Celestial Inventories

Celestial Inventories
© 2013 by Steve Rasnic Tem
Cover artwork © 2013 by Erik Mohr
Cover design © 2013 by Samantha Beiko
Interior design © 2013 by Danny Evarts

All rights reserved.

Published by ChiZine Publications

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

EPub Edition AUGUST 2013 ISBN: 978-1-77148-166-3

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CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
[email protected]

Edited by Kelsi Morris
Proofread by Samantha Beiko

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

When Frank awakened, suddenly an old man, he discovered that the words no longer came easily. Objects had lost some of their definition as their names slipped away.

He remembered the word
aphasia
, but thought it was a peculiar sexual act.

The bed was narrow, yet he couldn’t find the edge of it. He could not move his arms, although he could flutter his hands like broken birds. If he twisted his head around as far as it would go, he could see another bed behind his, and another bed behind that one, rising layer after layer into an unending night. He was traveling the bottom edge of a great bed slide, the force of it pushing all sleep aside, creating ripples up and down the dream continuum, where vacationers flew without airplanes and family members refused to wear their own faces.

As a child he had never felt truly safe in bed. Beds had seemed too rich with possibility for comfort. Blankets, sheets, pillows—inside their cases were the debris left behind after centuries of nightmare erosion.

But during late adolescence his attitude changed. He made love in these beds, never comfortable anywhere else. People were born in beds and with luck they died there and surely no important decision should be made outside the confines of a bed.

In middle age he had slept much of many days away in these beds. He supposed that had been diagnostic of some grave personal crisis, but he had slept too much to figure it out.

Now he sleeps very little, and the bed is picking up speed, nudged and rocked by the countless beds pouring down the mountain of night behind him, the bed slide roaring out of the darkness with a sound like worlds collapsing, scooping him up like the arms of a mother, the arms of a lover, as he is swept away into the final sleep.

Live long enough and smells go away, but the memory of them lasts forever. Live long enough and the memory of your strongest taste lingers without dissipation. His pillow was a pillow of memories. His pillow was ripe as yesterday’s banquet, and had been for years. Sometimes he thought there was no reason to eat some prepared dinner when he could kiss his pillow open-mouthed like a sleep-contented child dreaming of its mother. It had dairy texture, his pillow, and was at its peak of tastiness. Visitors to his convalescent bed envied the feast which greeted him each day: luncheon sheets, milk blankets, and a cheese pillow, their tastes recalling the daily meals of living that had brought him here, a worn out gourmet.

Won’t you be my cheese pillow?
It was the last thing he had said to his wife on her deathbed. She had smiled and kissed him with lips of bread.

When she died she smelled like starched shirts hanging outside on a stretched cotton rope, and the rain is coming just over the apple orchard, there.

He had been asking for his nose cup all day, but the nurse paid no attention. She went on with her knitting, letter writing, peculiar sexual acts with interns and insurance agents, breast feeding of the dead while he was in desperate need of his nose cup.

“Nose cup! Nose cup!” he would cry, but she paid no attention. And virtually immobile as he was, there was nothing he could do about it, not even drink at her breast unless
she
insisted upon it. “Nose cup! Nose cup!” he would cry, as if that were the name of the horse he was betting on.

He wasn’t sure which nose cup it was he had these days—he was sure his daughter had packed one for him when he left for the hospital, but that had been years ago, and by now some envious soul might have stolen his nose cup. He had no clear memory of which nose cup it could have been: the tall one with the bright red lips around the opening, the short squat one with the lime-green edge, the sharp one that left his nose bruised and bloody. It could have been any of them, and right now any of them would do, but the damned nurse would not answer his call.

The damned nurse would not answer most of his calls, as a matter of fact, preferring to attend to her own average affairs. That’s what happened when you got old, he supposed, but in fact it had been happening all his life. People refused to answer his calls. Whenever his wife had been cross with him, his voice might as well have been the ambient breeze for all the attention she paid to it. His bosses had ignored his suggestions without exception, making him wonder why they bothered to keep him on at all. His son the archplumber (and what was that?—he could not remember) had always turned the other way when he was talking. His daughter drove him and carried him and nursed him those last few years at home, but it had been his body she had responded to so dutifully, not his voice.

