FICTION « In Which We Watch From Afar The Alive Thing »
Saturday, March 10, 2012 at 11:43AM Every Saturday from now until the sun dies we will feature a made-up story. You can find an archive of those stories here.
TV
by SPENCER T. CAMPBELL
Sometimes I would take a dress and lay it out and take some socks and lay them out and take some shoes and lay them out below the socks and take some ribbons and lay them out on the floor about a foot above the dress. Then I would take some construction paper and draw a nothing face on it with marker — a very easy, very nothing face, two arches for eyes and a mouth, nothing else, maybe eyebrows though, and nothing else, it’s so easy to make a face like that look like nobody at all — and I wouldn’t even cut the construction paper into a head-shape, but would lay it whole on the floor above the dress, and put the ribbons on top of the paper so it looked like nobody wearing all my clothes. Then I would take my Polaroid Colorpack camera and take pictures of the nobody on the floor, and lay those pictures in a sort of ring around the nobody and watch them come. Sometimes they came quickly and sometimes they took a long time. They never seemed to take the same time from occasion to occasion, but on every occasion each picture took the same amount of time as all the others, so maybe they did all take the same time every time, and maybe it was me taking time differently from occasion to occasion. Then, when the photos were done, I would take the camera again and take one of the whole scene. Then I would put that on my dresser and pick up the dress and the socks and the shoes and the ribbons and go to the closet and hang the dress up and line the shoes neatly underneath, and go to the dresser and fold the socks over once so they stayed neat, and put the socks in, and put the ribbons in, and go and take the construction paper and tear it up, and take the pictures — which hurt to tear, and sometimes bled color if you did — and so just fold them each neatly over once, and put them in the bin, all so I could have something to do while the final picture came. It made me itchier than anything to watch, so I needed a lot of distractions. After I’d thrown everything away, I’d wait with my hands knotted. It was awful time. But then at last I had the picture, and that was something. I’d look at it a while and try to get a picture in my head that was the same exactly as the picture in my hand. But I never could.
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Some other times, I would go downstairs and stare a long time at the shut TV. I got a glow from my reflection in it. It had to be shut or it wouldn’t show me; all the open TV showed was the TV. The TV sat in the room’s wasted corner, at an angle between the kitchen door and the stairs. It gave the room a new kind of wall and a new kind of opening, also.
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This was all before, and it’s the last I’ll say of it.
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Zach purchased the TV, and brought it in and set it there and looked at it for a long time in the corner without once moving, and then left the room and came back with a crate, and lifted the TV, and set it on the crate and stared at it a long time, and then left the room and brought a square of carpet in and lifted both the TV and the crate and set them on the square of carpet, and stared and nodded as though now it was good, and backed to the couch and looked right at the TV and smiled, and pulled at the clicker’s cord like a length of fishing wire until it was taut, and wiped his fingers over the buttons, and at last flipped it on, and I didn’t see any difference between this and just the plain new TV, or even the old TV, in terms of goodness, but I didn’t say so.
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If you turn off a light or a dishwasher or a car or lawnmower, the thing turns off, but if you turn a TV off it’s like turning it on in a different way.
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If you sit very close to a shut TV you see yourself blown in the middle, and if you move yourself from side to side the blowing changes, because the moving happens two ways at once.
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If you put your tongue on a very newly shut TV it bites softly. If you put your tongue on a TV that has been a little while shut it lightly breathes, sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t do anything. If you put your tongue on a TV that has been shut a while it is like touching something worse than dead, something that never was alive, and you get a finger-ache and your tongue goes stale and hangs, and you are pulled from the living world into the unworld of things that never were and never could be alive, and it is hard to tell whether all these things that are lying around are a presence or an absence. But the point is that this is a way to tell how new your shut TV is.
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If you get so close to the TV that the reflection crowds you, and you stare a long time, the room inside the TV becomes the only room you can imagine: flat, blown, square, light-dead. You can live there a while, but it is never long enough. Then, after a time, if you move very slowly away, it is like shrinking more and more inside your TV room, and then for a second, before the other room comes deepening in and just about knocks you to the ground, if you move slow enough away and make your attention to the room a loved thing, for a second you switch off and you are nowhere at all.
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I was pleased as a child and pleased through high school and pleased in college and as an adult to imagine myself pretty good at the basic household chores and the basic household machinery. I kept a nice house, though simple, on my own. It doesn’t matter now. I forgot where I was going. Which is maybe a way, in telling, of forgetting where you were before.
