The Neighbors Don’t Take Kindly to Him

The thing about the Buddha is that I had no idea where it came from. I slid into the driver’s seat and there it was, hanging from a chain on the rearview mirror. Somehow this didn’t seem strange until I was telling the story later. Only then did I consider the facts: that I was the only one with keys to my car, that I’d been in it only moments before and there had been no Buddha then. “When I think about it now,” I said later, “It doesn’t really make any sense.”

My uncle’s neighbors had been calling the cops on him for years. He collected feral cats the way my boyfriend collected Pez dispensers, amassing them by the dozens. His neighbors in the desert did not take kindly to the daily stench of raw chicken he stored in trashcans outside his home to feed the felines. They didn’t take kindly to him in general: a middle-aged man resembling the Unabomber with his unruly hair and beard, a man who rarely bathed and spent his days shuffling around, feeding cats, mumbling. Kids from his neighborhood sometimes threw rocks through his windows.

Years ago I heard a story about the time his water heater went out. Embarrassed by the state of his house, he decided he wouldn’t let anyone inside to fix it. Instead he boiled pots of water on the stove, which he then poured into the bathtub to clean himself. This worked until the day he spilled water on his foot before it cooled and burned himself badly enough to warrant a trip to the hospital. I remember hearing this story several times and thinking what an eccentric man he was. I did not think: mentally ill. I thought: odd.

When I worked at a retirement center years later, I realized how easy it was to dismiss the strange behavior of those close to you. Actions that seemed so clearly to me as an employee to be related to dementia were often brushed away by a family member as a personality quirk. Oh, Mom’s always wearing her pajamas and talking into a banana like it’s a phone. That’s so Mom.

The beehive discovered inside my uncle’s house, the one he maneuvered around daily instead of trying to remove? That was so my uncle.

When I saw the small Buddha figurine, my first instinct was to take a picture. I’d post it on Instagram or Facebook and ask who was responsible. I often wondered where things came from. A few months earlier a series of typed messages showed up in my mailbox with no information about the sender. “If you learn from defeat, you haven’t really lost,” said one. “What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals,” said another. I wanted to think their appearance was random, that there wasn’t someone out there targeting me specifically as the audience for these messages. I assumed the arrival of a Buddha in the car, too, was random. One day it wasn’t there; the next, there it was.

I had a list of my own behaviors I knew were strange, including: 1) I’d park thirty blocks away to avoid getting too close to another car. 2) Every time I had a third cup of coffee, I thought about a letter F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to someone once, which I read in a biography years ago, where he described the hefty role coffee and alcohol played in his writing. I’d think about his death, so young at 44, and I’d become convinced my own death was imminent because I always drank my coffee black. 3) When my insomnia got so bad and nothing else worked, I started watching videos on YouTube of people giving softly whispered tutorials about folding towels or applying makeup. Sometimes they pretended to be shopkeepers or real estate agents or ear doctors. Nothing else would help me sleep but those videos always did.

In the car, I had an armful of things I’d need for camping. I set two tote bags, a pillow, and my purse on the passenger seat next to me. Earlier that day I filled my backseat and trunk with the rest of the camping supplies. It was the thirtieth year my family and two other families were camping together. It was the first year I was bringing my boyfriend, though in the past I brought someone else. The previous guy and I fought so often I began to think that’s what relationships were: tumultuous, painful. We argued in the tent moments before the group picture and I wiped my tears as best I could. The camera was far enough away that when I looked at the picture later, it seemed like I was smiling, happy. Sometimes I think I spent years of my life putting on a show.

My uncle missed his flight to Portland. Our family was gathering to hold a belated memorial service for my grandparents. When my grandmother died three years earlier, a depression took over my personality that weekly therapy sessions did little to quell. By the time my grandpa died in December I was learning to not let my emotions consume me. For so long after her death, the magnitude of the loss hovered over me. I shed tears in cars and bathroom stalls and beds. In some ways she was my everything and in other ways she wasn’t: I had my family, my friends.

My uncle had his cats. To the best of my knowledge, he never had a lover. When my grandma was alive she checked on him daily. It was her mission to make sure he was okay. This was another thing I learned at the retirement center: even those who spent most of their lives with a partner by their side end up spending their final days alone.

When employees found my uncle pacing the airport carrying no suitcase and an empty shoebox, he had stacks of hundred-dollar bills bulging from his wallet. The stench of his body odor and cat urine was so strong, he was not allowed on the plane. Employees helped to clean him up and get him on a later flight, but he brought no clean clothes with him and the next day he smelled just as bad.

I sat next to him during the memorial service. I tried to pay attention to my dad and other uncle as they spoke of my grandmother’s kindness, my grandpa’s steadfast nature. I tried to cling to the words, to remember the woman who’d fed me Oreos while beating me at Scrabble and the man whose personality morphed from stern to sweet after a stroke. I tried to think of them and nothing else, but that smell. The aroma was a mixture of sweet and rotting flesh and each inhale made it sharper. Just a few more minutes, I said in my head over and over. It became the afternoon’s mantra. Just a few more. I made it all the way through, but as soon as the ceremony concluded, I found a bathroom and vomited.

When I raised my phone to take a picture of the Buddha, I noticed an older couple locking up their Thai food cart in the lot next door. The cart was bright yellow and I had only been there once, when my friend Rachel ordered what she thought was a rice dish but turned out to be soup on a dripping hot day in May. Now the husband and wife were balancing stacks of pots and pans in the nook of their arms and they looked like they had a system, like they’d been working together for years and no longer needed to use their words.

