| The Walking Man’s Monsters
“There are monsters even in these modern times,” the Walking Man said to me. Whenever I took my ancient dog for a walk, the ancient Walking Man appeared and followed me. I never asked his name and he never asked mine. I rarely replied in more than one syllable, hoping the dry old man with the waterfall beard would slip away instead of telling me about food prices or his medical problems or the interesting shape of a rock he found. Despite my trying not to hear the Walking Man, I caught information about his life that had slipped through his ramblings. He came from, or once lived in, Oklahoma; he had a daughter who lived nearby; he had participated in some war, somewhere, at some time. I assumed he was once an English major since he said that Tennyson was full of it but T.S. Eliot wasn’t. I knew what he was talking about because I was an English major too, incidentally. That was why I had nothing better to do than walk my dog so often. The Walking Man talked at me about everything that interested him but he had never said anything truly interesting until he mentioned monsters that day. “Monsters?” I asked. “They’re not extinct,” he said, “like you might think of extinct. Not extinct like the polar bear but extinct like Fiji.” “Fiji hasn’t sunk yet.” I was correct. At the time, there were still a few habitable islands in that archipelago nation. “Sure it has, ‘cause the perception of it, huh?” The Walking Man stuck up his little lightning bolt of a finger for emphasis. “People think Fiji’s gone but it’s still there, especially the sunk parts. But polar bears, now, there just ain’t none left. Even the buried ones, they’re not polar bears, they’re skeletons. Fiji’s buried but it’s still Fiji, see what I’m saying?” “Yeah.” I took a keen interest in whatever it was my dog sniffed in the grass. “Monsters are like that, like Fiji, huh? They’re just gone ‘cause people forgot they ever were.” “So where are they now?” “Look around!” He screamed without warning, scrunching his nose into a shriveled strawberry. His outburst frightened half a dozen birds and a mother with a baby carriage into vacating the area. I would have left with them if my dog had not nailed her nose to the ground. “Look around,” the Walking Man whispered after a moment. “If monsters are buried like Fiji, they aren’t buried at all. So where are they? They’re all around.” “Uh-huh.” “And I see them. I see ‘em all everywhere I walk, and I walk everywhere.” “So why haven’t I seen them?” “When you’re surrounded by something, you don’t see it. That’s where you are right now, surrounded by monsters you don’t see.” I tugged on my dog’s leash. Her collar pulled back to reveal the groove in her fur and she finally started walking again. I followed, and so did the Walking Man. “Okay, old man,” I said, “point them out to me.” “Mwuh?” He asked in a grunt, surprised I addressed him directly. “I said point out these monsters,” I gestured at nothing. There were trees around us, a sky above us and a faint row of skyscraper teeth between the two. No monsters. “I seen ‘em,” he said, and pointed at the sky. “There’s a real bad one what comes from the sky, but not a sky like this. It’s too clear. When the wind goes quiet and you can see three different colors in the sky, that’s when Tornado comes.” “I’m pretty sure tornadoes aren’t monsters.” “I didn’t say a tornado, I said Tornado.” My dog sniffed at a discarded snack wrapper. “Same thing, isn’t it?” The Walking Man paused and coughed twice. He always did that before rambling out a story. He scratched the side of his head, one of the two sources of his beard, and said: “Not in all ways. Like everything, it’s on the inside. Inside a tornado there ain’t nothing but air. Inside Tornado’s tornado, there’s Tornado: a terrible wind demon if there ever was one. Ever see a coconut crab? Big ol’ crab, bigger than your dog there?” The old man wasn’t necessarily exaggerating. My dog was a Jack Russell Terrier, a smallish dog about as large as the largest specimens of the crab in question. “I’ve seen pictures,” I said. “Well imagine one of them with hairy legs, bumblebee wings and an exoskeleton made of rock quartz. That’s the monster called Tornado. Lightning strikes when it flicks its antennas. It swings its flat claws and blows out every kind of swirling wind, even hurricanes if it wants. And the roaring sound of that wind? That’s the hum of Tornado’s wings. They beat so fast they knock down trees miles away.” “And you’ve seen this thing yourself?” “It’s enough to see the signs, ain’t it? I saw a tornado and knew Tornado was riding in it.” “How?” “Because Tornado’s a monster that feeds on conflict, whether it’s colliding air masses or family troubles. One day back in Oklahoma my family had a hell of a trouble in the morning hours. By afternoon, Tornado came. He’s drawn to conflict, it’s what he eats and drinks. That’s why the world’s had so many storms lately, it’s ‘cause of all the conflicts we’ve been having. There’s so much conflict around, he’s getting fatter and stronger by the day. Not even the colony monsters are safe from him.” “Colony monsters?” “Oh yeah. I call ‘em that ‘cause they mostly live in groups.” “All right, point to them for me.” An earthquake hit the Walking Man’s face and tore open a gaping smile with a rumbling laugh. The man lifted his arm and pointed South. “My little Lydia lives out there that direction. She lives in a nest of colony monsters, a nest what feeds the worst monster of all. “It’s a nest of Man-djuns. They’re hollow things that can’t reproduce themselves. They formed in Earth’s core when Earth was a baby. For billions of years they tunneled