Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  *

  NUMBERS

  The idea that he might inventory the digits of his life, that he might count, that he might find a number for the numbers, both fascinated and appalled him. He avoided the task as long as possible, and had no faith at all in a satisfactory conclusion to such an effort, but he felt compelled, at least for the sake of completeness, to attempt it.

  He thought that he might have been more relaxed if he’d done better in math at school. But working calculations had always intimidated him. There seemed to be secret rules to the workings of the world, rules which the other students appeared to know. For years he would blame his failures, especially his failures to understand, on his ignorance of these special rules.

  And yet despite these experiences he had a deep appreciation for numbers, in particular the physical look of them. The combination of elegance and simplicity in these figures could only have been arrived at after numerous centuries of evolution.

  He had one each of a number of items, hundreds of ones actually, and yet ultimately this solitary mark, a single upraised finger, stood for himself and his aloneness, futile and without meaning by itself.

  Whenever there were two of a thing it seemed an illusion, an accident waiting to happen. The second was always set aside in case the one broke or was lost. Any sort of relationship between the two was doomed.

  Three seemed to be the oddest quantity; one could rest assured that the third would never be used. Most often it was stored, and from storage it was lost or might be given away as a present when adequate funds were unavailable for the obligatory gifts for birthdays, marriage, Christmas, and graduation (at least that had been his plan; in fact, he never knew anyone to give these gifts to).

  Past this point one entered the realm of “few” and “several.” He had four light bulbs, five dictionaries, eight pens, thirteen key rings which had never been used. After thirteen, things were measured according to the containers they filled—a box of paperclips, a vase of flowers, an old shoe full of marbles.

  He’d discovered at an early age the power of simple mathematics. Two plus three plus four, takeaway five. He was fascinated by the pure rhythm of it, describing the movement of people in and out of a town square, the life and death of a hive of bees, the growth of communism, the decline of the family farm. Looked at in terms of an individual life, numbers measured the steady process of growth and development, the geometric acceleration of mental complexity, and the infinitely additive quality of even the simplest human life. Of all his inventories, this inventory of numbers seemed truly celestial.

  But when during his schooling they entered the realm of square roots and algebraic functions, he found himself frightened. In these mysterious formulae he began to see hints of the secret workings of the universe, where an error in math might very well result in the wholesale destruction of planets. He put his books away, then. Eventually he dropped out of school entirely.

  Now, decades after his last math class, numbers continued to haunt him. The tiles in the ceiling had a number, if he was brave enough to pursue it. So did the fibres of his carpet, the hair of his head. He had heard once that if you counted all the hairs on your head you would use up your allotted time and die.

  One morning he would swear that there were microscopic numerals etched into the whiter portions of his fingernails. Another afternoon a shoe scuff across linoleum resembled the numeral 6.

  These figures could be combined and calculated. They might be plugged into formulae. Things would be made to happen, but all the resulting events might not be particularly desirable.

  Somehow he knew that if he could only escape this weight of numbers, he might truly be happy.

  *

  FLOORS

  In the year of his thirty-fifth birthday paranoia held sway. He became obsessively concerned over the strength and composition of his floors.

  It distressed him that, until now, he had never thought much about his floors. All this time they had been merely a repository for what had dropped out of his life during the transitions from one moment to the next. Those dropped items now seemed to be of the most importance in defining who he was and what he had become, the most essential items for him to inventory.

  But now, in his thirties, he had come to realize that there was a platform, a stage, a foundation underneath this strata of his belongings. Not the rug, which had worn so thin that he could virtually feel the nail heads in the boards beneath, but the boards themselves, and the subfloor, and the timbers which supported the subflooring. These were the essentials, what a life was based on.

  It became necessary to inspect the floor beneath the rug and his things, to see if there was more than one floor, if the floor varied from room to room (he’d never seen beneath this rug—it had been there when he’d first moved in and he had been a very foolish young man at the time). There was no telling what sort of disasters lay dormant in the mysterious floor boards under his feet.

  To facilitate this inspection he spent two days picking his belongings up off the floor and putting them into boxes, bags, baskets. Then he moved all his furniture into one of his two rooms.

  Peeling the rug off the floor was difficult in spots because past spills had resulted in the rug sticking firmly to the old boards. A firm tug usually pulled the rug loose, but often with a loss of fibre and backing. Tiny insects he did not recognize scattered and slipped—their group movement like a kind of crazed liquid—through the narrow cracks between the boards, perhaps into the apartment below him. He did not know the tenant there so this did not concern him.

  Throughout much of the main living room the floor was made up of staggered planks three and a half inches in width. Two-thirds of the way across this room, however, these boards ended and faint lines and dark discolourations in the floor indicated that another wall had once been there. He could not imagine the purpose of such a wall, unless to conceal something at some point in the past. This made him anxious—there were limitless possibilities here.

  Past this point the floor was made up of wooden squares a foot on a side. He thought they might be oak.

