Celestial Inventories (2 page)

Over time moisture and dirt would get into the newspaper barrel and the newsprint would begin to crumble, disintegrate, clump together into doughy balls of word fragments and abstract black and white photographs. The newspaper ladle proved exceptionally effective at this point, mixing these ingredients until entirely new events, more hopeful and interesting events, appeared in the bowl of the ladle. “Flowers rocket presidency!” he would read gleefully. “Old landfills achieve Dow Jones!”

Sometimes he would announce these new and improved news events to the neighbourhood, but the only response he ever received was the closing of curtains, the dropping of shades. “Well, just kill the messenger!” he’d shout at their suppressed houses, and return to his stirring.

It was the only artefact he had from his father. Heavy pages of polished metal welded to a series of brass hinges: if you weren’t careful turning its pages you might cut yourself grievously. In fact he did just that once when he did not like what he read on a particular page.

“The most important thing,” his father used to tell him, “is the face you show the world.” To find that face, all he had to do was look it up in the book.

The surprising thing was how that face changed from page to page, as if turning the pages of this mirror book moved him forward and backward through time. He couldn’t always be sure in which direction he was going: his face was alternately wrinkled and smooth, but seemingly in no particular pattern. A young man, he had the creased brow of a man decades older. An old man, he had a baby’s full and rosy cheeks.

He had known little of his father all those years—the man had had no hand in raising him. All he’d imagined was a distant figure with an outrageous sense of humour.

In fact he had completely forgotten what his father had looked like in pictures until now, when he finally turned to the last page in his mirror book. There the old man smiled at him, winking, no doubt wondering why it had taken him so long just to turn the page and say hello.

He could not remember where he might have gotten the thing—perhaps he had been required to wear it during one of his many hospital stays—but what struck him most about it now was its terrible impracticality. The metal of it was much too rigid for true comfort, and its numerous holes permitted the weather to moisten or even freeze what little hair he had left. It had never been a comfortable or stylish hat from what he could remember, and people stared at him rudely when he wore it outside the house.

But however he might have obtained this odd piece of apparel, he didn’t want to waste it, so he took to wearing it inside the house while watching TV, at the dinner table, a few times even in bed. His wife complained half-heartedly, but he was convinced that secretly she envied him his colander hat. After all, she was always borrowing it to drain the spaghetti noodles.

Sometimes at night the most intense of his thoughts from that day would gather just under the surface of his hat before escaping through the holes. They would rise to the ceiling then and chase each other playfully until the endless cream of the ceiling might absorb them so that he could go to sleep. During those quiet, relaxing times he could say to himself, “Thank God! Thank God for my colander hat!”

His wife had told him that they would make his feet much more comfortable. She had taken to picking out all his clothes for him and he was ready to accept that she always seemed to know best. If left to his own wits he might choose something totally inappropriate to wear upon his feet.

Healthy feet depended on good drainage. He believed he’d actually read that in a magazine somewhere. If sweat was permitted to accumulate around the pores of the feet, a good deal of rotting might occur.

But one day the drain shoes clogged and his feet began to swell. His wife was out of the house, so he went shoe shopping without her. A small, timid clerk was dusting ladies’ pumps. Frank grabbed him by the collar and pulled him close. “I need new shoes,” he growled. “My wife bought these shoes here and now they’re killing me.”

A shadow of alarm crossed the shoe clerk’s face. “I’ll . . . I’ll see what I can do.” He fell to his knees and as he fiddled with the drain shoes Frank felt a series of strong emotions, culminating in an almost sexual relaxation which started in the balls of his feet and spread throughout his body. He could hear the clerk weeping as he frantically made adjustments, but the man’s tears did not make him at all nervous. Whatever the man was doing, it felt wonderful.

“These drain shoes are just terrific,” he told his wife that night over dinner.

“Sure, Frank,” she replied, and finished eating her carrots.

Until that day he had never thought of dust, never felt the dust, had never even seen dust as far as he could remember. But when he awakened that morning dust was all he could think about.

On the ceiling were great continents of dust. Dust lined the insides of lampshades. Dust baked on the hot bulbs. Dust lay over his sheets and pillows in shapes vaguely reminiscent of crime scene body outlines.

Dust powdered his hair, plugged his ears, coated the soft inside of his mouth.

Trails of dust led him from room to room, outside to the car and back again. He took off his shoes. A silt of fine dust covered his bare soles and he was alarmed to discover that layer by layer his skin was crumbling into powder.

He slipped on the thickest pair of woolen socks he could find and went in search of other deposits of dust. There were many more: dust in the kitchen cabinets, dust painting the worn seats of his chairs, dust coating his books and photograph albums, dust filling his wife’s eyes when she looked at him.

She always said he didn’t listen to her, he didn’t focus. This time he really tried, but the dust swallowing her tongue made her impossible to understand.

Every other month or so an old friend of his would die. Could this be their dust, their way of making sure he remembered them?

Not that he blamed them—he desperately wanted to be remembered himself. He would not settle for mere dust.

If he avoided mirrors and clock faces maybe the dust wouldn’t be noticeable, would blend in with all the petty little deteriorations of the day. So he sat down in a chair in the middle of the living room, eyes and head straightforward, and committed himself to be oblivious to time.

Dust slowly filled his eyes until he saw through a permanent grey haze. Then he knew that his own personal dust time had arrived.

During the latter part of middle age he became much more concerned with matters of efficiency. Everything in life took up entirely too much time, and he wasn’t sure he had the time to waste. He also became almost obsessed with the wasting of our natural resources, which seemed to him to be an extension of his concerns about wasting time. Time itself, surely, was not only the most valuable resource, but also the most personal.

