Celestial Inventories (5 page)

Also puzzling is the choice of The Disease Artist’s final ailment
¹²⁸
: a rather undramatic assemblage of symptoms—weight loss, a barely visible swelling of the lymph glands, dry cough, fatigue and fever—symptoms indicative of a number of conditions. Only the white blemishes on the tongue, the red, brown, and purple marks on the nose and eyelids, and the various skin rashes are of any particular aesthetic appeal.

Only at the end of the Johnson film do we hear any clear statements from The Disease Artist. At one point he is heard to say, “It is our need to be remembered, to let other people know that we once walked this world.” And at another, “To tell them how it was, how it used to be, how it felt to be there.”

Clearly, we must take this as an artist’s statement about what it must mean to be an artist in a world that does not always appreciate one’s chosen art form. It is unfortunate that like the fictional Hunger Artist before him, who never found his defining food, our own Disease Artist passed from us without ever discovering his defining disease.

Halloween Street. No one could remember who had first given it that name. It had no other. There was no street sign, had never been a street sign.

Halloween Street bordered the creek, and there was only one way to get in: over a rickety bridge of rotting wood. Grey timbers had worn partway through the vague red stain. The city had declared it safe only for foot or bike traffic.

The street had only eight houses, and no one could remember more than three of those being occupied at any one time. Renters never lasted long.

It was a perfect place to take other kids—the smaller ones, or the ones a little more nervous than yourself on Halloween night. Just to give them a little scare. Just to get them to wet their pants.

Most of the time all the houses just stayed empty. An old lady had supposedly lived in one of the houses for years, but no one knew anything more about her, except that they thought she’d died there several years before. Elderly twin brothers had once owned the two centre houses, each with twin high peaked gables on the second story like skeptical eyebrows, narrow front doors, and small windows that froze over every winter. The brothers had lived there only six months, fighting loudly with each other the entire time.

The houses at the ends of the street were in the worst shape, missing most of their roof shingles and sloughing off paint chips the way a tree sheds leaves. Both houses leaned toward the centre of the block, as if two great hands had attempted to squeeze the block from either side. Another three houses had suffered outside fire damage. The blackened boards looked like permanent, and arbitrary, shadows.

But it was perhaps the eighth house that bothered the kids the most. There was nothing wrong with it.

It was the kind of house any of them would have liked to live in. Painted bright white like a dairy so that it glowed even at night, with wide friendly windows and a bright blue roof.

And flowers that grew naturally and a lawn seemingly immune to weeds.

Who took care of it? It just didn’t make any sense. Even when the kids guided newcomers over to Halloween Street they stayed away from the white house.

The little girl’s name was Laura, and she lived across the creek from Halloween Street. From her bedroom window she could see all the houses. She could see who went there and she could see everything they did. She didn’t stop to analyze, or pass judgments. She merely witnessed, and now and then spoke an almost inaudible “Hi” to her window and to those visiting on the other side. An occasional “Hi” to the houses of Halloween Street.

Laura should have been pretty. She had wispy blonde hair so pale it appeared white in most light, worn long down her back. She had small lips and hands that were like gauges to her health: soft and pink when she was feeling good, pale and dry when she was doing poorly.

But Laura was not pretty. There was nothing really wrong about her face: it was just vague. A cruel aunt with a drinking problem used to say that “it lacked character.” Her mother once took her to a lady who cut silhouette portraits out of crisp black paper at a shopping mall. Her mother paid the lady five dollars to do one of Laura. The lady had finally given up in exasperation, exclaiming “The child has no profile!”

Laura overheard her mother and father talking about it one time. “I see things in her face,” her mother had said.

“What do you mean?” Her father always sounded impatient with her mother.

“I don’t
know
what I mean! I see things in her face and I can never remember exactly what I saw! Shadows and . . . white, something so white I feel like she’s going to disappear into it. Like clouds . . . or a snow bank.”

Her father had laughed in astonishment. “You’re crazy!”

“You know what I mean!” her mother shouted back.
“You don’t even look at her directly anymore because you
know
what I mean! It’s not exactly sadness in her face, not exactly. Just something born with her, something out of place. She was born out of place. My God! She’s
eleven
years old! She’s been like this since she was a baby!
”

“She’s a pretty little girl.” Laura could tell her father didn’t really mean that.

“What about her eyes? Tell me about her eyes, Dick!”

“What
about
her eyes? She has nice eyes . . .”

“Describe them for me, then! Can you
describe
them? What colour are they? What shape?”

Her father didn’t say anything. Soon after the argument he’d stomped out of the house. Laura knew he couldn’t describe her eyes. Nobody could.

