What Wally Was, Writing

Wally was sitting at a desk of fine African ivory. The desk was an opulent bit of furniture crafted from the tusks of eleven African bush elephants: 5 adult males, 4 adult females, and 2 adolescents – nearly an entire herd, really. Wally didn’t think of that often. Right now, he was thinking about what to write. He contemplated deeply, undulating with powerful thoughts when suddenly it struck him.

“Why not me?” he thought, and then said it out loud, repeating what he had said in his mind. You see, Wally was looking for a protagonist. Wally was a novelist, a new one, a self-proclaimed one, after a successful career inheriting his father’s diamond mine in Angola. He was forced to sell the business after a violent uprising three winters ago, but saw this misfortune as an opportunity to focus on the career he had always wanted for himself, not what his late father demanded of him. Wally had been educated at the best schools in the world (another a result of his father’s demands) and had noticed in all the time attending lecture and reading literature and participating in small discussion groups, everyone respected and cared for famous authors. Wally coveted that attention and so decided he would become one himself, even though he hadn’t the slightest clue what it took to write a novel. He figured he’d start with what he knew, which was himself.

 After a short spurt of fervent typing, it occurred to Wally that he would not be able to write a best-selling story. He was far too rich. The stories he had to tell would never land with the audience, who was or ought to be much poor than he was. Wally liked to put himself in the shoes of those less fortunate than him, not literally, he would rather die than remove his ostrich leather loafers, but as an exercise. If he was one of those poor sots, he would not, could not understand the interiority of someone as wealthy as he. He couldn’t blame them, no one could, but he would simply have to pretend to be someone else if he wanted to sell copies of his manuscript. A humble rags-to-riches melodrama with a tragic, relatable, and exceedingly poor main character.

Wally was sitting at a desk made of mud. It was a desk of sorts, since Wally used it as one, but most people would’ve seen it and called it a pile of mud. That’s just that kind of guy Wally was. Where someone saw a pile of mud, Wally saw something precious. He erected the mud desk from what was available to him, which was mud. You see, Wally was exceedingly poor. That didn’t keep him from having a terrific imagination.

Sometimes his imagination got him into trouble. There were some blackhearted people didn’t want someone so low to dream so big. There would always be those who would look down on him or go out of their own way to push him down. These people, big as they thought they were, were small minded. They would never know Wally was secretly someone else, someone bigger than they could see. When Wally started that imagination of his he could grow large, so large he could hold the whole world in his palm and shake it like a snow globe, if he wanted to. He applied the same talent for making himself large, to making himself a completely different person. He would squeeze his eyes and turn into some man or woman somewhere on the snow globe. Much of the time, Wally imagined himself in his massive form — whose sneeze could snuff out the sun like a birthday candle. This could get boring. Sometimes, Wally would chose to be someone else, if only for a little while. He often chose to be a king or a cowboy or a deep sea explorer but today he wanted a challenge. In other words, he wanted to test himself by becoming the person farthest from himself. Wally cared deeply for freedom and imagination, so he would become someone who was devoid of them, someone who was very dull.

Wally was sitting at a desk on the thirty third floor of an office building on 66^th St. It was the 11^th hour, but Wally didn’t seem to notice. Wally was all alone. He was also lonely, which is important to say because they are not always the same thing. You see, even when Wally was around other people, he was alone. Last week Betty Howard fell asleep face first into her yogurt at lunch sitting across from Wally. He was telling her a story he now couldn’t recall, but whatever it was it was, it was very dull.

Wally seemed to have this problem wherever he went. At school, at the mall, at the pub, anywhere. That’s why he dedicated himself to his work. He wasn’t particularly good at what he did, but that didn’t matter. When he was at his desk, he knew what to do. He knew who he was and that was that. It didn’t leave any room for imagination, which he hated. Wally hated many things. He could rattle them off the top of his head like a party trick. In his dull life, it was the one thing he was good at.

Even for Wally, sitting at his desk several hours after closing was unusual. There was a reason for this. Yesterday, someone surprised Wally at his dull desk, peeking over his cubicle and peering in. It was Samantha, the intern. She was perky and sprightly and youthful and so many other things Wally hated. When she walked into his dull world she smiled at him, and he squinted back at her dimpled face, fearing it.

Samantha apologized. Wally’s face had contorted in such a way it looked like he was in pain, but he wasn’t, at least not physically. Wally looked the young woman dead in the eyes, though only his eyes were dead, and asked her: “What do you want?” Samantha, fortunately, was generally a happy person who got out, had hobbies, and friends outside of work. The crushing delivery of Wally’s question did not send her scuttling away from his cubicle.

She pursed her lips and pressed her index finger to the supple skin under her ear in a way that melted a man like wax. Wally was no ordinary man. He hated Samantha's mannerism, which make her look like a schoolgirl. Samantha remembered why she bothered Wally – having lost herself in the dark, musty, sad pits of his eyes – and perked up like a balloon. “That’s right!” she said, “I wanted to ask you what you like to eat, since I’m restocking the fridge and wanted to get everyone’s opinion first. It’s my big summer project!”

She followed her question with a very cute giggle, but Wally was so devastated he didn’t even notice. No one asked what Wally liked. Wally didn’t know what Wally liked. He could rattle the things he hated off the top of his head and that’s almost what he started to do, but he didn’t. He just sat there with his mouth open a bit, staring into space. Samantha was a clever girl and realized she struck a nerve. She apologized again and backed out of Wally’s cubicle. Wally remained at his desk with his mouth open a bit, staring into space. From the moment Samantha asked him that terrible question, Wally tried to think of what he liked to eat, all the way up until the 11th hour. Miraculously, no one noticed he hadn’t been working and all that time he hadn’t moved. Wally finally emerged from his long catatonic state and rattled the first thing off the top of his head. It wasn't what he liked to eat, it was one of the many things he hated, since he knew about those. “Wally”, he said, since it was what he hated most.

Wally was a very dull person, but he never thought that was his fault. He didn’t choose to be born. If he could’ve, he wouldn’t. He wished he wasn’t. He wished very hard that he was someone else.

Wally sat at a desk in the school library. He preferred a desk with a window view, but there were none available today and maybe that was a good thing, since today he had a lot of work to do. Wally was prone to distractions. Today, of all days, he could not afford to have his head in the clouds. He needed to be here, in this library, with this work, at this desk. It was a fine desk, just fine, nothing special. Someone had carved an elephant into the acrylic veneer with a sharp pen, permanently vandalizing it. Wally took some issue with this, since he was in student government. The drawing wasn’t bad though.

Wally pulled a disinfectant wipe out of his bag to wipe down the desk. Apparently, someone had thought to use the desk as a stepstool because there was a shoeprint on the desk next to the drawing. Whoever it was had been somewhere muddy, since dirt had caked up in the shape of the bottom of a shoe. Wally started laughing at the randomness of it. He laughed harder than he expected, or perhaps more than the muddy shoeprint warranted, because it drew the attention of the girl at the desk next to his. She looked probingly for the source of the comedy, but Wally had already wiped it away. He was stuck in such a state of embarrassment, he couldn’t explain himself and she went back to whatever it was she was doing. Wally muttered a curse at himself and removed his books and laptop from his backpack. He placed all of his things neatly on his normal desk and inhaled long and deeply through his nostrils. He looked down at the stack of books and then the windowless wall in front of him. Wally stared at the wall. It was white and featureless and caught his attention. Then he started daydreaming.