The Cry of the Sloth (24 page)

I have no plans. I don’t remember a time before when I had no plans. I wander from room to room and kick things. I lie on the sofa and imagine that I am covered in fur.

In front of me I see a blankness. I don’t know if it is an open door or a wall. I don’t know how to find out. Do you have any suggestions? I think I am going to stop now.

Andy

p.s. If in the envelope with the suggestions, you could slip a few dollars …

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Dear Willy,

You have failed to answer my previous letters, but as you can see I have not given up. For most of my life I have been dragged down by ideas of dignity, vanity really, and a strong desire to be liked. However, I suspect that this is all behind me now, or else how could I bring myself to write you again after the indifference and contempt conveyed by the absence of even a postcard from you? I regard this change in my outlook as a breakthrough. A breakthrough and a blessing, that’s what it is. I used to cringe whenever I pictured you looking up from one of my missives and saying to someone, perhaps to a room full of female students, “Listen to this, girls.” And then you read aloud a few choice passages from my letters in a high, simpering voice, while the young things bite their lips to hide the mirth occasioned by your hideous rendition of my desperate plight. I had only to imagine the eventual outbreak of overt tittering for a hot flush of shame to o’erspread my neck and face. I am writing to let you know that it doesn’t matter now: I have unpacked my soul and there is nothing in it.

And speaking of packing, I don’t know if I wrote you about my boxes. Last month I was very busy putting up in cardboard cartons almost everything I owned that might be called personal, even at a stretch. I started with just a few things I didn’t need at the moment, and gradually accelerated. In the end I had packed everything except the furniture and appliances, which were too big, and a change of clothes. As I folded down the flaps of each box and taped them shut, I experienced a very small impulse of joy. It was little more than a twinge, but after doing a series of boxes I sometimes felt giddy and had to lie down, which leads me to suppose that the impulses, small as they were, are accumulating somewhere, perhaps to burst forth some day in the future. There were soon a lot of boxes, and I found it difficult to move about in the living room, where I had most of them stacked. In fact, I had to choose at any given moment whether I wanted access to the front door, the upstairs, or the kitchen. I found myself spending much too much time moving boxes, even though I did, at first, enjoy experimenting with different arrangements. I also for a while enjoyed building towers so high and so precariously tottering that I could make them fall over just by jumping up and down in increasingly distant places in the house, eventually getting as far away as the kitchen. But when that became boring, as it quickly did, I started getting rid of them. The odd thing is, when I first packed the boxes it was with the intention of just putting things aside, getting them out from under foot, so to speak. It had not yet entered my head that I could get rid of them altogether and permanently. Yet this now became my all-consuming goal. Fearing that a large number of boxes thrown out at one time would provoke objections from the pick-up men, especially since the majority were full of books and extremely heavy, I had to carry out the project gradually, stealthily in a sense, at a rate of eight or nine cartons a week. Thursdays are garbage days. I think of them as blessed garbage days. In the early morning I would stack at the curb as many boxes as I dared. Then I would go and sit at an upstairs window to wait for the truck. Every box was labeled, the contents listed in minute detail, so I knew exactly what things were about to embark. Every collection day brought a small thrill—even saying good-bye forever to something as insignificant as a pair of socks was something—but the moment of supreme joy arrived the day all my writing, everything up to the moment I started packing a few months ago, took the ride. Notebooks, manuscripts, scribbles great and small. Seven boxes of it. In the remaining four boxes going out that morning I had been careful to place only the least interesting objects, so as not to mar the singularity of that day’s pleasure. The collectors were the usual pair of big-gloved ex-convicts. When they pitched the boxes into the truck, I nearly fainted with glee. I watched the hydraulic crusher close over them. It whined as it mashed them in with other people’s most prosaic trash, garbage, leftovers, and other ejections, pulping it all into a varicolored sludge. I was sorry that there was no way for me to get inside and watch.

Having witnessed my belongings and achievements embarking in this way, I have thought that perhaps I should imitate them. Of course I can’t hope to literally put myself into a compactor. I could, however, just take a trip. I am not sure about my car, though. It seems to me an untrustworthy item. It stops for no apparent reason, often in the middle of an intersection, and refuses to go on. Then, just when I have decided to get out and cajole a push from the vehicle behind me (which at this point has begun to honk), when I have already one foot on the pavement, it will suddenly leap forward, forcing me to scramble back in or be left sitting in the roadway. I used to be embarrassed by this, but since my breakthrough I just wave gaily as I shoot off. On the other hand, the car starts without fail in the cold and seems likely to run for a while once I have coaxed it up to speed on the highway, and a while is plenty of time to get there. Get where? you ask, and well you should. After all, getting somewhere must be the point of it all, else why embark? And that is really the question I keep asking myself. Why embark at all? I could just as well stay where I am, on my sofa or in my deck chair if I feel like it, or on the grass in the park. But it will soon be getting too cold for that, and then it will have to be on the snow in the park. Just thinking of this makes me wonder if I shouldn’t put off my embarkation for a month or so, in order to be able to lie down in the snow in the park. Above me the stars will be icy pinpricks in the clear blackness of the winter sky. The branches of the oaks will be blacker still. The idea of a further journey will naturally occur to me then, there in the snow, but I shall not let myself be tempted. I know myself well enough to suppose that I won’t stay out that long, long enough to really embark. No, I imagine I’ll stay out just long enough to catch a nasty cold. As all the reward for my effort I’ll have ten days of dripping nose and soggy Kleenex. However, I also know it is really just the enormous appeal which adventure has always held for me that seduces me into imagining I will be able to get even that far. In fact I will probably not succeed even in getting out the door. I’ll open it, a blast of cold air will rush in, and that will be enough to do the trick. I’ll shiver and think, Not now.

But the idea doesn’t leave me, and a few minutes later I am back at the door. With all my things finally gone, it is really only a matter of time. You see, there is nothing for me to do here anymore. I am embarking because I am bored, because I am frightened, because I am sad. But really because I don’t find my jokes funny anymore. Looking back over them I ask myself if they were ever funny, or did I just make them seem so by my laughter.

Your faithful correspondent,

Andrew Whittaker

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