“Nose cup! Nose cup!” he cried again, thinking of how its mere presence would soothe him. How it would contain and preserve the smells of the day. How it would bottle up his sickness and keep it from spreading. How it would take him back to an earlier time, when his mother did all the nursing, and the only things invading his body were those
he
had put there, and the smell of his own life was the most intoxicating spirit of the world.

He kept telling his nurse to keep the closet door closed: inclement weather was hiding among his old coats and pants, and he certainly didn’t want any of that slipping unnoticed into his room. Closet weather was the worst possible sort, even when it was sunny closet weather. Because of being forced indoors, he supposed, and crammed into such a small space. It turned upon itself, festering its intemperate wounds with squalls and tornadoes. If let out into his room it might very well do a great deal of damage. Closet weather had no sense of boundaries. Closet weather had no sense of embarrassment.

He could hear it now behind the closet door: gnashing, weeping, filling his shoes with tears and hail.

He asked the doctor to order a key tree for his room. He supposed hospital administration made the final decision, but perhaps if they thought it was of medical benefit the doctor’s recommendation would influence them. His doctor was the self absorbed sort, however, always nodding and smiling at him, so he really had to speak up and use his best salesmanship to convince the man of the benefits of a key tree.

“We had one in our house in New Jersey,” he explained. “My wife was skeptical at first. ‘What do we need all those keys for?’
she asked. She was a woman. She didn’t understand. The keys would drop to the floor and make these little shiny piles on the carpet. If you didn’t pick them up and use them right away they would tarnish, lose some of their definition. And of course if they lost too much definition they wouldn’t fit anything. I tried to tell her, but she would just complain about the clutter. ‘Clanky, clinky clutter!’ she called it.

“After awhile she came around, though. She began to see the benefits of having a key for everything. I’d known I’d wanted such a thing since childhood. The bigger the better. I didn’t care that it made the living room floor sag. First thing in the morning I would pick the freshest key, the one that grew near the top, and use it to unlock the first wonders of the morning. A series of keys got the toaster and the stove to work. And after much thought I’d choose a key to unlock a smile, or a grimace of determination, whatever was required.

“After a time my wife learned to use the keys quite well. She had keys for all manner of small satisfactions. She stayed content.

“I could never find the key for money, however, or the one for courage. I used to stay up nights worrying that I had missed them, that they had fallen off and rotted before I’d had the sense to pick them up.”

The doctor had seemed unimpressed, even when the old man presented the key to his constipation, and an enema proved no longer necessary.

“Turn it off!” he cried out in the middle of the night. But no one would come to help him. So he had to stare at the window floating in the middle of his hospital room, the one that illuminated his life as it had been, when there had been friends to visit, when there had been friends alive to visit.

“Turn it off!” he cried, but the window continued to burn brightly, an endless vista of the past stretching within its narrow frame, until he thought he would go blind from it all.

The next morning they found him asleep on the floor by his bed, his arm stretched overhead, his hand clutching an invisible cord. A nurse went to the window by his bed and opened it, and the old man woke up in the light.

This is what had gotten him into the nursing home in the first place. This armchair brush which now lay in the bottom drawer of his bureau, underneath the socks and underwear he no longer wore. He’d gotten it for his favourite armchair, the one his wife had bought him: “You’re always standing around, bothering me. You need a place to sit. A good, comfortable place to sit so maybe you’ll stay there awhile and leave me alone.”

A heavy brown chair with plush seat, back, and unusually high sides so that he might nestle in for the day. So heavy the chair was that there was no thought of ever moving it: the delivery people brought it into the middle of the parlour, set it there on the Persian rug with its shades of multicoloured effluent, and there it would stay. And there he would sit, day after day hour after hour, moving so seldom he began to think his wife had plotted some sort of premature atrophy for him by getting him this chair. He sat through her cooking and cleaning and her secret activities which she’d been freed to do now that he was trapped by the chair. He got up once, he remembered, to go to her deathbed, speaking of cheese pillows, but then he sat through her death which he didn’t discover for hours as he was trapped in the chair. His daughter tried to get rid of it after his wife’s funeral but he stopped her. He was used to it by now and besides, it was the last thing his dear wife had ever bought him.

