The Hoarder's Son

Part I

I am no prophet—and here's no great matter;   
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,   
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker
- T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

The only neatness in the house was in the stacking of pizza boxes in Randy's room.  These stacks were geometric, intentional, almost organized.  Despite the thick coating of mold and the smell, the boxes were a refreshing change of pace from the scatter and disorder of the chaos and debris piled throughout the rest of the premises.  
    Unlike his mother, Randy kept nothing inside of his pizza boxes.  Barbara would have kept them for storing small things - scraps of fabric, spools of thread.  Not Randy, he just never saw the point in throwing them away.  It was a wasted effort in the roach-infested house.  He had never seen his mother clean, nor his grandmother, and both had allowed such a congregation of garbage to accumulate that Randy's collection of pizza boxes and Pepsi bottles was negligible.  He had taken out a few stacks when he could no longer reach the door, but given up long before they all were gone, and quickly replenished them.
    Less organized were Randy's books.  Most of them were stuffed under the bed, others were strewn across the floor. The works of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and H.P. Lovecraft.  Randy was fascinated with horror.  He fancied himself a prince of darkness in the same way so many middle-aged men fancied themselves orcs or the husbands of anime princesses.  It was as likely a fantasy as holding a job or finding any woman.  He laughed at most horror movies and thought it made him an unmatchable dark force – a man impervious to all things terrifying.  He kept himself surrounded by the water damaged tomes of all the masters of horror for inspiration to maintain his dark persona.
    Randy wasn't like his mother.  He considered his mess of torn horror and sci-fi titles a collection rather than a hoard.  His boxes were just a bit of trash in his own space.  He would admit he was lazy any day, and his bad foot pained him too badly to make daily trips out to the trash, but that didn't make him like his mother.
    Since Randy's mother, Barbara, had grown so hard of hearing, he no longer bothered to mute his computer.  Moaning filled his room.  Randy worked himself as he watched the bouncing breasts of the supple young space princess, her pink spandex top ripped aside to expose them.  Her groans helped him along.  She was no Nichelle Nichols but the thrown-together storyline evoked some distant memories of the science-fiction heroines that saw him through puberty some forty years ago.  
    The princess squealed, her breasts still bouncing as the man beneath her bucked her up and down.  Randy felt himself groaning too.  He was drawing nearer, his climax imminent - 
    "Randall!" His mother's voice pierced with the harshness of a woman who had smoked for a good fifty years.  It startled him out of his fantasy, but he didn't pause his video.  He was certain she still couldn't hear or make out the moans.
    "What, ma?" He shouted back out over the noise of his speakers.
    "Come eat," she demanded.  Her heavy footsteps crunched as she left his locked doorway atop piles of miscellany.  Randy slunk back in his chair for a moment, watching the porn star princess still.  He wondered for a moment if he would have time to finish up before she would come back angry that he had ignored her.  He decided against it, though.  He had grown soft and was having more and more trouble as he aged correcting that.   Forty years of the same palm and routine had deadened him a bit to the sensation.  He had thought of ordering one of those handheld molds of a porn star's vagina he discovered on his more nefarious internet searches, but he was certain his mother would go through a package if it appeared on their doorstep for him.  She didn't quite understand privacy, nor did she understand that a grown man had some needs that could not be fulfilled by his mother.
    Randy groaned in annoyance and clicked down the video.  The room went silent.  As he pushed his chair back he felt his bones resisting.  The uncomfortable downward curve of his upper spine fought against him as he tried to straighten himself up.  His arthritic knees resisted.  His bad foot struggled beneath him.  At only fifty-five, he had a weaker body than even his obese mother.  Eventually, though, he stood as straight as he had for the last several years.  His spine still curved, his legs never quite straightening out, he clutched for his cane and limped out the door.
    The walls were invisible in the hallway as well, but where Randy's room was lined neatly with boxes, this room and the rest of the house was piled haphazardly with things that may once have been valuable.  The stacks of old furniture, of trinkets, of statues, of building materials, of half-done crafts, were impossibly tall.  There were more pizza boxes here as well, but these were used for storage - scraps of old fabric that Barbara imagined she would use to make patchwork quilts were stored inside, soaking up grease and cheese.  The objects towered precariously, treacherous pillars of heavy and unstable materials.
