Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  If he had ever had a child of his own this broken off bit of toy would have been all he could have passed on. And even this bit of bear was slowly losing its definition: the face almost completely worn away, a piece of the drum missing, the left arm strangely warped.

  He thought briefly of taking the thing to someone for repairs. He devised desperate, last-ditch plans for saving the integrity of the thing. He never carried out any of them.

  One day he couldn’t find the toy. It had warped itself so completely as to be indistinguishable from all the other shape changing debris which had filled his rooms. It was up to him, then, to find the form his childhood had warped into. Of course, there were several possibilities: the ornament from an old car his mother had owned, or a fancifully turned piece that had once topped a bedpost, or a bright red key whose indentations resembled the city skyline as seen from the upstairs bedroom window he’d had

  as a boy.

  He picked up the key and put it on a chain he wore around his neck for the remainder of his life, touching it each night before bed to make sure it was still there. At night it was a locomotive with his hand at the throttle, churning away below his chin and laying tracks across his chest. Or it was the tiniest chainsaw removing his left hand. Or it was a red backed beetle with three eyes and tiny razor blades for teeth.

  But most of the time it remained a key. Even in his sleep he could hear the locks coming undone before its greater presence.

  *

  PITCHER

  He owned a pitcher with no bottom. He speculated that perhaps at some point the bottom had broken off. He bought it at a small junk shop down the street and did not notice its abnormality until he arrived home with it. He remembered trying to fill it with water at his sink, and being amazed at how much water it could contain. Now it sat atop his refrigerator, filling with air, in case he might someday require an emergency supply.

  *

  APPLE

  Once, rather than eat an apple, he sliced it in half and set it on his small kitchen table. The apple still had a three-quarter inch stem. He came to understand that this was the sole bit of nature which had entered his apartment in years. If he had a magnifying glass, he supposed it would show the streams and valleys hidden within the white flesh of the apple. After a period of intense scrutiny he came to realize that at the centre of the apple was a woman’s genitalia. And within that, the dark seed. He pulled out the seed and kept it in an aspirin bottle in his medicine cabinet, and felt it now and then when he went to the bottle to remedy a headache. After a few hours the apple browned and wrinkled. One morning it was mysteriously missing from his table.

  *

  BATTERIES

  He’d never been able to throw away batteries, even the alkaline type which could not be recharged. He’d long suspected that all batteries were the same, that some were just provided different labels so that the shopkeepers might charge more, but he had no desire to risk “explosion, leak, or personal injury.” The objects in his room were sprinkled with such dire warnings—domestic life was a dangerous adventure.

  But even the alkaline batteries had always seemed too substantial somehow to simply throw away. Batteries had too much weight, and with their sleek lines, their designated positive and negative poles, they seemed too important somehow simply to discard. He’d always admired their clean self containment. There was something almost magical about the way they could be snapped into a calculator, tool, or toy, and then bring that device to life. It was a bit like having a plug-in heart, or a plug-in soul. A source of great, invisible energy.

  Occasionally he would pick up a supposedly dead battery and put it into something like a radio. Now and then the radio would crackle suddenly, as if a ghost struggling back into some sort of consciousness. With some batteries he tried this experiment again and again until he was sure they were indeed dead.

  Batteries came in a variety of sizes, but in a smaller variety of voltages. This bothered him, that the slim AA size contained within it the same 1.5 volts as the comparatively massive D cell. Even the smaller batteries were solid, self contained, full of life.

  He thought about experiences he’d had with batteries in the past. Once as a boy he’d found an old flashlight at the back of his father’s closet. When it wouldn’t switch on he’d opened up the case and discovered a kind of dried milk corrosion on the inside. He’d been horrified, as if he’d cut open a human body and peeked inside.

  With some friends of his he did cut open a battery once with a hacksaw. Inside the steel and cardboard outside there had been another, softer metal, and inside that a dark paste around a solid black rod. When he held the black rod it gave him a feeling of raw power, as if he were holding somebody’s still beating heart in his hand, as if he had just reached into them while they were walking by and pulled the bloody thing out. The stuff around the rod made his fingers itch.

  His health teacher once said that people were like batteries, and had to be recharged periodically by rest and food. That made more sense to him the older he got.

  He collected all the batteries he could find in his apartment—including the ones inside radios and other things—and put them into a pile. They were of all different types, powers, and sizes. Triple A’s and double A’s, the flat, odd-looking 6-volt size J’s (he couldn’t guess what he might have owned that that would have come out of), watch batteries, and others with no code or brand designation. The reason for the variety of shape and size quite escaped him.

  A more significant mystery, of course, was that of electricity itself, which bothered him as much as an adult as it had as a child. It ran through wires like veins, but the wires weren’t hollow like veins—he’d cut several different kinds open just to see. Electricity was invisible, mostly, except when it was at its most dangerous, when it was loose outside a wire or wall plug or appliance. That was when it was sparks or fire or a sharp jagged line like lightning. Then it could fry you, roast you, turn your hair to ash.

