The Day the Apartment Flooded

The days of sadness never went away. They followed one upon another and rose and fell like one another. Egged on by the constant rain, they bobbed near and around each other without mingling, but with the semblance of mingling, and their ebb and flow and rise and fall was the flood that filled the apartment and soaked the furniture and the clothes, starting low at the legs and climbing with the dual sinister forces of cohesion and adhesion up, up everything, metal stood no chance, and soaked the room and banished all smells but the moldy smells and the odor of the promise of decay, setting an eye on the lurid monotony of the present and casting the other on the not-so-distant and not-so-promising future, the one that made the individual days of sadness look like a cold metallic sheet of sadness, a single unending day of sadness upon which no sun would ever shine or, and this was cruel, set, and from which the cold and the damp could not be wrung and off of which the dull light reflected with a dullness double its own.

It was a Sunday. But without the sun, that is, in the conspicuous absence of the sun—conspicuous because of the duration of the absence, day after day, the erasure of the demarcations between one and the next—Remley referred to it simply as Day. The night he also referred to as Day, because the paleness outside the window was indistinguishable from one hour to the next. And by this orthographic elision Remley simplified his life.

And because Day was a day of rest, by rule and habit, from day to day Remley did what one does on such a day: he rested.

Until he was tired of resting and recognized that by resting everyday there was nothing to rest from but rest itself.

So he set to work simplifying his life even more, beyond what one might consider valuable or reasonable or even sane, divesting himself of those things that maintained against the agitation of monotony any color or texture.

He removed the screen from the third-floor window and began to cast out. Clothes in big sheaves that, because they were heavy with water, fell en masse without the expected life the wind and fall should have breathed into them. Dead wet birds shot in flight. Dishware and cooking ware and all with a muffled clutter in the curtain of rain like a distant unthreatening thunderclap. The television dented into itself but refused to shatter under its weight, a failed suicide attempt. Books fumbled through the air, already forlorn-looking before Remley hauled them to the precipice and let go five at a time. There weren’t many, and they huddled in a miserly pool that the mattress obscured on impact. He left the bed frame because, as everyone knows, a naked bed frame carries the same significance in a room as a cobweb, that is, of abandonment or neglect, and can be left. Two suitcases, a DVD player, the contents of the bathroom, a clothes basket, an iron (there hadn’t been an ironing board, so throwing out the iron was a vague weight off his mind), a collection of odd tools, four or five encased light bulbs (none of which broke, that well encased), cleaning supplies, shoes, shoe polish, the only mirror (which did break, but hardly into a thousand pieces as was the expectation).

And then the clothes off his body, a piece at a time. An old sweatshirt, the red t-shirt with a white rendering of the Little Prince in his flowing cloak, a pair of new-ish jeans that still hadn’t been washed, socks that needed to be washed, and a pair of white underwear.

Next the hair on his head and the hair on his legs (which took a while and left nick marks) and the hair in his crotch and under his arms. He had planned ahead, was rather deliberate about the whole thing, moved without the energy or madness that might somehow justify the spectacle to an outsider. This is why the last thing he threw out (after all the food in the fridge—the fridge itself he had maneuvered to the window and decided that was good enough) were the scissors, the shaving cream and the razor.

His apartment wasn’t empty, despite what the neighbors later termed “the tirade” that had littered the narrow entry to the outside door. There was still the desk that was attached to the wall; which, while convenient, disrupted the flow of the apartment in the way that it ate up much of the only wall with any usable space. There was the bed frame like an anatomy skeleton or some art installation, missing its plaque. The table he had thrown out, and the chairs that matched the light wood of the table, and the arm chairs made of the same cheap wood finished in the same factory shine, but it was as if they were still there the way the faux-wood floor, also the light piney color of the chairs and the table, recalled them with the same casual defiance that dawn in other places, further from the arctic circle, recalled the night and was made up of it as much as it was made up of the coming light.

The countertops, too. Remley wasn’t violent, neither was he big, and so felt satisfied tossing the tossable things and leaving the rest.

The apartment had been renovated recently, within the last year or two, but nothing looked new; it all just looked recently renovated, enough so that one might find it, down to the doors (inappropriate in their number and dark extravagance in contrast with the light wood and unbroken eggshell white of all the walls) at a chain store of interior décor. The kind of store that houses a café for the wandering shoppers who, having finally found their way through the purposeful labyrinth of the floor plan, discover themselves to be strangely hungry and suddenly unaware, because of shopping fatigue, of the middle-class consumer trap they are about to consummate with an order of biscuits and gravy on top of the stainless steel cheese grater and matching floor lamps they’ve just bought (matching not only each other but the floor lamps in every third house on the block or apartment on the floor).

But the inconspicuous color of the floor and the countertop and the desk, and the coolness and consistency of the color of the walls seemed apt, as if the apartment and its relatively recent renovation was one room in a large apartment that included the rectangular spaces outside and the rectangular piece of blank cloud-choked sky visible from the window out of which Remley had just thrown all his possessions. It was a grand layout on the grand singular theme (grand only in its scale and orderliness) of a blank canvas.

And Remley, standing in the middle of it with his eggshell white nakedness in the pale light of day, even when he waved his arms or kicked at the air or gave the finger (with both hands targeted like two guns) to the weight of the ceiling and the two floors above it, was like an unplugged floor lamp, identical to all the other floor lamps out there (the ones walking through the rain along the main street holding umbrellas tight and coldly against the sadness falling around them).

