Pwidge Perplexable

It’s an eight minute walk to the Metro subway if the crosswalks favored my stride; catching a crosswalk signal to cross is about speed and timing. I had just left the gym and, in a fit of hubris, figured I’d done enough cardio to grab a bowl of orange chicken at a Panda Express oh so conveniently located around the corner. This was a solid strategy on the part of this restaurant chain to get the weak-willed warriors on their way out of the gym. Mentally I’m not strong. I’m their target and a fucking bullseye is what they get.

I ate and walked. Cool air pushing through my sweat-drenched shirt complemented by the scorching orange paste-coated chicken stuffs sliding down my throat. My body doesn’t know if I’m cold or hot. 

It was a nice night.

Before I could get home I stopped into a gas station to rinse my hands. Subways cars, orange chicken and the gym means you’re bound to catch something if you’re not cautious. And I am cautious. But sometimes I wander and it being such a beautiful night I took a path that led me towards an emptier part of the city. Where homeless look at you in judgement. 

And in my wandering tonight I saw someone; an anachronism of my youth placed here in my current path in life. 

The unconscious man I had tied up at my feet has clearly seen better days. I think he’s seen worse too. But today is gonna be up there for him because I think I might murder this man. My childhood hero. My savior.

I remember my solitude as a child better than any other part of life. When I was a child, the bus driver would hesitantly drop me off a the foot of the gravel driveway. “Your parents were in there, Johnny?” In hindsight she might have been the first person to take an act of interest in my well-being, although I wasn’t cognizant of that at such an early age, and my parents didn’t particularly like that brand of interference; ignoring me builds character. Abuse builds a man. Yadda yadda. So I nodded my head that they were in there and stepped out onto the unfinished driveway, dust kicking up as my feet touched down. The driveway would never be finished. Not in my parent’s lifetime. And by the time the bank foreclosed on it I was long gone.

I remember it coming on every day—3 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m. replays on weekends. Afternoon light streaking through our well-worn secondhand curtains, with a never-settling dust in the air creating “god” rays and reflecting across the cathode ray tube television precariously perched on the only table sturdy enough to hold it. All glorious twenty-four inches of vibrant colors, painted on a canvas just for me. A circus of events made with papier-mâché and bits of wire to create the lowest-budget puppets and sets, with the colorful ringleader dutifully at the helm: Pwidge Perplexable.

Alone in that house the television not only kept me entertained in a home that greeted me with an occasional pat on the back but more often than not a slap across the face, but also provided me with a friend and confidante: Pwidge. A master storyteller who encouraged imagination and talking to yourself for some amazing conversations. He would launch into kooky rants about duty and being reliable while interacting with his magical sea of creatures. Life was more difficult on the days the show didn’t go on the air as expected. It felt like being stood up.

Years later, when I was in high school I saw they had “rebooted” the show for a new generation of viewers. But it wasn’t Pwidge. The sets all shiny and new. It was a slap in the face to the nostalgia and wholesomeness of the original. Shitty digital puppets and green screen sets for an actor to flounder around on set with. 

“So you can imagine,” I say to him, “after not thinking about you for decades because while your show my have been a silver lining in the shit storm I called Upstate, it’s still the wrapping on a terrible time better repressed. But seeing you there behind me. I’m not gonna lie Pwidge, I thought you were following me to rob me. No judgement but, ha, I guess a little judgement. 

I lean my head back and smell the air, expecting that, in this man’s presence, I would breathe in nostalgia. But it smells like a city does.

“W-who are you?” Pwidge asks not understanding his predicament fully. “Where am I?” 

“You are you, that’s who you are. And you are here. And that’s what’s important right now. It’s like how on your show the minutiae isn’t really important. Just know that you’re here because you’re a killer.”

“K-k-killer? My s-s-show? Where am I” He’s holding his head. It’s probably a little sore from when I hit him from behind and dragged him here to this secluded area where screams from the drug-addled are as common as a car horn in New York. 

“I’m sorry about your head. I had to improvise after you stopped willingly following me with the promise of beer. I hadn’t really planned on abducting anyone tonight.” I’m pacing a little bit, looking down at my hands and up at the dead trees. The darker it gets the creepier they look. “I’m not even sure why I did it. Autopilot I suppose.” I drift off in thought, not sure where I went but something snapped me back to my current predicament: Killer. You sir, are a killer. Metaphorically, duh, but also maybe literally; I don’t know your story. But yes, you killed my happiness. You killed my safe place in the recesses of my mind.”