  In his kitchen area he discovered the first real possibilities of a weakness in the floor. A steady leak from the mysterious plumbing (coming to surface under the sink, briefly, in a hard-to-interpret knot of pipe) had spread through the boards, leaving white mineral deposit and granular brown rot the length of their edges. A number of these boards were still damp.

  He used a knife blade to pry up several for a deeper inspection. One split into two soggy strips in his hands. The subflooring had almost completely rotted away in one spot. Dark veins showed where the damp had ventured into the beams.

  His fears had been justified, then, but no remedy seemed immediately available. He didn’t quite know what to do. He was well aware of the building superintendent’s attitude toward such things: he’d be blamed, told that he should have noticed the leaks. An excuse to raise his rent (which he could not afford), or move him out entirely (which he could not bear). And certainly he could not afford to hire a repair person on his own.

  Finally he wiped up the moisture as best he could and stuffed the rotted cavity with rags, bits of junk, whatever he could find to bolster the weakened boards in hopes of keeping them from sagging. Then he put back the rug and scattered his things from the basket, seemingly at random but in truth not randomly at all. Even in such a scattering everything had its place.

  For the rest of his life he would step lightly, waiting for the entire floor to buckle and collapse beneath him at any moment. Such anxiety did not seem unusual or in any way remarkable to him: he considered this about par for a man in middle age.

  *

  GLOVES

  Gloves were what hands wanted to be, he thought, stylish and coveted by the poor, especially in cold weather.

  He had nine gloves in his possession: three matched pairs and three solitary orphans. The matched pairs were worn and threadbare, but the orphans appeared virtually brand new, s
howing almost no wear at all. The other thing peculiar about these orphans was that he could not recall either purchasing them or receiving them as gifts (in which case they would have been from his mother). Moreover, their patterns and colours—checked, polka dotted, bright orange—were definitely not to his taste. The only other explanation he could think of was that they had been left in his drawers as a prank.

  Wearing gloves had always felt strange, and he avoided it as much as possible. But he found himself wearing them more frequently than he had when he’d been younger. In fact, some days the rough weather in this part of the country made gloves almost a necessity.

  Gloves had never felt comfortable to him, not even when he was a child. His mother had bought pair after pair in different styles and sizes, but it always felt as if he was wearing someone else’s skin. Even when they fit they didn’t fit, not really. He kept expecting to see blood seeping out of the cuff.

  Now the gloves he wore most of the time were old and tattered, the fingers stained and faded as if they had handled something corrosive. They looked like his discarded hands, as if he had finally grown tired of their inadequacies.

  They might have been a sculptor’s gloves, or a gardener’s. Now they were empty and flaccid, as if disappointed in him.

  At night he worried about how they slept. In the light of early morning, when he first saw them, he was suddenly afraid that he had murdered someone in his sleep.

  Because of these misgivings he tried to go without gloves for a time, even in the coldest weather. But as he grew older the skin of his hands became loose and wrinkled, and stains from what he had handled eventually became permanent. By the time he was forty, he realized, his hands would appear to be ill-fitting gloves he might have borrowed or stolen.

  He would never again feel that his fingers were experiencing direct contact with anything. Touch became a distant sort of sense, and open to interpretation. After a time he realized he didn’t even recognize the feel of his own skin, except from the inside.

  *

  RAZOR

  He had only the one, but then he shaved only once or twice a month, when he had to go out in public. He maintained a full beard, but there were always these patches, on cheeks and at the base of the neck, where the beard grew a five-o’clock shadow and stopped. These he shaved as a bow to good grooming.

  Shaving had always made him feel clean, and yet it also possessed the ability to unnerve him. He’d read somewhere that, besides cutting the beard, shaving removed infinitesimal layers of skin from the face. Thinking of this made him reconsider even his twice monthly shaves. A quick perusal of past photographs proved inconclusive, as most of these images of him were either too small or slightly out of focus. The few good portraits did give him pause, however: subtle differences in the contouring of cheeks and jaw, and apparent changes in the skin bordering the nostrils, which now made his nose seem more prominent. Looking at himself in the mirror now, he saw a stranger. He wondered absently if more or less shaving might make a man look younger. He supposed it depended on the particular face hiding under those thin layers of skin.

  If a man wasn’t careful, he thought, he might be awfully tempted to attack his face with a knife some morning, just to see who might say hello.

  *

  CHAIRS

  He’d read in a book one time (sold in the quaint used bookshop downstairs that always carried such odd little books) that in the peculiar individual stresses of a chair were recorded the ghosts of everyone who had ever sat on it.

  He thought this complete nonsense of course, although he could not shake this fantastic conceit from his imagination. If it were true, then he had had intimate contact with hundreds. All his chairs were secondhand, and relatively old. He started looking for body oils in the wooden finishes, vague impressions of trauma in the padded parts. With each day the chairs seemed more and more uncomfortable, as if preadapted to previous owners, the contours of countless corpses memorized by the fibres that pressed against him when he sat down.

