The Sheila Variations

Things

I've been working a lot on off-line stuff - not the particular piece below (which is part of a long-ass novella I wrote) - but I figured I'd post this anyway. At the bottom I provide links to other bits from this long piece I've posted. You'll start to see the theme. Not the plot, perhaps, but the theme.

THINGS

Erin and Zachary sat in the dark smoky spaces of nighttime Chicago (when they were not in either his bed or her bed) and talked about things. Literally: Shower curtains. Forks. Ballpoint pens. Dental floss. Pringles. Filing cabinets. Objects held a talismanic power for him. The rocking chair from God, (described to her in such excruciating detail their first night together), had been Erin's first clue in this regard. She picked up on something going on here. Objects anchored him to the earth: a shower curtain will always be a shower curtain; things had a permanence that he found riveting. Although he never said it like that. He did not analyze himself. He just talked to her eternally about his elasticized sheets, his new phone, his confusing remote control. She loved this. She would prompt him, egg him on. "So ? tell me about your coffee maker." She was completely content hearing him describe his futon frame for the hundredth time.

When Zack's brother got married, he had given his old futon-frame to Zachary. Zachary told Erin about the problems with it in loving detail. When he tried to move the futon-frame up into its couch position, it kept slipping down. It wouldn't hold its shape. Something was wrong. Zack loved it when things were wrong. So he devised a way to keep it in position using a bungee cord. He demonstrated the process to Erin one night.

"Now watch. Watch what happens without the bungee."

Erin sat cross-legged on the dusty rug, drinking beer and watching, enthralled.

Zack flopped himself onto the un-bungee'd couch, making an elaborate obvious pantomime of his own everyday behavior, saying, "Oh, hey, whatever, I'd like to just sit on my couch?" and then, with a jolt, the frame crashed into horizontal mode, leaving Zack splayed out.

Zack leapt up. "But now ? watch this."

Deftly, he shoved the futon frame into position, grabbed the bungee, stretched it across the mid-section of the futon, and clipped the ends together round the back of the frame. Then Zack began the exact same pantomime from before. Erin felt like she was watching a Buster Keaton movie.

Zack exclaimed, overly casual, "Oh, hey, I feel like just sitting on my couch right now?" and he threw himself onto the futon, and lo and behold, it kept its form.

Erin applauded.

He was always dragging things in off the street, he couldn't stop himself. His apartment was cluttered with random un-needed furniture. He didn't care about spatial relations, or whether or not he actually needed the item. He put things anywhere. There was a huge bookcase in his tiny bathroom. He had a fancy curli-cued end table in his dank tiled kitchen. There were wooden chairs strewn about. It was accumulation, not decoration.

One night, at around 3 a.m., he had come across a desk on the street outside his apartment, and he had dragged it all the way up the three flights of stairs by himself. He had made such a ruckus, banging the desk accidentally against other apartment doors, making dents in the stairwell walls, long scratches in the paint, that other tenants had later complained to the landlord. Zachary admitted to Erin, "I was trashed. I felt like Popeye."

The desk only had three legs. Zack got in trouble with his landlord over a 3-legged desk. But he didn't care, the rest of it was in perfect condition. Z explained the entire desk to Erin in as much detail as someone else would describe their two-month trip through French Polynesia.

The 3-legged problem was solved by stacking milk crates up where the fourth leg would have been. Of course, the milk crates were full of things that Zachary needed to get to on occasion, all his video tapes, for example. So every time Zack and Erin wanted to watch a movie, the entire desk had to be dismantled and then put back together. It might have been simpler to keep the videos elsewhere, Erin thought, but she held her tongue, because Zack seemed to like the entire process too much. It filled him with excitement, and an awareness of his own ingenuity. By dismantling the desk repeatedly, he could realize again and again what a rock star he was for having it in the first place.

Zachary bombarded Liam and Erin one night with a rambling soliloquy about his coffee table (what it looked like, why it was so cool, why it changed his whole living room). At one point, 5 minutes into the speech, Liam turned, looked directly at Erin, and stated in a bored and over-it monotone, "It's a coffee table. It is not the reincarnation of Christ."

But Zack wasn't "bored and over" anything. And nothing was "just".

He said to her once, as they were drinking beer at O'Reilly's, "So I'm really excited about my new deodorant."

Erin lit up. "Tell me everything."

"Well, you know how much I sweat ? "

"Uh. Yes. I am aware of it."

"And no matter what I use, the sweat still comes. So I asked my doctor about it, and he recommended something called Dry Sol."

Dry Sol. He said it as though the words were "the ark of the Covenant".

"Dry Sol. What is that?"

"Well, it's deodorant," he said impatiently.

"Okay, okay. Calm down."

"And it is unbelievable. I no longer sweat. At all. I remain completely sweat-free for hours on end."

"Meanwhile, silver oxide is leaking out of your shoulder," was Erin's worried comment. Zack skipped over this.

"It's a miracle. I don't have to wash my clothes every other day anymore." He lifted his arm up and commanded her, "Feel my pits." They were in a public place, so Erin hesitated. Zack lifted his arm up higher, a bully, "Come on, feel my pits. Feel 'em!" A red-faced drunk sitting on the other side of Zack leered at this entire exchange, waiting to see what Erin would do.

Blushing, Erin placed her hand in Zack's armpit, investigating the situation.

"See? See? Am I not completely dry?" His tone were was one of "I told you so", intimating that Erin had been bad-mouthing Dry Sol for weeks.

A glow radiated within Erin, moving outwards, gliding over her skin. She leaned in to him and softly kissed his mouth. "Yes. You are completely dry."

Zack had gotten so worked up it looked like some sort of Tasmanian rage might be coming on. He bellowed, an off-kilter spokesman, "Dry Sol. It kicks some serious ass."

Other parts of this story:

The rocking chair soliloquy

Answering machine messages

What did they talk about

He only had one fork

Haircut

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