Celestial Inventories (17 page)

“You only want the best for them,” he begins. “Your children. Your grandchildren. And if you don’t have children it’s the children of others you want to thrive—is this not so? Because then you can believe that something of this life will go on, and do well, and make of itself a thing of beauty against the failing of the light. For what else is there, but the spark of us carried by children into the lands where we will never travel?

“And so you buy them things, grand things your own parents could never afford. And you hand these things to them, as if you were handing down sacrifices and offerings to some fierce and unstoppable god. ‘Take these things I have given you and do well,’ you say. ‘Make my dreams into something capable of movement and breath. And do not damage me, make no attempt to rob me of my last remaining dignities because I swear, I only wish you well.’

“And that’s the best you can do. That’s the best any of us can do, in these final days of sales.”

Placing his sample case on the concrete in front of the old man, he goes into the trunk of his car and hauls out box after box of Bibles and encyclopaedias, grand dictionaries full of ideas he has never been able to express, baskets of outdated kitchen accessories which have lost both their utility and their names, perfumes and cleansers, small gifts for every occasion. The old man stares drunkenly at the salesman, unable to manage even a thank you.

The salesman walks away empty
handed, leaving all the voices, all the give and take and the I’ve-got-something-special-for-yous behind, knowing full well that he will not have to sell himself to the rain, or the wind, or the ground with its daily increase in gravity. And there is a peace in knowing that not all deals have to be closed.

From the outside, his home looks no different from all the others. This is the way he wants it—there is a comfort in the cloning of every house he has ever seen on television, the slavish duplication of columns and brickwork, the same angled roofs repeated again and again across the horizon to become a geometry of reassurance.

Emil has no reason to leave his house. The company pension provides for him quite comfortably. Why he should be receiving a pension, why they should reward decades of poor salesmanship, he has no idea. But then reward and punishment has always been a puzzle he is unable to solve.

Groceries can be delivered relatively cheaply from the smaller stores. Items may be ordered over the phone even without a catalogue: he will work from lists of merchandise but pictures of anything are forbidden in his house. He receives a daily newspaper, but pays the man next door a handsome sum to censor it for him, until the paper is like lace in his hands, beautiful in its way as shreds of celebrities and the dire news of the world allow the morning sunlight to pass through, making intricate shadowscapes on his Formica kitchen table.

He spends much of his day walking around naked. He has grown increasingly uncomfortable with clothing: even the plainest garment seems to evoke one style or another, and then he feels he is wearing packaging, and cannot breathe until it is shed.

Without clothes he can clearly see the damage that wraps him. There are cracks in his lower face and left arm from hours driving directly into the sun. There is dry and flaky skin across a chest and abdomen which no one has touched in years. There is an arthritic right hand which burns and freezes in the position of one asking for money. Several of his toes are missing. He does not remember what he did with them.

He has lost the full range of motion in his left arm. His left leg twists awkwardly inward, making it painful to maneuver up and down steps.
I didn’t even sell these things,
he thinks.
I was never that good. My arms, my legs, my hands, my heart pulled and squeezed: I just gave them all away.

His front doorbell rings. He peers out a nearby window. A small boy, staggering under the weight of a large box, looking up at Emil’s closed door forlornly, as if behind it lies the only safety the boy has ever known, and yet the door must seem hundreds of miles away. Emil wraps a towel around himself and goes to greet his visitor.

The boy’s eyes grow huge when he sees Emil. But he musters his courage. “Sir, I’m trying to earn extra money this summer selling these fine candies . . .”

“Son.” Emil crouches next to the boy, careful not to expose himself. People are scared, they’re scared everywhere he’s ever been, and he doesn’t want them to get the wrong idea. “Son, listen. You’ve got to get my
attention
first. Then you’ve got to pique my
interest
.”

“Peek, sir?”

“Then you have to show me some
conviction
. Then you have to kindle my
desire
. And finally you have to
close
the deal. Nothing really happened here today if you can’t manage that last part. It was all just a dream, one big fantasy if there’s no closing. AICDC, son. Attention, interest, conviction, desire, close. Remember that.”

Emil realizes the boy is staring at his belly. Poor salesmanship, drawing the prospect’s attention to his own faults. “So are you gonna buy a candy bar, Mister?”

