The Man Who Ate Books // Chapter Four: Part Two // Dave Buys a Roomba

There are days when Wally just sits there. He doesn't talk to anyone, he's compliant, doesn't raise a fuss, just sits on the couch, staring off. On those days, he's looking at something through the walls, peering through that shaken up Etch A Sketch in his brain to his old town, the one that wasn’t built to change, that still exists completely and exactly as he remembers it.

On days like that, when he’s staring through the wall, the whole place starts to wear on me. It is so cosmically screwed up, this abysmal black hole of misery that brings people like Wally to a place like PACE. There isn’t a single resident that horrible things didn’t happen to; they won the misery lottery and are all drawn together like magnets, the staff follows like iron filings, each with their own shit-story to tell. And we’re all stuck, like a mouse on a glue trap, not dead yet but unable to do anything except accept the suffering until someone is kind enough to step on it or run it over with their car or it finally just dies from exhaustion and terror.

Perhaps someone has lied to you and told you that this is what is best for all of us mice. That such suffering must be endured until we reach perfect mousiness.

Don’t believe them.

Wally was present, mostly, the day Dave brought in the scrap computer and we went to Wal-Mart.

“Hey, check this out,” Dave said, bringing in a computer case he found in the neighbor's gutter. “There’s gold in that thar’ e-waste.”

“Tell me again why you’re gathering all this crap,” Wally said.

“Look dude, I'm telling you, when everything falls apart, and the trucks stop running here with all the food, no one is going to take paper money. You better have silver, you better have gold. You better have bullets and seeds and alcohol.”

“Sounds crazy to me,” Wally said, leaving to his room.

Dave turned back to me. “No one is going to trade you a can of beans for a dollar bill. You’re going to be using it to kindle your cooking fire.”

"Or maybe we could wad them up and throw them at the Zombies,” I said.

"Look man, there will be zombies, millions of people just like you too foolish to prepare, zombieing around the towns scavenging for food. After a few weeks without food, you might eat brains. Maybe not people’s at first, but cow brains might look tasty after a few weeks, after that, who knows?

“Maybe you could get Skinner to pay you in e-waste.”

“I already asked him to just pay me out in gold.”

“What did he say?”

"Told me to eat a dick. Didn't say whose, so I'm guessing he didn't mean his own. I told him he'd better figure it out and get a stockpile ready to keep this place running, though. “Canned food, water, cigarettes, gold.”

“What did he say?”

He didn’t say much, but he bought a bunch of canned food and water.”

"It's a licensing requirement. He has to keep a few weeks of food and water and disaster
supplies on hand.”

"See, the government knows what’s going on. Why else would they make you keep that stuff.”
I looked at him, unsure how serious he is.

“Where's Wally?" I ask.

“I don't know, I thought he was in his room.”

We check the room. Wally's is under his bed, laying on the floor on a pile of money--small bills, ones, fives, a few tens. ”

“What are you doing, Wally?” I ask. "Counting my money. I'm rich.”

"See,” Dave says. Even Wally is getting ready for global financial meltdown. You don’t trust banking institutions, Wally?”

"I trust banks fine; I just like to sleep on my money.”

“How about we go to Wal-Mart and spend some of it,” Dave says. “I want to get a Roomba.”