The Gate Theory

by Kaaron Warren

  Nobody from the police station had called, but then why would they? They’d all thrown in their two dollars, their five, for his farewell present, the TV and universal remote sitting on a stand in his lounge room, showing a football game. As far as they were concerned, he was sitting up with a packet of Cheetos and a six pack of beer, watching daytime television. If they thought of him at all, they imagined him doing nothing. Resting, at last. He’d worked hard at the station. He swept up, wiped the phones with disinfectant, cleaned the bathroom mirrors, emptied the waste paper bins. Whoever was doing it now may think sometimes that Alvin had done a good job, that there were no surprises left behind, no hard jobs left undone, but none of the rest of them would think of him very often, although he’d always laughed at their jokes and had tried to help their cases in small ways.

  One time it was the way the armed robbery suspect bent in the edges of his Styrofoam cup. Alvin’d shown the captain, holding the cup out without speaking.

  “That yours, Alvin?”

  “No, the suspect. I just noticed when I was cleaning out the bin. Folded in. Like they found behind the counter.”

  “You’re right. You are right.” The captain reached out to shake his hand but Alvin stepped backwards, banging into a chair and almost tripping. “I haven’t been having a wank, Alvin. Hands are clean,” the captain said.

  “It’s my hands,” Alvin said. “I don’t want you to touch my dirty hands. Sorry. Sorry.”

  “You did a great job, Alvin. Okay? Good job.”

  Alvin had backed out of his office, smiling.

  ~~~

  He moved from room to room in his house, grounding himself by looking at his familiar objects. The scented candle on his mantlepiece. He’d never lit it, wanting to save it, and he tried to inhale its scent, regretting his caution. The lady who’d given it to him, all the cops called her Mrs. Moffat. She was lovely. Lovely to look at, lovely in her grief, lovely and kind. She made Alvin feel as if he could be a normal person somehow. Such a good mother, so full of anger and grief. Her daughter, only twelve, murdered and found in the filthiest of public toilets. The shame she must have felt, that poor little girl, shame and pain and terror.

  Mrs. Moffat’s skin was pale, pink, soft. Her hair was a pale red colour, curly around her head like a fine mist.

  He looked at his books, thousands of them, mostly crime. He probably knew more about most cases than the cops did. If he’d been taller, and if his parents had been more encouraging, he might have made it.

  His kitchen, dusty but clean. Freezer full of meals for one. He really liked them and was sad to think he’d never eat one again.

  Nobody found him. Nobody called. He began to enjoy the sensation; the sense of freedom and he discovered he could explore away from home.

  He watched Mr. Wallis at Number Three eat his sausages and chips while reading the newspaper. Sauce sopped up with a piece of bread, sauce under the fingernails although the man was usually clean. He had spoken more to Mr. Wallis than to the others. Mr. Wallis was often outside doing his roses and it was easy to discuss the colour and health of the flowers.

  Alvin tried to talk to Mr. Wallis. “Excuse me, Mr. Wallis. Lovely flowers. Lovely. Have you seen me for a while? Think about it. When was the last time you saw me? You should knock on my door, Mr. Wallis. Be a good neighbour. Wonder where I’ve been and know I’ve never been missing for more than a few hours in twenty-five years. Go knock on my door and find me, Mr. Wallis. I’m dead,” but Mr Wallis didn’t react.

  He could slip into all of his neighbours’ houses. He’d walked past every day for twenty-five years, never been asked inside. If they were out gardening or collecting their mail they’d talk to him. A simple, “Hello, Alvin, off to work?” or “Back from work?” or “Off to do your shopping?”

  He would make small comments but the conversations never developed. They would turn away, or they would ask him something too personal. Or the children would appear with their dirty, grabby hands and he would have to move on, politely, nodding and smiling.

  Now, he could sit with them as they ate as if he were part of the family. At Number Five, they ate in front of the television. They ate boiled eggs and toast; it looked delicious. Comforting. He didn’t feel like he was intruding; he felt as if he belonged.

  At Number Seven, he watched as the young girl (what was she? seventeen?) invited her boyfriend in. He didn’t watch more than that. He always changed the channel of the TV if that sort of thing happened. He didn’t like it. His mother hadn’t, his father hadn’t, and he didn’t.

  The children played soccer in the park next to his house and he tried to grab the ball when it flew loose, but it rolled right through his fingers. He hoped one of them would kick wildly, sending the ball into his yard, perhaps through the window. But his hedge was high. His mother had valued her privacy and the idea of people looking in at them from the park or the street upset her.

  “No one wants to look at us, Mum. We might as well be invisible. And we’re not doing anything interesting. Just sitting here watching TV.”

  His father harrumphed. “Nothing but rubbish on.”

  “You and me watching TV, Dad reading the paper. No one cares.”

  “You don’t know people. They’re natural sticky beaks. Poking into business which isn’t theirs.” But of course his mother was describing herself, like a fly on the wall she could be, especially at the hospital where she worked as a cleaner. He hated how intrusive she was in other people’s lives. Sometimes she’d note their addresses and wander by their houses, checking up on them.

  Stalking, Alvin called it.

  “We do our bit,” his parents told him when he said he wanted to try for university. “We are public servants. We do the jobs others might not want to do, but we do them to the best of our abilities. That’s our place, Alvin, and there is no other for people like us.”

  His father worked in administration at the local police station and that, at least, meant he saw some interesting things. When it came time for Alvin to leave school, both parents offered to find him work but it was the police station Alvin was keen on. He liked to solve crimes and look at clues. He liked putting things together.

  He had tried other part time jobs but always, for some reason, he had been asked to leave. He knew he did his job well; the references they always gave him attested to that.

  “If they want to be all touchy feely, that’s their problem,” his mother told him. “We can’t be expected to be like that just because they want us to. If someone is going to judge you because of it then you’re better off without them.”

  Alvin knew it was more than that. He was not a stupid man. He knew that people just didn’t like him. That some people glowed with likeability and made people want to be around them and others, like Alvin and his parents, were either ignored or disliked.