“Say I do buy a candy bar from you. What are you going to do with the money? Are you going to save that money, son?”

“I’m gonna go to the movies with it, if you buy a box of ‘em. Six to a box. Ten dollars.”

“OK, then. I’ll buy two boxes.”

“Do you have a wallet, sir?” the boy asks skeptically.

“I own a wallet, even a pocket in a pair of pants to keep it in. I probably even sold myself that pair of pants. I don’t always walk around naked, you know?” The boy continues to stare at him. Emil stares back. Finally Emil asks, “Do I give you the money first, or do you give me the candy bars first? Anymore I’m not so good . . . at this commerce thing.”

When they find him a week later only half the candy bars have been consumed. The property is on the market for several years before it finally sells, longer than any listing the local realtors can remember. In fact, the poorly painted “For Sale” sign becomes a familiar landmark that the neighbours actually miss when it is gone.

Little Poucet was born small as his father’s middle finger, smaller than a mouse, smaller by far than his six brothers who had all come out normal sized. Although he would eventually grow a bit larger than this, inside he would always feel that same size. His parents ignored him, expecting him to die, because he was so small, and because he was mute.

Because he was mute he had never found much use in words. Words were walls and boxes enormous adults built: the caves and castles and impassable mountains that made lies and broken promises out of each new day. Words could not be trusted. The adults in his life used words with an emphatic pounding of fist against table and a broad, fleshy palm across the face as they told you who you were, what was to become of you, and what you must believe. Little Poucet vowed that when he eventually used words, as he knew he would someday, they would be practical words. They would
mean
something.

But in the beginning Little Poucet relied on dream, and memory, and for as long as he might remain a child, he knew these would be very much the same.

Little Poucet’s most important dream was the lush memory of his mother’s bedroom, where he would spend every minute of his life until departing on the journeys that would make him so famous later on. He supposed it was his father’s bedroom as well, although this faceless mountain of flesh (except for the whale’s eye of him which would stare at Little Poucet even in sleep) visited the bedroom rarely. When his father did visit, the children were kept asleep with warm, oily drinks before bedtime. This was so that the mountain that was his mother and the mountain that was his father could crash into each other with a great moaning and quaking of the bed, without the children disturbing them. But Little Poucet never drank the drink. Little Poucet never slept, waiting up all night to hear the words his parents used with each other.

He had no experience of other bedrooms so he could not know whether the world of his mother’s bed was grand: for someone of his small size it was preeminent. He had come into the world into the pale soft folds and dark-haired shadows of this bedroom, as had all his six brothers, and if his parents had so decided he would have left the world by way of this same room. He remembered lying on his mother’s immense white breast, her billowy flesh extending in all directions across the bed and toward the dark walls of night beyond.

Always a small lamp glowed in this room, but it served only to intensify the darkness of those distant walls until Little Poucet was compelled to give them the name Terror. The lamp spotlighted his mother’s oily flesh, the pink nipple, the heavy wet smell of her as she breathed in and out like waves pushing the raft of him to another side of his contained world.

His mother was always the central event of this world, her size at times making her indistinguishable from the bed, her creams and perfumes and powders and foods ranked on the tables beside her head and the forest spread of her thick black hair, her sighs and moans and gaseous eruptions providing a background music to his day, her silvery flickering black box a gate to one side of the darkness beyond the world of the bed, a gate full of noise and words and dancing dreams, which Little Poucet would not gaze at for long for fear he’d be struck blind as well as mute.

And beyond this the cracked rectangle of yellow-brown shade that covered the window, made to glow half the day with loud noises from other giants and hard smells close to, but not as pleasant as, the smells his mother created.

So central in fact to this world was his mother that on those rare occasions she gathered her heaving flesh and left to get something from the Kitchen or to Go Potty, Little Poucet would huddle to himself with his eyes closed, desperate to find in his dreams some comforting memory of her.

When time for Little Poucet to Go Potty it was small and insignificant (later he would understand this to be from the rarity of food), and collected into a can his mother kept in the nighttime beyond the bed. Sometimes he would see her smelling the can before she put it away, smiling and nodding so that her great black tresses fell all over flesh and bed, covering his own scarce flesh like a web that caught and thrilled him.