  He had five chairs in the apartment, only one of which was comfortable, and that one broken beyond repair. It sat by his bed, the sides splayed out and cushions fallen and fraying, like the abandoned nest of some huge, exotic bird.

  This had become his chair, and he had given up all hope of finding anything comparable. Broken or not, it was the last thing he sat in each day before climbing into bed. His mother had always said that there was something of the lowlife in anyone who would slide directly into bed at the end of the day without the proper sedentary transition. He didn’t really agree, but he had made the sitting a necessary part of his evening ritual just the same.

  He would sit in this chair and read, or drink some juice, or listen to the radio, until the vaguest impression of fatigue stole over him, at which exact time he would climb into his bed. The chair fit him so perfectly, he suspected, because no one else had enjoyed it much. Any other ghosts had abandoned it once it began to lose its shape, and the chair’s ensuing amnesia had led to a complete collapse.

  He attempted now and then to discover what made the other chairs in his apartment so uncomfortable. Some were simply too stiff, like refugees from a military school, demanding a firm and upright posture from any occupant. Others were ill proportioned for his body, the seats too narrow or the legs slightly too short, as if they had been developed for some altered design of humanoid.

  He began to wonder which came first: the chair or the being who sat in it. Which moulded which?

  So always he was forced to fall back into his decrepit chair, which he seemed to resemble more each year. His flesh took on the same frayed, lumpy consistency. His hair the same stiff spray of fibres, his slouch the same broken collapse of back. It was only when the tiny, black backed beetles began their infestation of his sitting place, followed by the narrow white worms who moved back and forth on one end as if in trance, like some form of intelligent cancer, that he tossed the old chair in the alley where it sprawled in battered pieces like the mutilated corpse of a derelict.

  He was never able to find another comfortable chair like that, and was often reduced to sitting cross legged on the floor—like some heathen, his mother would have said.

  It felt good to have the beetles and the worms out of his apartment. But he would always feel that from then on he lived on borrowed time.

  *

  ASHES

  Although he’d never had a fireplace, although he didn’t smoke, sometimes he found ashes in his apartment. A blend of white, grey, and silver, sometimes vague trails crisscrossed the room, as if someone had been pacing with cigarette in hand.

  Sometimes there was a small pile of ash by his bed, as if that same someone had been standing there watching him sleep.

  During the worst heat of summer he sometimes imagined that his tired thoughts burned up in the night heat of the room, making the fine dusting of ash he found on the sheets every morning.

  Sometimes in the dead of winter the presence of ash on his cold floors was almost comforting, reminding him of warm, rich earth, and all the possibilities that suggested. He would lie on his floor for hours and, using a pencil as probe, turn the bits of ash over and over. Sometimes he would position his high intensity reading lamp on the floor over the ashes so that he could make out more detail. He would churn the grey and white and silver flakes over again and again trying to determine what sort of objects had been burnt to make this ash, until he’d reduced the flakes to powder and less. He stared at the bare traces of them disappearing into the carpet, and thought he could see newspapers, trees, small houses, old women in rocking chairs.

  One night he was aware of a stronger scent in the smoke: of perfume and shampoo and powder recently applied. He sat on the edge of his bed and let these smells drift over him and cling to his bare flesh. The dead woman who might have had his child was there in the room with him, and the baby two years old. He felt the fine powder of their passage all over his body, creeping into the crevices, slipping under hi
s eyelids to make his vision blurred and gritty. He wanted to wrap himself in a sheet and rub the ash of them into his skin, and then he wanted to dive under a shower, wash it all off screaming. The taste of the ash on his tongue was bitter, like poison. He saw sudden rents in the walls, and then the dark air swam with red.

  After several years the continuing presence of the ash in his apartment, its constant renewal, began to disturb him greatly. He lay on his bed staring out the open window, until one night he thought he could detect the barest trace of smoke entering there, and then he knew the answer. He spent the next few weeks scouring the nearby streets searching for a silent and secret crematorium.

  Although he thought he might have come close at times, he never found it. He might, then, have doubted its existence, but there were all the stories in the papers about missing people from the downtown area, and now and then during his searches he would pass through faint clouds of powdery smoke, even though there was no apparent source.

  Back in his rooms each night he would gaze through the veils of smoke that entered the window. The powdered ash which littered his floor was no longer an irritant or a comfort. It was crowds of people, speaking and gesturing; it was lives cut short; it was shadows and memory.

  During the days he began to see his own flesh differently. He’d never had any luck with a tan—he just reddened quickly, then burned. He was practically the palest, whitest person he knew, except for an albino kid he’d spent half the eighth grade with. His limbs were a uniform shade of cream, with pink highlights over the joints and where he figured the muscles to be. Looking closer, he could see that his skin was a patchwork, irregular lines dividing up the surface. Its pallor gave it the appearance of glowing. In the midday light his body appeared filled to the brim with light, his dark hair a cap and an abrupt end.