  ~~~

  He kept trying to make the neighbors hear him, lead them to discover his body, but no one even shivered. He felt desperate, watching his body rot, knowing he should be elsewhere.

  But he found he could move a fair distance. He felt light and released, free from fear. He didn’t care what people thought of him, didn’t care how he looked. Wasn’t concerned that people might touch him, steal from him, knock him down.

  He travelled around the block and to his local shopping centre, where he watched people rude and polite, honest people and thieves, acts of love and acts of hatred. It surprised him to know all this went on without him.

  ~~~

  Each time he returned, he thought perhaps he’d find police and ambulances, that someone at last would miss him.

  He took to walking the streets in an attempt to feel alive, part of the living world. Nobody could see him and out of politeness he avoided touching them.

  He’d never even kissed a woman. At school, when everyone else was paired up, even the ugly ones, Alvin sat aside. He watched the sweaty hand-holding with disgust. The sloppy kissing in the classroom distracted him from wor
king. “Pay attention, Alvin,” the teachers always said, but it was hard with everything going on and no one to help him out.

  The only woman he’d ever really thought about kissing was Mrs. Moffat, and that was not possible anymore. He’d been too polite to approach her then.

  His mother had always been proud of his manners.

  On the third Friday after his death, he went to his favorite bookshop, which specialized in true crime and the paranormal. Entranced by the window display of a new ghost hunter book, he didn’t notice the group of teenagers barreling towards him, talking, walking in that high way teenagers have, as if they are floating on air.

  He felt the shock of the young man walking right through him like a jolt of electricity. Alvin stepped out of the young man feeling heavy and full of a dull ache. He could see his own reflection, faint and transparent, in the window.

  The friends moved on, unaware. The young man stood, dumb-founded.

  “Joe! Come on!” they called. The young man tilted his head at them.

  “Joe?” he said.

  “Come on, Joe!”

  Joe stared at them, completely blank. He didn’t seem to know who he was, where he was, who they were. Alvin took a step backwards, feeling the footpath on his feet, watching the teenager’s rising panic.

  He could feel the footpath.

  Alvin was solid. He touched the glass window; cold. He touched his own face; just as cold.

  The teenagers led Joe away. His arms waved at them. “It’s all right, Joe,” they said. And every time, he said, “Am I Joe?”

  Alvin sat down on a bench. He was filled with Joe. Joe’s life and emotions. Strange things like love, lust, joy. Things Alvin had not experienced.

  Joe didn’t like his younger sister, not at all. She was ten, a smart arse, smarter than him, everybody said so, but all she did was read. Read her books and talked smart to the adults. Her friends were ten like her and ten was boring; Joe could remember it. He liked reading for a while but it’s the sort of thing you grow out of when you get a life. Life is too short to read, he said, and his friends said it too. Sometimes he hid her books. She hated that. “Read a new one,” he said. “Start another one,” but that’s not what she wanted, she wanted to read that one. He’d think of other ways to be cruel as she grew older.

  He didn’t really like being cruel but there was something about it, something good. He wasn’t cruel to everyone, only the ones who deserved it. The ones who gave him the shits, the weak ones who cringed. But there was that kid, the one when they were thirteen, you wouldn’t forget that kid, you’d hate to have that kid as a son, you’d feel like a failure. Even Joe’s own mother said this. She said, “Oh, how must his mother feel?” when the kid walked past, pants all loose and high, picking his nose, his hair greasy, you could almost see imaginary dogs yapping at his heels to make him walk the way he lifted his flat feet like that.

