The Hoarder: Part 1
Part 1 | Part 2
On the first Monday of every June, Barry climbed into his 1982 Ford and made the 3-mile drive down a winding gravel road to his bank in downtown Parowan, Utah. Once there, he parked in one of the two handicapped spots at 8:55 a.m. shortly before the doors opened; and, if they didn’t open at 9:00 a.m. sharp, he banged on the glass until someone let him in. Only the new hires were taken aback by the man’s rude behavior. The rest of the staff, many of whom had known Barry since they were kids, told the younger employees that the eccentric old hermit was harmless but not right in the head.
Once inside the bank, Barry withdrew $3,000 from his savings account; and, without thanking the teller or acknowledging the security guard holding the door open for him, walked back outside, climbed into his truck, switched on the ignition and began his long drive to Salt Lake City. He didn’t listen to the radio as he drove, since it had burned up on March 6, 1995 after picking up an alien transmission from the dark side of the moon.
As soon as he made it to the southern outskirts of the big city, Barry began scouting around for a room to rent for a week. At the ripe old age of 78, he had an AARP card which sometimes gave him discounts. But since he didn’t pre-book ahead of time, he often found himself out of luck with no rooms available or a requirement to pay by credit card, which he couldn’t do since he’d never owned a credit card in his life. Whenever this happened, Barry parked at a trailhead next to a latrine and slept on a wool blanket beneath the truck’s fiberglass camper amidst a half dozen cardboard boxes overflowing with magazines he’d brought with him from Parowan in the event his house burned down while he was away.
The purpose of Barry's yearly trek to Salt Lake City, which he treated with all the solemnity of a holy pilgrimage, was to scour the used and antiquarian bookstores within the metropolitan area with the aim of augmenting an already vast private collection of pulps and other magazines from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. These included supernatural tales, whodunits, westerns, and a lot of science-fiction. He also enjoyed the “true” stuff—true crime, true detective, true tales of the frontier, and other such factual pulps. But he shied away from anything political, popular mechanical, or national geographical, since those were far too “true” to be believed and their pages were usually glossy, which didn’t smell as good as the foxed yellow ones.
He refused to buy periodicals postdating July 20, 1969 because that was the day Apollo 11 landed on the surface of the moon and woke up the aliens living on the other side of it. Whatever happened that day caused reality on earth to shift gears in a way Barry was still trying to make sense of. He likened it to loggers cutting down a big sequoia and releasing toxic microbes into the air that had lain dormant for thousands of years. Since the fabric of reality had been torn apart and haphazardly stitched back together again, it made no sense to read new magazines since the aliens had seeded these with errant falsehoods to distract the unwary.
While in Salt Lake City, Barry would visit the same bookstores sometimes two or three times on the same day before committing to a purchase that he knew he shouldn’t make. Frequently, he owned multiple copies of the exact same magazine he was now laying down money to buy yet again. But since he often forgot where the other copies were, he reasoned that it was more convenient for his research to have a second copy to hand in case he needed it.
The “research” he was engaged in was a painstaking review of the magazines he owned in the hopes of finding clues that had been missed by the wise ones of those simpler decades, clues that might help save humans from the delusive world that they were now caught up in. But the older he got and the closer he got to dying, the more he realized that he wouldn’t be able to save humanity before he keeled over and died and that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because humanity might not be worth saving.
Barry didn’t collect hardbound books because they took up too much space; and space was at a premium in the two-story house he lived in. The house had been built in 1882 by his great-grandparents, two stalwart members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Days Saints, whose hard-bitten faces scowled down at him from the faded black-and-white photographs mounted to the peeling walls. Whenever a stack of magazines fell in the attic, Barry presumed it was one of them expressing disappointment with what he (the last of the bloodline) had done to the place.
