More About Our Upstairs Neighbor.

 

There's a dark-haired man who lives on the third floor of our house. It seems to us that he moved in about two years ago during my wife's surgery, so we weren't playing especially close attention. Some of the folks in my circle have hinted that he might work at the local TV station. That doesn't fit, though, with the lumbering gait that is his wont just before he calls it quits for the night. Don't get me wrong. We've never actually seen him up close. It could be that we never saw him at all, except maybe across a field at a park about six miles from here. Other than that, there's been the odd grainy photo glimpsed through a partially obscured window at our neighbor's time-share in the Lower Valley. The sounds in our heads work quite well to keep us alert and up to date. The only fires that he's been known to set are small-bore affairs which bear all the telltale signs of stress-induced nostalgia.

It seemed to us that the most pragmatic way to approach this situation would be to arrange for a meeting with a guy who knew our upstairs neighbor's ex-wife when she was just starting out in the South Crenshaw section of Los Valdes, Idaho.  When he saw us at his door in the wee hours of a recent Wednesday morning, he reached into the pocket of his bathrobe and pulled out something about the size and shape of a postage stamp. The thing was, though, this was no postage stamp. Not by a long shot. In fact, I'm not even sure it was alive. It could be there was something 'in the air', because, after I came to, my wife announced, quite abruptly I thought, that she wanted a divorce. I advised caution since we didn't really know what—or who!—we were dealing with.

The first person to come down the hill that night showed identification to the effect that his 'name' was Phil Patmin. We took turns running his numbers until we hit 'paydirt'. It turns out that no one ever decided to act like that at all. In fact, all meal plans at the College had been canceled the previous Spring due to the Ebola outbreak.  Now that I've been living in my van for all of two weeks and my girlfriend has finally gotten her drinking license, we plan on driving down South and setting up a Quarterblaine Shop on the campus of BGNL. That should see us through until my Dad finishes his prison term. For maybe the first time ever, it's possible that he'll show us his collection. Rome wasn't built in a day, but you could've fooled me, is all I'm saying, okay?

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