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When you move someplace new, it takes a while to spread out. It is all so strange for you at first that it takes time before you get a feeling for where it is you don’t fit. I got spread out in this house and found I didn’t know about the simplest things.
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Good coffee must be ground before it is steeped or brewed, then exposed to hot, not boiling, water. Only at this point will it release itself. The best way to make coffee is with a French press plunger and a fitted glass beaker or carafe. You take some good whole bean coffee, and you grind it coarsely, and take your measuring spoons and measure out eight round tablespoons, one at a time, and drop them, one at a time, into the fitted glass carafe, and you take four cups of water that have been brought to a boil on the range, and then let to settle until they are just under boiling, and you take about one tablespoon or two of this hot water, and you soak the grounds in it for thirty seconds to let them begin to open, and then you pour the rest of the water slowly on the grounds, and you stop it with the plunger, and you sit for four to five minutes and let it brew, and then slowly you plunge the grounds until they become a layer on the bottom, and then you take a shallow cup with an open mouth, so the aroma can breathe, and you add milk, or cream, or sugar. If you put the milk and sugar in first, it will save you stirring, but stirring can be nice, so there is a degree of improvisation involved in whether you put the milk and sugar in first or after, but you put your milk and sugar in and then you pour the coffee in and then you enjoy it, or you pour the coffee in and then you put the milk and sugar in and then enjoy it.
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Sometimes, especially by the second cup, the coffee will have be cooler than is ideal, but it’s OK, because you don’t want to go through the whole process again, and so you drink it that way and enjoy it anyway. But if you put the water in too hot it will ruin your coffee, so that is never an option. A cooler cup is not so bad, actually, and, because it is different than the first, hotter cup, it gives you a nice sense of the thing coming to an end, and wraps it in a different kind of memory that can be repeated again and again and again, and so it is nice to have a different feeling for the second cup and then the last after that, which is colder still and almost tepid, and has more of an acid twang, and pulls milk deeply to the bottom, it’s nice to have a sense of this meaning something different and being so.
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A TV in a dark room will put out a faint particulate glow, even when it is shut. If you creep into a completely dark room in the middle of the night, you get the feeling that the TV is on for you, even when it isn’t. If you shut your eyes and let the dark creep and the color residue freckle away until all that’s left is a black wash and you open them again, the TV seems even brighter and more kind and watchful. If you go up to it and put your hand on it, or lay your cheek beside it, or lick it, you get the strange sensation of light without heat, a touch without contour, and you can lie for a long time within this clutch, which is also a kind of soft electric rain, and sometimes even sleep, right there.
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Very good coffee is nice to enjoy black, but even very good coffee can be acid and leave a sharp backtaste that by the third cup is like a spread of fire, so I use 2% milk or whole milk, either way. Cream, I find, fills it out too much. Milk opens up a whole other kind of variable with regard to its freshness and its effect on your coffee, so it is never a bad idea to smell or even taste it before putting it in, because even a little bad milk can ruin your coffee and consequently your morning. Milk that is just slightly sour is OK to drink in coffee, though, and gives the cup a nice twist, and in fact my favorite way to drink coffee is to take a bit of milk that is just slightly sour and mix it with very good coffee brewed in a French press plunger, but Zach doesn’t like it that way, so I don’t often have it that way. Zach has an awful disregard for sour milk, and is always on the prowl, smelling and tasting the milk we have and sometimes he declares even a very new, very full carton of milk to be off, and hurls it in the trash and shudders a little as though just the smell or the taste of the milk he had to test it had spread into his insides and made them bad, too, and sometimes after this he stalks to the upstairs bathroom and slams the door and spends several minutes audibly heaving above the toilet bowl and moaning for a glass of fizzy water or an aspirin or a hot towel, and moaning about how his insides are churling up, and sometimes I creep over to the trashcan and very quietly lift the lid with just the tips of my fingers, while in the bathroom he is crying and moaning and churling, and with the tips of my other fingers I retrieve the milk as carefully as possible, so the bag doesn’t rustle and so I can carefully replace it in a second without the trash being visibly disturbed, because that’s one thing that Zach has another second sense about, and I raise it to my mouth and take a long drink, and it is always just fine, so Zach is sometimes overzealous about the milk, but on the other hand you could say he’s cautious, which is an admirable quality to have.
