The Cerebral Catalyst

“If my man ever pulled that shit, I tell you what I’d do. I’d hand him a broom and a dustpan and tell him to sweep his ass up, put on a shirt, and not to be late for work,” Eileen assured her, in the breakroom, shaking cremora into her coffee and passing the can to Diane. “Sit around all day, going to pieces, making the whole damn house dusty. Mmm, mmm, no sir.”

Of course, Eileen was right. She was always right about these things, was always right about men, was about right about Brian. The bitch. Every morning, she’d ask, “That boy all swept up yet?”

Diane would avoid eye contact, biting her lip.

“Mmm, mmm, mmm,” Eileen would say emphatically, shaking her head in judgement. “Not my man, no siree.”

Back home, Diane tried reasoning with him. “It’s been three weeks now, Brian. This has gone on long enough. I really don’t know what you’re trying to prove or what exactly you hope to accomplish by this. But it has to stop. It’s time for you to pull yourself together and be a man. I know it’s difficult for you, although I won’t pretend to understand what you’re going through. How can I, when you refuse to let me in? I just wish you could trust me more, that we could be honest, really honest, with each other.”

He just sat there, all smug — god, she hated when he was smug. He just sat there in a smug little conical pile, rising over the cushion to a height of about two feet. A little of him had spilled onto the floor, and a fine dust covered his side table, and the latest issue of Nature, and a half filled-in sudoku puzzle from a Sunday supplemental, and a ceramic mug, in the bottom of which an ounce or so of black coffee had mixed with the dust to form a thick, grayish paste.

“How can I help you, if you won’t even acknowledge me? How can you be so cold? Why do you treat me this way?” A tear trickled down her face and dripped from her jaw. “Forget it, then, damn it. I don’t even know why I try.”

She rushed out of the den, down the hallway, and into the bedroom, slamming the door hard enough to make a framed photograph fall off the wall. She heard the glass shatter. She didn’t look. She didn’t have to. She knew the picture intimately, had memorized every detail. It was a picture of Brian and her, red-faced and smiling, on top of a pyramid in Mexico, their sunglasses pushed back above their foreheads, their T-shirts drenched in sweat. They leaned into each other, their cheeks pressed together, and clung to each other desperately, their arms around each other at the waist.

She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the head of the nail in the wall. The nail made her think of a hammer. She thought about taking a hammer and smashing that nail right into the wall, right through the wall, with one mighty blow, liberating the nail and a circle of plaster surrounding it, sinking the hammer all the way up to the base of the claw. This thought made her feel better, so she imagined doing it over and over again, all over the wall, making a plaster and paint Swiss cheese of the entire eastern side of the room. Then she imagined the whole wall crumbling and collapsing under the irresistible force of her wrath. Then she imagined the wall pristine again, except for that nail, and she began the entire process again.

After a while, she calmed down, and then she began to feel guilty. Thought maybe she had been a bit harsh. She went back into the living room. He hadn’t moved.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to lose my temper, before.”

He didn’t make a sound.

“Have you looked at the new issue of Nature?” She pointed to the magazine, waiting on the side table. “There’s a really nice paper on the genetic basis of condescension in the domestic cat. A really elegant piece of work. I think you’ll like it.” Taking the magazine from the table, she flipped through to find her place, then propped it against the arm of the chair. She took his glasses, wiped the lenses with the tail of her shirt, and carefully placed them about where she imagined his face should have been, high on the outward facing side of the pile. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, remembering, and turned on the lamp. “There. That’s better. Well, I’ll just leave you to your reading. Enjoy.” She knew he hated when she prattled on while he was trying to read, or watch television, or stare blankly at treetops, swaying in the wind, outside the window in the opposite wall.

She went into the bedroom, lay across the bed, and pulled a thin novel from beneath the mattress. The book was called Slug, and it was about a traveling shoetree salesman who becomes embroiled in a plot to assassinate the head of a major multi-national vending machine syndicate. She read chapter four, in which he narrowly avoids being run over by a parcel delivery van commandeered by a counter-intelligence agent from the U.S. mint. At the end of the chapter, which she thought really could have been shorter by several pages, she closed the book and returned it to its slot. Then she turned off the lamp, rolled onto her side, and quickly fell asleep.

