Chapter 5 - Obsession.
I was still hunched over my computer playing with my pictures when Daphne finally got home from work several hours later. She seemed happy to see me in one piece and with my brains still intact. She even made me a cup of English Breakfast tea and brought me a sandwich to nibble on while I continued to work.
“Where’d you get that new drawing? It doesn’t look like your other stuff,” Daphne asked as she laid my dinner down next to me on the kitchen table.
“The drawing on the right is mine but the one on the left is one that my Mystery Man had in his apartment. I had to adjust the sizing and angle a little - which took me forever to get right, by the way - but I was able to get them to line up perfectly. See?”
“You look so proud of yourself,” Daphne laughed as she stole a potato chip from my plate.
I shrugged, what could I say, I was pretty damn impressed with how well the manipulation had turned out. It wasn’t something I’d ever done before, so yeah, I was feeling a little smug.
“You’re such a supercilious little asshole,” she teased but I didn’t correct her since it was basically true.
I leaned back so my friend could get a better view of what I’d been working on. I’d taken the older drawing and manipulated it so it was the correct size and angle to match my more recent drawing and then overlapped them so that the left half of the building was the old drawing and the right half was my modern building. It was remarkable to see that the building had remained basically the same, even though the details around the building had changed so much. So, in my drawing, you could see the modern street signs and traffic lights along with more mature trees and even a car on the street in front of the building, while the older drawing showed a building bare of even the modernities of fire escapes or electrical wires.
“I plan to use the manipulated drawings, superimposed over a colored photograph I have from that same angle, as the centerpiece of my painting. Then I’m going to add other pictures and found objects to the canvas and incorporate it all into a painting collage. What do you think?” I asked my friend and occasional art critic. Daphne was one of the most honest people I knew, and if she thought something I was doing was crap, she wasn’t one to hold back, which was something I equally loved and hated about her.
“It’ll be brilliant. All your stuff always is,” Daphne declared around a mouthful of toast she was munching on - why did she always have food in her mouth when she talked to me? “So the ghost let you back inside, huh?”
“Sorta. I kinda had to break in again, but at least he didn’t try and push me down the stairs this time. He didn’t seem to like his coffee though.” I went back to messing around with the pictures while we spoke. “He also kinda freaked out at one point after I asked if he wanted to look at my drawings of the building. I let him look through my sketchbook, but it was like he was afraid to touch it or something. And then he washed his hands for, like, an hour, scrubbing at them with this little brush till they were red and raw. It was weird. What’s up with that, huh?”
“Sounds like your ghost might be OCD or something,” Daphne expounded, going into what I called her ‘Expert’ mode. “We just did a unit on phobias in my Psychology class last month. I was really surprised to learn how prevalent those kinds of compulsions are. The textbook we had said that it affects more than two percent of the population, which is like one out of every fifty people or something. Not everyone has it as bad as what it sounds like your ghost is going through - only about half the reported cases are considered that ‘severe’. I wonder if it’s a result of some kind of childhood trauma or something - the data we looked at says it’s most likely a combination of environmental and behavioral conditioning that occurs in conjunction with low serotonin levels in the brain. There’s some really interesting studies going on in that field . . .”
I interrupted her before she could get lost in an esoteric description of some obscure medical study I couldn’t care less about. “But the hand washing? I mean, did I do something to trigger that?” I’d never met anyone with OCD before, so this was all completely new to me.
Daphne pulled her hair out of her ponytail and I watched as it cascaded over her shoulders in this big mass of curls. “They say people with OCD each have certain characteristic behaviours - like, for your ghost, it’s compulsive hand washing - that they use as a way to get rid of the obsessive thoughts they are having. Different people have different compulsions. So, an individual who experiences an intrusive obsession regarding germs, for example, may engage in hand washing to reduce the anxiety triggered by the obsession. Because this washing ritual temporarily reduces the anxiety, the probability that the individual will engage in hand washing when a contamination fear occurs in the future is increased. As a result, compulsive behavior not only persists but actually becomes excessive.”
That didn’t really help me, but I appreciated her trying, and I marvelled at her almost encyclopedic knowledge of useless crap. “Okaaaaayyyy. But what the fuck do I DO about it? I don’t want him hurting himself every time I go over there just because I ask him to look at my sketchbook or something.”
“You’re going back? Again?”