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When I was first brought into the house it was in the capacity of a guest, so the household machinery, including the making and enjoyment of coffee, was not an issue; it did not feature in my capacity as a guest to understand it or to make it work. And so it was for several months that I dawdled and fussed over the machinery, pleased to imagine I was pretty good with it, before it became clear to me how miserably I understood everything. It is awful to finally spread out in a place and discover that your grasp on even the simplest things is so poor. The first time I made coffee here, it was with a CoffeeMan automatic drip coffee maker, which is the least troubled way possible to make coffee and heats the water for you and keeps the coffee warm for you automatically with a built-in electric hot plate, and about the only thing it doesn’t do is add milk, and it is the kind of machine that even a very dim child can operate more or less intuitively, and so it was a real embarrassment when this first pot of coffee was nothing but sickly, black sludge that even milk and sugar couldn’t cut, but just sort of pooled on the surface of and veined into here and there in shallows, and Zach was not angry but visibly embarrassed for me, sitting at the kitchen table with his elbows up and his head cradled in his hands and looking at me through the long silence, and it was a real awakening to discover that my grasp on the machinery was not even up to the level of a very dim child’s, and at that moment the scales fell away and every appliance in the kitchen struck me with its terrible presence, and I was made darkly aware of my misrelation to it all.
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The refrigerator is the color of sweet cream butter or a light custard, and it has rounded corners and is cavernous and very new, and I like the refrigerator very much because it hardly requires you, you just plug it in and go, and you can shut the door and put it right out of your mind and it just does its job, so that even if you moved away or fell ill or died outright, it would go on doing its job, keeping things cool and fresh and new, and it is wonderful to have something you can count on to outlast you like that. But it does require some work, and this is another instance where I was basically at the level of a baby in terms of understanding what the machinery wanted of me. There is a great temptation you must turn all your effort into avoiding whenever you see the lovely knobs to turn the refrigerator and the freezer to their maximally cold settings, the thought being to keep your goods coldest and freshest longest, but this will ruin your refrigerator and possibly your goods, because nettings of ice will colonize there and get into the workings and colonize those until the refrigerator chokes out and all your goods spoil, and the worst feeling in the world is to open the door to a warm box of teeming, sweating goods, so it is never an option to turn the knobs that way, and it is a good idea to leave them at the medium setting because that is what’s factory-recommended, and so that is what’s best. If you do turn the knobs a little colder, it will take 24-hours for the adjustment to take place, and the waiting time for that is just awful, and there is a great temptation to open the door and put your hand inside to see how it’s shaping up, temperature-wise, but this is the worst thing you can do, because opening the door sets the balance off, especially during periods of adjustment, and it must be stringently avoided at all costs.
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If you unplug a TV, it’s yours and dead. If you plug it into the wall again, it’s alive, but isn’t yours anymore. The TV wants to belong to itself, which is an admirable quality. And you can’t spend all night unplugging it and owning it and replugging it and giving it back over and over again, because you feel so wrung in the morning, and etched below your eyes with fingers of indecision, and anyway it’s good to give the TV what it wants, so I usually end up plugging it in and giving it its thrall. But that’s a choice you have to make.
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The refrigerator requires a complete clean at least once every week, and this is something you cannot do on a whim but must plan for in order to ensure counter space for all your goods and time to let it dry, and this is another case in which it is nice to have a regular schedule to count on and look forward to and eventually fall into without thinking, and it’s also best for the refrigerator and best for your goods and your day, all of which reap a lot of benefits from regular work. First you fill up the sink with warm, not hot, water, and you take some dish soap and put a few squirts in so it’s barely foaming. Then you go to the refrigerator and open it and look at your goods and form a mental picture of approximately how much space they take up, and then you go to the counter nearest the refrigerator and clear off a space approximately equal to your mental picture, and then you go and you get your goods and put them in the space on the counter. Now time is of the essence, because the goods begin to sweat almost instantly and you can just imagine them turning inside their containers. So you take an absorbent cloth and dip it in the frothy water and wring it out until it almost isn’t wet anymore, and you go to the refrigerator and scrub all the surfaces until the rag gets cold, and then you go refresh it in the water and wring it out again until it’s warm and almost dry, and you take it and you continue scrubbing until every surface is clean. Then you take the meat drawer out and the vegetable crisping drawers out and the dairy hood off the door and you drop those in the water and you scrub them just as though they were dishes, which, when you think about it, they’re even dirtier than dishes because they’ve had, for example, blood tracing into them all week from raw meat, so you maybe give them a little more rigorous attention than with dishes. Then you take a dry cloth and absorb the worst of the water from the