Anybody in the neighborhood can tell you about the Mutterer.  They'll tell you how he used to shuffle up and down every street, touch every gate or hedge or walkway before every house.  They'll tell you how he was always very clean.  They'll tell you how he would touch the same spot on every car parked on the street.  They'll tell you that the alarms never went off when he touched the cars, and nobody ever yelled at him for the touching.

If I wanted to know about the man behind the Mutterer, I wouldn't talk to them.  I'd talk to me.  See, I knew the Mutterer before he was the Mutterer.  I worked with him.  One of those guys so normal and average that we all expected some day he'd snap and kill a bunch of people.  No sign that anything was strange about him at all.

Maybe it started as a compulsion starts, I don't know.  I remember the day I first noticed it.  He and I were walking to the main doors of our building and I noticed him touching the single bicycle chained up to the bike rack.   He brushed his fingers across the rear tire and said something soft.  It sounded like, "You won't slip, you won't fail."  

I looked at him, curious.  He shrugged and said something to the effect that if it got Mark home safe to his family on a bike through a February evening in Buffalo, it couldn't hurt.  I considered it carefully and nodded, adding my own prayer for Mark's safety in my mind.  Maybe I'd even ask Mark if he wanted a ride home if we were leaving at the same time.  There would be room in the back of my truck for his bike.

Maybe something happend to convince him that his mutterings and touchings of things actually worked.  Maybe he failed to touch and mutter once and something when horribly wrong.  He started getting to work later and later every day.  It took him longer and longer to get stuff done.  He always seemed to be poised briefly, his fingers brushing something, his lips moving, his voice just too low to hear.

Eventually he lost his job.  He was single.  No kids.  Owned his house on the corner of our block.  Maybe he had some money saved up.  Maybe other relatives got him some sort of assistance.  I never could figure it out.  

See, it's not easy to have a conversation with a Mutterer, even when you try.  You're always going to be second most important to them, even when they'd like to pay attention.  He gets up early early in the morning and starts walking.  As far as I can tell, he got up to a grid more than nine blocks by nine blocks.   All of those houses and cars and bikes and dogs and birds and squirrels and children and people all under his protection.  

The funny thing was that they got over the creepy factor and really seemed to believe in him there for a while.  Maybe he brushed into someone just before something good happened to that person.  Maybe a desperate mother pushed her sick child into his path.  

People started to leave food and gifts on his porch.  He never looked dirty or too hungry.  His hair was long, but pulled back neat, and clean.  He always had a pack of those hand wipes, and he'd wash his hands with them at the end of each block.  

Does it seem like I'm a little too interested in him?  Maybe that's because I feel guilty for not knowing what was happening when the community turned against him.  I should have seen the pattern.  People walking by his house, flicking their fingers at his gate and hissing softly under their breath.  The soft fffthoot of a small gob of spit sailing through the air to the steps of his porch.  The dwindling piles of canned goods and baked goods on that porch.  

I don't know what they expected him to do, or what failed.  If it failed because he didn't touch and mutter somewhere or if it failed because it was going to fail anyhow.   Maybe they'd exhaused every other avenue and he was their last hope.  I don't know.  

They killed him, you know.  With their hissing and their cursing.  When they stopped treating him with respect and dignity.  When they stopped appreciating what he brought to their community and when they stopped sharing what they had with him.  When they did not teach their youngsters to respect strangers, and when they turned a blind eye to the things that happen that harm strangers.

I guess I killed him too.  

He watched over us all, he touched out lives and our things, he willed them to go right.  Doesn't much matter if it worked or not, he tried, he never hurt anyone... I don't think.  

I noticed that his house is for sale.  Seems to me that if I get together my savings and go in for early retirement, I can take over for him.  Move in to that place, walk the walk, mutter the mutter.  Reach out in a hundred little hexing ways to try and help my neighbors.   

I think... I'll take up picking up litter and putting it in a garbge bag.  Maybe even a broom to sweep up broken glass so the kids and dogs don't hurt their feet.  

I'm sure I'll catch on soon enough.  Anybody in the neighborhood can tell me how to do it.