Except for the memories that were still settled and stacked on the shelves and other flat surfaces of his brain.

Bald, naked, smooth like an infant but without an infant’s careless happiness--the lightness associated with a memory weighed down only with the substance of itself, empty and light in the absence of memories--Remley set about discarding the objects from his brain.

This was harder. Many of his memories wouldn’t fit through the window. And still others slipped through his fingers. They were heavy of themselves, but also heavy from the weight of the water that had soaked them through, too.

Worse, as he pulled them from his brain two at a time, hands like the mechanical arms on an assembly line, plucking at an inhuman rate broken bottles from the belt, the memories just floated around in the apartment like cans of food, bobbing and nodding on the knee-deep water, pretending to mingle but remaining distinct and apart.

So he opened the door to his apartment, which was no small thing to do against the pressure of the uncountable cubic feet of water, expecting the rush of water to empty the memories into the corridor and wash them down the stairs, but the water remained like a block of gelatin in place and shape, and his memories continued to bob and wag as if with an uncontrollable, silent belly laugh. At him.

Remley lay down, thwarted, among the discarded memories in the water, and the weight of the remaining memories, those he could not discard, be it for a nostalgic tie or the ferocity with which they defined his person or as members of the mere fact of quantity, raised the water level to such a height that things began of their own to spill out over the windowsill and cascade into the courtyard. To Remley, ears in the water, it was like a silent movie, featuring the ceiling in a slow spin, the unexpected entry of the window frame, the blank sky in which he imagined seeing stars, the upward rush of stucco on the neighboring building and a cinematic fade to black.

It was a sight that onlookers, the few there were, described as inspiring in its uniqueness and near-beauty. Waterfalls rarely fail to impress, and this one was no different, especially given the rare sight of a body flowing over the edge and down as beautiful as if a waterfall were made just for this, for the ride of a lifetime. And among them, among the three or so who caught the spectacle, there may have been a hint somewhere of envy alongside the awe and dread and the uneasy sense of portent.

Box of Candy

Without a second thought, and only a perfunctory first one, Dill Winsome returned the box of lemonheads to the shelf and picked up, instead, a box of Boston Baked Beans. He didn’t know the reason for the exchange, because it was pretty reflexive and, as mentioned, thoughtless, neither was it complex, but Dill Winsome’s mind was the kind that responded to branding, and where lemonheads were a generic candy, the box of baked beans was trademarked.

Nonetheless, taste—a more basic instinct than brand loyalty—motivated a second exchange, and Dill Winsome took his box of lemonheads and his sweaty dime to the checkout line.

He was not first in line, he was not last in line, but he was shortest in line and youngest in line and by far the shopper with the fewest items and the least experience.

This is the story of Dill Winsome’s first ever-purchase with his first-ever money, and it’s a story with a global echo and a perfect resonance. In this story there is anxiety, doubt, restiveness, existential crisis, anticipation, ennui, pretense, excitement and the loss of innocence. Because Dill Winsome is six with a found dime and a grimy face and the real belief that he’s cheating his family of a certain small windfall by this indulgence and setting the trajectory of his life on the Wrong Path; that this found dime is not a found dime but a stolen one, by virtue of his failure to look for its owner; and that, then, there is an element of sin and blood in the silver coin, which he dropped to the counter prematurely so as not to burn the miniature bust of the dead president into his palm.

His turn was up, the line had shifted, and he placed his purchase on the counter, but the dirty dime and the box of lemonheads lay untouched and unnoted. For the first time in his life, Dill Winsome was utterly alone.

To recap, there was an epic moment of ambition, where the hero had asserted himself at the edge of a perilous vastness, doing what he’s only ever seen done, presenting himself at the door of the world’s indifference for the first time as something other than a child, constructing from observed action and the power of his own fledgling imagination a new self, and failing miserably.

Because the cashier passes him over, leaves the box of lemonheads and the grimy dime lying side by side on the counter and Dill Winsome’s insistent stare unacknowledged. Presenting Dill Winsome with the sure doubt of his own existence and a real-life conundrum.

This perhaps is where it gets sticky. Dill Winsome has been passed over. The cashier is ringing the next customer up. The world has turned the slightest bit on its axis and in the process flung the body of the little six-year-old boy, who sees eye-to-eye with the counter top, off the path to independence, adulthood, self-confidence and, if it is possible, the future. He will have to reassert himself or lose himself forever. What other choice does he have than the one between action and acquiescence? Between protest and oblivion? The nuances governing the morality of this exigency are clear to Dill Winsome, despite his age, though he cannot articulate them outside of fighting back a tear or two, to swallow the lump. Already blowing a dime, for which he did no work, on satisfying a superfluous physical appetite, of which his parents would not approve, in conscious neglect of his struggling family, Dill Winsome is now faced with the prospect of theft.

But he does not steal the lemonheads.

Instead, he rewinds time, collects the lemonheads, retraces his steps, moving back up the line to its end, takes the corner, makes a deliberate line to the candy aisle, replaces the box of candy (they make that subtle tambourine noise when they settle into place) and, ever so coolly, as far as cool goes in the eyes and ability of a six-year-old, and with the same degree of stealth and projected nonchalance, removes himself from the store, one forced and shaky step at a time, paying all the liquid wealth he has in the world for the mistake of believing in the value of so small and miserable a thing as a dime.