drawers and the hood and you set everything on a different counter, and you unplug the sink and let it drain. It’s a good idea to rinse the sink with a dousing of very hot water to eradicate any blood or vegetable matter that may linger. Then, after the sink has been renewed, you put the plug back in and fill it up again with warm water, not hot, and you take your dry cloth and you dip it in the water and go back to the refrigerator and scrub all the surfaces again with clean water to get the soap off, and you go back to the different counter and take the drawers and the hood and dip them into the warm water and rinse the soap off, and then you take another dry cloth and you absorb the worst of the water and you set them aside again to let them air dry. If they do not air dry, they will streak or even mildew. Then you have to wait for a long time with the door open for the surfaces to air dry, but if you do not let the surfaces air dry, then nets of ice will creep in, especially if you’ve given into temptation and turned the knobs to a setting above what’s factory-recommended, and you have the choking of the workings problem again, and the teeming goods, even if you haven’t turned the knobs all the way. This waiting period is awful time, but you can use it to drain the sink and rinse again with hot water and take a good look at your goods in the open air, which always look sad that way, crowding like orphans, and try to find anything extraneous and remove it from the crowd and throw it away, which feels purifying, even if it is, in a way, like chucking orphans. If you are uncompromising with your goods, and chuck everything that is not absolutely essential and absolutely fresh, you end up with a much smaller amount of goods after cleaning the fridge than you had to begin with, and so it looks newer and cleaner than ever when you are finished. Then, after the refrigerator is totally dry and you have checked with your driest cloth that there isn’t any hidden moisture lingering inside, you can finally replace the goods and shut the door and forget about it.
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Don’t own pets. Don’t have children.
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I think a reflection is a personal thing, because it’s the look you have for yourself, and it always bothers me when Zach comes and peeks in on me at the mirror, and I always tell him to scram because it feels like he’s come and rubbed some part of me off and looked at the exposure underneath, and I feel like it must be gruesome to see me this way, like when you crack the skin of a Polaroid and look at the nat of tense fiber bleeding color, the chemical glob that waits in the unexposed film like a clenched fist and opens when you take the picture and spreads into the picture, and when you peel the skin back afterwards you find it never was a picture, but an object consisting only of itself, something brute that when you took the picture and released it never had the picture in mind, but only whatever shape of its continuing existence would most approach and approximate the picture, and you see that it never was whatever the image was at all but a momentary tensing in the arrangement of its otherness. This is why you must never take a photo of yourself, it’s too much of a wrench, but only photos of things that are already things. I guess what I’m saying is that when you see far enough inside something, you can’t make it relate to you anymore, and the farther inside something you go the harder it is to find yourself there, and I am always worried that Zach sees his notness in me when he pokes in and sees my exposed and personal and separate self in the mirror, and I think this is the reason he wants to look, that there is a lure he feels to express himself to me at my most uncomprehending, when I have shut myself of most of him, to encase me in the bottle of his own experience of me as though I were becoming more and more a message he himself had written, and it is not fair, because in a way all my tending of the machinery that he brings and sets up for me is a way of assuring myself to him, of spreading out what all of me is his for sharing, and it’s a lot I do for him and his machinery and a lot of myself I make available to him that way, and everyone needs some time to be alone for her own looking, and for this reason letting him see the way I come up in the face of the shut TV is never an option, because that is myself rid most completely of anything that isn’t, a kind of dead signal that I like to become, because it doesn’t go anywhere and doesn’t belong to anybody, but makes itself back into itself, continually becoming what it is. A furiously moot point.
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I have a whole box of Polaroids, but I’m no fool about them, I know they aren’t for me. Every picture you take is always the only picture you could take. The frame is a real thing. If the picture looks like it belongs to you, that’s a lie, because inside it’s still saying, No vacancy, no vacancy, no vacancy.
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Pets and children are nice ideas, but they’re not really worth it when you think of all the extra cleaning you’ll have to do.
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People like to think of dirt as something contrary to human beings, as though the most human space would be the cleanest space, but that’s an unfair view. People and dirt are completely related: if you had a house where no people lived, it would stay clean all by itself. This is why cleaning seems like it is about the machinery, but is really just a way of seeing what your actual shape is, in living, and by cleaning you pull yourself back a little until you are not too much bigger than yourself, so you can have space again to spread into.
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Sometimes I lose myself for a minute and imagine a nobody’s house, where all the appliances just sit and course with electricity.
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The machinery is something that people created for themselves, but it would work a whole lot better without them.