Laura didn’t make judgments when other people talked about her. She just listened. And watched with eyes no one could describe. Eyes no one could remember.

No, it wasn’t that she was sad, Laura thought. It wasn’t that her parents were mean to her or that she had a terrible life. Her parents weren’t ever mean to her and although she didn’t know exactly what kind of life she had, she knew it wasn’t terrible.

Yes, she was born out of place. That was a big part of it. She didn’t enjoy things like other kids did. She didn’t enjoy playing or watching television or talking to the other kids. She didn’t
enjoy
, really. She had quiet thoughts, instead. She had quiet thoughts when she pretended to be asleep but was really listening to all her parents’ conversations, all their arguments. She had quiet thoughts when she watched people. She had quiet thoughts when people could not describe her eyes. She had quiet thoughts while gazing at Halloween Street, the glowing white house, and all the things that happened there.

She had quiet thoughts pretending that she hadn’t been born out of place, that she hadn’t been born anyplace at all.

Laura could have been popular, living so close to Halloween street, seeing it out of her bedroom window. No other kid lived so close or had such a good view. But of course she wasn’t popular. She didn’t share Halloween Street. She sat at her desk at school all day and didn’t talk about Halloween Street at all.

That last Halloween Laura got dressed to go out. That made her mother real happy. Laura had never gone trick-or-treating before. Her mother had always encouraged her to go, had made or bought her costumes, taken her to parties at church or school, parties the other kids dressed up for: ghosts and vampires and princesses, giggling and running around with their masks looking like grotesquely swollen heads. But Laura wouldn’t wear a costume. She’d sit solemn faced, unmoving, until her mother finally gave up and took her home. And she’d never go trick-or- treating, never wear a costume.

Once she’d told her mother that she wanted to go out that night her mother had driven her around town desperately trying to find a costume for her. Laura sat impassively on the passenger side, dutifully got out at each store her mother took her to, and each time shook her head when asked if she liked each of the few remaining costumes.

“I don’t know where else we can try, Laura,” her mother said, sorting through a pile of mismatched costume pieces at a drugstore in a mall. “It’ll be dark in a couple of hours, and so far you haven’t liked a thing I’ve shown you.”

Laura reached into the pile and pulled out a cheap face mask. The face was that of a middle-aged woman, or a young man, cheeks and lips rouged a bright red, eye shadow dark as a bruise, eyebrows a heavy and coarse dark line.

“But, honey. Isn’t that a little . . .” Laura shoved the mask into her mother’s hand. “Well, all right.” She picked up a bundle of bright blue cloth from the table. “How about this pretty robe to complete it?” Laura didn’t look at the robe. She just nodded and headed for the door, her face already a mask itself.

Laura left the house that night after most of the other trick-or-treaters had come and gone. Her interest in Halloween actually seemed less than ever this year; she stayed in her bedroom as goblins and witches and all manner of stunted, warped creatures came to the front door singly and in groups, giggling and dancing and playing tricks on each other. She could see a few of them over on Halloween Street, not going up to any of the houses but rather running up and down the short street close to the houses in
Idareyou
races. But not near as many as in years past.

Now and then her mother would come up and open her door. “Honey, don’t you want to leave yet? I swear everybody’ll be all out of the goodies if you don’t go soon.” And each time Laura shook her head, still staring out the window, still watching Halloween Street.

Finally, after most of the other kids had returned to their homes, Laura came down the stairs wearing her best dress and the cheap mask her mother had bought for her. Her father and mother were in the living room, her mother having retrieved the blue robe from the hall closet.

“She’s wearing her best dress, Ann. Besides, it’s damned late for her to be going out now.”

Her mother eyed her nervously. “I could drive you, honey.” Laura shook her head.

“Well OK, just let me cover your nice dress with the robe. Don’t want to get it dirty.”

“She’s just a kid, for chrissake! We can’t let her decide!” Her father had dropped his newspaper on the floor. He turned his back on Laura so she wouldn’t see his face, wouldn’t know how angry he was with both of them. But Laura knew. “And that
mask
! Looks like a whore’s face! Hell, how can she even see? Can’t even see her eyes under that.” But Laura could see his. All red and sad-looking.

“She’s doing something normal for a change,” her mother whispered harshly. “Can’t you see that? That’s more important.”

Without a word Laura walked over and pulled the robe out of her mother
’s arms. After some hesitation, after Laura’s father had stomped out of the room, her mother helped her get it on.
It was much too large, but her mother gasped “How beautiful!”
in exaggerated fashion. Laura walked toward the door. Her mother ran to the door and opened it ahead of her. “Have a good time!” she said in a mock cheery voice. But Laura could see the near panic in the eyes above the distorted grin. Laura left without saying goodbye.

