Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Finally, he thought of the fifteenth wall, the invisible one which had been removed, the only remaining indication of which he had found vaguely traced on the floorboards when he lifted up the rug. It was this wall which had become the most significant as he entered his fifties. It appeared in his dreams: a shiny, silvered thing which lowered itself slowly and made everything look new again, refreshed in its mirrored surface. It was the wall with a purpose, the wall with a fresh look, the wall that made all the difference.

  That, finally, was what kept him in the apartment and made it impossible for him to move. He had first to imagine all the possible ways he might have decorated that wall, and the effects of each on the total effect of his apartment.

  *

  SHOES

  He wondered if other people never threw away their shoes. He did not, of course, but he had never owned many pairs. He wondered if rich people gave or tossed away their shoes. He supposed the conscientious ones gave theirs to tax-deductible, charitable organizations. But there were a great number of misers among the rich as well, and perhaps they recycled the shoe leather into belts or even fancy book bindings. Even he had twelve pairs cluttering up the place, and three more singles with no apparent mates. The two pairs he wore the most—the beat-up tennis shoes and the dull black, leather pair—sat at the ready by his bed. Now he wore the bright red loafers with the holes in the top. Why there should be such holes he did not know—these shoes seemed too loose to have worn in such a way.

  He had never paid much attention to what people wore on their feet. He didn’t understand why others noticed such things. Sometimes it made him uncomfortable, thinking that below eye level your feet might be doing almost anything. Feet could be completely detached from the rest of the body. Feet were the underworld, the low lying dark, the realm of subconscious impulse.

  The rest of his shoes were scattered across the floor in a broken trail that led from bed to closet. There might be an odd shoe or two hidden under the dresser or his bed, dust filling them rather than feet, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Old shoes always seemed rather worse off than he remembered from the last time he’d worn them. His black canvas-tops were a good example of this phenomenon. When last he’d put them away—approximately five years ago—they’d been turning a little grey on top due to wear, and the stitching was beginning to come loose on the outer curve of the right shoe. He’d put them away in the corner by the radiator, and had never picked them up again.

  Now when he looked at them they had collapsed, were almost flat, as if someone with much larger feet had been wearing them and had stretched them quite out of shape. All the inner structural strength had disappeared. It then occurred to him that it was these same dark (but becoming grey) shoes he had been wearing in his dreams for years. In his dreams he had never taken them off. He had never replaced them. He had worn them through hot, burning sands and waded through the periodic dream floods.

  It was not, he thought, because his dream self was more frugal than his waking self. There was just something peculiarly “right” about those particular shoes on his feet in his dreams. They seemed less like shoes than dark, mysterious, shadowfeet which took him into those realms his subconscious wanted to go. Sometimes in his dreams they even seemed to breathe on their own, to move independently, like dream animals, shadow beasts wrapped around the stubs of his ankles.

  He realized that he must have been wearing these shoes in his dreams long before he actually owned the shoes. Purchasing the shoes had not been taking advantage of a bargain at the local discount store; it had been preordained.

  He conceived a plan in which he would examine this old pair of shoes each morning for signs of change, signs of the previous evening’s dream. He would put them back carefully each time, however, in their rather obscure resting place, because to do otherwise might adversely affect his dreams.

  One morning the tops of both shoes were badly scuffed. He remembered dreaming the night before of a wild scramble down a steep slope, through a mass of sharp branches and rocky debris. Another day the shoes had darkened, almost charred, and he suddenly recalled racing through streets of fire, howling when the hot embers landed on his arms and back. Then there was the odd, hazy day when he had reached for the shoes and found them sodden, crumbling, and overgrown with moss. That night and many nights thereafter he dreamed nightmares of his own death.

  As an old man he woke one morning and found the dark canvas shoes missing, and an exhaustive search of his apartment did not turn them up. Forever after that he would not remember his dreams. He lost his gift of prophecy. The subjunctive eluded him. He would also cease to use such words as “would,” “will,” and “shall.”

  *

  PAPERS

  His apartment always seemed to be filled with them. Originally, he had decided to inventory the papers according to a number of different categories—newspapers, letters, bills, magazines, advertising, general correspondence—but during one late evening of cataloguing he determined that they were all pretty much the same thing, whatever their physical forms. They were ephemeral display areas for words, words whose ultimate utility was dubious. So he stacked the papers in piles around his apartment according to size and weight. Then he restacked them according to their relative weights of sincerity. The “very sincere” stack was quite small, and controversial. He hadn’t the temerity to create a “completely sincere” stack.

  People spent an inordinate amount of time creating this vast volume of wordage. He wondered where they found the time, how they dredged up the energy and/or inclination. One could fill page after page over a lifetime and still not convince anyone to lend you money, change their opinion, or love you. Words were like dreams: the mind sweeping out its garbage. Here, all around him, were words. Possessions, words, dreams, garbage: they seemed little different to him.

