Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  The man ahead of him put one foot forward and the others, including Richard, did the same.

  A very slight shuffle to the right and a step back. Richard struggled to maintain his composure, did the step just the same, feeling as if he’d been kidnapped. By the time they reached the sixth floor, he felt barely capable of exiting. He turned quickly to see what might be in their faces, but they’d fallen back into their still, stuffed positions. He entered the offices of the insurance company sweaty and disheveled. And sorry to have left the elevator behind.

  He was told he was ten minutes late and would have to wait an hour for the next appointment. The clock above the receptionist’s desk pointed to two o’clock exactly, but he did not object. The reception area was full. He found a solitary chair against the wall, mostly hidden by a large potted plant. He had to remove a large pile of magazines from the seat in order to sit down. Not seeing any place to put these, he pulled them into his lap, hugging them and hunching over to keep them from falling.

  A few feet away a fat man raised his right hand slowly and placed it on the front part of his head, immediately above the hairline, pressing down with obvious strain, as if trying to keep one particular train of thought from jumping track.

  On the other side of the reception area, almost behind the desk, Richard saw another man—well-groomed, hair slicked back—do the same.

  A younger man with his face buried in a financial magazine raised his hand slowly, palm up and wavering like a snake’s head, then brought it over in a stretch-like motion, finally settling it somewhat surreptitiously onto the same region of his head.

  Richard’s vision filled with the nervous flapping of shadows like dozens of birds exhausted from their long journey. He closed his eyes, looking for his place of quiet solitude, and, unable to find it, opened them again. The men still held their heads in the same way, as if waiting.

  Richard searched a last time for a place to put down the magazines, and, failing that, raised his hand high and slapped it over the same region of his head. The magazines crashed to the floor and spread in a wave over the shoes of the people sitting nearest him. Everyone in the room glanced his way except for the three men with hands on their heads, who now lowered their hands without a glance in his direction. He felt his face burning, got up, and left the office.

  Out on the sidewalk and everyone appeared to be walking his way. As he pushed through them they raised arms and elbows, overlapping one against the other as if to prevent his flight. On the next street corner a small group stood off to themselves, wrists raised at exactly the same angle as they stared at watches that were missing, pale bands of skin left as evidence.

  He felt only a whisper of guilt about stealing a car. Richard manoeuvred the stolen car through streets full of chatting, focused people, people with important appointments to go to, places to see, definite things to do, conversations to have, parties to attend, shadows to scatter, loneliness to bury in a cascade of forced laughter. He at last felt the growing anxiety of someone with a destination. And he would not permit a crowd of other people, those people, the people whose full lives had always put the lie to the so-called life he had cobbled together on his own, to delay him in any way, make him late for the meeting he had waited for all his life.

  It saddened him that the truth of it had never been clear to him before, that people like him, people who had endured a solitary desperation all their lives, required no words for their secret communications, that their private handshakes demanded no actual exchange of touch, that their meeting places were spontaneous and secret even unto themselves, that, like the early Christian churches in a world of persecution, they met wherever and whenever more than one of them came together in one place.

  Richard looked out the driver’s-side window into another car that had pulled alongside. He wagged his head to the left, veered the stolen car to the left, and that other driver did the same. And another car beside that one, as a result driving up onto the sidewalk, ploughing over the crowds there, striking the front wall of a department store, exploding into flame.

  Richard grimly focused again on the road to his destination, hoping that none of the people he had recently recognized were out on the sidewalk just then, and sparing a good thought for the brave and devoted driver who had no doubt lost his life in service to the cause.

  But of course we are legion, he thought. When one of us dies there is always another to take his or her place. We always thought we were alone, and our gratitude at discovering our belonging knows no bounds.

  The building ahead of him looked little different from the rest, which was appropriate. No crowds pushed inside as if this were some concert hall or sporting event;, and that, too, was appropriate. Because no matter how many of them there might be they would never be a crowd, not in the way these successful and fulfilled unenlightened ones made a crowd.

  Richard was pleased to see that no one lingered around the entrance to the building. No one paid it any particular attention, and that was as expected, and wonderfully, joyfully, appropriate.

  He stopped the car a few feet from the entrance and abandoned it there. Going in he glanced at the sky, the way the roofline pierced it so nicely, demanding respect.

  A few gathered before the elevators, joining him as he made his way through the doors, repeating his gesture of rubbing at his left eye (let it not offend), scratching at his neckline (let it bare itself before thee), pulling at his trousers (my legs belong to you).

  They were on the rooftop, waiting, although they did not appear to be waiting. They did not appear even to be aware that others were up on this rooftop with them. They stared at the sky. They stared at the streets below and at the horizon of stone and steel containers stretching in all directions. His company. His associates. They did not look at each other.

  But they were here together. Richard understood that the way of silence, the way of solitude, was their way. There was no plan or determination. None was needed.

  Well after it began, Richard realized there were fewer of them. Then fewer still. Then he saw a few slip over the edges, like birds sucked one by one into a rising tide of wind.