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Zach calls this my ironical point of view, but it seems pretty realistic to me. Sometimes a Zach’s eyes flatten and go moist and he floats the idea that a dog or cat might give me something to be happy about and find caring in. I always laugh out loud and put my hand on his shoulder and go over, in detail, all the new cleaning tasks a pet would entail, because Zach has trouble seeing the big picture without it being spelled out for him in detail. Sometimes he protects his eyes with his fingers and rises without saying anything and goes upstairs and goes to sleep, and I must paint a convincing picture because the issue always disappears for a while. Kids and animals, you have no time to love them because you’re always so busy cleaning up after them. Like the Polaroids, kids and animals are not really for you, the way your TV or refrigerator or blender is — they just happen in the same space as you, and once they spread out there, there’s nothing you can ever do to simplify it again.
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A fish would be the closest thing to a TV, because it brings its own container and does everything inside it, but I couldn’t look at a fish for too long without wondering what it would be like inside there, to be a fish, too, without feeling a gurgle of jealousy about the fish in its bowl. So a fish would be a bad idea, too, in terms of getting anything accomplished.
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It’s hard to know exactly what you own and what owns you. Maybe a better question would be about how much you take from something versus what you lose. I think that the best things don’t own anything and aren’t owned by anything, either, but it seems hard to think this way for long.
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The TV screen boils up in the middle, curving pleasantly like a clam or oyster, but the screen is not a shell, it is a skin, an effervescent membrane, that expresses everything inside it when it’s on and everything outside it when it’s shut. Everything inside it is the same for everyone, but everything outside it is different, and depends on the particular shape of the living that goes on around it. Another way to think of it is that the unplugged and shut TV is yours and dead, the plugged and shut TV is yours to share and alive, and the plugged and on TV is alive and isn’t anybody’s. But it’s good to let a thing be what it is, especially when it’s so giving, and it’s good to join sometimes the sharing that everybody else is doing, which reminds you of them and your place in them. This is what prime-time means: everybody sharing at the same time what is given and isn’t lessened by the giving, everybody watching the same shows at the same time and furling out into the same mind, it’s like everybody breathing the same air. If everybody lived in the same place and ate the same food and slept the same and had the same clothes to wear and moved the same way between the same rooms and had the same conversations, pretty soon they’d have the same ideas, too, and the same bodies, and this is what it’s like to have the TV on. Something herds inside you. I think that the best thing would be to have the world divided exactly in two, the people on one side and the machinery on the other, and everyone would go about their own business, the people would gurgle and slop, making babies, and these would grow and have their own babies, and everything would heave forward for a while and then start to pool and spread and equalize, and after a few years the people side would be nothing but a tepid, unbreakable ocean, and on the machine side the machinery would go on, vast and motionless, cold and settled, unused, unsoiled and unspoilt and unshared: the way things last tells you how to respect them, and by lasting, the machinery would lay claim to what it deserves, and by pooling and oozing, the people would, too, and this way there would be a rearrangement of things, with the machinery on top and the people on bottom, the way that in a boat certain objects stay bolted and others collect into the corners, but this isn’t very realistic, because people want the machinery to manufacture certain ideas about them and keep those buoyed up, and they confuse what they leave on the machinery and what they take from the machinery for the thing itself, and so people will probably go on depending on the machinery and using it, and the machinery will probably go on depending on the people to scrub away their stain of use and renew it, and everything will heave forward all together, and no one will know if they are one thing or the other or both or shared or alone, and this is really just a way to stretch the same net over a void that will not accept it, and which, the net, everything real passes through on its way from one void to the other, and maybe only every once in a while something frisks the sides of the netting as it passes through and sets reverberation failing out across it, which for a moment feels like life, but isn’t.
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Nothing’s easy.
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Some things in nature tumble and others ooze and some serenely fall, but you can’t see any of it, just feel the net’s feeling the passing-through of it, and you can’t see the net either, but it’s the quavering joint between you and other people and people and the machinery, vast and tense and tensely shivering, and it’s an awful burden, and I’d release it if I could only find where in my hands I’m holding it.
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There is such a thing as spreading out too quickly in a place, which is when you get used to things enough to forget them before you’ve known them long enough to know them, and this sets the balance off, and it’s like creeping around with a body that isn’t yours through a space you can’t see half of, and the objects inside are half-decayed and you move through these wrong objects with your wrong body, touching them and taking care of them and tending them with what you think is your kind of love, and you keep putting your wrongly-shaped hands on them and feeling for what is right in them, feeling for what they’re giving back in shape and weight and space, and trying to form a mental picture of it all that’s the same exactly as what it is, and but you might as well be someone completely different moving through some completely other space, and the worst thing about it is you can never know it’s happening to you and there is no way to correct your wrong vision and get the right vision of how things are, because you never see it’s wrong, it looks so right.
