Self-Preservation

In the first month of the year after the holiday season she felt out of sorts (the season she got the diagnosis, the season the doctor gave her a referral to the Giant Hospital), Barbara bought things. She awoke every day with the phrase carpe diem on a looping conveyor belt in her mind, showered in frigid water as soon as it shot from the showerhead (to wait for it to turn hot was the difference between life and death), and dressed quickly and simply, for it was imperative she be at the Big Lots! when the doors opened at nine. Not getting coffee at Starbucks across the street, not parking in the parking lot, but actually standing at the door. If she wasn’t, she’d already lost out on the possibility of claiming the entirety of the day’s clearance rack, lost the day’s meaning. Once she was inside and had chosen the right shopping cart, she wheeled it directly to the farthest point in the store and began scavenging down the aisles. She loaded up on whatever was on sale: toothbrushes and bath bombs, Connect4 and Barbie dolls, bras too big and too small, leftover tinsel, a dog bed, a Discman with AM/FM radio, a swiveling office chair. She gathered them as a squirrel gathers acorns, each day collecting and organizing and storing, and just as a squirrel buries its treasure in the space between the heavens and the inferno, so Barbara rocked herself into a trancelike state between the aisles of her own meticulous making at home: Apparel, Holiday Decor, Office Supplies. Day after day she returned to the ever-changing display at the front of the store where a carousel of discounted items from electronics to baby bibs required a Tetris-like rearrangement of items in her cart. On the morning she cracked the puzzle without once having to take an item out before putting it back in again, she let out an audible “Amen,” and that afternoon arranged things at home without rocking. By then she was placing things not in the house but behind the garage, where there was a broken refrigerator she’d found by the side of the road. The fridge had compartments, and that was its point. Because she had a nagging feeling that lining things up along the backside of the garage could be considered the beginning stage of something unspeakable (she did not know what it was exactly, but it had to do with avalanches of tools, hidden insect nests, getting lost without anyone ever realizing), she told herself she was placing things outside only until her husband cleaned up his stuff, only until the exterminator came, just until she could find the stove, only putting things in a new place because it was more spacious, easier to see, only because things had a way of getting away from her in the house just when she needed them. The fridge reminded her that compartmentalizing was key, that preservation was crucial. Outside she didn’t have to worry about an avalanche when she rocked, outside she could stack things farther apart so they could breathe. Space was essential for creating new walls. Sometimes Big Lots! ran out of clearance items, and she’d have to go to Walmart or Target or search for some immaculate yard sale in another ramshackle town along the Hudson, pick up clues leading to the dump at the far end of town, find decaying toilet bowls or fish tanks. When that happened, she moved cautiously, limited only by her truck’s size, feeling, finally, the importance and care each item required of her, the mendable lawn mower, the patchable coveralls, the fractured mirror, the ripped duvet, the oozing boom boxes, the jigsaw that occupied her whole mind, body, and soul.

So that she never needed help, she kept a jack (or three, and a detachable folding hauling bed, ready whenever she needed it) in the back of the truck. She could lift a whole rusted-out car with two hands (slip the jack under its belly, forget the wheels, wheels fall off, wheels were to be organized separately anyway), and she hauled in dishwashers, boilers, and dryers. Sometimes, she would stand on top of the largest mound and stare out at the overwhelming security around her (she always tried to make eye contact with the landfill manager, a sign of impregnable mental control, nothing ever lost in her world), and then she would shuffle back between the heaps, letting the natural bulwarks guide her to the sagging truck. In the first month of the year after the holiday season she felt out of sorts, the season she got the diagnosis, the season the doctor gave her a referral to the Giant Hospital, a horrible season to exist, Barbara welcomed 4,798 treasures big and small onto her property. Sometimes, in the late afternoons, the terror would course through her bloodstream, form a new growth in her brain, shoot her in the eye with vivid visions of rectangular wooden boxes and yellow carnations and insect-filled dirt and the inevitability of what she’d already created for herself in this world, but all that disappeared when she was amongst her things.