Tim Horvath - Understories

I spotted Box Man coming up the landfill feature known locally as “the Molehill,” comprised of tens of thousands of moles that had been surgically excised from their source — cheeks and derrières. Those who desired to graft a mole onto their visages knew they could always rely on this reservoir of protuberances, as well.

Now I was ready for him. “I do care,” I pleaded as he got close. “I really, really do.”

The box sputtered but then responded as instantaneously as though our conversation had been continuous.

“What is it that you think you care about, exactly?”

“I do not think I care. Yes, I think. And I care. But notwithstanding your skepticism, I do not think and care in a single semantic swoop.”

“Harumph,” said the box. “You’re the last person who would know what you care about. And, in any case, I can almost guarantee that you do not care about what is in me. What you do care about is seeing what you can’t immediately see, what’s concealed from your vantage point. As soon as you see what’s inside me, you’ll cease to care and will wish to discard me like any piece of cardboard that isn’t ruggedly constructed with such Euclidean virility as myself.” With this, it began to do the box equivalent of flexing, bending its flaps, making its corrugations ripple outward.

“How do you know if you won’t show me?”

“I will not relent,” said the box. “Narrative structure would dictate a gradual withering away of my defenses and a climactic divulgence of the contents of my secret interiority. But I know all about narrative structure. So don’t even try it, buddy.”

I had started out being intrigued by the man behind the box. I felt I’d been distracted by the box itself. If only I could pry it away from the hands that bore it around, slice through it with an X-Acto knife or set it aflame just long enough to out the box bearer. I checked the forceps I’d used earlier, but I hadn’t splurged for the flamethrower or any Deluxe Features at all, having been down on my luck at the time due to the legal fees expended in settling a court case with a maimed courtesan.

There was only one thing to do. I needed a box of my own.

When you are not in need of a box, the prospect of snaring one appears piddlingly easy and straightforward. Boxes abound, this world a surfeit of boxes. Packages fling themselves at you; in a pinch, you could scoop out the Styrofoam peanuts, feed them to the nearest lemur, and keep the box. The concentration of cardboard rivals that of atmospheric oxygen.

And yet, when bereft of a box, in a non-box-possessing state, the simple procurement of one becomes a staggeringly difficult obstacle, as I was soon to discover. I went to sources that I was sure would land me a live one: a moving company, a department store, a company that sold ready-for-school dioramas over the Web for obscenely lazy children. I figured I’d order a “Washington Crosses the Delaware,” rip out the Father of Our Country, the Popsicle-stick oars, and voilà. I told myself I’d be doing a good deed, since some kid would actually have to do work.

Not so fast. They’d been bought up by the world’s fastest-growing confetti concern, which ground up offbeat items — yachts, chocolate bunnies, erotic Victorian curios — and pressed them into little flakes for those disenchanted with mere papier.

“All the luck,” I lamented. Then I found a box lying outside on top of an orange rind atop a juniper bush, which was itself straddling a gin mill. I didn’t hesitate — I grabbed it, steeping my senses in its ablutional aromas.

Now, embracing my own box with the desperation of a man who wants to show off his fox-trot with his wife at a ballroom dance in order to impress his mistress who is fox-trotting with another man only to find that his mistress’s lover has invented a whole new variation called “the fox-gallop,” which is faster, more rhythmically impressive, and just plain groovaliciouser, I approached the original Box Man on the path.

By now, though, box toting was rampant. Everywhere you looked, there were men and women carrying boxes, boxes carrying men and women, and, most of all, boxes carrying one another, having done away with the middlemen, along with the appetites, petty jealousies, and other inconveniences that had gone with them. The box I was pursuing, I realized, was no longer the one that I had set out to find. I heard a chorus chanting, “This End Up! This End Up! This End Up!” getting closer and closer, but my view was occluded. And then it happened: I was swiftly inverted. Just like that, eye-to-eye with an ant, a divot — holy rhythm.

How sweet they felt, then, that first time it rained, the dolorous globules, reaching my head only after caroming off the long-suffering bottoms of my feet!

Our talking is a kudzu of carotids in which we lose our marbles. Hours later, they tumble out as we are snoring, awakening us one at a time, hard little tumors we flick underneath one another. By morning, we lie like border states whose boundaries are rivers, anomalously straight, canals funded by nature.

When I get nervous near you it’s like a utility forms and hits a whole town with its too much. Everyone goes shed ‘n’ attic and unearths devices: those they need, those they never use, those borrowed and never returned, those they wish they’d borrowed and could thus return, those they don’t recognize, those whose uses they can’t fathom, those double-barreled ones that lend skulls cold spots, those too flimsy to withstand unearthing, those that served as stunt doubles for other devices once, in their heyday, those they don’t really need. But want. Among them: electric utensils, rodent rotators, epilepsy inducers, oars, spooling agents, laminators, pompadour replicators, run-on detectors, vaginal dredgers, mechanical fins, metronomic innards, palate ticklers, religious spatulae, hissiphones. Those that look burned but not flammable. Those that come off synthetic yet overripe. Those for pulling, for turning, for penetrating, for twisting and more. Thanks, we say, blushing, thanks. What they do with them is done, and then they are put gently back into their slots, slid onto the hooks and rafters, and eventually I can meet your gaze once more.

Next year starts my stint as anthropologist on that island where relationships and existential quandaries are thrashed out in small talk, and any mention of the weather or the pop diva’s latest gown makes the strongest rack with weeping.

Even the tolls adjust on our approach. You catch them trembling and think it a trick of light. Whatever we hand over, coughed and culled from cushiony crevices, is always “exact” and “change,” and still you clamp down, silent as mile markers, on one bald coin.

Whatever else we are, we are surely a beard that has convinced its owner to stop shaving. How long? No longer do we even notice the Unabomber comparisons, the razors orphaned in the snarl.

Write when you are starving. Write when you are sated. Write in the throes of eating — find a way, free up a hand between bites, intrachew. If all else fails, invent a new writing implement, half pen, half fork (to think the spork anything other than a mild innovation shows a paucity of imagination); then sweep a bite into your mouth, pausing only briefly before nose-diving right into the midst of your ongoing sentence, the one you left hanging between a dependent clause and an independent. Now, at last, the acts of eating and of writing have fused for you into a single four-pronged gesture, as they did for me long ago.