Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  He imagined his skin granulating, bits and pieces of it falling away as the inner fire that was his life consumed him, the flesh flaking off, turning into bits of ash. Each night, he knew he lay down to sleep a bit dimmer, a bit less defined.

  Some day soon he knew he would wake up with ash filling his throat, ash on his tongue. He realized now that he needn’t search out crematoria. The consuming fires were right here.

  He breathed the ash in and breathed it out. He said a sudden prayer for his flesh.

  *

  LAMP

  He owned one lamp, with a very long extension cord. He liked to move it around his apartment, several times each day, in order to achieve a variety of lighting effects. By his bed, he felt as if he were in the tropics. With the lamp in the other room he was an arctic dweller. Positioning the lamp in his closet put him out on a distant planet, centuries away in the bottomless dark. Sometimes he’d balance it awkwardly on his chest, and the sun rose and set across his belly. His mother sent him another lamp for Christmas one time (tall, blue, art deco), but because of possible confusion he never plugged it in. That particular lamp sat in one corner now. He pretended it was a statue of Venus.

  *

  MAIL

  Mail was irrelevant. Sometimes he received advertising circulars, and he would wonder for a long time how they had acquired his name and address. He finally decided that some unfriendly neighbour was selling not only his name but his address as well, probably for an inflated fee. Rather than count his mail, he would ink out his name and address, then wander the hall randomly slipping the letters and circulars under his neighbours’ doors. Some weeks he might make a hundred such trips. The mail stopped coming after a final postcard which read:

  please stop

  *

  HAIR

  There were a number of things he had never been able to understand about hair. He’d always lost it in prodigious amounts—every week he found mats of it in his bed clothes, scattered across his carpet, great gobs of it trapped in his drains and between the teeth of his combs. And yet when he looked in his mirror, his hairline looked no different. He should have gone bald years ago.

  The hair he found scattered about his apartment was greyer than the hair remaining on his head, as if once free of his scalp it aged at an accelerated rate. Or maybe it was someone else’s hair, blown in by the wind. Or maybe the hair from his older scalp, transported here by dream. Dream hair. He’d read somewhere that hair was related to bones and fingernails, although he could see no family resemblance. He tried to imagine bones like hair, snaking and fibrous through the vacancies of the body, a strong and flexible armature that would permit human beings to move in a way somewhere between the locomotion patterns of a snake and a lizard. Then he thought he could feel the hair growing throughout him, spreading its roots through his organs, webbing them and wrapping them so intimately his interior might soon be completely furry.

  These meditations upon hair continued for several days. Each morning he discovered still more hair when he awakened: filling his shoes, layering his bedclothes, brushed into corners, swept up into his cupboards. It occurred to him that the more he thought about hair, the more hair materialized, as if these narrow, fibrous wisps of thought had solidified into the chains of protein hair.

  He considered whether flesh or hair decayed faster and concluded that flesh was the probable answer. He’d heard stories that your hair continued to grow after you died but didn’t think them true. Still, he liked to imagine the hair of all the dead growing beyond the grave, breaking out of coffins, spreading throughout ground and rock, entangling fibre by fibre until one day all the dead were linked by this massive hairy network. If your hair continued to grow long after you were dead then perhaps a kind of immortality was possible. If your hair continued to grow then perhaps it became a repository for all your final thoughts, your last dreams and unrealized aspirations. Your hair was the ghost of you.

  With such obsessive speculations it wasn’t surprising to him when the morning’s supply of new hair began to appear accompanied by new stray thoughts of no apparent context, and discrete, distinctive voices—sometimes so low as to be inaudible, sometimes loud enough that they distracted him from his own thoughts. These ideas and voices gathered in every available corner along with the scattered hair.

  It was with great reluctance that he eventually decided to clear the hair out of his apartment. Although he had a great tolerance for litter, the press of voices and foreign ideas began to grate. He was gradually being pre-empted in his own home by the ghosts of strangers and of his past and future selves. Besides which, hair was not properly an object for inventory but a part of the very fabric of the universe itself.

