Abode Obsession

The apartment was spacious, with sixteen foot high ceilings, a sizeable living

area, three bedrooms, a full service kitchen with a walk-in pantry and one bathroom

containing a deluxe porcelain tub without a shower. A three foot long hose with a

spray nozzle was adapted in place for a shower. You could say that the apartment

was vintage, perhaps built half a century or more ago.




Michael was a hermit and never left his apartment. It wasn't a phobia so much as he

was always content to remain indoors. He would leave only to replenish his pantry

or get new things, whatever they may be.




He would watch a lot of movies on his DVD player or he would use the internet to

make sure he never fell out of contact with the people in his life. He hadn't done

any work for years, content on lazing about his hard earned apartment.




He use to write fiction under a pseudonym name and the occasional film plot

under his real name. Years of writing eventually paid off and he made enough money

to set him well for life. That's when he called it quits.




There was a demand for his talent for a few years following his grand exit

from the entertainment business. He gracefully declined all the offers, quoting

himself as overworked for so long that his motivation and imagination had become like

a dry well. Of course he was lying, but if business people knew he was as good as he

ever was creatively they would never quit asking.




Michael would get the occasional visit from some of his friends that he once worked

with. They would always ask him when he would go back to work and he would always

tell them, "I don't know, maybe never."




He wasn't much of a teaser or one to play "hard-to-get" and everyone knew that

so they respected his wishes without pushing the issue or probing him like he

had a secret project in the works. He was a face-value sort of writer and never made

anything out to seem like more than it really was. He was also a firm believer

in "what-comes-around-goes-around" and that served him well because nobody ever read

into anything he said or did with anything more than what was really there.




He loved jigsaw puzzles, owning far more of them than he could solve in his whole

lifetime. He would order new ones on internet auction sites for extra cheap although

he already had a pile of unsolved jigsaw puzzles in the back of one of his

extra bedrooms, waiting for his next puzzle-solving excursion.




He had a large desk on wheels that he would roll out into his living room where

he would glue the puzzle together on a tag-board while he watched movies. Each puzzle

was different time-wise to solve. Some would go on for a week or two, some would

go on for only a few days. He would hang the puzzles up on his walls when they were

finished.




There wasn't any central theme to the jigsaw puzzles he purchased or chose to solve.

It only mattered if he liked the picture or not. So there was a variety of

puzzle-pictures hanging on his walls. Anything from cars to country or city scenes

to classic movie actors or actresses. He had over twenty of them hanging up.




Although he was a writer in trade, he only owned a few books. He hadn't liked to read

much like many writers he had known throughout his life. It wasn't much of a deal

anyways as he always found a way to fill his time and continue to make sure his brain

functioned.




Michael was never one to intrude or impose himself on others. He had no desire

to debate or argue or push any agendas. He would quietly during his writing career

make his way ahead of others without any hassles as he never risked getting

on anyone's raw side.




He also had a knack for avoiding conflict in both his personal life and his

professional life. He would go the other way whenever someone would try and bait him

into a squabble or goad him into a meaningless test of wits. Being of sound mind

and exceptional reasoning skills, he saw such behavior as nothing more than

an emotional and mental drain and he wasn't one to enjoy self-deprecation.




It was often very dark in his apartment because he would leave the curtains closed

and the lights dim. He would go so long without going outside that once he actually

did go outside his eyes would need half an hour to overcome the sunlight.




He would contemplate how tough life was before he began his writing career, before he

realized his talents. He would consider what life had become and give himself kudos

for how far he had pushed himself and for what he succeeded in doing with his life.

True, he had it much harder than a lot of folks who succeeded in entertainment,

but that was all finished now. His contentedness in lazing about was well deserved.

He likened his current temperament as being a doughy chunk of volcanic ejecti tossed

into a freezing waterhole. He was fried and his indoor vacation hadn't appeared

so awkward with all things considered.




He never had writer's block. He hadn't thought of his break as the creative clog

he let on with the people in the business, he saw it as an overdue break

from the scathing pressures of the business itself. He knew he could continue to bang

out best sellers and golden plotlines but he knew that the pressures of life

in the spotlight were getting the good of him and wearing him out. He quit while he

was ahead and that was greater than fizzling out and losing his mind.




