Celestial Inventories (33 page)

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.

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 his 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.

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.

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 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

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 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 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.