  He gathered up dust mops, feather dusters, and lint brushes he had not used in years. He went through his apartment carefully, picking up objects one at a time and removing the hair from them. He worked his way through every square inch of carpet, into every corner and recess, across every level surface. As he usually kept his closet empty it was an easy matter to remove the bar and line the closet with trash bags he’d split and taped together, to make one, huge trash bag, a slit near the top for an opening.

  Each day he added more hair to this closet/bag—long or short, dark or red or blonde, curly or kinky or straight, pubic or chest or head—until he had filled it, until the hair pressed out the front of his bag so that the bag looked like a huge, black belly.

  He closed his closet door and searched the apartment. Finding no more hair, he locked the closet door. He left it that way several days.

  The voices protested loudly at first. Once in the middle of the night he opened the closet door and peered down the slit with a flashlight. The mass of hair moved in rolls of lips, great ridges of gums, and yet out of synch with the voices he heard.

  After a few days the voices faded to a whisper. After a few weeks it was not even that.

  One summer morning he hauled the giant bag of hair out of his closet and slipped it carefully down the stairs, afraid that it might break at any moment to spill hair and voices everywhere. He wrestled it to the alley behind his apartment building and set it beside the dumpster.

  By afternoon someone had scavenged it, before the garbage collectors could arrive.

  *

  PLUMBING

  Plumbing was secretive, hiding in the walls. Sometimes it betrayed its presence by the noises which escaped it. He thought it might be embarrassed because of all the secret, seldom-talked-about bodily fluids it transported throughout the building. He did not know how to count it, so he entered it onto his list, simply, as: PLUMBING.

  *

  ICE

  Ice was only an occasional visitor to his apartment, but a disturbing one when it came. Most often it indicated a leaky window or a furnace gone bad: the ice would fill the corners of the windows, sometimes layering itself so thickly it seemed to have penetrated the glass itself, so that it had all become cold, become ice, right down to the molecular level.

  Ice reminded him how poor he was. Ice let him know that there was death in the air. “You’ll catch your death!” his mother used to say to him. Sometimes it seemed this apartment was the trap he would use. He inventoried the ice according to the number of patches he found and their relative size. Then he described their shape, their consistency, and how they felt against his skin. The ice was a numbness in his reactions, a gap in his defenses. Ice was what happened when life no longer surprised you.

  During the winter of his thirty-ninth year he could not keep his gaze away from the ice, the way it crept across the panes, the way it burned when the sun was high. If company came for Christmas he’d have to thaw it out somehow, get rid of it, so people wouldn’t think him poor or otherwise deprived.

  But he recognized that company was not likely. He’d be left to admire the beauty of the ice alone. If he left his holiday eggnog on the windowsill it would freeze. If he slept too close to the window, he would freeze as well. He would catch his
death.

  Ice was a death travelling through the veins, a numbness spreading through the skin until everything else was squeezed out. Ice killed the dinosaurs. Ice in the major organs started the Dark Ages. Ice killed forty-two inventions still brewing inside Tom Edison’s aging brain. Ice put an end to the career of Charlie “Bird” Parker, and ice would effectively terminate him as well. He would freeze like the pipes in the worst winter, then melt down like a Popsicle in August heat. He would rot like spring ice on the river. He would turn into steam.

  On the eve of his fortieth birthday the furnace went out again. Both of his windows cracked. Every ghost in his apartment—those he had known as family, lovers, and friends, and those he had never met before—froze solid into visibility. He walked from ghost to ghost, touching his tongue to their glassy surfaces as if they were a form of frozen dessert.

  He remembers that taste even today: potentially sweet, but familiarity had made it bland.