  If he took the stacks of papers—whatever the current scheme of classification—and dropped them from a height and permitted them to spread, interesting juxtapositions occurred where the papers overlapped. An old letter from his mother might blend in with an advertising flyer for men’s underwear or cancer research and he might never notice the difference. At night he might dream of his childhood, and his mother putting cancer-causing agents in the front of his underwear while he slept.

  Or old bills and overdue notices might become part of a page of poetry and he would feel a certain spiritual elevation because of the breadth and intensity of his debt. Words jammed into words and sentences ran and melded as his feet shuffled through the papers on repeated midnight journeys to the bathroom. Too many words produced nausea and lower abdominal distress. In the dark, the ragged piles of paper made him think of excrement experimentally processed for creative and elegant disposal. He thought there should be a statutory limit on the number of words a person might say or write. Some people could expand their limit by application for special licences. For others, there might even be a special lifetime limit court imposed as punishment.

  Whenever possible, he tried to limit the amount of paper and accompanying wordage coming into his apartment. He removed all store receipts and flyers in the store parking lot. He cancelled all subscriptions and wrote mail order houses angry letters immediately upon suspicion that he’d been put on another mailing list. But still there was the necessary mail and other written information which slipped by almost unnoticed.

  Feeling as he did, he might have removed all paper from his apartment, permitting the trash people at last to haul away his great store of it. But he came to see the act of creating these words, however inessential, to be as natural and incidental as breathing. He wondered whether copywriters had words appearing in sales pitches long after their deaths. And there was the issue of his mother’s letters—how could he toss away the lost voice of her?

  He thought the worst job must be that of the trash man charged with disposing of such paper. He wondered if he had to wear cotton in his ears to muffle the voices. He wondered how he kept h
is composure rifling through the casual or earnest utterings of the living and dead, the famous and the anonymous. He wondered how he handled the o’s, the a’s, the e’s ground beneath the wheels of the bulldozers, pulping together in preparation for one last great garbled howl.

  *

  GRAVITY

  It was everywhere, he’d been told, at least on this planet, and was therefore not to be counted, not even to be considered in day-to-day decision making. And so he chose to ignore it, to snub it, and was rewarded with a subtle lightening of his existence.

  But now that he was old, such suppression seemed a waste not to be tolerated. During the course of these inventories he discovered that gravity existed within his apartment in great quantity and diversity.

  There was the gravity that lined the inside of his shoes from a full year’s travel, and another year of time spent standing in various lines, which added up to a gravity equal to one somewhat complicated relationship.

  There, too, was the gravity of unopened letters, especially those he was afraid to open.

  Cooking utensils had gravity, although less than that of the food which went into them.

  He realized eventually that his mother had left her gravity behind when she’d last come to visit. He could feel its presence, although he couldn’t quite locate it.

  After months of searching he found a small depression in the rug next to his laundry hamper which he had not touched in months. He raised the rug to discover that the depression continued all the way into the floor boards.

  He found that, if he put a wastebasket over his mother’s gravity, thrown paper balls would always land inside. For several weeks at least this made him feel like a successful man.

  *

  CARDS

  He once considered binding them with rubber bands or keeping them in a shoe box the way so many of his friends did. But that would have made them immediately all of a kind, with no special quality, a part of his past to be stored away and forgotten. At least with them scattered about the floor and piled carelessly on his dresser or bedside table, he could be surprised by these reminders that occasionally someone thought about him, even though it might simply be that he had never been removed from a Christmas card list.

  The ones he liked best were vacation picture postcards from such exotic locales as St. Louis and Nashville. But he never quite understood why people felt the need to advise him of their recreational plans. He had, of course, a multitude of cards sent to him by his mother until she died. There was even one—a “thinking of you” card—which arrived in his mail box two days after her death, apparently mailed the afternoon she died.

  He thought a prepackaged “thinking of you” card was a rather odd concept. Because what “thought” could be involved here? The card itself was rather nonspecific; surely his mother’s thoughts of him weren’t nonspecific as well? It was like saying to someone, “I’m thinking of you but I’m not going to tell you what I’m thinking.” Such messages could lead to a rather paranoid view of the world.

  Scattered about his apartment, the cards were voices, disconnected from time and physical bodies. They spoke eloquently of the futility of human attempts at communication.

  Hope you feel better soon. Sorry I forgot your … Happy Holidays … Greetings from the tropics … Best wishes … Yours for a merry … Wish you were here.

  *

  SHEETS

  He’d never quite understood the desirability of fresh, clean sheets. It was like sleeping in a manila envelope, waiting to be mailed to heaven or hell. He owned two at a time, a top and a bottom, and he used them until they had aged almost the colour of him. Sleeping in them was almost like sleeping in his mother’s flesh, naked and ready to be born, not like some shroud, or ghostly manifestation of all the blank days ahead.

