Celestial Inventories (30 page)

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.

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 regard 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.

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.

It was a piece of a toy, the whole of the thing long forgotten. 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.

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.

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.

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.