Tim, as he says to call him, yells “SHUT UP, YOU!” at the homeless man who is walking with the shopping cart that overflows with rotting food, stuffed cloth bags and cardboard signs. Wailing and sounding as if he has something lodged in his nose or throat or both, Tim waddles past the Arlington Library toward the wide green grass of Quincy Park. Tim repeats most everything he says, loud and then often soft, so again he says, “Shut up, you,” starting confidently, and then draining to almost nothing, a whisper. He closes his eyes as he mouths the words, tilting his head back as if it’s too heavy for his neck. The homeless man looks away from Tim, then down at his shopping cart and muffles his voice. Tim adjusts his pants, twisting them left, right, then left up underneath his large, hard belly and swivels his hips, still waddling, until the belt line is just right. He’s wearing those brown pants that old men wear with the perfect creases that look like they might be made out of sandpaper. The pants are too short, or hiked too high, and reveal his white socks. Tim’s not old, though–probably 45. Maybe a little older, but who knows? He won’t say his age. Tim says there’s a lot he won’t talk about.The day before, Tim stood up quickly from the inside steps of his apartment building. He was sitting there then bam! He was up when a neighbor walked in to do some laundry.

“I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE ANY MORE!” he said as he blocked the astonished neighbor who was holding a laundry basket. “I WON’T TAKE ANY MORE FROM HER!” in that high scream. Tim furled his lips, raising his neatly trimmed mustache, squirming it. “My boss has done some very bad things, and I’M DONE THERE!” Then, more quietly: “No, not any more.” The noise echoed up and down the three flights of stairs. Then Tim walked out into the night on one of his night walks. He often doesn’t talk of those walks either but just goes. He walks around Arlington.

Then, three days later, Monday morning, outside the three-story, crumbling brick apartment building in Arlington, Tim says: “I don’t talk about a lot of things. I don’t normally do that. I don’t talk about a lot of things because, you know, some things are just private. Some things…some things are just private.” He’s speaking softly today, and there’s sun and a nice breeze. He’s standing on the apartment steps that lead to the sidewalk that he so often walks up and down, to work, to wherever. His short graying hair is slicked today, neatly parted on the left side. He’s shaved, but it looks like his mustache was trimmed too closely on the left side, and that he (or someone) cut off about half an inch. It looks like he pulled it off and shifted it to the right side of his face.

When he’s talking calmly, Tim drops his head back and closes his eyes. He says from the steps, “Like about my job. I can’t talk about my job. I no longer have a job.” Tim says, pointing down the sidewalk, west toward Westover, “My job, I quit my job. MY BOSS! MY BOSS!” He thunders this. Then, “I just couldn’t take her. Couldn’t take her. So I quit my job. I say, ‘I can’t let her do those things to me. Those very bad things.’” He pauses here, hands in his pockets. “Very bad things. BAD THINGS!”

He then comments on the weather (the sun should be out all day), and on an appointment he has later in the day. He mentions something about the brickwork of the building. Then he returns to the topic of work: “I still go back there, to Uno’s Pizza down the street, and they like me there and they say ‘Hey Tim, when you coming back here?’ They say, ‘When you going to work here again?’ And then I say, I say, ‘Nope, no way, no way, not after what she’s done to me. Not after my boss has done very bad things.’” Tim says all this with his eyes closed, head back as if he’s trying to soak in as much sun as possible.

He says he’ll talk some more, “but not Wednesday morning because Wednesday morning is his scheduled therapy time,” and then he says that “Wednesday morning just won’t work because of his scheduled therapy time until noon, and scheduled therapy time normally runs the whole time because it’s supposed to, and it’s called scheduled therapy, right here in the apartment building they come.” Tim says they come to him. Door-to-door therapy.

Tim does not talk about: his upbringing, his hometown; he never says if he’s been in love or if someone has loved him; he won’t talk about past jobs, school, church. He discusses and repeats the here and now.

Tim also won’t discuss his medical history. Some of his neighbors categorize him as a “little slow.” One surmises that he may have fetal alcohol syndrome. Tim has a distant look. He speaks slowly and it often appears that he’s looking through whoever he’s talking to, or he holds an expression as if he perpetually has a question to ask. Then he’ll repeat words or phrases in rapid succession. Tim says he doesn’t like to process a lot of information at once. He often forgets names or people in general. “Where do you work?” he asked me. It was the third time he asked that question in three days. Tim goes to therapy, or therapy comes to him, but he never says what he suffers from, what he’s lived with all these years.