“Yeah . . . I kinda told him I would bring the manipulated pictures over for him to look at. After all, I owe him after he let me break in and all without calling the cops on me. And, besides, I didn’t really get time to look around at the interior, except for the small room he lives in on the top floor. There’s got to still be a lot of interesting details to draw, you know?”
“What’s this dude’s name, anyway? I can’t keep calling him your Ghost Man forever.”
I could feel my cheeks pinking up a little as I admitted I had once again forgotten to ask him his name.
“Have I told you lately how strange you are?” she asked, looking at me as if I was some alien lifeform she wanted to put under her microscope and examine like one of the bacterium in her bio lab.
“It’s not my fault. I got distracted by the hand washing thing and then the drawing and then I started thinking about how I could manipulate the pictures together for my project and the next thing I knew I was on my way home and I didn’t realize I’d forgotten to ask his name till I was halfway here,” I explained, feeling like a toddler who was trying to explain his way out of being in trouble, while Daphne looked on at me with this infuriatingly indulgent smile.
“You like him,” she grinned, Daph loved nothing better than ragging me about my love life . . . or lack thereof.
“I don’t even know him, Daph.”
“You loveeeeee him. You wanna marry hiiiiiiim. Justin and Ghost Man, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g . . .” she started to chant, taunting me just like she had back when we were only seven and I made the mistake of telling her I was going to marry Aladdin - you know, the one from the Disney cartoon - when I grew up.
Of course, I reacted completely appropriately and maturely by sticking out my tongue at her and then throwing the crusts of my sandwich at her face. What? She deserved it. Although we probably do need to grow up eventually, right? Well, maybe not just yet, though.
When we’d finally stopped giggling, I sighed and returned to my computer work. “Okay, so don’t give me too much shit, alright, but, yeah, I kind of do see something in him that’s . . . I don’t know . . . compelling, maybe . . . He’s intriguing in a way. I can’t figure him out. And you KNOW how big of a sucker I am for a mystery. It’s like I can’t stop till I solve the puzzle. Maybe that’s why I feel like I need to figure this guy out too?”
“I can see that. It’ll be an epic battle of the compulsions, though. His OCD versus your romanticism.”
“So, who do you think will win?” I had to ask.
“You, of course. You’re way too fucking stubborn to let something like a mere neurological impairment stop you,” my BFF insisted with a smile at me, leaning over to give me a reassuring kiss on my cheek. “Just be gentle with him, Tiger. He has no idea who - or what - he’s gotten himself involved with yet.” Then she took up her own cup of tea and started to head down the hall to her bedroom. “Okay, now I’ve got to tackle about a week’s worth of genetics reading. Wish me luck and if I’m not out by morning, send in a rescue team.”
“Luck, Daphy!” I yelled over my shoulder and went back to my computer work, visions of my Mystery Man and my Mystery Building twirling interchangeably in my brain until it had all become one big mystery that I was compelled to paint.
And maybe to solve.
I was waiting at the door to the computer lab at school the next morning when the geek squad guy who ran it showed up for work. I probably could have gone to Kinko’s and got my photos printed out the night before, but the equipment at school was actually higher quality and the price was definitely better - free. My father already gave me enough shit about wasting my college trust fund on a useless endeavor like art school, dribbling out the pittance he allowed me for living expenses only after I supplied him with a detailed accounting of every single penny I spent every month, and questioning me over any expense he thought was ‘frivolous’. It just wasn’t worth the effort to convince him that I needed to spend $50 on Kinko’s copies when I could get the same prints gratis through school. So, even though my fingers were itching to get started on the painting part of the project, I forced myself to wait to print the pics at school.
I was too happy with the results when they were finally printed to be too upset over the wait, though. The multi-layered look of the old and new drawings on top of the modern full-color picture, was absolutely perfect for what I’d envisioned. This creation was going to end up being a masterwork - or at least that’s what I kept telling myself. Which meant I was in a buoyant mood when I left school and ran the entire way to my building to show off my work to the Mystery Man. I only stopped briefly, to get more coffee for all of us at the Crazy Mocha shop across the street, and then I was there at the lobby door, doing my jiggling and kicking thing till I got the door opened again. Bill met me on the third floor landing and I obediently gave him his cup of creamer, disregarding the fact that he tried to scratch me as I set the container down. And then I was there at the top of the stairs, knocking on my man’s door.