.....

When she awoke, it was still dark, but light spilled into the hallway from the lamp in the den. She glanced at the clock on the nightstand. 4:32. She got up and walked to the den. He hadn’t moved at all, not a speck. The magazine was just as she had left it, still opened to the first page of the cat story. His glasses were still sitting on the front of the pile, where she had delicately placed them.

“I don’t know how much longer I can take this. Do you intend to sit there, in that spot, until the end of time? Why don’t you do something? Anything? Scatter yourself around the room. Mold yourself into a dust castle. Scream. Cry. Laugh. Tell me to go to hell. Anything!” She yanked the glasses off him and hurled them behind her, into the wall. “Damn you. I hate you for doing this to me. I would never do this to you. Never. Do you understand me? Do you, goddamn it?”

Still he didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. She began to cry. She put her hands on the arms of the chair, and she slumped down onto the floor, onto her knees. She let her head drop onto the edge of the chair, inadvertently getting a little of him in her hair, and her whole body began to shake.

Eventually, the shaking stopped, and she got up and went into the hallway. She pulled out the vacuum cleaner and rolled it into the den. “I didn’t want it to end like this,” she assured him, dispassionately, uncoiling the cord and plugging it into the wall. “But you haven’t left me many choices,” she added, connecting the hose attachment and the upholstery brush. “I hate you for bringing me to this, you goddamn, cold, arrogant son of a bitch!” She tapped the power switch with her toe and the noise of the machine seemed to carry away her worries, washing over her, leaving her somehow lighter, softer, more diffuse. And then she realized it wasn’t what she thought. “Oh god,” she whispered, horrified, “so this is what it’s like.” Then she crumbled into a pile of ash. The hose attachment, with its upholstery brush, fell onto the pile in the chair, as the vacuum continued to run, noisily sucking most of him up before sliding off the cushion and onto the floor to suck up the better part of her, too.

Eventually, the downstairs neighbors became annoyed by the racket. And when their persistent pounding on the door proved futile, they became suspicious and called the police. As reported by a local newspaper, a thorough investigation confirmed that the bag did, in fact, contain both of them. The lead detective was quoted as saying the police had been unable to determine whether a crime had been committed. “It may have been a mercy sweeping gone bad. Or it could have been some kind of pact. In any case, it does appear that the woman was the sweeper.” He said they wished to maintain possession of the vacuum cleaner and its contents, indefinitely. When asked whether this was the strangest case he had ever seen, the detective replied that he had spent eleven years in vice and had seen “all kinds of really freaky s___.”

The story was picked up by a national tabloid, and was widely, and grossly, misinterpreted as tragically romantic and vice versa. The story was copied and widely forwarded via email. Somewhere, right this very moment, in a second story apartment, a woman sits staring into a screen and reading the story aloud to her husband, as he stares out the window at the tops of trees. “Do you remember,” she asks him, “when we were like that, just two piles of ash in a single bag, perfectly homogenized, with no way of telling which speck of dust was from whom?”

It takes him a moment to come up with the perfect answer and, when he has it, he says, with a smile, still looking out the window, “There’s no one on earth I’d rather spend eternity stuffed in a vacuum cleaner bag with.”

Then they smile at each other, and laugh, like a couple of hopeful, pathetic fools. Returning to the task of parsing her inbox, she becomes aware of an odd sensation, vaguely familiar but not entirely pleasant. “Oh, god,” she whispers, to herself but aloud. “So this is what it’s like.”

“What’s that?” he mutters, indifferently.

She waits. But nothing happens and, after a moment, the feeling passes.

“Nothing,” she tells him, as she left-clicks, forwarding the story to everyone she knows. “Nevermind. It was nothing at all.”

______________________________________
Don Hucks's fiction has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Clockwise Cat, Ghoti, The Pedestal, and Pindeldyboz.

posted 05.05.08.

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