A strange thing happened that week: Malcolm’s life became normal. Well, as normal as a life could be when you shared a wall with a meth head.

Malcolm Steadman will buy a gun in 41 days.

Most of his neighbors were transient. Travelers, or men needing a place to cheat on their wives on a budget, occupied most of the rooms most of the time. But there were a few semi-permanent residents that Malcolm was slowly becoming more and more familiar with. These were the people who existed between the outskirts of society and society proper. Malcolm’s next door neighbor smoked meth, and was up at the strangest hours of the day blaring country music at ear shattering levels and shouting strange paranoid delusions of Hilary Clinton trying to steal his penis with black magic. A man who lived across from Malcolm, at the other side of the U-Shaped motel building, carried groceries in every few days, but never took out any trash. Another neighbor, a young girl in her early twenties wore a face perpetually raw from tears and streaked mascara and only left her room when a man in his fifties arrived on an old Harley Davidson. These were his new peers, and he fit right in.

Malcolm was eating a grapefruit, his television off and his shades slightly drawn from the window. He kept to himself and had fallen into a routine of walking to work, patrolling the neighborhood for Garry with little commitment, and returning to his room to watch for signs of life in the motel as if it were some sort of morbid petri dish prone to violence. He was sort of happy. Sort of. Routine was nice, and Malcolm fell into it easily enough. Fitting in, which was somehow still vaguely important to him was a non issue when those you were supposed to blend in with were as strange as you. Knowing where he would sleep each night lifted a giant load off of his shoulders, such that he did not know that they were sore with pressure until the load was gone.

The morning is where most of the action happened. Travelers rose from their slumbers and hurriedly whisked themselves away. Either running to get to where they were going as fast as they could, or hurrying to get as far away from the motel without rising suspicion. The man who took out no garbage, but brought plenty of consumables in would leave in the morning, squeezing through a door opened just enough to let himself out, but allow no peering eyes to see what was within. Only the meth head stayed quiet in the morning. Everyone watched everyone.

Malcolm’s grapefruit did not taste ripe enough.

The savage roar of a motorcycle cut through the air like a rusty and dulled knife, then faded away as distance and memory became one. Malcolm watched as the young girl who’s face knew only sorrow turned a corner and started walking toward her room. Malcolm was often self-conscious as he watched his neighbors. He felt as if he were intruding, and the last thing he wanted to be was Creepy. At the same time, he was practically stalking Garry before he lost him, so that ship might have sailed and been refitted twice long ago. He looked away from the girl, trying to give her privacy, when something demanded a double look. The girl was not alone, and she was not with the old biker.

She was with Hope, Garry’s girlfriend, aged in pimples.

They looked paranoid, and in this instance someone was watching them. Hope looked over her shoulder before the other girl opened the room’s door with her key and they entered. The drapes were already shut.

Malcolm had no idea if she and Garry were still in touch, but junkie circles tended to be communities where everybody knew and used each other, so long as they shared the same habit. Malcolm had no idea if Hope used, but given the environment, this seemed likely.

He peeled a section of his grapefruit clean, and ate a segment of the bitter fruit.

No harm would come to Hope in Malcolm’s plan, but it seemed logical to keep tabs on her if he was to find Garry once more.

Here are some things Malcolm had become once he fell out of society: homeless, mad as a hatter, perpetually scared, and now creepy. Malcolm did not like being creepy, but it was hard to navigate with his moral compass on a planet that lacked a magnetosphere. Was it enough that he was harming nobody? Probably not, the last thing young women needed was more leering. At the end of the day, the simple truth was this: there was no justification for his actions that would convince him that he was okay. That he wasn’t a villain. He could tell himself that he was being vigilant, he could tell himself that his spying was necessary if he was going to fix his problems. But if you felt gross about something, well, chances are you were being gross.

He left the dried skin and inedible innards of his fruit on his bed.

So, he thought to himself, now I’m creepy, you learn something new every day.

Put Malcolm in an office, and he’ll blend right in (assuming he isn’t homeless) and will fake all kinds of niceties and lie about all of the sports that he doesn’t watch. Put him in a carnival and he’ll immediately wear a giant foam hat, eat things that should never be deep-fried, and look like every tourist ever. Put him in an environment that nurtures the strange, the creepy, and the paranoid, well, he’ll take that up like an eager chameleon.

This begs the question, he thought, will my mental state improve with my environment? Does my need to blend mean that I can be outstanding if I surround myself with the best, instead of those that have been tossed away? Of course, he knew the answer to that. He had started his journey in a decent environment. Maybe it was the depression, and the isolation that inevitably soured him, or maybe this was his natural equilibrium. Was Malcolm creepy because he was around creepy people, was he creepy because he did creepy things, or was he just creepy?

He had not even noticed the cold sweat on his forehead until he went to scratch his face for an itch. He had not even noticed his quick heart rate, and his white knuckle tension. His panic attacks from an identity crisis were now so normal, that he did not even realize that he was in the midst of one. It was so normal that he gave it no further thought once he realized that he did just have one.

Instead of giving it further thought, Malcolm turned on the TV and watched an hour of the live action Hulk, starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno before walking to work. He never saw that the man who never threw anything away was watching him, or that the young woman peered out of her window to watch the meth head next to him. He never saw the transient open his doors with a pair of binoculars in his hands.

He never saw Garry leave the woman’s room. His face as raw as hers.

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