There had been no radio or television set in the house when he was growing up, because his mother and father eschewed these for obscure religious reasons. But they hadn’t restricted their son from going to the cinema in Parowan if he wanted to. Barry went once in 1952, but had been unable to concentrate on the film because someone or something had been sitting in the dark with him and whispering things he couldn’t make out due to the audience’s laughter. (The film had been a comedy.) But despite never having seen a film or television program, he knew a lot about the plots of these from written summaries he happened to stumble on in the fanzines he collected.
As a child Barry had been mercilessly ridiculed because he couldn’t speak. His hearing was unimpaired and he could understand what was said to him and write with fluency. He could even groan, sigh and laugh, but his voice was incapable of forming articulate speech. After his parents died, he disconnected the telephone; and, since he had never learned how to operate a computer, the idea of sending written messages via a smartphone had never entered into his calculus.
Barry was a bit vague as to what an “Internet” was, although he assumed it had something to do with the hooded consoles at the DMV he was obliged to interact with in order to retain his driver’s license. One of the DMV employees would sit side-saddle with him and work the keyboard or mouse on his behalf, as the elderly man pointed out the answers to the multiple-choice questions on the screen.
The elaborate technology of the modern era was vastly different from the worlds of rectangular-mouthed robots and flying saucers with domed cockpits of his favorite pulps—further proof in his mind that the course of nature and the laws of physics had been upended in the wake of the 1969 lunar landing.
Cancer had carried away Barry’s mother in 1973. His father managed to sell acres of family land (in both Utah and Nevada) shortly before his own death in 1980, placing the money in a trust that generated enough money for his son to survive on. To supplement this income, Barry received a disability check from the state each month. He had no debts and attributed his good health and longevity to a spare diet of baked beans and SpaghettiOs consumed straight out of the can. Sometimes he treated himself to a hearty meal at a gourmet restaurant, such as Denny’s or Cracker Barrel.
He stopped going to church after his parents died, because large gatherings agitated him; and he didn’t like to shake hands with strangers, because he never knew if the strangers whose hands he shook were real people, ghosts, or aliens. He wondered if aliens and ghosts had souls like humans or if they were more like insects—automata that did whatever the microscopic punch cards and vacuum tubes in their bodies told them to do.
More than anything, Barry hated being hugged. This was due to the incident that had happened to him when he was nineteen years old and the shirtless man in the abandoned cabin on the other side of the yard, the man with a spotlight instead of a face, had climbed into his bedroom window, hugged him like they were best pals, and then jabbed a needle into the base of Barry’s skull.
The next day, he wrote a detailed account of what had transpired and handed it to his mother and father to read. His father, presuming a sexual maniac was hiding out in the cabin, stormed outside to investigate but found no trace of anyone living there. Barry, who knew what a sexual maniac was from the detective stories he had read, composed another note and handed it to his father: “This wasn’t like that, daddy. This man has been living in the cabin since I was a kid. He never bothered me until last night when he climbed in through the window.”
Barry’s mother checked the base of her son’s skull but could find no marks or cuts. She told him the monster magazines he read were making him imagine things. His father was more direct: “Don’t share these crazy stories with people, or they’ll put you in an institution for the rest of your life.”
A few weeks later, Barry reported that he had not seen the man with the spotlight face since he snuck into his room: “I checked in the cabin this morning and he was definitely gone. He must have gone back to the moon.”
Having read the note, his parents looked at each other in dismay.
“What’s going to happen to you when we’re gone?” his father asked.
Barry wrote on the pad, “I know I’m not the kind of son you wanted. I wish I had brothers and sisters to make you happy.”
His mother rose from the table and left the room, weeping.
His father took Barry’s head between his hands. “You broke your mother’s heart just now. We both love you. But we don’t understand the way your mind works. . . As to why you don’t have brothers or sisters, I can’t answer that. It’s the will of Heavenly Father.”