Pwidge’s eyes dart here and there, almost like a robot accessing memory files. He wants to be confused and focus on the pain in his head, needs to, but he instantly knows. He knows that I built my life up holding this person as a pillar of that foundation and that seeing him here, like this, was too much. He knew it and despised me for it: I was a fan.

To look at him now though, I almost didn’t recognize him. I had to see past the grime of his skin with wrinkles I don’t remember ever seeing when I was a kid. His clothes are ratty and smell with years of sweat. But you can’t change the eyes. Underneath this veneer of depreciation is the man who entertained millions. Billions!

Through tears in his eyes, probably from shame, he looks down at his bonds cutting into his wrist and then back up to me. “Y-y-you c-c-c-can’t keep me here. P-people will be looking for me.”

Pwidge tries to get to his feet, but I tied those too, using his own shoelaces. And his wrists were bound using mine. Like I said, I wasn’t planning on this and on short notice for abduction I guess you use what’s available.

“‘No one is looking for your Pwidge. Not even me. Fortuitous don’t you think!?”

The dawning crept all over his face. Finally this won’t be a one-sided discussion but a dialogue between a fan and their fallen idol. 

“You were…you watched that?”

“You raised me up as a child, you pieced back together the shards of my existence and tonight, here, you broke me.” I bellowed after that “You were an actor! You were respected. You had a television show!” This wasn’t my proudest moment of this interaction. At this point it was a pleading for an explanation.

His chuckles start off slow but build up to a disheartening and sad cackle intermingled with sobs. 

“L-look, I’m glad you got something out of that show but I—I haven’t thought about it for a long time. Judging by who old you look now I’d say you were too young to know what was actually going on.” He shakes his head a little, clearing out the cobwebs and gaining his vocabulary back. “The term ‘Dumpster fire’ is new but I actually saw my show thrown into a dumpster and set on fire, and it was apt.”

I shout at him, at the sky. Not with words just a yell.

“It was! It was.” He chews the scenery. “It made me a household name for five-year olds around the city. It was local broadcast, that’s it. For the thousands that lived in that city maybe thirty people watched.”

His rant feels frenzied. I may have given him a concussion.

“To the industry I wasn’t even a blip of a joke. I didn’t exist. And you make a few mistakes in life and back then people didn’t forgive. You couldn’t explain what made you that way, what trauma…” He loses his steam. He’s reliving something he wishes he wasn’t; something that put him on this path. "I couldn’t get work after that show. No one wanted a-a-a low-budget version of much better shows with a past that followed them.”

He goes back to holding his head. “It meant—nothing.”

I sit there on the grass and dirt, unsure of just how disgusting this area is but for right now all I can focus on is this solitary week jutting up from the ground. If it weren’t called a weed I think it would be beautiful.

“We’re in a pickle here, Pwidge.” I say

“Stop calling me that. My name isn’t Pwidge, that’s a character’s name. My name is Peter. If you have the audacity to hit someone from behind and then kidnap them, at least have some goddamn respect” He pleads. The name hurts him in some fashion, or the memory of what it took from him.

“Not to me.” I say calmly without looking away from the weed, not having listened to his plea to call him by his actual name. From his point of view it probably seemed I was having a conversation with myself. “No no no but now that I’ve made this, let’s say impulsive decision, I have no recourse. If I let him go he’ll obviously go to the cops. He’ll say you won’t, but of course he will. I can’t leave him here cause the cops may just come to him and that creates the same problem for me.” 

“I won’t.” He says on cue. 

This dandelion looks beautiful in this moonlight. It dances in the night wind, unaware the world loves and hates it for what it is. 

“I grew up with the lessons of your show on my lips. I watched and participated. You were my only friend. Hard to believe I’m sure but I wasn’t “popular” as a kid, whatever popular means. When my home was empty except for me and you we would live those little adventures together and you wouldn’t judge me for the second-hand clothes I wore or the fact I often sat alone in the cafeteria not eating because I had no money and “mom” hadn’t gone shopping for a week.”

Why am I crying? I sniff and wipe my cheeks. Very damp. Damn. Didn’t even feel it happen. Is this catharsis or just the final straw?

Peter is sitting up now. His arms are still behind him but he can lean a little towards the tree behind him. But instead he sits forward, looking like he’s actually putting himself in pain by being more uncomfortable that he was. Is he hurting himself?