  *

  STONES

  Following several passes across the rug he came up with sixteen stones of various sizes, all larger than what might have been inadvertently carried in within a shoe. He could not recall ever having brought them in. Were they part of some childhood rock collection? If so they seemed far less glorious now, a dull gathering of browns, greys, and blacks. But stones always seemed more glorious when beheld through sparkling water, and during his childhood his collection had always been gathered from the bottoms of streams.

  One of the sixteen proved to be in fact a dried and hardened bit of apple, and yet that still left fifteen mysteries remaining in his collection.

  *

  TEETH

  Teeth were one of those parts of the body which seemed a part of the room itself. Not only were they a form of interface to this room—chewing its food, articulating its air, gnashing together through its anxious energies—but objects which might deteriorate if left up on the shelf too long. They could never be completely his—he was far too aware of their separate existence.

  He still had many of his teeth from childhood in his mother’s old heart shaped jewelry box—she’d protected them religiously. It seemed that many parents put a great importance in their children’s baby teeth, as if these were proof of their parentage, that the children hadn’t been stolen and placed full-grown into their home.

  His mother had gone a step further, collecting his teeth during his teen years, and even a few from his early adulthood up until the time she died. She was always calling him up, getting him to swear again and again to save any teeth he might lose in an accident, to retrieve any teeth a dentist might remove. “They’re yours! He has no right to them!” she would say, although of course what she really meant was that they were hers.

  Periodically she would travel the twenty miles by bus to his apartment to gather them for the jewelry box collection. She would examine each one carefully before adding it to the box, critical of flaws, speculating as to what terrible things he might have been eating which no doubt directly resulted in the loss of the tooth. These examinations always made him uncomfortable, as if he were witnessing his own autopsy.

  He continued collecting his teeth for some time after his mother’s death until the idea that he was now putting only permanent, irreplaceable teeth in the heart shaped box became oppressive to him. He became acutely aware of teeth as bone, and it seemed that he was storing away his corpse, one bit at a time. If he picked up the box and rattled it, he could imagine all those hard bits of himself calling for their brethren. He could almost feel the bones inside himself creaking, yearning for their place, yearning for death.

  So now the teeth lay quietly in their box, collecting dust, the box shoved under the edge of his bed so that he couldn’t kick it over accidentally. One of his teeth was missing from the collection—back when he used to take the teeth out periodically for examination, and hadn’t been careful, he’d dropped it somewhere near the middle of the floor. It had been a tiny tooth from when he was five or six, and it had seemed to yellow by itself over the years, as if some trace of the food he’d eaten then had remained on it, candy or banana or perhaps a grape still working its discolouration after all these years.

  It was slightly round, resembling an unpopped popcorn kernel or a yellowish seed, and he had picked up many such kernels and seeds in his searches over the years thinking he had found it. But the tooth had not been found. He did not vacuum, so he felt sure the tooth must still be there, but years of periodic searches had still not turned it up.

  It seemed foolish to still be bothered by its loss, and yet if he had lost a finger or an ear, and he knew that it was lying about, hiding underfoot, then such a situation would of course seem intolerable. This wasn’t the same, he knew a tooth wasn’t the same, but where do you draw the line? He had never learned. Worse still was the fact that it was the tooth from a younger self, a part of a childhood self which was irreplaceable.

  Sometimes he would awaken to the sound of a scratching somewhere in the room, and he would sense the presence of his childhood thoughts, but aimless now, detached from the body of his childhood self. Vague hungers and long forgotten yearnings
floated through the room. All night and all day the scratching continued, as the tooth kept up its futile attempt to chew through his belongings—impossible without an opposing tooth to press against—as it hungered to eat its way through to his present life.

  *

  TRASH

  The uninformed observer might conclude that his apartment was full of trash—a trash heap, a garbage pile. This wasn’t true at all, of course, but the result of American cultural prejudice. Trash was worthless discard, refuse of no utility. Americans threw away basic utility all the time—containers for holding things, cans and plastics that could be cut into other shapes, and an immense variety of parts of things, knobs and hooks and protuberances of all sorts—much that could be called “spare parts.” There were also all the recyclables, but that was a different argument.

  Trash was anything left over: pieces too small to save, torn bits, non-reusables, organic debris. Anything which resisted inventory. The best trash showed clear evidence of its manipulation, or more often, destruction by human hands or teeth. He supposed this made this category, legitimately, “artefact” trash. He got rid of most such things after a brief study of the signs they displayed of human use, but there was always a bit he kept in a plastic container labeled “Trash” (and therefore capable of inventory)—a representative sample of all that he deemed permissible to throw away.

  Non-artefact trash, trash which had been so thoroughly destroyed that it showed no signs of humanity, depressed him. It made him feel insignificant.

  Some people were called “trash,” although he had never used the expression in that way himself. He supposed this to be some sort of ultimate insult. And just like the trash he accumulated, there were also people who had been untouched by human hands.