I wish I were asleep. I try to block out the TV with a pillow around my ears. I try to fend off the fetidness by spraying cologne all over my torso. I am not sure if I am hearing Peter whale on his dog or if it is my conscience recreating the past.
I have to go to work in the morning and I have a feeling I will be very tired when I wake up. I'm letting a defenseless mammal get mauled. I'm allowing a drunk to ruin my life. A man would have squashed this problem long ago. A vertebrate would be in sweet slumber by now, having either a new neighbor or having put this inebriated one in line. I watch the red hours pass on my alarm clock. I wish Loraine were asleep next to me, putting her arm on my chest.
Either BBC broadcasts for twenty-four hours or this loon tapes it. There is a hurricane in the West Indies and it is moving toward the Gulf Coast. American troops are being positioned in Saudi Arabia. Fa Lun Gong members were arrested in Beijing. There is a sickly feeling in my stomach coming from powerlessness, but I do not snap. I hear a bottle smashing, and I am not pushed off the edge. He actually turns up the television, and I still don't lose it. Hours pass, allowing for less and less sleep, assuring a worse and worse day at the office. And then I hear the sound amidst this clamor that finally does it. It is the sound of a stream of urine hitting my front door. I don't have to look through the peephole to see that it's Peter. I will not need an investigation team to discover that my drunk-ass neighbor is relieving himself on my frigging doormat. I hear him collapse afterwards, falling onto my recycling bin. There is a clinking of his body hitting glass bottles.
I vow that I will have him moved from that adjacent unit. I swear by every tombstone that bears my surname that I will not rest till he is gone. I will muster every speck of courage that is sitting in the marrow of my bones. For every transsexual that wants to come over and pet me, for every hour of rest that I have surrendered, for every maltreated dog that has had to endure Peter the drunk, I will not fail.
After spilling out this manifesto, I fall asleep. I suppose the release of anger and frustration in the form of bold promises is a good sedative. I begin to dream of being chased by a wolf man with a hatchet. This is a nightmare in which I run, the one in my waking life will no longer involve running.