  Outlets had never made much sense to him, how they could work. Until he’d had a gall bladder operation. They’d run a tube into his arm and the other end went up inside a bottle of glucose. His arm took the glucose because it needed it. When an appliance was plugged into an outlet it took out the electricity because it needed it.

  When he reached his teen years he began to worry that perhaps electricity actually consisted of the souls of the dead. His parents didn’t consider this a very viable theory and to express their criticism they hospitalized him for a time. But by the time he was released he believed in the validity of his theory even more. In the hospital had been these great fluorescent lights and when they were turned on they buzzed somewhat grumpily and flickered unevenly, as if spirits jostled into consciousness. Sometimes he would spend hours staring at a bare, incandescent bulb, until he believed he could see the faces of the departed in the brilliant glow.

  Sometimes the electrical roar of a vacuum cleaner, clothes dryer, or can opener sounded like the voiced disappointments of dead neighbours or relatives.

  He had let go of these theories by the time he had moved into the apartment, but he still could not throw away the batteries, these little vessels of the dead, these miniature phone booths of the hereafter.

  *

  DIRT

  For all his clutter, his apartment was remarkably devoid of dirt. Sometimes he would search for dirt with almost a desperation, anxious to find any traces of the larger world outside. The antiseptic quality of his clutter bothered him frequently. He sometimes believed that a mysterious force—the elves, the aliens, the government—was removing his belongings while he slept, charting their exact positions much as a movie director’s assistant might, cleaning them before returning them to their previous locations in the morning. The purpose of this procedure was beyond him, but he’d decided a long time ago that purposes were well beyond the understanding of the ordinary human being. Purposes were available only to those with access to the “big picture,” and the big pi
cture was the province of those you never met, who worked behind the scenes.

  What little dirt remained, he was convinced, must have been left there for a purpose, as a kind of clue or message. So inventorying this dirt became a task of some significance.

  There was always some dust behind his dresser. He had trouble classifying this furry substance—it had the greasiness, the cohesiveness of dirt, but it also seemed light and air filled, as is the nature of dust. The fact that some of this substance remained after the mysterious renewal of his room led him to believe that this was a message: perhaps a reminder of the transitory nature of matter, or the prospect of his imminent death.

  A thick layer of dry, feathery dust had been left on the north side of one of his lamps. He was particularly impressed by the uniformity and thoroughness of this layer.

  For a time he believed that the dirt had been left to mark the location where a death had occurred, where flesh had jelled and bone had flaked and crumbled, until eventually a residue of earth was all that remained, He’d read about how many bits of dead insect and animal existed in the average ounce of dirt—a nearly incalculable amount—but was more interested in how many bits of human form were to be found in the soil. He suspected this was a taboo statistic. Still, it would be good to know how many of the dead the average child carried in on his or her shoes every afternoon.

  *

  CLOSET

  The closet was a strange area. He thought most people must think of the closet as a storage place, for keeping items out of sight of guests. But since he had chosen a lifestyle in which items remained in plain view, his closet seemed of little utility. Some closets, he supposed, might be doorways to other realities, but his seemed content to remain an appendage of space.

  During inventory the closet did become handy as a waiting area. Items were moved there as they were counted, then moved out again. The closet was very useful at this, and helped him keep track of what he had counted.

  Once, quite by accident, he stepped into his empty closet during inventory. He found himself standing there, gazing out of its doorway, into his apartment beyond. Suddenly it was as if the apartment was no longer his. He had stepped out of the everyday world, a child again, and now gazed into the life of his future self.

  He waited for some time for his older self to re-enter the room so that he might see exactly how he had turned out. After a few hours it was obvious that this event would not occur. Disappointed, he stepped back into his apartment, back into his old self, back into the seemingly endless task of inventory.

  *

  BOX

  For all the objects which filled his room, he knew of only the one empty, unfulfilled container. Not that there were no objects which might contain other objects—there were far too many of those to count. And there were also the jars and tubes and pill bottles containing all his medicines, but he kept these always full. In the city, emergencies waited around virtually every corner. One had to be prepared. Although he’d never, in fact, used any of these medicines. Medicines had an almost desperate quality about them, and he’d always believed that desperate measures were to be avoided until absolutely necessary. This small metal box resembled something a magician might own, its sides brightly painted with black enamel and a finely detailed cloud of white, silver, red, and yellow dots which might have been a piece of star map, but which he would never be able to identify with any certainty. He’d bought the box in a little junk store on Colfax thinking it would be useful for containing something of particular importance, but he had never been able to find the right thing to put into it. Now its emptiness was an irritant—he wished he’d never acquired it in the first place—but it was too attractive to toss into the trash.

  It might have made a good box for paperclips but he always lost the paperclips before he could get them into the box.

  Boxes were meant to keep things in. Perhaps at this late stage in his life he had nothing left to keep.