A few houses down the sidewalk she pulled the robe off and threw it behind a hedge. She walked on, her head held stiff and erect, the mask’s rouge shining bright red in the streetlights, her best dress a soft cream colour in the dimness, stirred lightly by the breeze. She walked on to Halloween Street.

She stopped on the bridge and looked down into the creek. A young man’s face, a middle-aged woman’s face gazed back at her out of dark water and yellow reflections. The mouth seemed to be bleeding.

She walked on to Halloween Street. She was the only one there. The only one to see.

She walked on in her best dress and her shiny mask with eyes no one could see.

The houses on Halloween street looked the way they always did, empty and dark. Except for the one, the one that glowed the colour of clouds, or snow.

The houses on Halloween street looked their own way, sounded their own way, moved their own way. Lost in their own quiet thoughts. Born out of place.

You could not see their eyes.

Laura went up to the white house with the neatly trimmed yard and the flowers that grew without care. Its colour like blowing snow. Its colour like heaven. She went inside.

The old woman gazed out her window as goblins and spooks, pirates and ballerinas crossed the bridge to enter Halloween Street. She bit her lip to make it redder. She rubbed at her ancient, blind eyes, rubbing the dark eye shadow up into the coarse line of brow. She was not beautiful, but she was not hideous either. Not yet. No one ever remembered her face, in any case.

Her snow-white hair was beautiful, and long down her back.

She had the most wonderful house on the street, the only one with flowers, the only one that glowed. It was her home, the place where she belonged. All the children, or at least all the children who dared, came to her house every Halloween for treats.

“Come along,” she said to the window, staring out at Halloween Street. “Come along,” she said, as the treat bags rustled and shifted around her. “You don’t remember, do you?” as the first of the giggling goblins knocked at her door. “You’ve quite forgotten,” as the door began to shake from eager goblin fists, eager goblin laughs. “Now scratch your swollen little head, scratch your head. You forgot that first and last, Halloween is for the dead.”

We tried to prepare the kids a year or so ahead. They might be adults to the rest of the world, but to us they were still a blur of squeals that smelled like candy.

“What do you mean
move
? You’ve lived here
forever
!” Our oldest daughter’s face mapped her dismay. Elaine was now older than we had been when we found our place off the beaten path of the world, but if she had started to cry I’m sure I would have caved. I hoped she had forgotten that when she was a little girl I’d told her we’d stay in this house until the end.

“Forever ends, child,” her mother said. “It’s one of the last things we learn. These walls are quickly growing thin—it
’s time to go.”

“What do you
mean
? I don’t see anything wrong—”

I reached over, patted her knee and pointed. “That’s because the house is so full there’s little wall to be seen. But look there, between that sparkling tapestry of spider eggs and my hat collection. That’s about a square foot of unadorned wall. Look
there
.”

She did, and as I had so many times before, I joined her in the looking. I was pleased, at least, that this semi-transparent spot worn into our membrane of home provided clear evidence: through layers of wall board like greenish glass, through diaphanous plaster and thinnest lathe, we could see several local children walking to school, and one Billie Perkins honoured us with a full-faced grin and a finger mining his nose for hidden treasure.

“Is that Cheryl Perkins’ boy?” she asked. “I haven’t seen her in years.” She sounded wistful. It always bruised me a bit to hear her sounding wistful. I’ve always been a sloppy mess where my children are concerned.

“You should call her, honey,” her mother said, on her way into the kitchen for our bowls of soup. My wife never tells you what’s in the soups she serves—she doesn’t want to spoil the surprise. Some days it’s like dipping into a liquid Crackerjack box.

Elaine had gone to the thin patch and was now poking it with her finger. “Can they see us from out there?” Her finger went in part way and stuck. She made a small embarrassed cry and pulled it out. A sigh of shimmering green light puffed out in front of her, then fell like rain on the floor.

I handed her a cloth napkin and she busily wiped at the slowly spreading stain. “They just see a slight variation in colour,” I replied. “It’s more obvious at night, when a haze of light from the house leaks through.”

She smiled. “I’ve noticed that on visits. I just thought it was the house sparkling. It’s always been . . .” She stopped.

“A jewel?”

“Yes. That’s not silly of me? I always thought of it as the ‘jewel on the hill,’ so when it seemed to sparkle lately, to look even more beautiful than ever, I thought nothing of it.”

Of course she has been using this phrase since she was a little girl, but I said “What an interesting comparison! I’d never thought of it that way before. But I like that, ‘The Jewel on the Hill.’ We could paint a sign, put it up on the wall.”

