Gary Lutz - Partial List of People to Bleach

It had all been her sister’s, she said, if a sister is who it had been.

I am always in doubt of whoever can’t die right away.

She was gone some nights, too. Things happen when you are younger and have it in you to pinpoint your satisfactions.

I would take the bus to look in on my husband. In my absence, life had scarcely scratched at the man. He never bothered going through my pockets or sought secrets in my miscellaneals. His point of view was exactly that — a speck, something too tiny to even flick away. We were in the bathroom; he was razoring the daily durations of hair from his cheeks, his chin. I was sitting shiftily along the brim of the tub. There was the hankering hang of his thing. I let it fool itself out to me.

Days were not so much finished as effaced. You caught sight of new, unroomy hours looming through the old. Then months more: months of fudging forward unfamished. Then a Sunday night, a worldly evening, finally.

We got off the bus, the woman and I, at the first town we came to. It was a paltry locality with a planetarium, a post office, a plaza. The plaza had a restaurant. We went in, ordered, raked through each other’s romaine, thinned out the conversation, set off for the restroom together. Somebody had taped to the mirror a reminder that hands should be washed for thirty seconds — the exact length, the sign went on to say, of a chorus of “Happy Birthday.” We thus sang as we soaped the other’s dickering fingers, but when we came within syllables of the end of the third line, where you have to put in the name of the “dear” celebratee, we broke things off.

It was the same driver for the trip back — not a nice man.

This being my history, I snapped out of my marriage, pieced myself back into the population, prodded and faulted, saw red, then wed anew in wee ways.

This husband and I soon set a waning example of even our own business.

I later fell in with a girl who kept a cat on her head to stay warm.

I was mostly of a mood to pollute, and she was frank in her dreams, which she logged, but a liar in all other opportunities.

Then years had their say.

HOME

When I got back from the mall, everything in my room had been rotated almost a whole eighth of an inch to the right.

I am taping it all back into place.

FEMALE VOICE ON PHONE: “NO MORE CONTACT”

I can’t speak for myself, but a job does things to a person, deducts a person pretty brutally from life.

Desks are terrible places, no matter how many wheels a chair might have.

You can’t do much about how drawers fill up.

WHAT TO DO WITH THE OHIO RIVER

Drain it, obviously.

Hire me to walk its length and gloat.

PLACE-NAMES

I once thought Ave Maria was one.

NEIGHBORS

He slips a note under my door, says he has forgotten how to talk, so is there something that can be done?

I meet him in the lobby. I bring my instruments in a wastebasket.

“It’s my first time,” I warn.

I go to work on him.

His first words: “I’ve got something in my eye. A kingdom or something.”

ERRAND

The girl behind the counter rang up my package of paper towels and said, “Will that be all?”

“No,” I said. “I want to suck out all of your memories.”

THE TROUBLE BETWEEN PEOPLE USUALLY GETS ITS START

The pastor kept saying, “Thy will be done,” and all I could think was, “Thy what will be done?”

I USED TO LOVE LPs

I used to love carrying them home from the store, the big, goofy flatness of the things.

I thought the numbers parenthesized after the song titles were letting you in on the time of day when the songs had been taped.

I thought the peak time for singers, bands, orchestras, was between 2:30 and 3:30.

LIKE THE LADY IN THE PLAY,

I have always depended on the strangeness of my kind.

SHE WAS CARDIACALLY ALL OVER THE PLACE

What they told me is that when the doctors opened him up, they found lots of accordion files, jars full of wheat pennies, a glockenspiel, a couple of storm windows, and told him there was nothing they could do.

RECORD PLAYER

I used to play my records with the volume turned all the way down.

I would lower my ear to the needle to hear the tiniest, trebliest versions of the songs.

I AM AWFULLY FOND OF THE INTERNET

Trouble is, I hang on its every word. I have old-fashioned, home-style dial-up that entitles me to seven screen names. I’ve finally curbed my online activity by using the “parental controls,” which I exercise by means of intricate settings from my primary screen name. The controls allow me to set restrictions on the nature and duration of the Internet activity conductable under each of the other six names. So for each of them I’ve permitted myself exactly one hour of activity each day, but it’s a different hour each day for each screen name, and unless I log on during that one hour, I’m out of luck. There’s no way, of course, that I can remember the allowable hour for each name for every day of the week, and I naturally never bothered to write any of it down. The result is that most of the time I can’t get onto the Internet at all, and it would be much too much trouble to go back and undo all the settings. So you might say, “Well, then, do all your business — whatever that might be, and it can’t be all that ennobling if you’ve gone and placed so many obstructions in your path — from your primary screen name.” Yes, yes, very good point, but somehow the Internet access from my primary screen name seems clogged, or something.

WORK

My humanity would have been misemployed no matter what direction I might have taken in life, but, no question, I have walked away cravenly from blocked-up photocopiers, paper jams of any kind.

A lot of toner has gone into all I have done.

THERE WERE WIDER AND WIDER SLITS IN A DAY

She had a three-legged table.

I always felt bad about that.

THE WHOLE DAY WAS TOSSING AHEAD OF HIM

As is generally the case, the father’s love for his daughter was sporadic and awful.

The town’s founders could have done a better job of laying things out so everything wouldn’t be within a stone’s throw.

I have to go around her to get anywhere.

GIRL

She wanted me to believe her best feature was her shadow.

PEOPLE KEPT OPENING WIDE

I keep seeing the phrase “a women” everywhere I look.

Trouble is, it can’t be just a typo anymore.

SECOND WIFE

The human body is far too hot.

It cooks things right out of your heart.

CESAREAN

I was hired to pack the old kind of computer disks into boxes for mailing, or maybe they weren’t even computer disks, because this might have been longer ago than that.

The supervisor said, “Just make sure you ball up some newspaper into every box to pad it.” He pointed to stacks and stacks of old papers banked against a wall.

Later, he checked in on me. Most of the papers were gone.

He picked up a box, then another, and another.

“Why the hell are these so heavy?”

FIRST WIFE

I don’t know which is finally sicker — specifics or engulfing

abstractions.

She said she was just looking for someone to ride out some sadness on.

MOTHER AND BANGED-UP SON

Looking back over everything I might have ever said, I see that I have never come down hard enough on any of the rooms I lived inside.