  Joe and his friends bullied him and they all knew it was wrong but couldn’t help it. Better than ignoring him, they said, but the friends, they’d know. They’d feel the guilt in the future but not Joe, he’d feel nothing.

  Alvin felt laughter, felt that sense of hysteria he’d seen in other people. He’d never really laughed, not like that. He didn’t get the jokes, they weren’t his kind of thing. But this feeling, this bubbling uncontrollable laughter, he would have lived life differently if he’d known that’s what you could feel. Joe’s friends and he, sitting around, talkingtalkingtalking, every sentence making them laugh harder, with one of the mothers, who was pretty sexy with her big boobs and her smile, she was younger than the other mothers and she liked these boys, she’d shake her head as if to say, “Oh, you boys,” as if only they understood, but she knew that made it funnier, she was that kind of mother. Alvin felt the physical reaction Joe had to her, the rush, the desire.

  The desire.

  Joe carried desire with him, dreamt it. The first kiss came at fifteen, all bluff and blunder, all soft lips and fluttering eyes, holding hands, checking breath. That was Lori Caldwell and he’d liked her for a long time. Not one of those girls you talk to. Those ones are hard to kiss. Alvin thought they were all hard to kiss. Joe and Lori walking home from school together, him taking the long route, every day for a week, those little hand waves goodbye, little winks, then the hands touching and finally, when her parents were out, around the back, leaning up against the slide and swing set she’d had as a kid, it was all rusty and unsafe but her dad never got around to getting rid of it and it was good to hang on, good to swing even when you were fifteen. There, leaning up against the pole, the kiss.

  Alvin couldn’t breath. He never knew lips were so soft, or that you wouldn’t think of germs, that touch could be so gentle and so good.

  It wasn’t all good, though. Alvin had always slept well, no need to worry, work secure, parents safe and then parents dead and what’s the point of worrying. No money worries. Joe worried about school and the future and the size of his dick. Worried about who hated him and who thought he was weak. Worried about his parents divorcing. Worried that his sister was smarter than him. Worried that Lori didn’t care about him, that she’d dump him before he dumped her.

  And there it was. Alvin felt it physically, a gently broken heart but he felt it in his stomach and his throat. It hurt. Physically hurt not to cry. No one to talk to who wouldn’t laugh or give advice Joe didn’t want, a deep sense of loneliness, and that Alvin recognized.

  He saw masturbation and magazines, secrets behind closed doors. He saw parents who cared, were connected, but out of their depth.

  He tasted huge piles of pasta, tomato sauce straight from the bottle.

  He saw Batman, Ironman, toys comics movies books t-shirts. These things had never interested Alvin but now he understood, he felt the obsession.

  Alvin knew everything there was to know about the young man Joe. Joe remembered nothing. His life began again.

  This was the first time Alvin stole history.

  The smell of hot chips filled him and he had a great desire to eat a bucketful. He wondered if he could. He stood up, feeling like a teenager, thin and full of life.

  As he walked the feeling faded, as did he. But he had been that boy for a few minutes.