“Oh, Daddy! Where would you find the room?”

This was, of course, the point of the conversation, the fulcrum about which our future lives were to turn. A painting can become too crowded in its composition, a brain too full of trivia, and a house can certainly accumulate too many plans, follies, acquisitions, vocations, avocations, heart-felt avowals, and memories so fervently gripped they lose their binding thread.

All about us floated a constellation of materials dreamed and lived, attached to walls and door and window frames, layered onto shelves and flooding glass-fronted cabinets, suspended from or glued to the ceilings, protruding here and there into the room as if eager for a snag. There were my collections, of course: the hats, the ties, the jars of curiosities, monstrosities, and mere unreliabilities, the magazines barely read then saved for later, and later, all the volumes of fact and fiction, and the photographs of fictive relatives gathered from stores thrift and antique or as part of the purchase of a brand new frame, bells and belts and pistols and thimbles, children’s drawings and drawings of children drawing the drawings, coloured candles and coloured bottles and colours inexplicably attached to nothing at all, my wife’s favourite recipes pasted on the walls at levels relative to their deliciousness (the best ones so high up she couldn’t read them clearly enough to make those wonderful dishes anymore), and everywhere, and I mean everywhere, the notes of a lifetime reminding our children to eat that lunchtime sandwich as well as the cookie, don’t forget piano practice, remember we love you, and please take out the trash. Our notes to each other were simpler and less directive: thinking of you, thinking of you, have a great day.

In one corner of the living room you could see where I had sat reading a year of my sister
’s unmailed letters found in a shoebox after her death, each one spiked to the wall after reading, feeling like nails tearing through my own flesh. And near the windows kites and paper birds poised for escape through sashes left carelessly ajar. An historical collection of our children’s toys lay piled against the baseboards, ready for the sorting and elimination we’d never quite managed, and floating above, tied to strings were particularly prized bits of homework, particularly cherished letters from camp, gliding and tangling with the varied progress of the day. And the authors of those works, our precious children, preserved in photos at nearly every age, arranged around the ceiling light fixtures like jittering moths, filling with their own illumination as the ceilings thinned to allow the daylight in. Gathered together I thought each child’s history in photos could have been portraits of a single family whose resemblances were uncanny and disturbing.

There were trophies mounted or settled onto shelves for bowling, swimming, and spelling, most candy bars sold and fewest absent days. And the countless numbers of awards for participation, for happy or complaining our children always did participate.

Some of the collections, such as the spider eggs or selected, desiccated moth wings I couldn’t remember for sure if their preservation had been intentional. Others, like the gatherings of cracks in corners or those scattered arrays of torn fabrics were no doubt accidental, but possessed of beauty in any case and so needed to stay.

These were the moments of a lifetime, the celebrations and the missteps, and I wondered now if our children ever had any idea what they both stepped in and out of on their average day in our home.

“What’s going to become of it all?” our daughter exclaimed. She moved through the downstairs rooms unconsciously pirouetting, glancing around. She’d seen it all before, lived with all but the most recent of it, but blindness comes easy. I could see her eyes trying to remember. “You can’t just throw it away!” she cried, when a rain of doll’s heads from a decayed net overhead set off her squeals and giggles.

“You kids can have whatever you like,” my wife replied from the passage to the kitchen. “But thrown out, left behind, or simply forgotten, things do have a way of becoming
gone
. Which is what is about to happen to your lunches, if the two of you don’t come with me right now!”

Within the sea of salt and pepper shakers (armies of cartoon characters and national caricatures with holes in their heads) that covered our kitchen table my wife had created tiny islands for our soup bowls and milk glasses. I had the urge to sweep that collection of shakers off onto the floor, just to show how done with this never ending tide of
things
I’d become, but I knew that wasn’t what Elaine needed to see at that moment. She stared at the red surface of her soup as if waiting for some mystery to emerge.

“Sweetheart, we just don’t need all this anymore.”

“You seemed to need it before,” she said to all the staring shaker heads.

“It’s hard to explain such a change,” I said, “but you collect and you collect and then one day you say to yourself ‘this is all too much.’ You can’t let anything else in, so you don’t have much choice but to try to clear the decks.”

“I just don’t want things to change,” she said softly.

“Oh, yes, you do,” her mother said, patting her hand. “You most certainly do. Everything has an expiration date. It just isn’t always a precise date, or printed on the package. And you would hate the alternative.”

I’d been distracted by all the calendars on the kitchen walls, each displaying a different month and year, and for just that moment not sure which one was the current one, the one with the little box reserved for
right now
.