“Pwidge and Johnny. That was who we were. I created a whole show in my head. I made my own puppets from discarded paper lunch bags that my classmates threw out after eating. I plucked them from the trash and they made fun of me all the more. Of course they did. But our adventures were what mattered. I was a neglected child, hated by everyone and discarded before I could ever be presented as something shiny and new and worth loving.”

Pwidge was staring down at the ground. He could have been asleep for how still he was until a shudder rippled through him followed by a heavy sigh. “I wrote those episodes.”

I look up at him, pulling my eyes from the flower in a field of dirt. 

“I thought it would be a way to bond with my…with my brother. He had a disease you see? A birth defect I guess you would call it. They said it was a delayed learning issue but as he got older it was clear it wasn’t a delay, it was a stop.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother.” I said, sympathetically. How did I not know that? But I never researched him in the time of the internet and his show was well before that age of the information highway.

“I thought maybe puppets would get a reaction. His eyes, once full of life because duller and duller until there was no recognition there. No spark of life. Soon he was bedridden and then the tubes. My parents, you understand, were well-meaning. They love Stephen. Too much to watch what was happening happen. They shipped him off to a facility. A place where they will attend to his needs. Or so they said. Soon enough the visits stopped from everyone but me. I saw him getting worse, not better. And so one night I went to visit him…

He sits up slightly, audible cracks come from his spine. He looks towards me.

“I did it out of love. You have to understand that. It was purely love but…”

“What?” I ask. 

He moves around on the ground a little, clearly uncomfortable and at his age and in his shape this position is probably the real torture. Still, I’m not about to let on that I notice or that doing this to him is eating a hole in my stomach. I’ve wanted to throw up since I got him here. 

Another crack from somewhere underneath Pwidge can be heard, but it’s soft, subtle. Maybe a twig he’s sitting on? Of course with his hands behind him I don’t see him working on retrieving a pocket knife from his pant’s pocket and don’t see that he’s already cut through his wrist bonds. He keeps steady and continues.

“I had begun drinking by then. Early twenties and already heading towards a DWI. So I did what I do: I drank and I went into his room. It was night time and, of course, no one was there. Why would they be? No one needed to check on him. In his sterile room he slept or was awake, it was impossible to tell. The weather had held up until then but when I walked into that facility the sky burst forth with hail at first, followed by rain. It was a sign.”

“I wanted it to look like an accident. I wanted him to find peace and rest. Have you ever tried to imagine what it’s like to be fully aware but unable to talk? To move? To do anything? What the echo of that screaming must be like? I’ve imagined it. And I’ve wept. For him I have cried rivers.”

He closes his eyes. “I pulled the ventilator’s power. But it wasn’t fast. My brother that I loved was slowly suffocating because of me.”

“Jesus Christ” I think to myself. 

I was hurting him in a new way that he couldn’t express to me. But I felt it. And the nurses must’ve too because they ran in and screamed. I screamed back that they’re killing him by keeping him alive. But I was killing him too. So they went towards the power cord and started to plug it in.”

I was on pins and needles. My hero killed his brother and he’s going to confess to it and—I can’t know this! 

“I pulled out a pocket knife, everyone used to carry them around back then and I cried. I swung it in front of me to keep the nurses away and put my hand on my brother’s forehead and brushed his hair back and whispering how sorry I was.”

“I’m sorry” I whisper. I’m not sure he could hear me.”

“Anyways…that was all a lie” Pwidge’s hands were suddenly free and his knife came to the front and sliced his leg’s bonds faster than I could register. 

From off to the side I hear a voice “What’s going on over there?” Before two phones come out and you can see the lights go on. A couple out for a stroll? An asshole influencer coming to the slums for clicks. Doesn’t matter. I’m now streaming live and it all feels like slow motion. My life as I know it could be crashing for abducting this man. 

Pwidge tries to run, to escape his captor but how I forced him to sit for so long had cut off the blood flow to his legs so when he tries to stand up, his legs pitch here and there in an absurdly comical way considering the circumstances. He makes a noise that everyone makes when they experience the pins and needles of appendages waking up and realize that their limbs no longer take orders from them. The grunt from him as his own knife enter his own chest was less comical, more—online for everyone to see. 

The hikers hiding behind their phones as the only shield they need make no attempt to help the man, they merely keep holding the phone up to him as he gasps. The turn to see me sitting next to this man so recently my prisoner. I try to explain. I try to sit him up, to show the people recording us that we were just pretending. I smile and shake Pwidge. “Just a show.” I say into the camera.