Sometimes she’d pull him up to her huge blue eyes (the whites slightly yellow, the entire eye long and fish-shaped) and watch his nose. A smell sour enough or sharp enough would make his nose wiggle, and she would know to put more powder on, or more perfume, or she would rub herself with a wet cloth, moving him like a divining rod over every bit and crack of her. What he did not think she understood was that his nose wiggled out of pleasure, because as much as he enjoyed the perfumes and powders which hung in a cloud over the great bed, it was the slightly corrupt fragrances underneath which really thrilled him.

Sometimes she would pull from behind her tables a large book smelling of insects and dirty linen, and she would read to Little Poucet written-down dreams of giants and trolls and nightmare castles, and missing princesses and ravenous wolves and even solitary elves, such as himself, who lived out their lives in lands no bigger than this, his mother’s bed.

Besides his mother and the smells and the murmuring gate and his own small presence and the occasional mounds of his six larger brothers (although usually they slept on the Rug in the dark outside the bed), there were always the pillows, of various sizes—each one bigger than he, and ranging from four to eight in number. The pillows were marvellous because although not as soft as her skin they always smelled of his mother and remained accessible to him when his mother was out of the room or quaking with the powerful presence of his father. Sometimes they surrounded him like her own breasts and legs, and sometimes he mounted them where they carried him off to dream. In his head he made up songs about the pillows, about their softness and firmness, about their sizes and shapes, about how they sometimes resembled his sleeping brothers, and about his occasional fear that they might be used by his mother to smother him.

Then into this world of his mother’s bed his father might loom, a towering cliff as dark as the walls. He was more a voice than anything else, and sometimes a pair of huge rough hands. His father always picked up Little Poucet and moved him to some distant valley of pillow when the giant came and entered her bed, there to roll and rumble and laugh, and to backhand Little Poucet off into unkempt shadows if the baby ventured too close to the adults’ play. But they were never very careful about what they had to say to each other, thinking Little Poucet’s mind to be small as well, and no threat to the slap and tickle that went on each night.

Sometimes his father smelled of distant rooms and other giants, however, and at those times Little Poucet’s presence was welcome in the family bed, as was that of his brothers, and they all played naked in the family caverns and on the mountain ranges the adult bodies made and remade throughout the evening, their motion so constant, fluid, and restless that Little Poucet could not tell where his own self ended and these ancient forms of creation began.

As grand as these reunions were, Little Poucet most loved the secret times when he was shoved to a corner of the bed and wrapped in pillows. His father the giant uncovered the thing Little Poucet understood to be Brother Eight, who seemed every bit Little Poucet’s size when he stretched his muscle, who had dark hair gathered about his feet leaving his glistening head bald, and who had been born with no face at all, which explained why his father kept him hidden.

During these frightening, exciting secret times, his father would plunge Brother Eight back into the dark original folds of his mother as if desperate to allow the distant ancient seas of her to effect a change, and at last to provide Brother Eight with a face. These attempts never worked the necessary magic, however, and so Little Poucet vowed never to tell the other six brothers of the secret of Brother Eight. Instead Little Poucet contented himself to lie beside the still, soft form of the only brother who was even more an embarrassment than he himself. Sometimes his mother’s hand came down during these times to stroke Little Poucet, in a way to suggest that she might be confusing Little Poucet with the almost identical Brother Eight. In his dreams they were two damp, slim little pixies, secretly smarter than their brothers, and by far the favourites of their monstrous parents.

“Can’t feed them no more. Nothing left, Sadie.”

Little Poucet almost missed the significance of his father’s statement in his wonder at the sound of his mother’s name, which he was sure he had never heard before. But having heard something once, of course Little Poucet never lost it, and going back over his father’s words he felt a growing alarm.

“Enough food for me and you. As little as they eat, still too much.”

His father spoke softly, deeply, as he did when he was trying to make Brother Eight a face. His mother’s face had grown soft and blurry, as if her flesh were melting.

“Hush now. You’ll wake the others,” his father said, looking at him with that great whale eye the way he might look at Brother Eight, something without sense and with only one purpose, and in Little Poucet’s case, a purpose his father obviously valued very little.