their way up, feeding off thermal energy, huh? But when they got up top, they started starving, so they opened their mouths wide and let little animals walk in for shelter in exchange for their body heat.” “Is that so.” “No foolin’!” He grinned. “Now as it turns out, Man-djuns adapted to humans because we’re the only things that can reproduce them. You know why or how?” I hadn’t a clue. “Man-djuns,” he continued, “took on shapes very pleasing to human senses. They grew big and solid with straight lines and square corners so people know they’re friendly. When people walk in, the Man-djun makes them keep all their property and comforts there so the people never leave and starve it. Then the people go and make families inside the Man-djun, which gives it even more heat to eat. “Now other people start seeing them living the good life in a Man-djun, so they get jealous and want their own. But if Man-djuns can’t reproduce by themselves, then that leaves only one choice: for people to build more!” The Walking Man threw his arms open in revelation. “Man-djuns have it made! Humans build more and more just to keep them fed! There’s a monster for you!” I was stunned. It was finally clear to me that he spoke in allegory. Man-djuns were modern mass-produced houses, their name a cynical play on the word “mansions.” For that matter, Tornado was a myth he developed to explain for what so many people had become unexplainable: Earth’s simultaneous outbreaks of violent weather and violent wars. The Walking Man was wiser than he looked. I suddenly wanted to hear everything he had to say, fearing I had missed something in his past boring tirades and wondering what other metaphors bubbled in his head. “That’s pretty interesting,” I said honestly. “What about the other monster?” “What, Tornado?” “No. You mentioned another monster, the one that the Man-djuns fed, the worst one of all. Can you tell me about it?” Just when it seemed I could use the old man’s talkativeness to my advantage, he went silent. My dog led me to a tree and promptly investigated every millimeter of its base. “You don’t have to point at it,” I said. “I just really want to know. What’s that monster like?” The Walking Man stayed put. He called out to me as if the distance between us were a canyon: “You never cared about what I said before and now you want to hear about the War Giant?” No metaphor about something named the War Giant could have been insignificant. “Yes, believe it or not. I’m sorry if I was rude before. Please tell me about it.” If I were a bystander I would have laughed at the scene. Yards away from something I wanted, I stood tethered to a dog whose only power over me was my fondness for it and its insistence on investigating the excretions of dogs who had wandered by before. “Seriously,” I said after a lull, “I want to hear what you have to say. I promise to remember it and even repeat it to other people if I like it well enough.” The Walking Man coughed twice. He looked at me solemnly and coughed again. “Don’t take your promise lightly, son. This is an important story.” “Don’t worry, I won’t.” The Walking Man walked towards me and stopped just far enough away for his words to have maximum effect. He began: “Every human in every Man-djun produces waste, solid and liquid, trash and table-scraps. All of it gets funneled into tubes. “All those tubes end at the navel of a fat, hairy, naked, toothless man one hundred fifty feet tall who sweats crude oil. His hands are eagle feet with gold scales and aluminum claws. His tongue is wide and purple and instead of taste buds it has hundreds of human faces. They either praise the man and his actions or slander his enemies and their thoughts. You got all that in your head, son?” I did. “Now imagine him on fire.” “Okay.” “That is the War Giant. The fire never goes out because he keeps sweating oil and because Tornado keeps fanning him. Tornado, remember, feeds on conflict. He leads the War Giant here and there to enflame old conflicts or cause new ones so Tornado always has something new to eat.” “Wait a minute,” I said. “If that’s true, then isn’t Tornado worse for being the one that leads him and feeds off what he does?” The Walking Man stared a mile past me. “No, no, not so. The worst monsters don’t haunt or hurt or bleed us. They don’t even represent some part of ourselves that we hate. The worst kinds of monsters cultivate us. “The War Giant does that through the Man-djuns. People can recover from just about anything, even a wind demon crab with a bloated burning beast behind him, as long as it’s damage from outside. But when a monster is born from their own way of life, they’re defenseless against it.” The Walking Man summoned up the last of his youth, loaded it in his eyes and shot me with it. “Just what is Tornado? Just what are the Man-djuns? Just what is the War Giant? And what other monsters do people not see anymore? If you answer those questions, son, you’ll start to see the nature of the world. And when you do that, you’ll know what I know. Keep your promise, now.” “Sure. But what is it you know, old man?” His eyes clicked empty, his ammunition spent. He began to walk away. “Uh, sir?” “The truth is a curse that only comes clear in code,” he said. “You can try a million ways to say it. It’s never enough. I figured I’d try monsters this time. It’s never enough.” With his back fully turned to me, the Walking Man raised his finger and enunciated clearly: “But it’s still there! Just like Fiji! See what I’m saying?” As well as anyone could see a spoken point, I saw it. As honestly as anyone kept a promise, I kept mine. It really is never enough. I figured I’d try a story this time. |