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Zach and I once floated the idea of children very seriously for a while, and then we dropped it. This was before, which I bring up again only to drop it, too, in a moment. But you can visualize it without worrying where it goes or what it connects to or what’s underneath it, because it doesn’t go anywhere and it there’s nothing under it.
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It used to be that love was still so much around us that it was like an atmosphere we were always pushing ourselves through, and the pushing was what gave energy to the love, which gave energy to the pushing. Before. I don’t really remember it. What it felt like. Except the feeling of pushing yourself through something that was nice to push through and warm, and, like the French press coffee maker, where it isn’t coffee on one side of the plunger where on the other side suddenly it is, love abrupted like that into a good. But I don’t really remember it, so I might be wrong.
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It feels so good to walk through your house when everything is clean and in order. You feel free to become a part of anything’s business: the ceiling fan, the alarm clock, the shower, the washing machine. A messy house chokes the machinery, and some of the machinery disappears, even if the machines don’t.
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It’s a real jolt to watch TV, sometimes. When you are looking out a window or driving around in the car, it’s not at all like watching TV, even though it looks like it is. Windows enlarge your look, but what comes from a TV is a barrage of flat places, flat sounds, the very quick pulse that flattens you, too. Look at the way the TV electrifies a dark room. Look at the startled shadows under the eyes and nose, and on the walls. And the sound: a flat fly-swatter of noise that hits you right in the face, right in the eyes, an echoless onslaught. The TV makes every room the same room: the TV’s room. Zach and I think watching TV is a good thing to do together, and it’s something you can’t help but do together, because you’re always doing it with everybody.
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Every person in America watches TV and thinks it’s good to do together.
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But nothing happens on TV. You can’t follow it. You can’t really implicate yourself in what’s going on. Only the cascade of sheets of image that stick to you and curl around you and coat you like cellophane.
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The most wonderful thing about the vacuum cleaner is all the feelers it has, which are at your disposal and are a cinch to plug in and plug out, and it’s like driving around an improvised insect which slips into every task you give it, burrowing and darting and chewing into all the unwatched corners and undersides of couches, chairs, bookshelves, crates, refrigerators, cabinets, tables, beds, dressers, and bedstands you can’t even fathom, the undersides. Originally I used a Eureka Golden PowerTouch Cordaway vacuum cleaner, which had an elegance and economy of form, like a very spruce young girl, and a lovely, tempting three-position trigger switch studding the PowerTouch power grip’s neck, and a beautiful box-top brocade bag. It was a very feminine, very agile, very graceful machine, and it made you feel just like you were Fred Astaire, but the zipper went bad on the bag and I had to chuck it. I didn’t say a word to Zach, thinking I could scrounge enough to get a new Eureka Golden PowerTouch Cordaway vacuum cleaner before the carpet went rotten, and for a time I forewent every frilly thing I could think to disallow myself and packed every pinched penny into my purse and sat on the couch with the purse held tight on my lap, and when Zach came home I gave him a smirk and said nothing, feeling paralyzed, but wishful, but paralyzed also to act on my wish, which was to shoo him right out of the house and begin madly vacuuming and washing and scrubbing and tidying, but I couldn’t begin because my access to the vacuum had come undone and that’s what paralyzed me, and but I felt so wrenched by this one short-circuit that presently my other allegiances to the machinery began to fail and fall away and I couldn’t do anything, I sat on the couch all day and communed with the shut TV, and when Zach came home I told him nothing about what all I was not doing, and my purse got fatter and heavier until it started to feel itchy, dead, contaminant, and I loathed carrying it around through all the rooms I was losing my relation to, but I was scared that if I left it anywhere I might forget it, and then Zach would find it and ask what it was I was saving for, and I couldn’t bear for him to know how brazenly I was mishandling our house and our things, how I was letting the carpet coil and clot with filth and the dishes stack and sour and the windows stale and the shower scum and the refrigerator, for all I knew, suffocate under cruel, tense nettings ice, and how I could do nothing at all but whiten my knuckles around the dead weight of my purse and watch myself blow and slide across the surface