He began carrying around a stopwatch so that he might time meals, trips to the bathroom, the time spent making love to his wife. All might be trimmed of excess seconds, minutes, even a whopping half-hour here and there. It was simply a matter of discipline, and certainly great discipline would be required if he hoped to make it into old age.

This was all fine with his wife, even the curtailed love making (
“It’s nothing like it used to be, anyway.”) Surprisingly it was the newspaper curtain which became a source of friction between them.

He’d erected the newspaper curtain in order to make the most of the time he spent sitting at meals or simply walking about the house, travelling from one room to the next. The frame of it he fashioned from coat hangers. The bottom of the frame followed the contour of his shoulders. With the central gutter of the paper firmly clamped between a series of wires, other wires could be used to turn the pages. In this way he might study a particular column of news for hours if he so desired, or turn the pages so rapidly they tore, if that was how he felt about the day.

“Get your head out of the paper!” she’d shout. Then, “Get the paper out of your head!”

She never understood. How an event forgotten is an event wasted. How sad it was when the ecology of personal tragedy was ignored.

It was no good at counting or tracking his investments, but it always seemed to know if the sun was shining or if he might expect rain that day. His plant computer had grown on the windowsill since both his children had been little. His daughter bought it for him one Father’s Day, with money saved from three bake sales (Play Doh cookies) and the proceeds from one weekend’s lemonade stand.

“You always tell us plants know more than they’re telling,” Marti said, handing over the pot. “Maybe this one will whisper its secrets to you! I already talked to it. I told it you were a good Daddy and it should tell you
everything
it knows!”

So the plant computer sat on his bedroom windowsill and he watered it religiously. It stayed healthy but did not grow—in fact he had no clear idea how to take care of it since he didn’t know what kind it was. It didn’t show up in any of the plant books from the library and Marti couldn’t remember where she’d purchased the thing.

Good Daddy or no, he never really adequately thanked her for the plant. He never adequately told her how much he loved her. Nor did he even understand how much he loved her. She was his daughter. She was female. And he’d never had any understanding of women. She grew up, and except for occasional phone calls and letters home, he had very little contact with her after that.

“What has happened to my daughter?” he asked the plant computer.

In answer it grew and grew, quickly doubling its size.

“How much does she love me?” was his second question. In reply the plant computer doubled its size again.

“She’s
mine
!” he shouted at the plant. “Where is she?”

And the plant uprooted itself, casting itself out through the window, where it joined the endless greenery below, becoming indistinguishable from the mass.

He used to type everything, afraid his handwriting might reveal secrets. Not that he believed he had any secrets—the really scary thing was that someone might be able to uncover secrets he did not have. But to type without revealing things unintentionally required focus and determination. It required that he hit the keys evenly and firmly in order to force away innuendo, to drown out surprise by means of the elevated key clatter.

So he took lessons and constantly refined his techniques, retyping meaningless lists into the night. But occasionally something would appear in the typescripts to disturb him—the name of a lover long dead, a bluntly-stated opinion he hadn’t even realized he had, a recipe for murder—and he would have to begin his typing all over again to eliminate all possibility of errors intended or implied.

These exercises made his fingers strong and supple. The typewriters, the sleek black or grey machines, fared far worse. Typing instructors eventually refunded his tuition, barring him from their classes due to destruction of class equipment. Keys snapped off, typeface arms bent and jammed.

“But typing is in my blood!” he would declare outside the locked classroom doors. Inside, his instructors knew better. Inside, they had the ruined machines which proved the blood was in his typing.

By the time he’d entered his thirties he’d pretty much stopped reading for pleasure, concluding that most people—professional writers most of all—inevitably lied when they put words down on paper. Perhaps they had no intention of lying, but it always happened just the same. The lies might be exciting or placating, but they were still lies, and they annoyed him. Not that he was completely immune to falsehoods himself—to have thought so would have been the most arrogant of lies.

Then a friend who worked in a library introduced him to the adjustments made possible by the book screw. “I feel sorry for you,” the friend had said one night, teary-eyed. They’d been drinking together for hours, journeying from bar to bar across the west side of town. “So I’m going to tell you about this one thing, but you have to promise to keep it to yourself. Big, big secret. I’d lose my job.”

Out of his jacket pocket he’d pulled a small hardcover book and demonstrated the book screw. Most commonly found on the spine of the book, obscured by the publishing company’s logo, the book screw could be tightened or loosened to fit a wide variety of settings and calibrations.

Frank took the book home with him. He bought more books—he located their adjusting screws.

He soon discovered that if he wanted more action, more sex, more violence, dirty words, there were settings for all those things. If he wanted more truth, there was a proper setting for that as well.

Not that he ever used it.

At the end of his street grew a mailbox tree.

It hadn’t always been so. When he and his wife had first moved in, certainly, there had been no such vegetation. Someone had to have planted it. At one time he had assumed the mailbox tree had some sort of official status with the post office department. Occasionally people went to the tree and came away with things in their hands. He’d always wondered what determined who did or did not receive their mail there.

So one day he intercepted his local carrier at the door and asked, “Why do some people get their mail at the mailbox tree and others do not?” Now that he was actually asking the question, putting the mystery into words, he felt somewhat slighted that they did not get their mail at the mailbox tree. He felt discriminated against.

“What? What tree is that, sir?”

“The one on the corner, with all the mailboxes attached to it.”

The mail carrier shrugged. “Never noticed it. Maybe some kids put it together, I mean playing around, you know? Maybe those are birdhouses on the tree, or, hey, houses for their dolls. Like a doll tree house?”