Karl did not like the idea of staying at other people’s houses after parties. At eleven o'clock, or eleven thirty if he’d had a little to drink, he would gather his things and leave. Though few people ever noticed, he would move a backpack around with him all night so he could leave at a moment’s notice. He would carry this from place to place at waist height, and deposit it behind himself wherever he ended up standing. When people did notice, they would ask him (usually while grinning) why he was concealing a backpack. He would say he was sick, and needed some pills. If he had already been asked the week before, he would say that he had come from work, and had needed to change his clothes in a hurry. Karl was rarely sick, and he hadn’t worked in over a year, but his explanations were so boring that nobody ever bothered to follow them up. Nobody knew him well enough anyway. When people asked him a question, it was usually because he had not spoken for a while. Karl had stayed afterwards once at a party, and he hadn’t cared for it. At midnight, he had stuffed his wallet, keys and tobacco into his boots, and settled in on the couch to read the newspaper with a blanket around his knees. He couldn’t get comfortable, even when the party moved into the kitchen and the stereo was swapped for a small tapedeck. The clinking of bottles and the rasping of matches weren’t really that obtrusive, but the volume wasn’t the problem. It was more annoying that it was going on at all. It seemed ludicrous to Karl that anybody would hang on to the last little bits of the party, long after it had been popularly abandoned, and drag it into the morning light. Besides this, the blanket he was given was itchy, and not long enough to both cover his feet and shield his eyes from the parallelograms of orange light the street lamps cast through the Venetian blinds. He woke to find his tobacco missing. When Karl was leaving a party, he would say so to a handful of friends. They would admonish him, but he would shrug and insist. He would remind them that he had work in the morning, and he couldn’t miss the last bus home. His friends would purse their lips and nod understanding. Karl had never once left in time for the last bus. He didn’t like to take buses at night. Wherever the party was, however far from home, Karl would walk back to his house. Karl had almost learned the entire map of his city on these walks, and had begun to plot intentionally esoteric routes back to his house. The walks were better when they were longer. Sometimes he would add hours to his walks by including unnecessary suburbs, just so he could count them among his collection. Though he was taciturn, and very poor company, Karl had gone to pains making a large group of new friends so he could develop original routes. Karl had endured some of the most inane and painful times of his life at these parties. He had sat through speeches celebrating the lives and achievements of people he’d rather were dead and unsuccessful. He had drunk tropical cocktails with private school rugby teams and sucked cask wine with crackheads. None of them, nor anybody in between, interested him anymore. He would sit in relative silence for five or six hours, feigning such indulgence that people were genuinely sad to see him go. Some people thought Karl was sage counsel, and bared their innermost as he sat silently and nodded. He would occasionally interject with one of the stock phrases he’d borrowed from daytime television. Karl had actually lost most of his old friends. Once he had completed all the routes in an area, he saw no point in keeping those lines of communication open. After a time, he had trouble remembering who his first group of friends had been. Many of them had been nice, but they hadn’t given Karl anything but places to leave. Karl occasionally found pouches of tobacco on his walks, but he’d quit smoking at some point he couldn’t recall. He had a bowl on his kitchen table full of half empty pouches of tobacco and packets of cigarettes. He would have offered them to somebody, but nobody knew where Karl lived.
