Celestial Inventories (34 page)

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.