1:53 am
Dear Diary,
A weird thing happened
to me when I went downstairs just now.
I wanted to get a jump
on my day by getting my lunch ready for tomorrow. I was thinking a
peanut butter and salami sandwich would be nice. Maybe with pickles
and onions and potato chips and leftover Chinese food. My wife
Cynthia thinks my sandwiches are gross. She says they make my breath
smell bad. I say toothpaste makes her breath smell bad, but I don’t
try to stop her from eating that. She says she doesn’t eat
toothpaste and I should stop being weird. I said good luck with
that, Baby. She had no response.
Anyhow, I went
downstairs and turned on the light in the living room, but I could see into the
kitchen. There was this little man standing there in the middle of
the kitchen. He was old and bald and wrinkly and his face looked
like it was covered in cobwebs. He just stood there, blinking. I
said, “Hey Man, what are you doing blinking in my kitchen? This is
where I blink.” He continued to blink, so I got mad. I
went into the kitchen to womp him one, but when I flipped on the light
switch he was gone.
“Hey Blinky, where’d you
go?” I asked, but Blinky did not answer. Unless he answered by
blinking, in which case, I could not hear him. I mean, he was a
pretty loud blinker, but not that loud.
October 12 4 am
Still awake. Thinking
about that whole thing in the kitchen. I can’t believe I forgot to
make my sandwich.
October 15
Hey, I saw that guy
again. The old guy in the kitchen. Turns out he’s the
Grobisher. I don’t know where he comes from or what he is
exactly. He’s not quite a person but he’s not a traditional monster
either. He’s not a vampire or a zombie or a Frankenstein. I checked
the search engines, but I couldn’t find any Grobisher, but I’m pretty sure
that’s what he said. Also, the name fits him. He totally
looked like a Grobisher.
October 30
Hey Diary, what ever
happened to that Grobisher guy? Sometimes when I’m in bed I feel
like he’s watching me. I mean, stop watching me sleep, you old
perv!
It doesn’t even bother
me that much anymore. Maybe I’m getting used to him. I sort of kind
of like it that he comes to visit sometimes. Does that make me a
perv?
Saturday Nov 27
So I was taking a nap
and I heard something scream. Like, maybe the baby or something. I
shot up in bed, trying to orient myself. Cynthia was out
shopping.
The baby screamed again
like maybe he was having a nightmare or something. Or like he was
being tortured by the Grobisher maybe.
I ran to the baby’s
room, threw open the door. We keep the shade drawn in the nursery,
but the hall light shone in around me. A dark figure huddled over
the crib. I’m pretty sure it was that Grobisher guy.
I ran at him. I
meant to knock him over, but he sort of disappeared. Like he
was a mirage or something. “What’s up with that, Mirage Man?” I
asked. I looked up and he was standing on the edge of the
crib. He has excellent balance, that Grobisher. He was
smiling. He had sharp, gap-filled teeth and onion breath. He’s
my kind of guy, I guess.
“Take care of the little
one,” he said in some kind of foreign accent. I think maybe it was
Australian.
I brought the baby into
the room and checked him for bite marks. He was pretty upset,
gasping and whatnot, but that may be because I only change him once a
day. All things in moderation, I always say.
Later, Cynthia came home
from shopping and she got pretty mad about him not being changed. I
tried to blame that Grobisher dude, but when I looked for him, he was nowhere
to be found.
That Grobisher is
turning out to be not very dependable.
Cynthia doesn’t even
believe he’s real. She acts like I made him up. What’s up with that?
December 6
Have I gone crazy? Cynthia
seems to think so. Then again, she always thinks I’m crazy. I don’t
think I am. I’m the same as always. I think maybe the
goblin I hallucinated is the crazy one.
December 9
Hey Diary, Guess who I
saw today? The Grobisher. This morning when I went down
for breakfast I found him waiting for me in the living room in the dark. He
told me not to turn on the light. I stood in the doorway and I could
just barely see him using the light from the kitchen behind me. I
squinted to try and see him better, but for some reason this only made it
harder to see him.
“Hey Dude,” I
said. “How do you keep getting into my house? Are you
using the doggy door or something, because if so I’m going to have to nail that
thing shut.” I started laughing because I imagined our dog trying to
get through the doggy door after it was nailed shut. I wondered how
many times he would bump his little poodle head before he would give up and go
live with the neighbors. I guessed seven times. I made a
mental note to put this on my list of practical jokes to do today.