  *

  NAILS

  In his apartment nails were used to hang pictures. He hadn’t the skill to use them for any other purpose. Nor the courage, for nails were sharp and capable of penetrating human flesh. Not that this is their intention. Nails possess a certain directness, he thought, but no intention.

  A pile of spilled nails made him think of houses falling apart. After the war, after all the houses have dissolved in the brilliance of atomic ideas, will only the nails be left?

  Nails were used to crucify the Christ, at least in the version of the story he knew. He wondered if blood had made the nails

  rust.

  He discovered a number of stray nails on his rug during the inventory. He could not remember purchasing them. For several nights after counting them he waited for the walls of his apartment to fall down, or for Christ to appear at his front door, His hands and feet trailing rust.

  At night he stared at the sky, searching for the nails the moon and stars were hung on.

  One morning he awakened with an odd pain in his belly. Blood had soaked through his T-shirt. Stripping it off, he discovered blood welling up from inside his belly button. With great care he fished his right little finger into the bloody cavity and came out with a long, thin nail of shiny silver.

  Over the next few days other nails appeared—out of his armpits, from behind his knees, under his chin. One especially long nail slipped out of his ear one morning as he first awakened.

  He put these nails in his small black metal box with the clouds of multicoloured dots, and labeled the box clearly with the number, size, and probable composition of the nails.

  He waited for an arm or leg to fall off during his sleep but this never occurred.

  One evening at midnight there was a knock on his apartment door. Since he rarely had visitors, and never one so late as this, he was filled with trepidation.

  The man at the door wore dark blue overalls and a bright, silver coloured construction helmet. His hammer, dangling somewhat lewdly from the front of his belt, appeared never to have been used. “Do you have any nails I could borrow?” the man asked.

  He went immediately to his metal box full of nails and gave it to the man. The man opened the box and examined the nails. “These are exactly what I was looking for,” he said. The man thanked him and left.

  All night long there were the sounds of construction all around him. All the next day the halls of the apartment building rang with laughter and song.

  But he had decided a long time ago he would never leave his apartment again. He kept that promise to himself.

  *

  FORKS

  There were six forks, each of a different pattern. If he flashed a bright light on them, their silhouettes resembled the hands of cartoon demons. He enjoyed using his cartoon demon hands to spear potatoes and tear pot roast into shreds. Sometimes at night he would sit by the window, holding his demon hands up high as his sharp eyes kept a constant search of the dark city streets below.

  *

  CLOCKS

  There were at least a dozen clocks in the apartment, but only half of them worked at any one time. Clocks were an odd sort of thing, ticking away in their dusty corners, achieving importance only when noticed. He wasn’t sure what importance clocks were for him anymore—he hadn’t had a regular job in years; he seldom went out; he watched whatever was on the television when he first turned it on; and whenever he was hungry, he ate.

  Of the six clocks that still worked, four of these gave the wrong time. Three were within acceptable limits, if one were working or otherwise had to get to places on time. Moving around the apartment to inventory their faces (one was on his bed stand, one on the wall above the stove, the other standing awkwardly atop his small black and white TV), he recorded them as showing five to one, eight to one, and ten to one. The actual time, according to the telephone and the two digital time pieces on his battered coffee table, was one o’clock. He’d never called time on the telephone before, but thought it important for inventory purposes.

  The sixth clock he kept hidden, inside a cupboard near the stove. Inside this cupboard it was currently eight thirty-two. He didn’t know if this was AM or PM; the clock was a simple dial with no such indicators. He’d lost track of whether the clock was slow or fast—since it was kept from view most of the time he had no relative reference point, the clock keeping its own time. Every day he wound this clock, but without resetting it.

