Walter White

My sister and her husband named their baby Walter White after Walter White, the character from the show "Breaking Bad." I asked them, why? What was their intent? They said they liked the show, and they admired Bryan Cranston's performance. Well then why not Bryan? A less dated name, and not all tied up with the villainy of the character. They looked at me like I was nuts. Your problem, they said to me, speaking in perfect unison, is that you're determined to live aesthetically instead of practically, and so you're incapable of making yourself happy. Then they stood up and left whatever room we were all in. Their words produced in me a moment of clarity, comparable to only one other time in my life, when my friend Mike called and asked me to give him a ride because he'd driven his car onto a median, and when I was on my was driving over to meet him, there was a troll in the road, a wild, three-foot figure with tangled, matted hair and filthy rags for clothes, stooped over and facing away from me and rubbing itself furiously, it would appear, through the front of its pants. I brought the car to a stop. It was dusk and my headlights cast a glow onto the troll's back. It was a narrow road and I wasn't sure I had enough room to drive around. The troll turned slowly and sneered at me, its back still bobbing up and down as it rubbed harder and harder with the flat of its palm. He grinned a mouth full of rotted, stumpy teeth. I flashed my high beams and it scampered off into the woods, cackling. Before, I said seeing the troll had been a moment of clarity -- what had I meant by that? I don't know. After the troll left I drove over to where Mike had driven his car onto the median and picked him up and took him to his girlfriend's place, his girlfriend was named Gina, and they broke up upstairs while I hung out in Gina's kitchen, or Gina's parents' kitchen, with Gina's younger sister, and then Mike came downstairs with frustrated, confused tears in his eyes and told me he could get a ride home, although God only knows from where. So I drove home. And when I got home my parents and my sister were out and all the lights were off except for one glow coming from my room. And when I got up there the troll was in my bed, under the covers. He was watching MTV on my 13-inch TV, he was watching that show Say What? Karaoke. He looked at me and said, "please, a-mister, I'm-a very-a sick." But how could I help him? I was not a doctor, much less a veterinarian. All I knew about trolls was they liked to eat garbage. So I collected some trash from downstairs, what looked like the heartiest morsels, and brought them up to him. He saw the bounty I laid before him and looked up at me, his face crinkled with gratitude, or the troll equivalent. He brought an empty soup can up to his mouth, but was too weak to chew. He waved me away, so I left to give him his privacy. I slept on the couch that night. No one asked me why. I could hear the troll cursing and grunting all through the night, fighting his fever. So again, what did the troll teach me? What truth gleamed in his black, beady eyes? Maybe something about the composition of the universe, the way the beautiful and the grotesque sustain each other. But I already knew that. So maybe that's what I learned, that I knew everything I needed to know, as if I'd lived this life a hundred times and was already acquainted with each of its grubby disappointments, and that anyone who tried to teach me anything or change my mind was a liar, everyone but the troll. In the morning he was gone, and all he'd left behind was a ripped-open trash bag and a thick, savory, rancid smell in the sheets that never washed out.