Then I remembered I was
scared and angry about the intruder. “What were you doing in my
kid’s room?” I asked. I wanted to strangle him, but last time I
tried to do that he vanished into thin air. Nothing makes you feel
as impotent as trying to strangle air. Except maybe when your penis
fails to get erect when you want it to. That makes you feel pretty
impotent also.
“I Sorry, I Sorry,” the
guy said in that crazy Australian accent of his. “I hear
baby cry. I try help.”
“You could help by going
away and calling me on the phone and saying Hey Man, your baby’s crying, why don’t
you go pick him or something? And then I would say. Oh
yeah, why don’t you mind your own business? I’ll neglect my kid if I
want to. You know what? I think I’m starting to see your
point. I still don’t like the idea of you coming into my house
though.”
“I always here,” said
the Grobisher, “in exist between light and dark.”
I laughed at his
ridiculous Australian accent. “In exist! Priceless! G’day,
mate!”
He then explained the
physics of his existence and how I am able to perceive him. Turns
out, the Grobisher is from some other dimension, like maybe the second or the
third. In some ways he occupies the same space and time as I do, but
he also exists in a place all its own. My family and I appear to him
in much the same way as he appears to me--at the edge of a lit room and a dark
one, popping in and out of some invisible but intertwined portion of the
universe. Somehow, he manages to exist simultaneously in both
dimensions.
I told him to stop being
so indecisive. “Pick a dimension already!”
He said it didn’t work
that way.
I told him all he needed
was a can-do attitude and a little elbow grease and he could do anything he set
his mind to! He checked his elbow for grease, but he didn’t have
any. I told him I would loan him some of mine. He was
resistant. We agreed to disagree.
He said he caught his
first glimpse of this dimension shortly after my family and I moved into the
house. One night, he thought he heard something, so he lit a torch
and walked through his cave toward the sound. Then he saw me and
Cynthia arguing over a bug.
She was against the bug,
as I recall, and I was for it. “You will never make money selling
roach farms!” she said.
“But how do you know if
we don’t even try?” I countered. She said she wasn’t going to have
this discussion and I had to stop leaving half-eaten donuts in the
bathroom. I told her it was all part of my plan. She then
said she would leave me if I didn’t quit attracting bugs. I
told her we would just have to agree to disagree. She said she would
not agree to that.
Anyway, the Grobisher
was initially frightened by our loud talking and animated gestures. He
was also a little freaked out about me eating donuts in the bathroom. I
said, “What else are you going to do in there? Read a book? Not
in this lifetime!” He didn’t seem to understand the question.
The Grobisher came to
realize that we were harmless, and so he began studying our ways from a
distance.
I had many questions, of
course. Where was his cave? How come I couldn’t see it?
Why did he live in a cave? Did he have nicer furniture than me?
The Grobisher said his
cave overlaps our colonial townhouse in space-time, but somehow occupies
different matter. When the light is just right, however, a wormhole
opens up between the two dimensions, and he can walk right through. He
said the best way is when two of our rooms that exist in the same space-time
have lighting that mirrors one another--like one has to be lit and the other
dark--then he can step into our dimension. Once he learned our
routine it was a simple matter of entering our world, and our home.
I say he visits, but
technically he isn’t actually here. When I tried to give him a high
five, his hand passed through mine. “Up high,” I said. His
hand went through mine. “Down low.” Same
thing. I formed a hole with my thumb and forefinger. “In the hole,”
I said, but no matter how hard he tried, he was unable to clean out my toilet
bowl. He explained that this was because he isn’t able to actually
cross into our dimension, it only seems that way.
“Let’s try it again,” I
suggested. “Eventually you’ll learn.”
Alas, he did not.
Cynthia came downstairs
with the baby, turned on the light and found me high fiving the air and asking
it to clean out my toilet bowl. Come to think of it, I’ve been
getting some pretty strange looks from that woman lately.
December 12
Dear Diary,
Got another visit from
the Grobisher today. That guy is popping in all the time now. I’m
like, “Christ, don’t you have anywhere else to go?”