of the TV’s room, and before long I had enough in my purse to buy a whole new Eureka Golden PowerTouch Cordaway vacuum cleaner and a spare besides, but in the waiting time the house had gone positively to mulch and I found, to my horror, that I was too disgusted to move, too paralyzed by disgust even to take the car to Sears or even to lug my purse over to the phone and plant one red hand on the receiver and call for delivery, and I knew that eventually even my connection to the TV would expire and I would be riven of every connection I’d ever had to anything, and become no more than the evaporate of what once was a person, a nothing face on a nobody body strapped to a purse bursting with useless money, and I never told Zach anything at all about this, but this is apparently another second sense of his, because one day he came home to find me lolling on the couch and peering into the TV’s room, my eyes squelched with tears, and he crept up to me with his own eyes huge and unblinking and he caught my wrist in his hand to stop the lolling and he presented me with a brand new Hoover Lark TurboPower upright vacuum cleaner, with attachment nozzle and attachments, which is a very strong, good machine, but not as pretty as the old Eureka Golden PowerTouch Cordaway, and so after I got over my complete shock and came to his presence a little and registered the gift and let the idea of it spread out a little in my head, and I began to weigh the pros and cons of the Hoover Lark TurboPower upright vacuum cleaner versus the Eureka Golden PowerTouch Cordaway vacuum cleaner, I was a little angry with him for getting the wrong thing, which looked heavier even than my purse, and so I couldn’t fathom lugging it around, and I really doubted I’d ever clean anything again, but I didn’t say so, I didn’t say a word. Maybe I smiled. But then the next day I dragged myself out of bed and took some special time making coffee the way I like it best, and then forced myself over to the closet and took the new vacuum cleaner and tested with a furtive little back-and-forth roll, and then sighed and plugged it in and started to use it, and at first it felt like pushing around a whirring, belching sofa, and I couldn’t imagine dragging myself through this day after day, but soon I got used to it, and once you get used to it you find it’s a dream to use and you want to vacuum all the time.
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It is very difficult to find a wrong thing on TV. Nothing on TV is too good, but nothing is very wrong, either. Most of it is about the same.
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You really should vacuum every single day. It can become a nice thing to look forward to after coffee, so the last coffee isn’t so much of a wrench. If you live in a two-story home, it’s a good idea to start on the furthest room of the top floor and work your way down, because dust settles, and if you started at the bottom floor and worked your way up, then by the time you got to the furthest room of the top floor the dust would cloud and sweep behind you and whoosh down the stairs and settle on the stairs and on the bottom floor and it would be just as dirty as before, and all you would have done is rearrange where the dust was settling, and the idea of starting all over again is sometimes tempting, but is never an option, because you still have to mop the kitchen, do the dishes, clean the refrigerator, wipe the counters, prepare dinner, clean up from dinner, etc. So you start at the top floor, furthest room, and you plug the Hoover Lark TurboPower upright vacuum into the furthest outlet and you work away from it in neat, regular strides that you have to go over three times before moving on to coax the worst dirt from inside the netted blades of carpet fibers, covering about a three-foot patch of carpet with every stride. You are setting yourself up for disaster if you work toward the plug, because you’ll end up walking all over the area you’ve just vacuumed and you’ll have to do it over again, so you start right next to the plug and you work out and then, when the cord is so taut you can twang it, you give it a quick little jerk with your wrist to yank it from the wall, like you’re flinching, or fishing. If you vacuum as you should, you’ll very soon get an automatic mental picture of where all the outlets are, it’s like knowing by heart all the exits on the freeway, it’s the very same sense of shooting down a featureless rivet but knowing exactly where you can plug back in and reconnect with the machinery if you wish to, and when you’re vacuuming it’s like driving down the freeway and taking every exit and getting back on the freeway and taking every next exit, because if you vacuum as you should, you will use every outlet in the house.
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Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, 60 Minutes, Gunsmoke, Medical Center, Hawaii Five-O, Cannon, Kojak, Kung Fu, The Odd Couple, The Brady Bunch, The Brian Keith Show, The Dean Martin Show, M*A*S*H, All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, The Carol Burnett Show, Mannix, Barnaby Jones, The CBS Evening News, The NBC Nightly News, ABC World News.