But it was only a few months after her death that the brown pile of the comfortable armchair began to grow, grow like a woman’s hair in the fullness of her youth. Then grow as quickly as in a dream, several inches per nap, a foot or more overnight. In no time it covered the floor, crept out into the hall, strangled two of the cats who’d wandered in after his wife’s death because he couldn’t get to them in time. He tried cutting the armchair’s luscious long hair, but it grew faster than his arthritic fingers could snip.

So it was that he came to purchase the armchair brush, sensing a need which he could, if he remembered well enough, fulfill. Just as he had brushed his wife’s long hair when they were first married and so much in love, he brushed the long hair of his armchair, singing to it and talking of the days gone by.

Until they found him, and took it all away.

He had constructed the fork file a few years before his wife’s death, thinking that the old age which appeared to be threatening them both might be delayed, even circumvented, if they could insert some better organization into their lives. But the fork file was dangerous, or so his wife had complained when she was jabbed by some naughty fork while rifling the file for a spoon or a clean pair of socks.

“No wonder!” he’d protested. “It’s a goddamn fork file, Elaine! No spoons, no socks, forks only!” And she’d stared at him with the disdain of someone whose patience has packed its bags and run away with a bible salesman.

So the fork file had become his project, and he’d spent hours each day on it, polishing row after row of tines, organizing the forks smallest to largest, most broad to most narrow. He wouldn’t permit Elaine to set the table with any of them, since he couldn’t bear to have them soiled, so they’d had to do without forks at mealtimes, which made the consumption of meats and baked potatoes a far more difficult proposition, but somehow they managed, and he had something nicely organized and impressive to show off on those increasingly rare occasions when company came to call.

The kitchen table had always kept good time, even though Elaine wasn’t always interested in the times it had to tell. Really, it was simply a matter of sitting at the table long enough, and staring at its shiny surface at just the right angle, and then everything might be revealed.

“Time to mow the lawn! The kitchen table says so.”

“It’s the middle of winter,” Elaine would grumble. “There’s a foot of snow on the ground.”

“Then we’ll just shovel off the goddamn snow! The kitchen table doesn’t lie about these things. Time’s a wastin’! The kitchen table says so.”

So Elaine would finally relent and give him the key to the garage where he might find the snow shovel and the mower.

“Time to buy us some fly swatters. Kitchen table says so.”

“How many fly swatters?” Elaine would ask wearily. He hoped the kitchen table would tell him it was time for her to go to bed soon. The poor woman looked completely worn out. But the kitchen table rarely clocked the events of his wife’s life. It was obviously far more interested in him. He hoped his wife didn’t feel too badly about that.

“About thirty. No thirty-two. Thirty-two flyswatters, that’s what the kitchen table says.”

“Expecting a massive fly infestation, are we?” He didn’t always care for the tone of Elaine’s voice, but she had her problems. The kitchen table refused to give her the right time.

“No, Elaine. Potato bugs. The kitchen table says it’s potato bugs this time. Thousands of them.”

Every morning he would take out his newspaper ladle and stir the barrel full of newspapers by their front door. That morning’s paper would always be on top, so he had to stir the papers well to get the news mixed thoroughly. When news was mixed improperly he could not achieve a good perspective on the events of the day. When news was mixed improperly bad days tended to cling together, making for bad weeks.

He
’d always read his news randomly, just as likely perusing some article about a conference of police chiefs from last month as today’s piece about a summit of super powers. He didn’t see this as particularly eccentric. Viewed over a length of time, news events were fairly predictable. Good and bad events, even surprising events, were distributed in the expected ways. To the young, virtually everything was a surprise. Old people knew better. But reading the papers day by day one could lose sight of the even distribution of fates. Some days a succession of truly terrible events might occur. Enough such days and a person might forget anything good ever happened.