“Aren’t you here a bit early?” the bushy-bearded face asked as he cracked open the door. “I didn’t think you were capable of functioning before noon.”
“How would you know that?” I asked, although I didn’t dispute his statement of fact, because it was, sorta, true.
“You never show up till after lunch,” he explained as he pulled the door wide enough to let me in.
“You’ve seriously been watching me the whole time? Why didn’t you ever let me in?” I held up the coffee I’d brought him but he just tilted his head towards the table, so I set it down there for him before plopping down on the sofa with my own yummy mocha.
“Make yourself at home, why dontcha,”
I couldn’t help myself as I gave Mystery Man one of my biggest and brightest smiles. “You didn’t seem to like your vanilla latte yesterday, so I went with caramel today. What do you think?”
I watched in silence as he walked over to the table and bent down, giving the drink a sniff. “Delicious.”
“You CAN actually drink it too, you know,” I prodded.
I could see the involuntary shudder that seemed to overtake him as he thought about what I’d said. “I uh,” he cleared his throat. He was quiet for a moment before he continued. “I’m not so sure I should really trust the guy that keeps on breaking into my house not to poison me.”
I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.
I stood up and walked towards the table where he was still hovering and reached for his cup. “How about if I take a sip of yours to show you that it’s perfectly safe for you to drink?”
Just as my hand was about to make contact with the cup, he waved his arms around almost manically and shouted at me, “NO!”
I jerked my hand away from the cup and stared at him uncomprehendingly. Apparently he really hadn’t been joking about the poisoning thing. Fuck, this was awkward. I had to think quickly to find something to distract us both from whatever the fuck was going on with the coffee thing.
“Urm, sorry . . . I, um . . . Would you like to see what I’ve done so far?” I asked apprehensively, seizing on the only topic I could think of that might get me out of this quagmire.
Mystery Man shifted nervously on his feet, his hands desperately trying to find something to occupy themselves with but ending up back in his jeans’ pockets. He gave the faintest nod of his head and I felt myself practically run back to the sofa so I could retrieve the folder where I had stored the photos I’d printed out that morning. I made my way back to the table with my work stretched out in front of me, but the closer I got, the deeper his hands seemed to delve into his pockets. Thinking quickly, I removed the new photos and set them down on the table where he’d be able to see them without having to touch anything. He seemed thankful and maybe a tiny bit less embarrassed as he leaned over to peruse my work.
“Not bad.”
I heard myself gasp loudly. “Not bad? Are you kidding me, these are fucking excellent.”
The mystery man smiled at me as if he found my blatant arrogance amusing. “How’d you manage to make it look like that. Half the old picture and half your drawing?”
Well, he asked, right? So that justified my launching into a very technical and detailed explanation of my photoshop skills, which then led into a full description of the entire project I was engaged in, backed up by a summary of my previous attempts at collage painting, all of which segued nicely into a lecture about the history of multimedia artwork over the ages . . . and I kept talking for, like, twenty hours or something close thereto, before I realized I was babbling on like a total loser and abruptly clamped my mouth shut in total humiliation. Damn I was really NOT good at normal conversations, was I? But it wasn’t my fault. He should have known better than to engage an art student in any discussion of any art-related topic. That’s just common sense, right?
“I suppose now’s probably not the best time to tell you I have no idea what ‘Photoshop’ is? Or, anything else you just talked about, for that matter,” he commented with a hint of a condescending smile.
“Sorry about that,” I mumbled, “I do tend to . . . go on a bit when talking about my work,” I stated and, without realizing I was doing it, I started to chew at the skin around my nails like I always do when I’m nervous - it’s a nervous habit I’ve had for as long as I can remember.
“No problem. I appreciate your enthusiasm. It’s amusing,” he stated, although he didn’t look amused right then; he looked uncomfortable as fuck, his eyes seemingly locked on the hand that I was currently nibbling.
Finally, when it appeared he couldn’t take it any longer, the man leaned over and grabbed a small plastic bottle of hand sanitizer sitting on an end table that I hadn’t noticed before. He mutely offered it to me with a tilt of his head, holding it out with his hand poised over the pump top. I took the hint and stretched my hand out towards him, palm up, allowing him to squirt out a dollop of the clear gel. Then he watched closely as I massaged the gel into my hands - I felt like one of those doctors you see on tv as they scrub in for surgery, washing their hands in a slow methodical process designed so they don’t miss a single spot where germs might hide. Unfortunately, the alcohol in the sanitizer caused my torn cuticle to sting and I hissed at the short but intense pain it caused.