There was a pathway carved out of the mess on the hallway floor, but even the path was just a pile of garbage small enough to walk on.  The floor was covered as usual with the debris of mother's hoarding.  A cardboard Hamburger Helper box was squished flat on the ground among piles of plastic wrappings – from cheese, from the film of frozen dinners, from the dozens of things she bought every day, making her rounds about the local thrift shops and dumpsters, never mind that she was legally blind and was not supposed to drive.  She would have to mow down more than a pedestrian or two before she would ever stop accumulating crap.  So far all she had managed to hit was a parked car and no one could know that was her.
    Randy waded across the path of garbage to find the kitchen where his mother and grandmother were waiting for him.  There was no such path in the kitchen or living rooms as there was in the hall.  Anywhere you ventured, you would have to do some climbing.  There were chairs and a table but those were covered as well.  Stacks of papers took up every seat.  Unopened mail, ads and newspapers, the torn-open envelopes from social security and disability checks, and so, so many ignored bills would never find their way to a wastebasket and instead, lived on the table.  Atop them was a few days' worth of dishes, shoved aside rather than cleaned.  Amid them was today's dinner.  A pan of greyish chicken thighs, still sizzling in grease and table salt, was set on a pile of newspapers that would likely catch fire under the heat of the pan if it weren't for the dampness in the room.  A bowl of mashed potatoes made fresh from store-brand flakes sat unnaturally white and runny atop another stack.
    Randy's mother was standing at the counter, itself littered with a seemingly endless pile of plastic film and moldy cardboard.  She was pouring from a two liter bottle of store-brand cola into a 32-ounce refillable gas station cup.  His grandmother was in the attached living room, visible in the open floorplan of the house, she sat in her chair, small and decrepit, surrounded by pathways where the garbage on the floor was piled low enough for her 75-year-old daughter to climb over, but too tall for her 101-year-old hips.  Unable to make her way into the kitchen, she stayed in her usual spot on the recliner, rocking lightly with a plate of food on her lap.  She barely seemed aware of it, though.  She didn't touch the food or look at it.  She just rocked mindlessly while staring at nothing.
    Randy approached the cabinet and grabbed a plate for himself.  He grabbed two chicken thighs and scooped up a mountain of imitation potatoes and then copied his mother in draining the rest of the cola into another large cup.  Between the two of them, they had killed a few bottles throughout the day.  They had always had voracious appetites, both of them, but it was just starting to catch up with Randy over the last fifteen years as he reached middle age.  His mother had always been fat, but Randy's speedy metabolism kept him naturally thin until his late thirties, when he had quickly ballooned and now sported a big round soda belly.
    Randy set the empty bottle back on the counter.  He didn't put the cap back on, didn't throw it away.  His mother did not do it for him.  The bottle became a part of the counter, just like the plastic wrap and empty cans and other empty bottles.  It took its place there and blended in immediately with a dozen others.  An hour later, if you'd asked Randy to find the bottle he'd discarded just that day, he would never have remembered which one it had been.
    "You don't thank your mother for dinner anymore?"  Randy's mother accused.  She didn't snap at him, only spoke with a general air of disapproval.  What she disapproved of, exactly, was hard to detect.  He spent the better part of several days locked in his room now, perhaps she felt abandoned.  Perhaps she just hadn't found any good loot in her daily dumpster dives today.  Mother's moods were unpredictable.  Granted, they were usually negative but the cause of her negativity was unpredictable.  Of course it was only at home that she let her grouchiness show.  Ask any stranger and they'd tell you she was a saint.  A sweet old lady, a grandmother whose estranged daughter and grandkids never called her and spent all her time alone. 
Of course, unlike her, Randy hadn't been out and about for quite some time.  He rarely left the house anymore.  He hadn't driven himself in years and he didn't really love going out with his mom.  He hadn't had that many places to go to begin with, but he had once loved to stop by the library every couple of days.  Now he just read the same books he had had for a while.  He used to stop by the video store twice a week, but now he watched the movies he could figure out how to stream and he played downloadable PC games and watched porn.  No more library.  No more Hollywood Video. 