  He was proud that when his own urge arrived he did not hesitate, but floated across the border between gravity and release without a second thought.

  They descended like huge, mad fowl, their mouths open in anger or weeping. There were a few hundred or more, and it was said that the way they twisted as they fell to their deaths, the way they swept their arms and legs out viciously in their final few feet of air, they seemed to be trying to kill as many in the crowds below them as they could.

  CELESTIAL

  INVENTORY

  DOORS

  When he first moved into the apartment the number of doors in such small quarters seemed excessive and bothersome. He had never lived on his own before, and had never imagined that so many entrances and exits might be necessary.

  Entering the front door he found himself thinking of his uncle Simon, whose death had made all this possible. Uncle Simon had lived on his own for over twenty years, seldom leaving his small house upstate, and seldom spending any money. In the will, he had explained that he was leaving his money to his nephew because “he is without a doubt the one who best understood my life style.”

  There was something vaguely disconcerting about such a judgment by a relative he hardly even knew, but he accepted the money. His annoyance with all the doors he had purchased was easily explained: in an ideal universe his preference would have been for one grand and enormous front door which he might enter once and never bother exiting again.

  His new front door was far from grand, however. No stronger, really, than any of his interior doors, except for an additional lock. Still, he experienced a breathless moment of transition as he passed over the threshold, a stepping from theirs to his, from there to here, from exterior to interior. To open that door was to travel a long distance.

  He realized that his actions would make many people re
gard him as a man who hated other human beings. But he simply had no talent for friendship, no aptitude for social interaction, and to people like him the agony of social contact eventually becomes unbearable. He had no hatred for people; quite the contrary—he loved even their eccentricities, and especially their weaknesses, which made him feel more a part of them, even at this self-imposed distance. But to watch them talking to each other one to one, laughing, embracing—this he could not stand, because he was quite incapable of participating.

  Besides the front door he counted five more. The front door led him directly into an area that, depending on the furniture, could be either a living room or bedroom. Another door in this room fronted a closet (doors on closets had always seemed a fake to him, a deception as to the number of options one had). Two separate doors led to a combination kitchen and dining area. He supposed in larger quarters two doors would have eased traffic but in an apartment of this size they made no sense. He believed that at one time the apartment building had been a large private dwelling, so perhaps the long-ago subdivision into rooms had inadvertently created this anomaly. People didn’t always adequately consider how their actions might affect people in the future—such short-sightedness was a basic human trait, he believed.

  A fifth door led to a bathroom, although he did not know how useful a bathroom door would be, since he would be living here alone and could not imagine himself entertaining guests. But it was the sixth door which troubled him most: opening it, he discovered a bricked-in opening with an old calendar taped to this new wall. He despised such architectural trickery, and over this door hung a tattered quilt which he would never once remove.

  The apartment also had two windows, which were like doors in that they were a kind of passage. But unlike proper doors which were practical, actual, and at times adventuresome, windows were for visionary pursuits, for dreaming, for planning trips the legs might or might not take.

  After a few months in the apartment he began to see the doors differently. The front door became a hatch, a lid to protect his private activities here. The closet door still seemed to have little function, although it became the door used in most of his dreams. The privacy of the bathroom door achieved its purpose when he realized that sometimes he liked to be concealed from the presence even of his own things, the props which dressed his life. The covered door remained covered, too dangerous to tamper with.

  But his attitude had changed most profoundly toward the two doors which separated the two halves of his apartment. These doors provided him with enough variety in movement and sufficient creativity in his transitions from space to space that he became confident for the first time that he might be able to remain in this apartment for the rest of his life, with only occasional ventures into the outside world for supplies. These doors encouraged his appreciation of an economical approach to living. They provided him with healthy exercise, recreation, and imaginative entertainments. If he passed through the doors in different ways they became metaphors for a variety of modes of travel, from boat to Ferris wheel. And after a time he became adept at imagining a different landscape thrown down before him each time he passed through one of the doors.

  It was the wealth of association inherit in these doors, and his need to understand them all, which led him to the idea of the inventories.

  The secret, he had discovered, was not how much you had, but how deeply you saw what you had.

  And for the hermit, it was necessary to see very deeply indeed. The ordinary, he knew, could become extraordinary. His two rooms contained the stars. New universes grumbled in his belly. Through these doors lay the celestial. It would be essential to monitor his discards very carefully, else an enormous percentage of his life’s significance might be lost.

  *

  COTTON BALLS

  Along with steel wool, vinegar, and plastic wrap, his mother had depended on cotton balls. “A home isn’t a home without cotton balls,” she’d once declared in a near manic moment of dead seriousness. He’d been unable to suppress his laughter, and she’d treated him with contempt for almost two full days in consequence.

  Over the years she’d developed hundreds of uses for the white puffs of near cloud: for applying makeup, for wiping noses, for reducing shoe sizes, for her endless craft projects, for miscellaneous padding. Once she’d tried to replace the left eyeball of his stuffed teddy bear with a cotton ball painted black in the middle to suggest a pupil. It frayed so badly that the bear’s eyeball soon seemed to have exploded.