I guess he’s a lonely
little Australian space goblin.
He said he doesn’t have
many friends in his dimension. He told me that if any member of his
clan found out that he was traveling into another dimension, he would be
ridiculed and quite possibly confined against his will. It turns out
he comes from a tribe of big dumb jerks.
In his dimension, the
other Grobishers are always fighting with one another. There is
constant warring between the different tribes, and even among his own
nationality there is intense competition to secure even the slightest advantage
in order to win food, employment, women, or whatever. It is a place
where only a lucky few, born into privilege, enjoy most of the advantages,
while the vast majority live in poverty.
“Sucks to be in your
dimension,” I said, but really I was thinking, “Now, I’ll never be able to get
rid of this guy.”
I asked him about his
job. He told me he was a low-level bureaucrat with little hope of
advancing into the upper strata.
I told him I worked at
the DMV.
December 15
My Grobisher and I seem
to have more in common every day. He also has a monogamous partner
and offspring of his own. He also feels disconcerted by the demands
of family life. He also has a mate who desires to see in him greater
ambition and who won’t let him start a cockroach farm. (On his
planet, cockroaches are called puppies.) Life in the other dimension
becomes less foreign every time the Grobisher opens his mouth. I
still make fun of his accent though.
December 17
The Grobisher is really
helping me work through some things. He’s helped me see that my
problems are the fault of everyone else and not me. I should be able
to leave my half-eaten donuts in the bathroom and start a cockroach farm if I
want to. It’s okay if I want to call in sick to work twice a week. Why
does my wife insist on crushing my dreams and ambitions?
The Grobisher said that
it was the same way with his mate. I then went through a whole thing
about g’days and mates and shrimps and barbies, but for some reason, the
Grobisher still doesn’t seem to get my humor. I think maybe it’s
generational.
“So what can we do?” I
asked him. “What will make things better?”
The Grobisher nodded
sagely as he stroked his pointy chin. Then he suggested killing my
family. Technically he said, “keeling,” but I’m pretty sure it means
the same thing.
I was
flabbergasted. “I’m not keeling my family. You go keel
your family.” I didn’t really mean for him to keel his family. I
just said it because he said it to me. I guess this is how peer
pressure starts.
He said, “I keel my
family. Then, you keel your family. Is fair, no?”
I said this is the kind
of thing that gives violent hallucinations a bad name. We finally
agreed to table the discussion until a later date.
December 20
Dear Diary,
How’s this for
weird? Old Groby showed up today. He was real excited,
beckoning me into the kitchen to look at something. I told him
I’d already seen my kitchen about fifty times that day, but he wouldn’t take no
for an answer, and I figured a fifty first snack of the day wouldn’t do any
harm. He had me stand at the light switch and then he reached for
the torch in his dimension, and when he counted three, he put out his torch at
the same time as I flicked on the light switch, and you’ll never guess what
happened! The kitchen vanished and in its place was the Grobisher’s cave!
I totally went into
another dimension!
And you know what? He
really does have nicer furniture than me. Also, his cave is much
cleaner than my house. The walls are a little sweaty and I banged my
head on a stalactite, but overall it’s a pretty sweet pad.
Then he showed me
something that was not so sweet. He beckoned me to follow him
further into the shadows and it was there, slumped against the wall, that I saw
his wife and his two little Grobishers. They weren’t moving and they
were covered in a blue liquid, not unlike my elbow grease. It was
disgusting. He’d done it. He’d killed his family.
“Dude,” I said. That
was all I could think of to say.
The Grobisher was pretty
ecstatic about the whole thing. He jumped up and down and rubbed his
hands together excitedly.
The best part about it,
he said, was that when the authorities came looking for him, he could simply
adjust the light and disappear into another dimension.
“Great,” I
thought. “Now he’s going to be at my house all the time.” I
told him if he thought I was going to clean the bathroom for him or make up the
guest room, he had another thing coming.
Nothing I said dampened
his mood though. He told me I could do the same thing. When
I killed my family, I could hide out in his dimension just like he was hiding
out in mine.
“I don’t know,” I
said. “Does your dimension have onion rings?”
December 22
Things just haven’t been
the same since I travelled to another dimension. It’s hard for me to
eat knowing there might be dead Grobishers under my kitchen table. It’s
almost enough to make me lose my appetite.
