I Am Your Whistling Neighbor
Or, How to Talk To Strangers, by Bryan Edenfield
Before reading this, it is advisable to read Witch of Wals.
I knocked on the door and it opened, not so much from the force of my knock, but in spite of it. It creaked and moaned and moved slowly, as if to say, “Fine, I’ll do all the work here.” I didn’t intend for that to happen. I wasn’t psychologically prepared to see the inside of the house, so I backed away, as if frightened, but I wasn’t frightened so much as wary, and surprised, and frightened.
A woman sat on what looked like a park bench, installed in the living room, into the hardwood flooring. It was dark; all light came from the open door and shined directly onto the woman and her bench. The spotlight had finally reached her; it was finally her turn to be the star of the show, my shadow lazily and inconsequentially draped over her.
She stood and spread her arms wide like wings, then looked at me with a big grin. Her lips were bright with red lipstick and her hair done up in what seemed to me to be an unnecessarily elaborate style, but I’m not well-versed in hair culture and so can’t say precisely what she did, architecturally. I don’t have the vocabulary for it, but it was gravity defying in a humdrum way, not like an airplane, but like commonplace magic. She wore a pantsuit that resembled a tuxedo, but it was ill-fitting, too large and baggy, and though she was not a small woman, it made her look like a wrinkled child. Her face and bare arms looked like those of an older human woman, but she held herself more like a youthfully uncertain peacock bird. She gestured to me, drawing me in with her left hand. She didn’t speak a word. She smiled, politely, not in a creepy manner, though I wouldn’t blame you for imagining it that way. She circled her hand towards me then towards herself, as if pulling me inside through subtle manipulation of air currents. It’s true, I felt as if I was being pushed inside, as if she somehow coaxed the air behind me to solidify and march forth, swooping me with it. But my hair and tie remained untussled by wind, so who knows.
Once inside, I saw a man was sitting on a piano bench, off to my left. He had not been visible in my initial door-framed view. He wore a baseball hat and safari trousers with a very thick coat that went all the way to his ankles, though he wore no shirt underneath it. He had many tattoos on his chest, which was hairy but not in a chaotic way. He had a very nice tan. Many of his tattoos were inscrutable, symbols and scripts alien to me. I recognized some Hebrew characters, though didn’t know what they meant. There were some Japanese characters as well, and some Icelandic, or at least Nordic, staves. Perhaps his body was covered in protection spells, because he seemed very well preserved and youthful, but he moved like a weak old man, and I knew, from the way he stood and grimaced at me, the way he used some white driftwood as a cane, that he had been on this earth far longer than I. The driftwood cane looked like a ceremonial scepter or staff, ending at the top in an array of writhing driftwood horns. There was definitely something skull-like about the top of the driftwood cane, but it was only driftwood, not a cane with a dragon skull fixed atop it, despite what I thought, for a split second.
I was still moving towards her. Closer, I saw that her tuxedo top was only a novelty shirt, a t-shirt with tie, vest, and buttons printed on it. She wore over it an actual vest and an actual tie, all far too large. She offered me a seat, gesturing to a nearby rocking chair, so I sat, because it seemed rude not to. He slowly crossed the room and sat next to her. As he did so, he crushed some shelled nuts in his mouth, and ate the shells with the nuts, letting bits fall to the floor. The floor, from an initial glance, looked clean, even shiny, but there was a lot of mystery stuck between the floorboard slats: old nuts, hair, dirt, nail clippings, dried and shriveled leaves, the world pulverized to dust.
It started raining and so the door closed not so much of its own volition but as if the door had arrangements with the air around it, and the air shifted. I felt this; it did tussle my hair and necktie this time. Perhaps then noticing my necktie, and noticing the woman’s oversized necktie, the man made a perplexed and annoyed expression, then reached into a pocket and pulled out a necktie of his own, pre-knotted. He slipped it over his head like a necklace and did not tighten it, so it hung loose, like a silken lanyard.
Finally, I said, “I’m your new neighbor. I was just coming to say hello.”
“Hello,” she said.
“I am unemployed, so I was thinking of offering my services to the neighborhood,” I said, after a long awkward pause.
“I’m unemployed too,” she said. The gentleman nodded in agreement.
Hesitantly, I asked, “Are you retired?” I was afraid this would offend them, but it didn’t. She answered yes and smiled politely. It should be noted that she was still standing, with the man seated on the bench next to her. She still held her arms out as if about to take off in flight. Then, she glided about the living room, rearranging the various items that hung on the walls.
“We must preserve knickknacks,” the man finally spoke. “You see, if we don’t move them frequently, they collect dust, and if they collect dust, they’re less beautiful.”
“Yes!” The woman skipped around the room grabbing things from the wall, setting them down, grabbing other things, setting them down, putting things back up but in new places, and so on. “It is a self cleaning system, if you include my labor as part of that system.”
“Which I do,” said the man. “But don’t think that means I don’t lift a finger around here.”
“He plays the piano beautifully. Why don’t you play our guest a song, Richard.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “I mostly wanted to say hi, and ask if you had any yardwork, or little tasks I could do for you.”
The woman moved an animal horn and placed it where an empty picture frame once hung, then took a horseshoe and hung it where the animal horn had been. “Are you like a small child trying to make some extra money for a hot new toy?”
“I’m a middle-aged man with many skills who is nonetheless not able to turn those skills into a lucrative career.”
“Do you know how to whistle?” the man asked me.
I nodded, but with uncertainty.
The woman took a photograph of some sticks and hung it where a bundle of actual sticks once hung, and took that bundle of sticks and nestled it in the animal horns, which she had hung where a candlestick wall fixture once hung.
“I will play you a song,” the man said. He stood, and though I began to gesture in protest, he batted this away before I could speak. He batted so forcefully that I felt my nascent words fall onto the floor, unborn and writhing. They seeped into the crevices between the floorboards with all the other batted-down nouns and verbs.
After a few minutes, he returned to the piano bench and played a well-known commercial jingle. I don’t desire to have product placement in my review of this experience, so will not mention what this jingle advertised, but I will say it was a cleaning product popular in the 1980s. He did not sing the lyrics, and when he finished he looked back at me with disappointment. The woman had stopped, and she stared at me with disappointment too.
“You were supposed to whistle along, ya melon head,” said the man.
“Yeah, what’s wrong with you. You dumb or something, guy?”
I cleared my throat because I was melting on the inside. “I was supposed to whistle along?”
“Am I not articulate enough for you?” asked the man. “Yes, whistle.”
“He is very articulate. I know that for a fact,” the woman said. “You might see a doctor about your condition. Maybe it’s simply an affliction of the senses and not a turpitude of the brain organ.”
“Are you deaf?” the man asked.
I shook my head, but was too confused to speak words.
“That’s too bad,” the woman said. “Deaf people are so interesting.” She resumed moving things from one place to another on the walls. “I don’t care for people with average faculties. That’s the real impairment, if you ask me: normality. I myself cannot taste anything.”
“And I suffer from a vertigo that leaves me unable to sense where my body is in space, whether I am rightside up or upside down. Usually, it’s evident by the sight of things, but you’d be surprised how much of this world is built downside up. Now.” He cleared his throat and cracked his fingers in a way that seemed painful and dangerous. “Whistle to this.”
He played another jingle, this one from the 1970s, but still familiar to me, as it likely would be to you regardless of your age, so catchy are these jingles that the memory of them is inherited, passed down from one generation to the next, like a parasite hitching a ride, leaping from one animal to the next. So, I whistled.
And they were quite impressed.