Tim takes walks, often late at night. He wanders. Without a job (or maybe even with) he doesn’t need to be on a certain sleep schedule. Tim says he sleeps when he needs to. When he can’t sleep, he sits in his living room and watches television, and while watching television, he’ll be out right there in his living room—with the sounds of all sorts of late night shows—and that normally does the trick.

Tim stands on the front steps to his apartment and watches the traffic on the street whipping by, trickling by, as if he’s waiting for a bus. He does this mostly in the morning. Then he wanders around the apartment building’s small yard and then goes inside or goes for a walk. He disappears.

Tim also often stands in the funeral home parking lot across the street from his apartment building. He’ll study the shrubs that line the parking lot, as if he’s searching closely and patiently for tiny bugs on its leaves. It’s a big lot, and when there are no funerals, it’s bare, except sometimes for that 40-something man, slicked hair, shifted mustache, with the big gut, concrete-hard, light-bulb-shaped body. He’s short, so sometimes he’s missed behind the hedges.

Tuesday: “Now tell me what you do for work?” Tim leans his head back and breathes in the late September air. “Tell me what you do for work?” Tim is interested in my reply, very interested: his eyes open wide, and then his mouth, and it sucks in air—an astonished sound as if he just won some money—and he smiles. Big smile. He speaks in that high nasally voice then about how great it is to be at a good job and do you have a good boss? And it’s so good to have a good boss, and he didn’t have a good boss down there at Uno’s. Nope, no sir, bitch showed no respect, especially she showed no respect in front of the customers and all his friends who worked there and ALMOST LOVE HIM. He’s talking high and fast now, a whirring engine, high and fast high and fast and LOUD now and.

Then he just stops talking, drops that slicked gray head back, while standing on the apartment steps, and closes his eyes. He’s deep breathing, maybe something he learned in his therapy sessions. Then there’s only the sounds of the traffic on the now busy street. And then, again, as if meeting me for the first time: “Yeah, yeah I can talk to you, but there are some things I can’t talk about. There are some things I just can’t talk about. They’re private, you know. You know, I just can’t talk about some things. I’ve been going through a lot; I just quit my job…down at Uno’s and I go down there still and people there like me and they ask, ‘Tim, when you coming back?’ and I say, ‘I’m not coming back, not after all that she’s done to me.’ Nope, no way, not after all the stuff that bitch did to me. Nope, not after all the stuff.”

He’s on those steps, higher than his audience, like a preacher at his pulpit reiterating the Golden Rule or tithing or church announcements about a bake sale. Tim is calm now, hands in his pockets.

Then later in the week, in the morning, Tim simply looks more awake. It’s as if he were waiting for someone. He smiles and holds eye contact.

“I been to two Uno’s Pizza’s today,” he says. “First one, I went in there and I told my old boss off. I told her off and said ‘I’m a SENSITIVE person and I DESERVE RESPECT.’ Yes, I deserve that, so I told her that.” Tim waddles down the short walk on the apartment lawn down to the street. He looks left, and then right, as if he’s about to cross the busy street. He says, “Then I had enough time to take the bus to the Uno’s in Maryfield, up over there, to transfer there for work and to make sure my paperwork was in with that manager, who happened to be a nice gentleman.”

Tim drops his head back, closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath.

“Do you know what he said? Do you know? Do you know what that nice gentleman at Uno’s in Maryfield said?” Tim sways back and forth, slow, then faster, and with his heavy torso, it appears he might topple over on the sidewalk. “The nice gentleman he says, ‘Tim, you won’t have a problem here, you’ll be treated with respect.’ That’s what he says. ‘RESPECT.’ Once my paperwork transfers, from my past manager, that bitch, I’ll be all set to work in Maryfield.”

He’s still swaying, looking up at the sky.

“So when she puts my paperwork in, I’ll get respect at Maryfield Uno’s.” He stops. “What?” he says. He sneers his lips and squints his eyes. “She’ll do it. My friends there who want me back will make her. They’ll make her do it, then I’ll work at Maryfield Uno’s with the nice gentleman manager.”

Tim waddles off down the sidewalk east (this time) toward the mall, waddling that concrete-hard, light-bulb-shaped body, bobbing. He waits at the crosswalk at the light, which he doesn’t mind. He says it’s nice at the crosswalk—almost makes up for the wait—because the electronic box tells you how many seconds you have to cross at the crosswalk, forty seconds even sometimes, FORTY SECONDS! From the crosswalk Tim turns and almost yells in a high register:

“BEAUTIFUL DAY, THOUGH! BEAUTIFUL OUTSIDE!” Then, ambling away, speaking softer this time, he says in a soft whine, softer, mixing with the whine of the traffic, an odd duet:

“Beautiful out, what more could you want?”