They stopped outside the car and peered at me through the window. They looked at me as I looked at the Buddha and time morphed in that way it does when everything seems simultaneously too fast and too slow. They were standing outside the car with their pots and pans and I was sitting in the car with all my camping gear on the seat next to me. When I looked around — when I opened my eyes — things that made sense moments before no longer did. The key I was absently aiming for the ignition didn’t fit. The backseat wasn’t filled with the sleeping bags and camp chairs I’d need for the weekend. It was filled with pots and pans and bags of food. And the Buddha — why didn’t I question the Buddha?

I was not in my car. My car was several feet ahead of us. I was sitting in a car that belonged to an older Thai couple, and they were looking at me with fear in their eyes.

While he was in Portland, my uncle lost the key to the truck he’d left parked at the airport back home. He was holding it loose in his hand — no keychain, no other keys — and likely set it down somewhere, the same way he kept setting his wallet down. My family tried to explain to him that you can’t just leave a wallet on the seat next to you, but it wasn’t a lecture that stuck in his mind.

“Whoops,” I said to the Thai couple, because what else could I say? I pointed to my own car. I pointed back to their car. How similar they looked in the dark, identical maroon exteriors. And yet — how different. The make and model were not the same. The shape, the size. It wasn’t the right car at all. How easily I allowed myself to believe I was in the right place. How logical it seemed that a random Buddha figurine would have magically appeared on my rearview mirror.

I was conscious of how crazy I looked as I grabbed my bags and my pillow and slinked out of their car as quickly as possible. “Our cars, they look so much alike!” I said and I was met with nervous laughter. We traded spots: I stood by the curb and they took their seats inside.

I immediately realized I didn’t have everything I needed. “My phone,” I said. “I think I left it in the car.” They shook their heads and I wasn’t sure if there was a language barrier or they were simply unwilling to deal with me anymore, now that I was outside the vehicle. I poked my head through the open passenger window and did my best to look on the seats around their laps. It was too dark to decipher anything but the pile of plastic water bottles on the floor of the passenger seat, which I’d missed seeing when I was sitting in the car moments earlier. If only I’d seen the bottles. If only I’d turned around and looked at the backseat. If only I’d paid more attention to the key that wasn’t fitting, to the myriad clues telling me I was in the wrong place. I sat on the sidewalk and emptied the contents of my bags, hoping to find the phone I already knew wasn’t there. They started the engine and pulled away.

It was only after I met my boyfriend that I realized how strange it was that I’d spent years of my life in relationships that made no sense. Some were volatile, others were boring, and some were sweet but clearly not meant to last. It didn’t matter how many signs there were or how much my stomach hurt week after week or how strongly I felt that something was off. I always tried to make things work. The more mismatched the pieces were, the harder I tried to cram them together.

My uncle’s truck was impounded. Again people called to report a smell. This time the authorities found maggots. When they woke him up in the airport, he had no memory of coming to Portland at all. He told them he’d been at the airport for four days, and he needed to get on a plane to attend his parents’ memorial service.

After I got into my own car, I drove to my boyfriend’s house. I told him the story about being in the wrong car and laughed so hard I cried, and then I really cried, exhausted by my own stupidity. I no longer had my phone as a result of sitting in a car that belonged to strangers. How did something like this even happen? This story is so you, my friends told me later when I shared the tale. It’s so Kristen.

After he was admitted to the hospital, it was difficult to receive information about my uncle. Privacy laws prevented this. Through him we learned that the prescription from his blood pressure medication had lapsed, but nothing else was clear.

I once saw a group of people surrounding a man who had collapsed and was stunned by their efficiency as they wordlessly divided the tasks of calling 9–1–1 and administering CPR. If he had collapsed in front of me, I thought, I wouldn’t know what to do. Would I have kept walking, pretending not to see? Somehow, they all knew how to handle the situation. They just knew.

When I returned to the Thai food cart with my boyfriend the next day, we found the older Thai man and I offered up an embarrassing conversation starter. “Hi, remember me? I was in your car yesterday? I think I left my phone in there.” We watched as the man turned his back for a moment and returned with my phone in his hand. After a long night wondering if I’d get it back, my order was restored.

I used to spend hours at a time at a bookstore-slash-coffee shop-slash-art gallery in West Virginia, where I’d order a dirty chai with soy milk, a drink that cost over five dollars, and I’d write on my laptop and think of my family and google images of bunnies and try to write a book. One time a homeless man entered the coffee shop, wheeling a bag behind him. His stench was fruity, the same as my uncle’s, and his hair was matted.

He sat on the other side of a woman wearing plum-colored lipstick. From his wheeled bag, he pulled out an old laptop computer. The lipstick lady stayed a few moments longer before gathering up her things. She complimented me on my boots as she walked by.

I stayed a little longer, but the man’s odor got to me. I stood up and gathered my overpriced coffee, my warm winter coat, my fancy laptop. I stood up in my boots, the pair that always garnered me compliments. I went to the other side of the store, away from the area where they served coffee, back by the books where there were a few tables and chairs. The lady with the plum lipstick was already seated in one of them. She looked at me and shrugged. I smiled at her faintly. Together we sat on the other side of the store, away from the stench, typing trivial things on our fancy machines.

What if he was my uncle? If I saw him on the street, would I cross to the other side? If he collapsed in front of me, would I pretend not to see?

I heard my uncle recently took in eight new cats. I have no idea where they come from or how they multiply so rapidly. They keep showing up at his door. Somehow they just know.

Kristen Forbes is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon, whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, Role/Reboot, Bleed for Jaded Ibis Productions, Brave on the Page: Oregon Writers on Craft and the Creative Life, Bartleby Snopes, Crack the Spine, Bluestem Magazine, and other publications. She holds a BFA in writing, literature and publishing from Emerson College and an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University.

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Photo by Corey Seeman.