  Half-heartedly he walked around the apartment with the box in his left hand—lid sprung open as if to pay homage to the ceiling, the shiny emptiness of it like a sterile wound begging for infection—now and then stopping, stooping to sort with his right hand through the objects covering his floor, fingers spread into a rake, a fan. Occasionally he would stop and pick up something, measure it with his eyes, try to set it into the box, looking for the perfect fit. A small Buddha figure, its belly too large to fit. A limited collection of baseball cards—the ‘64 Yankees, his favourite team when he was in the eighth grade—too wide by a sixteenth of an inch. An assortment of cuff links from his college years, back when he favoured French cuffs, but whose blended rattle inside the metal box was too much to bear.

  If he ever severed a thumb and had it wrapped carefully in cotton, it would fit perfectly inside the box. If he had been aborted at age two to three months, all three inches of his fetus would fit neatly within the box, his fingers and toes newly formed, his tiny body resting on a bed of green plastic Easter grass within the smart metal container.

  Once again he stared into the clean, shining emptiness of the metal box. Its vacancy left him impoverished. He had nothing to put inside but his imagination.

  Just under the edge of the bed a small furry head peeked out. This angered him so that he thought of catching the rodent, jamming its head into the box and then closing the lid with a snap. Then he realized that it wasn’t a rat at all but a small, battered dog he’d had since he was a kid. One glass eye hung by a frayed string from a tattered socket. The other had been pushed in so far that greyish stuffing oozed out around its circumference. Both discs of dark glass stared up at him, silent witnesses to his

  childhood.

  He pulled the knife out of his pocket and severed the glass eyes from the dog. They made a satisfying clink when he dropped them into the box. He held the open box beneath the overhead light and shook it. Light bounced off the metal in brilliant shards. He closed his eyes and his eyes filled with light. He rattled the box and vertigo opened up his head and brought a sick taste to his mouth. He clamped his eyes more tightly and held the box out in front of him, permitting the light to lead him out of the room.

  *

  FASTENERS

  The fasteners were attached firmly to the card. He had no idea what they had been designed to fasten: he’d completely forgotten buying them, and the package simply said: ONE DOZEN FASTENERS.

  They looked too large, and too strong for clothing. He imagined their function on camping equipment, or perhaps some industrial use. They looked strong enough to button the night up, leaving the day fastened safely inside.

  He tried to pull them apart by hand but couldn’t quite manage it, scraping his fingers raw in the process. Finally he picked up a screwdriver off the cluttered desk and pried them off the card. Each fastener fell apart into two large, shiny buttons, a male half with a broad, smooth, mushroom shaped head, a female half with a wide receiving collar.

  Again he puzzled over why he would have bought such things. The world depended on fasteners, that much was true. Tacks and glue and rivets and laces. Even the human body had a seam, running from anus to genitalia, fastened with a ridge of hidden, mysterious skin. Most fasteners were intended to remain hidden, blending in with what they fastened, invisible and yet essential. Remove the fasteners from the human body and everything spilled out, everything we liked to pretend didn’t exist.

  As for himself, he’d always believed that it was the fasteners themselves that were all-important. He liked large, brightly coloured buttons, oversized day glow zippers. The first thing he looked for on any new and unfamiliar object were the fasteners that held it together.

  He spent hours attaching fasteners to his furniture, his ceiling, walls. At one point he had to go out and buy a lot more fasteners. Fasteners had a way of multiplying their necessity. Put a few of them where none had existed before, and many more were now required.

  Finally he attached fasteners to the front of his torso. It took a while
to find a way to attach them firmly to his flesh. He tried all kinds of glues. Eventually he had to make use of the many small holes about the rims of the fasteners, and he sewed them into his skin, periodically wiping the blood away. Blood coagulated around the rims. After a few days firm circles of scab were in place around each.

  When the right night arrived he went about his apartment unsnapping the fasteners. The walls split open revealing rusted plumbing and frayed, antique wiring. Long tongues of dust spilled out of the ceiling. Rats and insects stared out of the opened cases of his furniture. Deep behind the lips formed by the unfastened bits of his world, ancient songs issued from unseen mouths.

  He pulled apart the fasteners in his torso one by one. He was surprised by the lack of blood or any other fluid. He reached in and emptied himself: pulling out the skeletons of his mother and father, the heart of a woman he’d once dreamed of marrying, miles of colon stinking with his rotted ambitions.

  *

  BREAD

  There was always the one loaf, wrapped neatly in its own package and resting in the middle of the table. It was his favourite food, but still he could eat only one loaf at a time. One third gone, it always resembled a baby stamped with a brand name on its diaper. One child, he would have had. He’d never thought himself capable, and the woman had been one of his rare ones—they’d both been drunk. He’d agreed with her that there had to be an abortion; he was never cut out for marriage or children. But still there had been that one possibility, that single, remarkable, fully-imagined child. Now sitting on his table wrapped neatly in plastic, his favourite food. A brown heel for the tight curls capping the baby’s head. Flesh soft, white, spongy. He tore into the baby every day, spreading it with mayonnaise and mustard, singing softly to it as he bit into it with a grin. The crumbs powdered his face, his lap. He devoured it hungrily. For it was his favourite food, this baby. It was a meal unto itself.