“Sorry,” he apologized as I shook the hand to help dissipate the pain.
“No biggie. It just stings a little.”
“Serves you right. Don’t you have better things to do with your fingers than stuffing them in your face?”
Okay, it’s not my fault that my mind immediately went THERE, right? I mean, you ask any gay man where he wants to stick his fingers and pretty much any one of them is going to have the same reaction? Amirite? But I had only just met this man - a man whose name I still hadn’t remembered to ask, by the way - so I didn’t really know him well enough to give the reply I would normally have given about just what I liked to finger. Fuck, I didn’t even know if he was gay; it was tough to tell considering his general OCD standoffishness. But now that he’d mentioned it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I started imagining my fingers doing some truly naughty things, which immediately translated to a rather intense reaction in certain other body parts, and the more I tried to stop it, the worse it got, till I could feel the crotch of my pants stretching tighter and tighter over those excited body parts, and fuck me, I was totally embarrassed but so turned on, and it wasn’t my fault that I had this sudden and almost uncontrollable desire to investigate just how hairy the rest of my Mystery Man was, and why was I such a total horn dog, somebody please stop me, or throw a bucket of cold water over my head or SOMETHING. I hate my life sometimes. I really do.
It was only then that I could feel my Mystery Man’s eyes on me and, holy fuck, that only made things worse. He was looking right at my dick, which got even harder now that it knew it had an audience, and seemed like it was trying to poke its way clear through the material of the Dockers I was wearing that day. I had to do something or in two minutes I’d end up throwing this stranger down on the carpet at my feet and having my way with him. Or letting him have his way with me. At that point I was open to pretty much anything, I was THAT horny. And it really didn’t help matters much that, right at that moment, my eyes wandered down his body and I noticed that even through his loose fitting jeans, I could see he’d sprouted a pretty impressive boner too! Which, I guess, answered the question of whether or not he was gay. But I still didn’t really know him which, for some reason, bothered me all of a sudden.
“What’s your name?” I uttered out of absolutely fucking nowhere, my voice sounding at least an octave higher pitched than was seemly.
His eyes burned into mine as he looked at me and I could see a slight smirk starting to appear on his face. “What? You mean there’s something you don’t know? I thought you were an expert on everything from Burglary to Bechtle.”
I might have become angry at that but then my host broke into a peal of laughter - real, joyful, belly-rumbling, laughter - and I got the feeling he didn’t laugh nearly often enough, so how could I be mad at him?
“Fine. Don’t tell me your name, then. I’ll just call you . . . I’ll call you, Egbert, instead,” I threatened, joining in with his laughter.
“Egbert? You think I look like an Egbert?” The look of disdain on his face was almost comical.
“Yeah, it suits you. Or would you rather I called you, Harry, in honor of your tonsorial choices?”
“Did I mention before how annoying you were?”
“Several times,” I grinned.
“Fine. You can call me ‘Harry’ and I’ll call you ‘Brat’.”
I shook my head. “But I told you my name already, it’s Justin.”
He shrugged nonchalantly but I could see a glint of humor in his eyes that I hadn’t seen there before and it gave me an unexpectedly huge thrill to think I’d put it there. “I think my name fits you better.”
“Okay, Egbert. If that’s how you want to play it, I’m game. But when my project wins first place and I get put into the end of term showcase at school, you won’t be able to come because your invitation will be under the wrong name. I’ll feel really bad about that, you know, but since it means I’ll get all the attention to myself, I’ll somehow deal with it,” I rejoined with a flirty grin as I gathered up my pictures and shoved the file folder back in my bag. “Now, I’m off to go create my masterpiece. See you later, Egbert!”
“Later, Brat.”
I was still chuckling over our exchange when I finally made it home and started to set up so I could dive right into my painting. I’d never felt more inspired than I did after my early morning meeting with Harry Egbert. There was just something about that infuriatingly mysterious man that seemed to light my blood and my brain on fire. And it was his sparkling, laughing, hazel eyes instead of the stone and brick of the building that were front and center in my mind as I began to paint.