“Tonight, couple hours after dark. You dress ‘em, I’ll take ‘em out into the city. Stop your blubberin’ now. Here, I’ll give you somethin’ for the pain of it.” Adult words, all of them.

And the rolling and heaving of the bed put Little Poucet back to sleep.

He woke sometime later from dreams of a giant troll beneath the bridge of his bed. The whale eye was closed, and his mother smelled of night. Carefully Little Poucet crawled over the dark coverlet of her hair and reached for the bag of black cookies with the dazzling white fillings, brighter than the bed sheets, that were his mother’s favourites. He hid the bag beneath one of the pillows, thinking of whose clothes might hide them best tonight when his mother dressed him and his brothers for their journey outside the world. He closed his eyes and pretended to sleep, searching his head for the words he might use for the first time to persuade his brothers of the value of his plan.

When he opened his eyes again it seemed as if he had indeed slept, and were still in the midst of a dream. Six of his brothers (Brother Eight, as expected, was off with his father somewhere) stood groggily upon the expanse of bed, his mother slipping over their heads rags she referred to as Their Clothes. Little Poucet had never seen these clothes before. As his brothers gradually woke up they smiled and winked at each other, as if on the verge of a great adventure.

“Pierre, Maurice, Charles . . .” She counted and recounted, stroking their sweaty heads. Then when she turned, Little Poucet slipped the bag of cookies into the back of Pierre’s trousers, which were much too big for him anyway.

Pierre turned in surprise as Little Poucet whispered behind him, “Be still until I relate my plan to the others,” keeping his mouth shut in obvious shock at his mute brother’s use of words.

Their father came in then, Brother Eight hid behind heavy coat and pants (
He’s to stay behind because he’s mother’s favourite
, Little Poucet thought). “Come along,” his father boomed. “It’s time you boys helped your father earn his living.” And so Little Poucet was forced to leave the world of his mother’s bed for the first time in his life.

Little Poucet was surprised to find that the world of the City was not unfamiliar. It was the world of the dark night walls in his dreams. The City was all buildings (this Little Poucet knew from the flickering gate) and what were buildings but walls that went on forever, filled with night and the stink of garbage and sour flesh and sheets? His father pushed the seven of them in front of him, prodding them along with a thick stick as if they were dirty, ill-fed geese. Now and then he would stop to retrieve a wallet from some drunk or addict sleeping it off in an alley, or he would gaze at the unbarred windows of stores and warehouses with a look of intense concentration on his great face, as if he were considering matters of stress, strength, approach. It was only then that Little Poucet understood how it was their father made his living.

Every few yards, hiding them with care and a small, swift prayer, Little Poucet scattered the dark cookies with their creamy fillings. He was careful not to let the others see him, for he knew they were so hungry now they would have gobbled them up instantly. It was hard enough for Little Poucet to handle them without risking a surreptitious lick.

Once they were deep into the tallest walls of the cool, smelly city, Little Poucet realized he had not felt his father’s sharp prod or heard his heavy footsteps for some time. He turned around and looked behind him. His father was nowhere to be seen.

“So, the old man’s taken off and left us little fools here all by ourselves,” Little Poucet said.

His brothers turned and looked at him in amazement. “He talks!” Maurice exclaimed.

Jean Paul stepped forward and examined Little Poucet’s mouth. “Maybe it was someone else,” he said. “A ventriloquist.” Little Poucet bit down sharply on his brother’s finger. Jean Paul did not cry out, but examined his bloody finger in the streetlight’s dim grey. “He bites as well,” he said.

“I will try to control my hunger,” Little Poucet said, but found himself gazing at his brother’s finger as if it were his mother’s huge and wonderful tit. He forced himself to look away. “I’ve left a trail. We must hurry and find the bits of it before someone eats it.”

They found each and every one of the cookies, passing them back and forth between them for nibbles, Pierre licking the fillings and Little Poucet taking the smallest bite for himself each time.

By dawn they had arrived back at the dark and greasy brick wall beyond which lay the apartment of their mother and father. Upstairs and outside the door they could barely hear their mother’s sobbing above the chatter of the flickering gate.

“With that score you made on the way home we might have kept them!” she cried.

“We can always make more where those came from,” the father shouted, and again the great bed began to rock and their mother’s cries to subside.