  But most importantly, she used them to administer various sorts of medicinal aid. He could remember vividly the soft press of them against his skin as she cooed and sang to him, trying to soothe his hurts both real and imaginary. Eventually the touch of cotton balls came to represent for him the touch of her own gentle fingertips.

  He had bought several boxes of cotton balls before he first moved into the apartment—keeping in mind his mother’s definition of a “home”—but had never really found any use for them. Years later, they were scattered everywhere, like the corpses of tiny white mice, or like a purer, angelic variety of the “dust bugs” which now and then spontaneously generated among his inventory. He was always trying to think up some sort of practical use for them, feeling that his adulthood was somehow less than complete if cotton balls did not play a major role.

  It was during a moment of half sleep one evening—his eyes shut down to slits, the air of the room gone grey with his weary brain cells—that he felt his mother’s fingertips along his arm, urging him to stir.

  He awakened to find a row of cotton balls pressed against his skin, their bodies spread slightly from the force of their labours. In the greyness of the room they were almost luminous. One by one they removed themselves from his arm, as if a hand tilting, the fingertips lifting in order, left to right. Then they drifted down into the darkness which blanketed his things on the floor.

  He got up then, determined to search through his apartment until he had located all his cotton balls. He didn’t turn on the overhead light, afraid of scaring them away, but carried a flashlight for sudden, surprising peeks into the darkness. He loved his mother, but now she was dead and he was on his own. He would not have her just suddenly dropping into his apartment this way.

  He felt, rather than heard, the soft presence of the cotton balls as they gathered in the darkness to make a larger, even softer shape. He flashed the light past his empty closet as the cloud that was his mother’s back turned from him and drifted into the shadows.

  “Mother! You have no right!” he shouted, and pursued her with the flash, which refused to get a fix on her, always trailing her vague outline. Now he noticed the vagueness of the light from the flashlight itself, how it consisted of a series of pale concentric halos, and then he realized that the flashlight would be useless to him for it was in league with the spirit world.

  He turned off the flash and groped for his mother in the near dark, counting on chance illumination from the city lights outside his window to guide him. He stumbled through the room, careless of the inventory crunching beneath his feet, paused, then turned back to the window. His mother stood against the light, a shimmering softness of cotton strands stretched near the point of dissolution.

  “Mother! This is not a good time!” he shouted, scooping random objects from the floor and tossing them at the form that was forty years dead.

  The stretched cotton tore with a whisper, then jerked back as if elastic, bits and pieces of her flying through the room.

  He never found another cotton ball, but the cobwebs in the far corners of his room seemed much whiter after that, and hummed with any slight breeze. And scattered strands of white, like ancient hair or cloud, appeared now and then on his clothing, stuck to a dinner plate, or floated at the edge of his bathwater. Try as he might, even after years he could never get the cotton balls completely out of his life.

  *

  TOY

  It was a piece of a toy, the whole of the thing long forgott
en. But the piece was clear enough: a carved wooden bear in a soldier’s blue uniform with a tall red hat, a drum in one paw. The figure might once have been mounted on a cart or a music box.

  It didn’t really matter what function this piece of toy had originally served. He had been one of those children whose toys had never lasted more than twenty-four hours intact. The question was always what long time purpose a thing might serve for him, not its original purpose when purchased. As a child he sometimes had intentionally broken a toy in order to end the suspense.

  The figure was his one bit of toy remaining, emblematic of a sparse childhood, and he discovered that by dropping it strategically among the objects cluttering his floors he could recreate various points in his past, emulating these periods in the rooms of his childhood.

  Dropped among bottles and tissues, it was a day spent sick in bed, waiting for visitors who never came. Resting amid piles of unanswered correspondence, it was the last reminder of long forgotten friends. Wedged among scattered tools and leftover materials, it was projects left unfinished.

  Its importance to his life had become muted since he’d stopped working, when so many of the objects of his adulthood became nonessentials, focal points for play. Toys. He began to wonder if life itself might be a toy to a dying man.

  Eventually it began to bother him that he didn’t know which toy the fragment might have been part of. He had had a wooden train set, he remembered, brightly painted cars and, in each, the wooden figure of some animal in costume. The soldier bear could have come from it. Or there was the make believe theatre he’d had when he was six. There had been animals in that, too. Or from even further back, he had the vaguest memory of tiny animals staring down at him from a contraption which bridged the open top of his crib. He supposed the little bear could have come from that as well.

  Sometimes he placed the toy on the top of his desk and stared at it for a time, meditating on all those things he had wanted as a child but had gone without. Back then, one old toy would be used to represent a new one, fantastic but unobtainable. So that an old wooden truck became Batman’s marvellous Batmobile, an empty box the Batcave, and an oddly shaped piece of wood wrapped in dark cloth was the Batman himself. These substitutions became far more elaborate and arbitrary as time went on: a loose wheel was a flying saucer, an aspirin bottle became King Kong, a lone chess piece the Invisible Man.