  ~~~

  He went home, sliding into his house and glancing, as he always did, at his remains. He sat there as night fell and thought about the fact that his mother and father were not waiting to meet him when he died and thought, as he had many times, that they didn’t love him as much as they should have.

  His mother killed by a drunk driver. “Don’t worry, we’ll get him,” the cops said. The guy had run into her car, sending it spinning into a lamp post. That took all the impact so the driver slid gently to the side of the road, unhurt.

  Bystanders rushing to help said he was laughing and the smell of alcohol was so strong they couldn’t breathe.

  His mother died instantly, though a bystander swore he’d heard her say “Don’t forget to take the mince out.” Now that Alvin had walked through Joe and taken his history, he understood what must have happened. She had risen through one of the bystanders (“I felt blank. Maybe the shock. I honestly can’t remember checking her pulse or anything.”) and was momentarily solid.

  He and his father had stood, side by side, at his mother’s grave. People tried to comfort them but both recoiled from the physical contact.

  Afterwards, they had sat at the kitchen table laden with food delivered by neighbours. Lifting the lids and sniffing, smiling at each other. All that food. “We’ll have to buy a freezer,” his dad said. It was the last joke the man made; as soon as the family car was returned fixed, he drove it off a bridge, leaving Alvin both carless and parentless.

  His father’s body was hard to get to. Get me the fuck out of there, Alvin. Move your lazy fucking prick arse, the man swearing more than Alvin thought possible. Fury in him. Nothing about love or his wife, I love my wife, nothing about that. Just find my fucking body.

  ~~
~

  Alvin didn’t need to sleep or eat or shit but sometimes out of habit or nowhere else to go, he’d watch his own body rot into the carpet. He did it to remind himself that he had lived. He’d known what he now stole from others. Though if he was honest he knew this wasn’t true. All that his thieving showed him was that he’d wasted his life. He’d done nothing. Felt nothing. It came as a great surprise, because he thought he’d had a life worth living.

  He didn’t use his occasional corporeality to tell people about his body. He liked the freedom he had, the ability to discover and explore, that he’d never had in life. He liked stealing history. He liked that he took on enough substance to feel again, although it hurt. He went in clean and clear. Came out full of pain and memory.

  He did use his moments of form to order a sign installed on his house, “Holy Order of the Silent Nuns.” He set up a light machine, timed to show movement in the evening. Those nuns praying or polishing the silver or whatever else people want to imagine nuns do. It amused him to do this, although he didn’t imagine any of his neighbours would come looking for him now. Still, he liked the idea of movement in his house, even if it was illusion.

  His house was fully paid for and all his utility payments automatic. His bank account full from his inheritance. They didn’t know that at the police station. They didn’t realize he didn’t need the money, that it was their company and the stories they told, that he liked to be around them and their crime-solving.

  He’d only ever helped in small ways. He’d tried the test once but he never told anyone how he’d done because his absolute failure was too embarrassing.

  ~~~

  Alvin discovered that he could steal history gently, a hand through a shoulder. This way he’d gather sensations, feelings. If he went to a bar and timed it right he could remember the taste of beer. They’d be dazed for a minute or two and wouldn’t remember emptying the glass. If it was food he craved, the person would forget they’d eaten the hot chips or the garlic bread and Alvin would be left, insubstantial but vaguely there, with the taste on his tongue.