Insulted, I stood up from the wicker-basket chair, and remembered how my roommate Julie once described her previous apartment in Chinatown. A couple years ago, her brother, a home renovator, opened up her kitchen countertop for some kind of do-it-yourself weekend project only to discover her entire kitchen counter, approximately fifty-five cubic feet, had been filled to the brim with live cockroaches, enough to fill four black garbage bags full of hissing wings and shells that were tossed promptly to the curb, and how even after the bags were tossed to the curb and collected, my roommate Julie vomited for five days straight, because she pictured the cockroaches’ legs locked together and their hard shells clicking against one another in one giant cockroach-ball-mass underneath the counter where she prepared all her favorite meals. She used to love to cook.
It’s enough to sicken you to death, I said as I turned around to face Chad Lambo and my adoptive mother, that such disgusting things can take place beneath the sterile surface, all the while you go about your daily life, eating and talking and gossiping and sanitizing and wiping things down and shitting.
The most we can do, I said, is to organize ourselves. Organization is good for morale. Make your bed.
I looked at my adoptive mother. Don’t you remember you used to say that to us back when we had all the time in the world? It’s one of the few things you said that turned out to be true. Organization has always been good, if not necessary, for the human spirit, even for those humans of the lowest common denominator, even for the most impoverished of souls. That’s why the homeless bums and beggars in Manhattan situated themselves on pieces of cardboard with their few cherished belongings surrounding them like a moat: organization.
I turned away from them both, disgusted at life as described by the sciences, disgusted at all biological life, trillions of cells and nuclei and mitochondria and membranes and bacteria multiplying and squirming and trembling and teeming invisibly underneath our noses.
We’re too dumb to see it, we’re too brainless to see how disgusting it is, I said.
Here’s what we’ll do, I heard Chad Lambo say to my adoptive mother, we’ll pray for her. We’ll just keep praying for her.
12
They didn’t try to stop me from leaving the living room when I told them Sister Reliability had important work to attend to.
You call yourself Sister Reliability? said my adoptive mother.
They call me Sister Reliability, I said as I reminded her of my position as overseer of troubled young people.
Before I excused myself, I asked them where my adoptive father was.
He’s at work, too, said my adoptive mother.
He went back to work? I said, appalled. Why isn’t he here grieving with us?
We all work on grief in our own ways, said Chad Lambo.
Thank you, I said with elegance.
I took the book about cars with me. I went back up into my bedroom, like a bug scuttling back into its crevice, furious with my adoptive father for abandoning us during this traumatic and difficult time. I managed somehow to find a patch of light for myself in the darkness of my childhood bedroom by looking at the book of cars, pictures of brightly colored, expensive-looking plastic and metal vehicles of death. When I set the book down, I noticed there was a sticker on the cover, a red circle that said HALF-OFF and then it was crossed out with a black marker and it said 75% OFF. It must have been one of those remaindered books on the clearance table, I thought. The cheapest book on the table, I bet, the cheapest book in the store! Everything in this house is so cheap, I laughed, even the most expensive things become cheap by merely existing inside this very house! Every item in the house that wasn’t a piece of furniture functioned as a knickknack or decorative bric-a-brac purchased in bulk quantities as cheaply as possible from places like Costco and Pier One Imports. Look behind one knickknack and see ten in a row, all waiting patiently for their turn to be displayed. Then it dawned on me: I had finally come up with a formula that made sense of everything.
An alert went off on my cellphone, a loud and brash alarm that sounded like a madman hammering on a piece of tin. CALL SUPERVISOR TO CHECK IN it said. I attempted to leave a message on my supervisor’s voicemail, to let him know I had safely arrived in Milwaukee.
Dear Supervisor, I said, I’ve finally formulated a theory of the house. I can’t wait to tell my troubled young people about it. Everything is extremely cheap here, even life itself! I laughed.
I called him three times, aborting each message because of my laughter.
Also in case you’ve forgotten, I’ve lost my only adoptive brother, I finally managed to say on my fourth attempt at a voicemail, HE KILLED HIMSELF and I need to find out HOW. Then I hung up. My laughter died and I felt a shock of despair race through me. Tone is difficult to control, I thought unhappily, we say things in our heads and we hear them and they sound right and when we speak them, they sound completely different to others. My voice has always been deep, almost like a man’s, and my laughter has always been the laughter of a monster, I despaired, and it only became more monstrous in proportion to the seriousness and finality of my adoptive brother’s death. They locked people up for laughing too much. Out of the corner of my eye, the book about cars sparkled and flashed, troubling me. Perhaps it had been a gift from my adoptive parents to my adoptive brother, perhaps it was given to him for his birthday. It made sense to me, it followed my theory of the house that my adoptive parents would buy the cheapest book on the clearance table, forget to take the sticker off, and then give the book to their adoptive son for his birthday. They purchased for him a book about a subject he didn’t care about, the cheapest book on the table, and they gave it to him for his birthday; they never understood one thing about either of us!