  Six more clocks in his apartment did not run at all, at least not to his knowledge. Sometimes he suspected they might run, but so slowly as to be undetectable. Perhaps they were on some other, older time system: insect time, shadow time, or dust time. One of these clocks lay face up under his bed, infested with dust bugs and spotted brown by some unknown liquid. Under his bed it was always twelve. Another clock formed one bookend on the short bookshelf hanging on the wall: three fifteen. Three of them sat faceless in a tattered shoebox under a window—he’d taken the faces off for some forgotten project, and now even when wound and the gears churning they were apparently timeless, like the other side of the sky, or reality’s backstage. But just because he couldn’t see the time, did that mean the time did not exist? Or perhaps he could put a different sort of face on the clocks, using different numbers in a different arrangement, different colours? Would that create a different kind of time? The last of his twelve clocks was lost, but often he could hear its broken ticking, and sometimes in the middle of a dark dream it chimed the wrong hour.

  Occasionally he would grow apprehensive about his timeless existence and determined to put his life under the clocks’ measure once again. But for years he wasn’t sure he could do this; he wasn’t even sure he knew how. Finally, because of a sense of age (time running out), or internal confusion (time slipping away), he decided to reintroduce this idea of time into his life. He attempted to keep at least four of the clocks in good repair, wound and set to the correct time. The rest of his clocks he would studiously ignore, knowing that to be distracted by their erroneous times would return him instantly to his previous timeless

  condition.

  But this new attempt at living according to the clock was an awkward one for him. He’d find himself watching their faces counting off the seconds to his next planned activity, betraying him as they smugly sped his life away. He began to worry about eating his meals too early or too late, afraid his sleep might be disrupted by hunger pains. He worried over the proper time for his bedtime, unable to ascertain the best hour for the maximum rest and renewal. At night, before he closed his eyes, he could hear the broken rhythm of his lost clock, reminding him of his shortcomings, failures and losses. The fact that his clocks all sounded differently worried him also; they ranged from electrical buzz through mechanical whirr through tinny ticks. In a safe and predictable world, all time would sound the same.

  And then he woke up in the middle of the night convinced that all his carefully tended time pieces had stopped. Even the broken ticking of his lost clock had drowned in the dark silence. He sat up
in bed, almost distraught that his attempt to live according to time had failed.

  Despite the sudden silence he sensed rhythm in the room. He crawled out of bed, got down on his hands and knees, and felt a rhythm in the floor. He began picking up objects: shoes and batteries, marbles and buttons, a half eaten apple, and discovered a rhythm in all those things. The shoes felt like a slow movement through loose sand, the batteries a heated yawn, the marbles a jittery but cold pulse, the buttons a series of small explosions in water, and the apple had the rhythm of an ant hill after being stepped on. Everything wound down at its own speed with its own dance. If he stared into the darkness long enough, he knew he’d discover that even the night itself had a pulse.

  When he realized he’d been holding his breath he released it with a soft quake. The characteristic broken ticking of his lost clock began again. He held his naked chest and could feel the broken rhythm there. He waited for the clock to stop. From a vague distance, as if the intervening space had been filled with thick liquid, he heard the growing alarm.

  *

  WALLS

  Walls were essential. They made his apartment possible. They kept other people out. They were highly efficient at what they did. Like machines, he thought. Machines of containment.

  But in his fiftieth year it was exactly this idea of containment which bothered him. The walls contained him. They prevented him from doing things. They kept other people out.

  Although the walls possessed continuity, corners and variations in paint and wallpaper permitted an accounting. One: the wall containing his front door. Two: the living room wall with its northern window. Three: the blank living room wall where he kept his bed. Four through six: the walls of his closet which hardly seemed like walls at all, since he had never thought of the closet as a part of his apartment. Seven: the wall that divided his apartment, kitchen from living space, with its two doors of passage. Eight (?): the other side of seven, but which looked so different with its tile and stucco, so that he didn’t know whether to count it separately or not. Nine: the wall with his dining table. Ten: the wall with his other northern window, and a plant box containing grey dirt but no plants. Eleven: the wall containing stove, cabinet, ice box, and rusted sink. Twelve through fourteen: the walls of his bathroom, slightly askew and with warped wall coverings from years of moisture damage.