It was late afternoon on the last day of Barry’s trip to Salt Lake City and he was heading to the checkout counter of his favorite bookstore near Temple Square. A young woman whom he did not recognize was at the register. He laid the stack of magazines on the glass countertop and handed her a greasy laminated card with the following message typed on it:
I suffer from a condition called verbal apraxia. That means I cannot speak. But I can understand what you say to me. If you require a response, I can write one down.
The girl handed the card back and smiled. “I assume you want these?”
He nodded.
The prices were penciled in on the first page of each item. He wished they wouldn’t do that. Once outside, he would sit on a bench and remove these with a pink eraser he carried with him at all times for this very contingency.
The cashier tallied everything up. As she did so, Barry frowned and massaged his left forearm with his right hand—a habit he’d picked up as a boy whenever he found himself alone on the playground surrounded by other kids.
“Total comes to $78.67. Cash or credit?”
He put four twenty-dollar bills on the counter and looked away. She handed him his change. One of her fingers brushed his and he winced. He gathered up the magazines and left.
Later that night he sat at the small round table of his motel room, browsing through the day’s purchases. The room cost $79 a night and smelled like pepperoni pizza. A man and woman were making noises on the other side of the wall. He concluded they were engaging in sexual intercourse, so he put on his noise-canceling headphones and pushed the “play” button on a 1985 Walkman. The cassette tape contained 120 minutes of static.
The first item on the stack was a magazine about early Utah called From Desert to Deseret. Only 27 issues had been published before the magazine folded in July 1969, the same month as the moon landing. He smiled at the ads for metal detectors and treasure-hunting kits. He was pretty sure he had multiple copies of the exact same issue at home.
He was about to set the magazine aside, when he turned over a page and found an article about Parowan. He began reading it and was pleasantly surprised to discover the article showcased his great-grandparents. But the only reason it had been included was because the story was sensational.
Barry’s great-grandfather had had a brother named Grady, who (like Barry) had been unable to speak, but who (unlike Barry) had been born with a facial deformity. A pen-and-ink illustration showed an artist’s reconstruction of what Grady might have looked like with a doughy twist of flesh stretching from forehead to chin.
An old photograph showed the timber-frame of his great-grandparents’ house when it was still under construction. A separate cabin had been built for the family to live in until the house was finished. With his great-grandmother expecting her first child, it was decided that, once the house was built, mother and father would move into it and Grady would remain in the cabin alone.
The article claimed that Grady would stand at the cabin threshold throughout the day “bellowing in brute despondency.”
Once night at the dinner table, when Barry’s grandfather (the firstborn son) had come of age, he told his parents that, at all hours of the night, no matter what the season, Uncle Grady stood in the cabin door opposite the his window; and, whenever he peeped out from behind the blinds, Grady waved at him, despite no light being in the boy’s room for Grady to see by. It was as if the man sensed the boy was looking at him.
A sister of the boy, who moved to San Francisco and became estranged from the family confided to the author of the article that, on the night her brother shared this strange story, a storm had rolled in that brought with it thunder “unlike any I’d ever heard in my life.” The following day Uncle Grady was gone and never heard of again. The sister was not named in the article “to protect her anonymity.”
This was the first time Barry had ever heard of his mysterious Uncle Grady or the anonymous aunt in San Francisco. He had always wondered why the old cabin had been built on the other side of the backyard and left empty for all those years.
When he turned to the next page, his blood ran cold. Before him was a grainy photograph showing the cabin. Standing in the doorway was the same shirtless man whom Barry had seen as a little boy, the man with the spotlight face who’d jabbed a needle into the base of his skull. As he stared at the illustration in horror, he heard a garbled inarticulate voice trying to speak to him through the static in his headphones.
[To Be Continued]
I'm really enjoying this character, and the eerieness is just the right pitch. Also, I totally sympathize with Barry here (not sure what this says about me ;-): "But the older he got, and the closer he got to dying, the more he realized that he wouldn’t be able to save humanity before he keeled over and died and that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because humanity might not be worth saving."
This is so good!! I’m really enjoying this character.