Then there’s the whole
thing about killing my family. I don’t remember ever agreeing to
that, but the Grobisher insists that we had a deal.
“A deal is a deal,” he
said. And there’s no denying that. A deal is a deal.
December 23
I figure if I’m going to
hold up my end of the bargain, I better go ahead and do it. Otherwise,
I’ll have to go through with my Christmas shopping. That means
tonight’s the night.
December 24
Dear Diary,
What have I done? Oh
yeah, now I remember. Here’s what I did:
First, I spent a good
deal of last night figuring out how to wipe out my family. I made a
big long list of all the ways I could do it: Shoot them with a gun, Shoot them
with a bow and arrow, shoot them with a tank. (It turns out I don’t
have a tank. Or a bow and arrow. Or a gun.) I
have knives, though. And forks. I thought about hitting
them with the car, but I still have, like, a hundred and forty eight payments
left on that thing. I considered poison, but Cynthia made me use
that on my cockroach farm. Drowning was an option, but I wasn’t sure
how to trick her into putting her head into the sink. I thought about
covering them in honey and feeding them to a bear, or perhaps a honey badger,
or some other animal that likes honey, but I wasn’t sure I could get hold of
that much honey. Finally, I decided I needed a break, so I put my
list down and went to the bathroom to have a donut and think. When I
came out, Cynthia was in the hall waiting for me. She was holding
the list.
“What’s this?” she
asked.
“It’s my shopping list,”
I said.
“Oh? You’re
shopping for rope, rifles, and poison?”
“I wanted to try out a
new recipe.”
For some reason Cynthia
didn’t believe me. Instead, she took the baby and went to stay with
her mother.
I went to look for the
Grobisher in the guest room, but he wasn’t there. He’d been in and
out of the dimension all day.
I went down to the
kitchen, and an interesting thing happened. Just as I switched on
the kitchen light, the Grobisher must have put out his living room torch,
because I suddenly found myself in his dimension. I looked around
and there were all these Grobishers sitting around watching the Idiot Box,
which is what they call television in his dimension. But these
weren’t just any Grobishers. These were his family. They
weren’t dead at all.
“Hey!” I cried. “What’s
the big idea?” I must have frightened them because they all went
scrambling. Once he saw who I was, though, my Grobisher came
out from behind his recliner, looking red and bashful and guilty. “What
is the meaning of this?” I demanded.
All the Grobisher could
do was shrug. It turns out, it was all a practical joke. He
never intended to keel his family. He just wanted to see if I would
do it. He wanted to see how far he could push me. I had
to admit, he got me pretty good.
“Well dang,” I
said. “I guess I’ll have to do my Christmas shopping after all.”
January 3
It took a lot of
convincing to get Cynthia and the kid to move back into the house, but I’m a
pretty shrewd negotiator. I just reminded her that she doesn’t “get”
my sense of humor, and she had to admit I was right. Plus, now that
the danger of me keeling her has passed, she really has nothing to worry
about. Also, once my cockroach business gets off the ground, we’ll
start living the good life, and she’ll forget all about the “unpleasantness.”
I haven’t seen much of
the Grobisher lately, and I think maybe it’s for the best. You just
can’t trust a guy who tries to trick you into killing your family. Next,
he’ll be trying to sell me time shares.
Still, I know he’s
around here, liable to pop in at any time. It’s gotten so I don’t
even want to turn the lights on. I’m saving a fortune off of our
utility bill. I’ve only seen him once since I uncovered his evil
plot, and that was on New Year’s Eve. It was nearing two in the
morning, and Cynthia was already passed out on the couch. An empty
champagne bottle rolled on the floor beside her. I went into the
kitchen for one last lump of sausage before bed. I opened the
refrigerator door and stuck my head inside. Somehow I sensed he was
behind me. I didn’t bother to close the door or turn around.
“What do you want,
Groby?”
“Keel your family,” he
said, and then I heard a bunch of other Grobishers laughing.
“Really?” I said, “this
is how you losers celebrate the new year?”
I felt the mood sour
behind me, and I thought I heard someone hiss something, but I knew to ignore
them. I switched on the light and they were gone.
See also Stuck: A Tale of Woe.
See also Stuck: A Tale of Woe.
