The town was small enough that a weekend fling could fuel Monday’s gossip, like when the cardiologist's wife was spotted sneaking the local gym owner through the back door. I grew up in a tiny town. I was meant to be a farm kid, but when my father fell ill and passed away, my mother packed us up and moved back to her parents' house.
My grandfather had been a policeman with a reputation for not putting up with any nonsense. He used to patrol the town in his old Ford Model T. High school students would drop their bottles and sober up in fear whenever they heard the T whirring down the street. I’ll never forget when, at eight years old, I spit in his face. He didn’t even flinch. I watched as the spit slowly streamed down the creases in his cheeks, while his green-gray eyes just stared at me.
When I was ten, my mother got us on the list for a social housing project. On the night of the lottery, we sat on cold metal chairs with all the other poor folks, watching a notary in a fancy fur coat juggle raffle balls. Then something magical happened. I was called up to help the notary, and the number I drew was the one my mom had chosen earlier. The notary congratulated me with a kiss on the cheek, her disgusting makeup sticky against my skin.
Life at my grandparents' house changed dramatically when my aunt moved in from the big city with her boyfriend—a tall, thin, bald man who had once been in the seminary. He took me hunting a couple of times. “Come on! Release your breath and shoot! Jesus Christ! How could you miss that one?” he’d say. The truth was, I would rather miss the shot, even at arm’s length, than kill a giant rat that seemed to be begging for its life. On one trip, he fell into a swampy pit and ended up covered in cow shit. “Don’t you dare laugh! You want to walk back home!?”
My aunt, with her big city money, would buy me fancy chocolates, comic books, pullovers, and boat shoes. I later learned from conversations with my mother that my aunt was trying to regain her favorite child status after being away. That’s why she treated everyone to expensive gifts—everyone except my mother. I had no choice but to smile and accept her offerings since it was my chance to savor the good things in life, though it sometimes felt like Stockholm syndrome. By the time I was twelve, I stopped pretending to like her. That was around the time of my sexual awakening when I started to enjoy long escapades to the bathroom to explore new sensations. I remember returning to the kitchen after one of these long absences. My aunt poured me some tea and served me chocolate chip cookies. As I added milk to the hot tea, a little spilled out. “You spilled some milk, huh?” she commented with a knowing smirk.
The next day, my grandfather fainted and hit his head on the living room coffee table. He had to be hospitalized. I spent the afternoon lying on the couch, watching my grandmother scrub the blood from the floor. She always whistled as she cleaned, but that day, she did it silently. Outside, however, she cursed loudly at the porch tiles while mopping, like she always did.
During the evening, my mother came back from her job at the public library and told me our house was ready. We packed up that night. The next morning, we walked across town to our new home. The phone company came the next day to hook up a line. That day was also my birthday. My aunt stopped by with her boyfriend, and they gifted me a Casio electronic keyboard. I told them I wasn’t really into music, that I was into computers. She told me I could have a personal computer if I learned to play the keyboard. Later that day, my grandfather called from the hospital and managed to say, “I love you.” He passed a few hours later.
Years later, when I was seventeen, I had my personal computer hooked up to the phone line and was loading a pornographic website when my grandmother knocked on my bedroom door. “I have to call your mother! Stop jerking off!” She had become completely herself after my grandfather's death. Not only did she talk more, but she had made her life her dream by dressing the way she wanted, going out to the places she wanted, and drinking wine every evening. After my grandfather's death, she lived for a while in her house with my aunt and her boyfriend, but after they broke up, my mother decided to have her move in with us. As for my aunt, after the breakup, she moved to the big city once again and started working as a secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture.
I still had the Casio electronic keyboard tucked under my bed. With the dawn of the Internet, I learned that it could be used to hack into analog phone lines. After several failed attempts, one night I played the notes to ring a Japanese phone number without the call being recorded on the phone bill. Although it felt great to do so, I was more interested in Fiona, my sixteen-year-old neighbor. The construction company of the social project, the architect, or whoever, had decided to build our homes with a shared wall. As good fortune would have it, her bedroom was right across from mine. On nights when my mother was out with friends and my grandmother was asleep, I would play a porn video and set the speaker against the wall. Afterward, a moaning would follow, almost inaudible, coming from her side of the room. I would masturbate to the rhythm of her moaning, tapping the wall faster and faster with my spare hand as my excitement grew, my forehead glued to the wall. Then, silence. And I would lie in bed, ecstatic.
One day, on my way home from school, I found Fiona watering the flowers my grandmother had planted. I thanked her for her gardening help and asked if she wanted to share a cigarette with me. "You are the fire, I am the water element," she exclaimed, pointing the hose at me. I jumped to dodge the water jet and fell to the ground. After she stopped laughing, she helped me up. “Light it up, wet boy.” We sat on the sidewalk and talked for a while: how I was destined to be a farm boy until things got complicated, and how she was looking forward to moving to the big city to study biology. When I felt completely at ease with her and it seemed she wouldn't mind staying a little longer, I asked her how she dealt with the strange noises coming from the wall we shared. “What noises?” she replied. “The tapping and banging?”, I said. “Maybe we should keep it as our little unspoken secret,” she whispered, her cheeks flushed. She was staring at me now, with her fleshy lips parted as I would imagine them when the wall kept us from kissing each other. “Should we?” I whispered, leaning closer.