It’s 4 am, and I awake being violently shaken. Actually, that’s not right. I’m being manically shaken. I say manically, as Manuel, my insomniac housemate, is obviously taking considerable manic glee from this assault on me.
“Andy, wake up!” Manuel shouts excitedly as he manhandles me. “Wake up!”
It’s my fault. I’ve made the mistake of letting my guard down. I’ve fallen asleep at the kitchen table. You don’t do that when you live with a murderer.
Of course, in an ideal world, you should never live with anyone you suspect might be a murderer. If you have to, though, you never do a doozy like me and fall asleep in the kitchen. For one, that’s where all the neatly lined up sharp things are.
“Andy, wake up!”
By this point, Manuel knows I’m awake. I’ve already started to try and rise, sending my laptop clattering to the floor in the process. Cue a nice new crack on the screen.
“See what happened?” Manuel says in faux shock, finally releasing me and stepping back to point at my laptop lying against the kitchen floor tiles.
“What the fuck are you doing, you fat little weirdo?”
That’s what I want to say, but I don’t. Never engage. Never react. Always play stupid. And never, ever trigger escalation.
“You fell asleep!” Manuel presses his hands together like in prayer.
“I was so worried. I came down, and it was just like seeing Janette.”
Janette, naturally, was the first person Manuel actually murdered. Officially, Janette, Manuel’s fiancée, came home drunk one night, before falling asleep next to a bottle of wine at the kitchen table. As the official police report puts it, she at some point fell, hit her head on the floor, and passed shortly after due to a bleed on the brain.
What Manuel forgets is that once, while extraordinarily drunk, he told me with manic glee the real story of that fateful evening. Namely, that he came home to find Janette asleep after not seeing her for most of the day, and was so overcome with rage because of her disrespect that he slapped her. Subsequently, Janette was slammed from where she was perched sleeping, resulting in her head smashing against the kitchen floor.
Seeing Janette’s lip start to quiver as she lay lifeless against the long unpolished tilework, Manuel realized that he had done wrong. However, he played it smart. He went to bed, slept soundly, and then pretended to stumble upon the scene of the still unresponsive Janette the next morning. Passing away a few days later after never regaining consciousness, Janette never had a chance to tell her side of the story.
I know it, though, and because I do, I’m shaken by the parallels of my newly smashed laptop and Manuel shaking me awake on what could conceivably be the exact same stool Janette was perched on before she went to sleep forever. This also gives rise to a question: Does Manuel remember telling me how he killed Janette?
Is this a test?
Hopefully, it goes without saying that in an ideal world, I wouldn’t live with an unconvicted killer. Sadly, Manuel’s abhorrently filthy downstairs bathroom (yes, I live in a bathroom) is the only accommodation I can afford at present. While being filthy, it is also the only room in his dog-urine-scented hovel that I can lock at night.
There is a room upstairs where Manuel keeps a menagerie of illegally trapped songbirds and rabbits. The door there, though, doesn’t lock, and during our first months living together, it became obvious that Manuel has no understanding of the concept of personal privacy.
“I’m sorry, I need to feed the birds,” Manuel would announce, throwing open the door at some ungodly hour every other morning. It also became apparent that if I moved anything, whether by accident or out of necessity, I would trigger Manuel’s quite astonishing obsessive-compulsive behavior.
“The workman, Andy! The workman has his tools, and all tools have their place. What can I do when I come here to get this or this, and what I want is somewhere else? Please, Andy. It is about respect. Respect! This is all I ask!”
I say Manuel’s OCD is astonishing, as the man has literally not taken a shower during the entire year we have so far spent living together. He sleeps on a dog-chewed, urine-scented mattress. His several dogs urinate and defecate at will anywhere. Worse, the kitchen and bathroom play host to piles of dishes that have been screaming for a drop of detergent for at least a decade.
However, every morning Manuel is meticulous about lining up his cigarette papers, marijuana grinders, and other instruments that he might require during the next 24 hours. Likewise, in the kitchen and the animal room where I used to sleep, Manuel has meticulously arranged knives, spoons, and various other thing-a-me-bobs. Many haven’t been put to any use for decades. However, if anyone ever so much as picks up such a thing-a-me-bob, before returning it to its exact former position, Manuel will instantly know. Such interference in his private affairs will also ignite a quite spectacular fury in him.
They say that there are four kinds of killers. From my analysis of him over the past year, Manuel is definitely of the power/control variety. This is why I go to great lengths to appear as meek and amicable as possible, even when the weird bastard shakes me down for an extra hundred in rent every few months.
“So, how did you get here?” People ask me. “Why live with such a human abomination?” Actually, no one ever asks me this. This is largely due to the fact that I don’t go swanning around telling people I live with an extremely dangerous psychopath. If anyone were to ask, though, the simple answer is that I got here out of necessity. COVID-19 destroyed my once lucrative freelance career. Rents went up as my income was plummeting. Then one night a woman I was living with gave me 24 hours to move out, and the only person I knew who might be able to help on such short notice was this bloody maniac.
It is worth me adding, though, that I didn’t know he was an actual murderer back in the day.
The most troubling thing these days is that I can see the killer in Manuel. It’s like I can see him starting to push his own boundaries to instigate some new altercation. Cash I’ve been squirreling away goes missing. Then he pleads innocence before I’ve made mention of the fact. He also killed my dog, which is something I’m blocking out for now. At least until I have the opportune chance to have my vengance.
I also know that Manuel inspects the bathroom where I sleep when I go to work. He checks the levels of the various powders and soaps and aftershaves he never uses, to determine if I’ve shown disrespect over the past 24 hours by using them. It came to a head recently when Manuel discovered that the level of his special conditioner for people who color their hair was lower than it was in his memory of last using it. (Which was likey some time in the 1990’s when he still had hair to color.)
A whole night he subsequently spent raging about prices going up. To appease him, I gave him fifty euros to replenish whatever stocks of cosmetics he thought I might have been plundering.
Never engage, never let his rages escalate, always try to appease and please. These are the simple rules I live by. Unlike Manuel, I also work. The hovel of a house we live in was bequeathed to him by his late mother. As such, Manuel pays no rent or mortgage. He also lives on state handouts. This and my quite exorbitant rent. My working, though, gives me an excuse not to be present as often as Manuel might like his budget court jester to be.
When I go to work, I am, therefore, free, and the later I go home the better. Right now it’s 2 am. If the fates are smiling on me today, Manuel will have splurged the last fifty euros I threw at him on a handful of sleeping pills and be dead to the world until I leave again for work tomorrow morning. If they aren’t, I’m probably in for another lecture about using too much toilet paper.
Either way, the quicker I hole up in the bathroom tonight, the better.
Leave a Reply