Elaine looked at her mother with an expression that wasn’t exactly anger, but something very close. “Then why bother, Mom? When it all just has to be gotten rid of, in the end?”

“Who can know?” My wife smiled, dipping into her soup, then frowned suddenly as if she’d discovered something unfortunate. “To fill the time, I suppose. To exercise—”
She turned suddenly to me. “Or is it ‘exorcise’?” Without waiting for an answer she turned again to her soup, lifted the bowl, and sipped. Done, she smiled shyly at our daughter with a pink mustache and continued, “our creativity. To fill the space, to put our mark down, and then to erase it. That’s what we human beings do. That
’s all we know how to do.”

“Human beings?” Elaine laughed. “You know, I always thought you two were wizards, superheroes, magical beings, something like that. Not like anybody else’s parents. Not like anybody else at all. All of us kids did.”

My wife closed her eyes and sighed. “I think we did, too.”

Over the next few weeks we had the rest of our children over to reveal something of our intentions, although I’m quite sure a number of unintentions were exposed as well. They brought along numerous grandchildren, some who had so transformed since their last visits it was as if a brand new person had entered the room, fresh creatures whose habits and behaviors we had yet to learn about. The older children stood around awkwardly, as if they were reluctant guests at some high school dance, snickering at the old folks’ sense of décor, and sense of what was important, but every now and then you would see them touch something on the wall and gasp, or read a letter pasted there and stand transfixed.

The younger grandchildren were content to straddle our laps, constructing tiny bird’s nests in my wife’s grey hair, warrens for invisible rabbits in the multidimensional tangles of my beard. They seemed completely oblivious to their parents’ discomfort with the conversation.

“So where will you go?” asked oldest son Jack, whom we’d named after the fairy tale, although we’d never told him so.

“We’re still looking at places,” his mother said. “Our needs will be pretty simple. As simple as you could imagine, really.”

I looked out at the crowd of them. Did we really have all these children? When had it happened? I suspected a few strangers had sneaked in.

“Won’t you need some help with the moving, and afterwards?” Wilhelmina asked.

“Help should always be appreciated, remember that children,” I said. A few of them laughed, which was the response I had wanted. But then very few of our children have understood my sense of humour.

“What your father meant to say was that moving help won’t be necessary,” my wife said, interrupting. “As we said, we’re taking very little with us, so please grab anything you’d care to have. As for us, we think a simple life will be a nice change.”

Annie, always our politest child, raised her hand.

“Annie, honey, you’re thirty years old. You don’t need to raise your hand anymore,” I told her.

“So what are you really telling us? Are we going to see you again?”

“Well, of course you are,” I said. “Maybe not as often, or precisely when you want to, but you
will
see us. We’ll still be around, and just as before, just as now, you’ll
always
be our children.”

We didn’t set a day, because rarely do you know when the right day will come along. We’d been looking for little signs for years, it seemed, but you never really know what little signs to look for.

Then one day I was awakened early, sat up straight with eyes wide open, which I almost never do, looking around, listening intently for whatever might have awakened me.

The first thing I noticed was the oddness of the light in the room. It had a vaguely autumnal feel even though it was the end of winter, which wasn’t as surprising as it might normally have been, what with the unusually warm temperatures we’d been having for this time of year.

The second thing was the smell: orangeish or lemonish, but gone a little too far, like when the rot begins to set in.

The third thing was the absence of my wife from our bed. Even though she always woke up before me, she always stayed in bed in order to ease my own transition from my always complicated dreams to standing up, attempting to move around.

I dressed quickly and found her downstairs in the dining room. “Look,” she said. And I did.

Every bit of our lives along the walls, hanging from the ceiling, spilt out onto the floors, had turned the exact same golden sepia shade, as if it had all been sprayed with some kind of preservative. “Look,” she repeated. “You can see it all beginning to wrinkle.”

I’d actually thought that effect to be some distortion in my vision, for I had noticed it, too.

“You know what you want to take?” she asked.

“It’s all been ready for months,” I said. “I’ll be at the door in less than a minute.”

I ran up the stairs, hearing the rapidly drying wooden steps crack and pop beneath my shoes. When I jerked open the closet door it seemed as if I was opening the door to the outside, on a crisp Fall day, Mr. Hopkins down the street is burning his leaves, and you can smell apples cooking from some anonymous kitchen. I brushed the fallen leaves from the small canvas bag I had filled with a notebook, a pencil, some crackers (which are the best food for any occasion), and extra socks. I looked up at the clothes rod, the rusted metal, and nothing left hanging there but a tangle of brittle vines and the old baseball jacket I wore in high school. It hardly fit, but I pulled it on anyway, picked up the bag, and ran.