"It could make you go nuts." He would tell people when he worked. Nobody

ever challenged that thought-line. Maybe because half of them really were already

nuts while the other half were on their way there. It seemed that way.




He was always practical in what he wrote about. Love, adventure, thrillers, action,

westerns, comedies, there was always a sense of reality in whatever he wrote

and he was very good at it too.




One day though, while idling away in his apartment, he happened upon a new subject

that eluded him his whole life; UFOs. Now, he had heard about the movies about alien

invasions or conspiracy cover-ups, but he always avoided them because he was a

non-believer. But his ex-wife Elaine sent him an email one early morning of a video

she recorded with her camera phone.




She was waiting at an intersection during rush hour when a silver disk the size

of a semi-truck descended silently and slowly then put on an intricate light show

along the outer rim. She began to record it while it was descending and Michael

could hear his seven year old son Dexter say, "Mom! What is that?! That's gotta

be aliens!"




For a good two minutes it hung in the sky motionless while it's lights made a random

dance along the outer rim. Suddenly it divided into two separate ships. A bright flash

drowned everything in a light so bright that the screen went momentarily blank. Both

of the space ships then shot off into the distance away from the camera and high

up into the atmosphere. Elaine zoomed in as the space ships disappeared then the video

promptly ended.




Michael never thought the recording was false or fake because his ex-wife and son

had never played any tricks on him before. He dutifully submitted it to a UFO agency

who declared it authentic as there were several other camera phone recordings

from other people who were there.




This UFO video sent Michael into an obsessive internet search for information

about space aliens. The more he searched the more his obsession deepened. He would

eventually push aside all of his activities while he searched the internet

for all that he could find on the subject.




He loaded his hard-drive with pictures, videos, news articles, official records,

personal accounts and whatever else on UFOs and aliens that he could find. He went on

the message boards to converse with others and he made an extensively detailed

"internet map" of all the sites he ever encountered on the subject.




He became an engorged conspiracy nut and began to acquire a paranoidal overtone in his

personality. He shut out his friends, never answering his door. He quit maintaining

his relationship with his ex-wife and his son. He had his windows boarded up

and had a plethora of new locks added to his already secure apartment door.




He would periodically scan his entire apartment for bugs, as he was convinced that

he was being watched. Every little thing that went wrong or wasn't perfect made

him reel into a degenerative obsession over whatever it was.




He couldn't function in public anymore. He hired a delivery man to retrieve groceries

or whatever other items he needed to survive in his apartment. The days became months,

the months became years. Eventually everyone quit trying to contact him anymore

as they all thought he was beyond all repair. They didn't know why he shut himself

away so thoroughly, they assumed it was from his bad experiences in the entertainment

business. They didn't know he became a neurotic conspiracy nut but that was precisely

what he had become.




A whole six years went down the drain while he hid away inside his sealed apartment.

At that point he had become like a folk hero over the internet with all his believable

theories on alien life and conspiracies about aliens. Although he was a figurehead

anonymously on the internet, in life he became a forgotten success, toiling away

in a delusional trip of perpetual paranoia that was more fitting of someone who was

less intelligent. Nobody he knew would ever know how nuts he would become though,

and that was a shame.




One day there was a knock on the door. Michael was surprised because nobody

had knocked on his door for a good four years. He even made his delivery man call him,

no knock. He didn't know what to do, he had become so unable to handle social

exchanges. His ability to handle other people had degraded so much that he had an

internal conniption fit when he heard the knock.




"Who's there?" He answered loudly, damning himself for removing the peephole

on his door and filling the hole with gel-cement. There was no return voice, only

another knock. He waited thirty seconds then said, "Okay, I'm gonna unlock the door!

Wait one second."




It took him another thirty seconds to unlock the many locks on his door. He slowly,

with hesitation, cracked the door enough to see. What he saw made him instantly numb

over from head to toe. His blood froze inside a second. A tall grey alien was standing

in his apartment hallway in tailored clothing that appeared made of felt or wool.

Michael tried closing the door as quickly as he could but the alien put his

arm in the way, forcing himself through the doorway. He grabbed Michael up with

the shoulder area of his shirt and lifted him off the ground like he was as light

as a feather. In the alien's left hand he had a small electronic device that he

pressed into Michael's temple. Michael passed out.






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