. . . trying to get into his apartment.
In the background,
approaching from far away down the hall
is a hulking figure with a baseball bat.
Our guy with the keys
well
doesn’t look like he’s up for a fight.
I mean, if he’s fucking up with the keyring . . .
Now,
you might be thinking that a grotesquely violent beating is inevitable.
It isn’t.
Do you know what determines the fate of keyring fumbler and the baseball bat beast?
Their neighbors. The other people who live in the building.
On any given night, a majority of the neighbors feel like they enjoy living in a sinister old building where rockstars have ODed on horse or stabbed their partner to death in a drunken rage-and where organized crime figures have been disappeared-the neighbors find proximity to the Reaper so stimulating that they get up to all kinds of adult situations behind closed doors.
Other nights, they become their parents of old, “What is the world coming to! Dear me! The breakdown of civil society and the fashions these days-and I declare well I never-!” Those are the nights when adult situations are at a minimum.
And that . . . let’s call it ‘Neighbor Energy’-that’s what determines if keyring fumbler lives or dies.
If the Neighbor Energy is really horny for the presence of death, living on the edge and shit-boom. Keyring clatters to the floor in a shower of blood, brains, cerebrospinal fluid, and skull fragments.
If the Neighbor Energy is at a low ebb, if everybody’s just watching cable news, and fretting over their loser children burning up their scholarship money snorting adderall and funnelling booze at some dumb-dumb state university-then no action. Just stasis. You get a frozen tableau like the robo-puppets at some long-neglected theme park ride slated for demolition.
And in the foreground our guy keeps fumbling his keys.
And our hulking bruiser keeps on coming from the deep background
and never quite arrives,
or
the beast arrives in high style,
and creates a mess that would make a cop weep.
Sometimes your neighbors are there for you,
sometimes not.
