woke. Then I sat, borderline comatose, contemplating suicide, watching TV. I only ate after I’d been here two days.”

  “And you made no effort to retrieve your car from the field?”

  “I had no need for it.”

  There was a pause in which Walter could almost see the unseen man nod his head.

  “Any guess as to why your place here never was searched, or your landlord never was alerted to the situation?”

  “Poor police work and a lazy landlord?”

  “Okay. . . . You indicated that your mind has not yet returned to normal, even after learning the truth of what happened to you that night. Obviously you’re traumatized. Do you plan on seeing a therapist, now?”

  “What would a therapist do for me?” For the first time, Walter found Victim Number Two’s tone to be less amusing and a little more disconcerting.

  “Well . . . help you sort out your real frame of mind from your drugged frame of mind?”

  “That’s the problem. There’s truth in what I felt while on the drug, the Blue Stew. The world has never made more sense than it did that night, when I threw myself into the river. It has slowly made less sense, ever since.”

  An alarming shudder occurred in Walter’s mind. He bent over fast and fumbled for the TV set’s power button.

  He didn’t want to hear any more.

  Deep down, Walter knew that his refurbished frame of mind was in the fragile
infantile stages—he couldn’t expose himself to these kinds of ideas yet. It was too dangerous.

  When life is what you make it, truth becomes relative.

  • • •

  Nigel was perfectly willing to act as Walter’s chaperone that day.

  It began with an innocent request for a lift to the dump, where Walter wanted to drop off the four overloaded bags of trash that he’d stacked outside his front door. Then, when Nigel got there, Walter realized he really should take the opportunity to use Nigel’s washer and dryer, too. After that, Walter reluctantly—only because he knew the answer would certainly be yes—asked for a ride to the nearest supermarket, twenty minutes away, where he wanted to replenish his food supply with more nutritious products than the usual frozen dinners.

  It was only after Walter had unloaded all the bags of food into the fridge and cupboards, and had started folding his clean laundry on the living room floor, that Nigel, who had suspiciously stated that he wanted to hang around, brought it up.

  “Walter, if you want I can help you sort out your insurance claim with the van. Then, maybe we can swing down to the used car shop on Fuller Street.”

  Walter looked up after tossing a pair of folded boxers into their designated pile. He sighed before saying, “Wow. Yeah. That would be amazing. You’re amazing.”

  “Gosh, thanks.”

  • • •

  At the end of that busy Saturday, Walter chose to host what he dubbed a “housewarming party” at his “new” place. Through the afternoon, in his few spare moments of thought, he had conceived it as a larger gathering including many people from his extended, neglected pool of friends—those that had come to his first, failed intervention, mostly. But, as the day wore on and wore him down, the concept downsized in his mind to just the three usual suspects.

  The choice to downsize was impeded for a while by one mental snag. At the core of the initial concept had been the idea that he could have Maddie Wendell over, and from there reassess her interest in him without taking any large, awkward steps. The snag snapped loose when he realized that the thought of taking a large, awkward step with Maddie did not bother him at all. When he thought about it, such social inhibitions seemed pretty small after all he’d been through.