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One lovely thing about vacuuming like this is that it bends the carpet this way and that, and exposes the color difference between the this and the that side of the carpet, so that when you’re finished, the entire house looks tiled in perfect rectangular sections like a vast carpeting of mute green TV screens. But the real thrill comes from using the attachments, which, to use them as you should, require familiarity, flexibility, and expertise. The Hoover Lark TurboPower upright vacuum has an attachment nozzle that comes alive at the flick of a switch, and four attachments. I was so upset when Zach brought the Hoover Lark TurboPower upright home, and just coming out of my hopelessness, too, that I never bothered to learn the true names of the attachments, and it’s a real embarrassment now to call them all the wrong names, which I made up subsequently, but a wrong thing is better than nothing at all, and everything that performs a task should be given some name, anyway, I think, because to perform a task is just about the best thing anything can hope to do. I would love to check the manual and get the right names right, but I incinerated it in the fireplace. The four attachments that come with the Hoover Lark TurboPower upright vacuum are: the fuzzy brush attachment, the rubber brush attachment, the rectilinear mouth attachment, and the slanted mouth attachment. This is not including the snaky hose attachment or the stiff plastic extension attachment, which, the hose attachment, is what actually plugs into the attachment nozzle, and, the plastic extension attachment, is what plugs into the hose attachment to extend it. You really have to use your wits about the attachments, because each of them is good for some particular tasks and bad for other particular tasks, and those the other attachments are good for. To vacuum tile or hardwood or any hard seat, counter, table, sink, dresser, or bedstand surface, you want to use the fuzzy brush attachment. The fuzzy brush attachment has lovely, silken, pliant bristles that jostle the dust on any hard surface and activate it and get it ready to be sucked inside. To vacuum any soft cloth or fabric or fuzzy or furry surface, such as clothing, towels, bedsheets, sofas, sponges, mats, pets if you have them, drapes, or flags, you want to use the rubber brush attachment, which teases the surfaces with its tense, firm, nipplish beads, and so activates the dust and gets it ready to be sucked inside. To vacuum any high-up surfaces, such as doortops, light fixtures, ceiling fans, ceiling corners, ceilings generally, windowtops, or vents and grates, you want to use the rectilinear mouth attachment in combination with the stiff plastic extension attachment. The rectilinear mouth attachment necks forward in a sort of leer to make it easy to reach such hard-to-reach surfaces as these and jostle the dust — which is out of sight, and deathly, because it is so easy to put it right out of your mind and let it lie dormant up on your doortop and clump and multiply — and activate it and unclump it and get it ready to be sucked inside. To vacuum the out-of-sight undersides of things like couches, chairs, bookshelves, crates, refrigerators, cabinets, tables, beds, dressers, and bedstands, you want to use the slanted mouth attachment, either by itself or in combination with the plastic extension attachment, and the slanted mouth attachment is very slim and very crafty and goes everywhere you don’t ever go so you don’t have to, and activates the dust there, and also coins, tabs, tickets, lint, bugs both living and dead, paperclips, strings and threads and strands of stray fabric, hair, jewelry, food, tacks, nail shards, also the tight bearinglike balls of anything that can be balled, such as newspaper, napkins, tin foil, cellophane, wrappers of all sorts, dead skin, pages, filth, tar, glue, peelings of all sorts, etc., and gets them ready to be sucked in. Undersides are the vast, canceled swatches of space that occupy every room and that you don’t know a thing about and don’t want to know a thing about, and it makes you itchier than anything to think about all these negative spaces that live with you like ghosts, and are unrelated to you and unrelatable to anything that’s yours except as its required counter, its hidden and private deepening, to express the way that every object you put in a room to fill it carves it up, too. And you don’t want to look at it, so you attach the hose attachment and attach the plastic extension attachment and attach the slanted mouth attachment and jab it into all these blank places and pivot it around and suck and jab and suck and jab and never look, until you’re sure everything has been sucked in, which sometimes takes all day, and it’s very purifying, but it takes too long to do it all the time as part of your daily vacuuming routine, so all week long you creep around with stress jitters and an animal alertness to every unseen thing collecting on the undersides and growing and teeming and clumping until the carved spaces are busier than the filled spaces, and the empty, other part of your house is busier and fuller than the part of your house that’s supposed to be full and yours, and your stomach gets a hole inside when you get the wrench of the idea that the places that should be empty have filled and the places that should be full are hollow, you feel awfully upside-down, and on whatever day you’ve allowed for you to do the full vacuuming routine you erupt from bed hot with anticipation and rush downstairs and swing the closet open and take the vacuum and take the attachments, and hotly, joyously vacuum everywhere with no sense of time until the vacuum’s engine is scalding hot and exhausted and begins to sputter, and your ears ring, and you lie right down on the couch with the back of your hand across your eyes and bask in the new, huge, good presence of yourself in a house activated to accept you, and sometimes you fall asleep right there for the first time in a week, and sometimes you even skip coffee, too.
Spencer T. Campbell is a writer living in New York. TV is an excerpt from a forthcoming longer work. You can find his twitter here.
"Ordinary People" - Ceremony (mp3)
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fiction, spencer campbell
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