Stranger at the Door

photo by Industry Is Virtue.

If I was to draw a character right now, and I mean bring him right through the front door and into the living room, who would he be? Let’s choose a villain. A man of moderate height, stocky, with a flattened nose like a boxer. Coarse whiskers grizzled black and gray. He wears a thick sweater of itchy wool the color of coal. Faded jeans. Black work boots. He looks like he works on a ship. The ledge of his brow darkens his eyes. He comes into the room, stomps the snow off his boots and onto my hardwood floors. He’s got a few flakes of snow in his hair that start to melt the moment he steps inside.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Does it matter?”

“Yeah, I think it does. It helps me see you as real.”

“Real, huh? I’m talking to you right now. Doesn’t that make me real?”

“That helps. Helps a lot, but give me your name. Seriously.”

“Okay, it’s Kurt.”

“Interesting.”

“Why do you say that?” he asks. “Is it because it is the name of your childhood friend, the bad kid down the street who latched onto you that one summer? Kurt the bully.”

“Hey now, that’s not fair,” I reply, a little unsettled. “I’m the writer here. I get to know everything about you, but you’re not supposed to know about me. How did you know about him?”

“Because I come from the same place as your memories of Kurt. Kurt and I are from the same neighborhood, so to speak. I know all about him, how you used to play boot hockey at Meadow Lake rink, and about how he took a shit over the side of the boards once. You looked over the boards. It was steaming in the snow.”

“Gross! I don’t want to think about that.”

“And remember how he told you he walked in on his mom and dad having sex once? How did that go exactly? She was standing in front of him with her robe opened. Or was it that she was giving him a blowjob? That’s right, you learned the word blow job from Kurt. When you first heard it, you thought it must be like a “snow job,” where you rub snow in somebody’s face, so a blow job must be when you pin somebody down and blow in their face.” He snickers.

“Okay, I’ve had about enough of that. Are you him, only older now?”

“No. Kurt was just a troubled kid, a bad influence that your parents didn’t want hanging around. I’m a little more damaged than he was, a little more dangerous. I’ve still got some good in me, but something happened that made me turn.”

“Something about your sister?” I ask.

“Or was it my wife? Or did I lose a child? I don’t know, you tell me. You’re the writer.”

“You watched one of your buddies drown on a fishing boat in Alaska,” I decide. “What’s your favorite color?”

“Silver. It was the color of my dad’s fishing boat, the color of a Mercedes Benz, the color of bullets that kill werewolves, the color of the coins that bought chocolate ice cream cones for me and my big sister.”

“So we’re back to your older sister.”

He looks at me pensively. “Leave her alone, okay?”

“Don’t worry, she’s still around. But I think we have to do something with her. You know; plot-wise. But let’s get back to your buddy drowning in Alaska. Was it an accident?”

“Yeah,” he answers.

“Good, I don’t want this to be some TV drama about a murder on rough seas. So if it was an accident, what’s the problem?”

“It was my fault. I let the line go. It snapped tight, caught him by the legs, swept him overboard. I even had him by the arm for a few seconds, but my hands were slick with chum. He slipped away.”

“Sorry. So how does guilt turn you into a villain?”

“It wasn’t what happened on the boat. It was what came afterwards, when I got on land.”

We continued talking like this, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. I offered him tea, but he took coffee; strong, black, with a sprinkle of cocoa powder in it. The cocoa powder showed me that there was still a soft spot inside of him, and that he did not want to degrade into some tough guy, thug stereotype. We went back and forth until it got late, trying to figure out what had happened with him before finding his way to my house. Had he run into some trouble while hitching down from Alaska? Did he have a drinking problem, beat up a woman, or did he somehow get wrapped up in his older sister’s problems? He wanted to turn his life around; I could see that, but I could also see him fighting the compulsion to knock me unconscious, steal my ATM card and my car keys and go on the run.

For my own safety, I had to find a part for him, and fast. Trouble was, I had lied when I told him that I was not going to kill off his sister. She was already dead, and he had something to do with it. I had no proof of any of this, and I hadn’t written about any of it yet, but I saw it the moment he walked through the door and stomped snow all over my hardwood floors. To figure it out, I had to get him to tell me. It was a part of the process.