Close Encounters

My leg hair felt like the innards of a golf ball digging their way out of a life sentence on my thighs as I make my way through the alley entrance to my apartment complex on a summer evening. I am having very practical thoughts about the capacity of my mouth. If I didn't have teeth, imagine how much more food I could fit in it! I take several steps past a homeless guy collecting bottles from the dumpster and through the gate to my complex before the guilt sets in. There is usually somebody in one of the alley dumpsters at this hour, but I'm not usually having such lustful thoughts about food, which will most likely be covered in cheese and hot sauce and other unnecessary enhancements, while the guy in the dumpster will probably be testing very different limits of his digestive system than heat and lactose tolerance. Thus imbued with a sense of moral obligation, I burst into my kitchen to heat some mediocre leftover beans that I was suddenly glad to have kept around. I crudely fried an egg and sliced some sharp Tillamook cheddar and designated even portions of each with intention to deposit them into several corn tortillas that were heating in the oven. While I'm waiting I poke my head out my bedroom window (my apartment is at the end of the building nearest the dumpsters) to make sure the guy is still there. I yell out to him, "Hey! Uhh, are you hungry?" He looks up and without hesitation says, "I'm ok, but thank you!" He sounded crisp and content, albeit distracted by the new bag he was tearing open to search. I refused to believe this, so I press on, "Uhh, are you sure? Y-you're in a dumpster..." He says, "I know..." then pauses and looks down at his next bag. He looks back up at me and continues, "...but I'm not hungry." I go back into the kitchen and package his meal in a sealable bag with napkins and a wedge of lime. No way is he telling the truth, but I didn't want to insult him by continuing to state the obvious. Even though I'm sure he's probably not paying attention to my every action as closely as I am, I find an excuse to go outside and "coincidentally" walk past him. I decided to wash my bath towels. As I leave the laundry room with my bag of egg and bean tacos with a slice of lime, and which I at the last moment decided to also add a sprig of fresh cilantro to, I call to him over the fence, "No seriously, I am not going to eat this. I'm going out of town tomorrow and this food is going to spoil, so I'd rather it not go to waste." He smiles, "No really, I'm not hungry right now and I ate well earlier." I pressed on, "Well perhaps you'll want them later on. Please take them!" No wonder he's homeless, the man doesn't know how to plan ahead! "Look man, the shelter really takes care of me, and I think I'll be back on my feet in a few days. But thank you anyway." He pushes his cart to the next complex, and I leave the bag on top of a car, hoping that if not him, someone else will be humble enough to accept a free meal.

The following night I am passed out on my couch with a melted bowl of ice cream on the armrest and, courtesy of my ex-girlfriend's Netflix account, some horrible documentary about life on other planets on loop on my laptop. It is 3AM and my sleep is interrupted by the sound of that bowl of melted ice cream falling off the arm rest. I am slow to react because I am not surprised, as the arm rest is very thin. In fact I passed out expecting the bowl to fall, but I didn't care enough to risk interfering with the prospect of robust sleep. I'm still not fully awake, so I try not to concern myself with how much of it spilled on the floor. I decide to remain on the couch for the night. I hold on to sleep in my hands like a jello mold that wasn't quite set all the way. These are my thoughts as I debate snipping the last thread supporting consciousness or if it is worth it to write down the line, "Ribbed Tupperware shape is gone; now I am grasping onto the largest lump" in the nearest notebook in the hopes that it would become a poem. Then I shift to my left and a warm sneaker kicks me in the shoulder. It is at this point I scream and jump and notice someone climbing in through the window behind my couch. Abandoning his attempt at stealth, the intruder falls into the room and says, "What are you doing here?" I wield my fallen ice cream bowl as a weapon and turn on the light... it's the guy from the dumpster. "What do you mean "What am I doing here"? I fucking live here, get out before I call the cops!" He sits on my couch and says, "Yeah, but you said you were going to be out of town." For some reason my first thoughts when he sits down are "So I guess it was he who knocked over my ice cream bowl?" and "Now that I'm awake, should I write down that line about the Jello mold." Too distracted to tell anything but the truth, I say, "Yeah, but... you said you were gonna be on your feet in a few days!" He nodded and said, "Yeah, from robbing your house!" Against my better judgement, I ask him, "Don't you feel bad trying to rob someone who tried to give you food?" He fixes his posture and says, "Nope. You fit the profile of someone who deserves exactly this. You live alone and judging by your meticulously chosen attire and that satchel you carry, you're an artist of some kind. You were eager to offer me an elaborately crafted meal that took at least 10 minutes to put together. When people do this it generally means that they're more interested in sharing the product of their labor than actually helping someone." My guard down, I try to ask several questions at once, but he interrupts me and says, "Not that I think you don't care at all... I mean, everybody cares somewhat, right? But just because you care doesn't make you some sort of selfless hero." This puts me on the defensive, "You may be right, but at least I chose to act. I mean, other people-" He interrupts me again, "You really miss her, don't you? The girl... or the guy you used to cook these meals for." I reply, "WAIT... you can tell all of these things about what I do in my spare time and why I made food for you based on casual observations... but you can't tell if I'm straight or gay?" He stares unfocused over my shoulder at the fruitlessness of that topic. Knowing that we both understood one another, I felt a bit more at ease, so I continue. "Ok, so if you knew that my offering of that meal was so important to me, why didn't you just take it? ... Oh wait! Are you trying to help me by not encouraging my lingering emotional attachments?" The homeless man says without hesitation, "Hell no, I'm not your shrink! I didn't take your food because I didn't want to give you the satisfaction. You're pretentious and small-minded, and the cultural and philosophical minutiae you obsess over shows that none of your priorities are right because you have had it way too easy in life. I broke into your house, and you seem to have completely forgotten this fact simply because I started talking about your favorite subject: yourself!"

I wake up as the bowl of melted ice cream falls to the floor and shatters against another bowl that had previously fallen off the narrow arm of my couch. In my dream, the man from the dumpster grabbed my laptop and smashed it on the floor where the bowl landed. My first thought is to lock my doors, but I am also pulled towards my phone. I was going to make a phone call. I stopped myself not because there was nobody I ought to be calling at this hour and in fact had nobody in mind yet to call. I stopped myself when I saw the time. 3:07. I was asleep for only seven minutes. I toss my phone onto a nearby table, then take two steps towards the door. Then three steps towards the couch. Then a step towards the table. Then to the shattered bowl of ice cream. Then my bed. I should latch the door, but what would the implications of latching my door be? What am I really scared of? I should clean up the ice cream, but then I'd need to put on shoes so my feet don't get cut on the glass, and the whole activity would preclude the notion of going back to sleep at all. I should not be calling anybody at this hour, regardless of their time zone, but for some reason I want to. There is no way I will sleep well on the couch. I shouldn't try to go to bed until I make a decision about the phone and the door and the broken glass. As if pushed, I sit back on the couch and poke my laptop out of hibernation and wait.