Celestial Inventories (32 page)

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.

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.

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.

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 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, showing 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.

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.

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.