A million Walters, and every day there were more who were. Mad. So very mad because they knew they were right. Because they were a million Walters. And were right, and nobody cared. They hated it when the margarine went off. When women passed them while driving. And when it rained and their shoes got wet. And when dogs barked at them. And when children spoke with those unnaturally high voices that sounded like the voices of porn stars. And when Blacks had better teeth. Walter was never comfortable inside. He could never sit down with a nice cup of, let’s say, Thai mountain tea, beneath a Cypress tree, and just let everything slide. There was always a tension that desired something, and never something good. The desire had to do with a release. If Walter wasn’t fucking someone or fighting, if he couldn’t kick a dog aside or kill a squirrel with a rock, the red-haired swine, then he sat on a chair in the kitchen where he had already destroyed everything that could be destroyed. The chair was made of steel. What kind of an idiot thought of making a chair out of steel? And on that chair he sat, both legs nervously bouncing up and down at a frantic pace he was unable to stop. The windowpane was already shattered. Same with his fist. Walter passed on what he had learned. He had grown up with his father, god rest his soul, in a flat he himself had later taken over. The father had been unemployed and had a badly enlarged liver. His mother was gone, she was a hooker, which is why she was gone, and Walter grew up with the knowledge that nothing in the world mattered except strength and aggression. His father thrashed him with every object in the apartment that was sound, and he was beaten up at school because he smelled bad, because he lied, because he couldn’t look anyone in the eye because when he looked his father in the eye he got beaten. Walter wet himself, he chewed his fingernails, he stunk. And why wouldn’t he, since the apartment was filthy; fruit flies did their rounds, maggots wriggled in old jam jars, and his father wore underwear he never washed; there was a dried ring of puke around the toilet. When there was dole money his father set out and bought alcohol, then there’d be fighting, then the money would be gone, and Walter would have to go out and steal food. That’s how it had been for Walter, and when he was finally grown-up and unemployed like his father, when his father was finally dead and Walter discovered that there were people who were afraid of him—that is, women and children—he began to blossom. To become loud and to find god; indeed he was so happy that there just had to be a superior being who had set him on this path. God, of course.