Thus-lessness

There are little people in my home. I wonder how they got here.

I can hear them hiding by the stairs, behind that ugly couch near the box fan that’s never worked right. And I hear their little hands clapping and I can hear their little teeth gnawing on their pilfered candy bars.

Ah, there must be hundreds of them running around here these days. Little people are everywhere!

Shhh! There! Just now. Over by the dining room. Did you hear ‘em that time?

The little people. Well, most of them are little, anyway. Some of them are merely very small. 

I have a list inside my head of the things I’ve got to do whenever the little people are around. Of the things that must be done and of the things that must never ever be done at all. They’re like rules. Things like DO have food available on a semi-regular basis. Things like DO NOT walk around the house in the nude.

And DO lock the gun away with the alcohol and any dirty pictures that can’t pass as art. But DO NOT leave Enter the Void in the DVD player, because little people are not mentally or emotionally equipped to deal with something like the sight of Paz de la Huerta.

DO. NOT. SHOW. FEAR. The little people can smell fear at fifty paces, just like dogs and like beautiful women and salesmen of used cars can. So do not be afraid of them. If you are afraid, then you’re history, adiós, you’re kaput.

Listen to me. Now, these little people, when you finally see them, they are going to be wearing mismatched socks and their shoes are going to be on the wrong feet and you might as well go ahead and accept that right here and right now because you’re never going to change it no matter what you do. You think you will. You think, “Oh, left shoe on the left foot, right shoe on the right foot. How hard can that one possibly be?”

It can be very hard. It can be as hard as anything could ever possibly be.

There! Did you hear that? Did something just shatter upstairs?

I told you. I warned you. Little people are here. They are everywhere.

They are coming.

They are coming like they came the other day when my friend, Doctor Belloq, was over. We were sitting on the couch and we were watching “Doctor Who” when, from out the crevices, out from the walls, out from the corners and cracks and the spaces crawled… little people. They came and they surrounded her in a semi-circle, silent and staring.

Silent and staring little, little people!

And I’d warned her, too, like I’m warning you now, but it did not help when it happened.

And they sat and they stared until one of them, who seemed to be their leader, asked, “What does ‘thus’ mean?”

That was all she said. It was so simple that it was hardly even a question at all, really, and yet Doctor Belloq – my over-educated, hyper-intellectual, always-has-the-answer-for-everything Doctor Belloq – she turned about as pale as Webster’s ghost.

Laughed nervously. She said, “I can use it in a sentence…”

The little person repeated, “What does ‘thus’ mean?”

Doctor Belloq said, “Therefore?”  Doctor Belloq said, “Proceeding from?”

That little person stood up, wagged her finger in the air and announced (quite sternly!), “I am worried about your thus-lessness!”

Then the little people, they scrambled away all at once, back to wherever they’d been before they’d come. We could hear them scampering around inside the walls, and they were chewing through wires and driving the neighbor’s dog insane.

In the very deadest part of night that night, Doctor Belloq called me on the phone. She sounded bad. She said, “What do I do? I can’t sleep, but I can’t claw through this sense of impending thus-lessness.”

She was a defeated woman. Beaten.

I can still hear them laughing.

The little people, I mean. They’re over there, even now, hiding in the closet with their flashlights and their glow-in-the-dark decals.

They are planning their next move. They are in control. They have had just about enough of me. This is their world; I just live in it. 

There... Did you hear that? It is the little people. Here they come!