    "Thanks, ma," he managed to say.  Having been alone in his room for quite some time, Randy examined the room for a discernible change in the scenery.  There was new garbage around, he was certain, but there was too much there already for anything new to stand out.
The cat's litter box sat tilted on top of a few boxes, its contents so overflowing that the cat had long since abandoned it.  Now, it seemed, it had abandoned them altogether as it had been several days since they had seen her. Glancing around, he looked for other signs of the cat, not really expecting to find any.  She had been missing for weeks and it was unusual for one of their pets to venture back home once they made their escape.  "You seen Patty?"
    "She'll be back," his mother said with the unfounded confidence she always held.  The cat was gone.  Randy knew it.  He wondered whether she knew it, too, and wanted to avoid admitting she had lost another pet, or if she was truly convinced by her own fruitless hopes.  It was always hard to tell with her.  When was she lying, and when was she delusional?  When was there a glimmer of truth in amongst the lies? 
    "You gonna get a new cat?"  Randy asked.  Barbara shrugged, her gelatinous chin jiggling against the weight of her shoulders falling.  
    "Can't hurt to have two," she said.  Of course it couldn't.  When had Barbara ever been happy with one of anything?
"Can't hurt to have two," Randy agreed.  This was the longest they had gone with only one pet in a while.  Ever since they lost the dogs.  All three of them had died the same time.  Fed antifreeze in the night by some stranger or neighbor, Barbara hadn't bothered to replace them.  She had buried them, the most effort she had put into anything in quite a while, mostly because she knew the city would make a visit if someone reported the presence of three dead dogs in their yard and she couldn't afford any sort of investigation.  It was the same reason she hadn't called the police to look into the murder of her dogs.  It's a slippery slope from investigating a crime committed against her to having the fire marshall come and try to condemn her house over minding their business.  Adult protective services would come next and put grandma in an old folks' home.
Not to mention the warrants Barbara had now for skipping her court appearance and snubbing her ticket after she got caught driving without a license two years back.  No one called the cops on the dog murderers.  No one knew their motive.   To Barbara, burying her three young dogs was a small price to pay for keeping the government out of her business.  When they weren't sending her checks, She didn't want them anywhere near her.
    Randy had not felt quite as indifferent to the dogs' passing.  He hadn't spent a lot of time with them, but they were still his companions and it was not up to some stranger to decide when his dogs would die.  He took it as a personal attack.  Maybe some kids targeted the smelly, weird house where the old people lived.  Maybe it was the conservative neighbor who always spouted on about how the disabled should be euthanized whenever Randy stepped outside with his cane.  Maybe it was his sister who he hadn't heard from in years, though it seemed random and petty that she would show up out of nowhere just to kill their dogs. 
As much as she hated her family, she had dealt with that hatred by distancing herself, she had not brought them any harm.  And she could have, easily, with a call to the police at any time.  One anonymous tip and all of Barbara's nightmares would come true.  Tax fraud, hoarding, neglecting her mother, disability fraud, unemployment fraud... it would all come out, all unravel, if the cops showed up any time.  That was what would hurt Barbara, not a couple of dead dogs.  No, if it were Mary, she would have acted years ago, and she would have gone after mom.  Not the dogs.
    Randy's first instinct when it happened had been to sit out with his knives and wait for the bastards to come back, but Barbara refused to let him.  If he scared the kids or actually harmed them, it would have just meant unwanted attention.  She told him to mind his own business and the world would mind theirs.  It was a fluke, she was sure.  Some bloodthirsty teenagers who happened to target their yard.  Just a product of chance.
Still, he kept a close eye on the back of the house through the window in his room.  He wondered whether he would have seen the perpetrator if he had paid attention to the outside more often in the past.  He was probably playing video games or sleeping when the freaks came through the yard to steal his dogs' life from him.  Now he made sure to pay attention at least for a little while each night.  He didn't know what he would do when he found the dog killers, but he would do something.
    Now, the cat was gone, too.  Who knew where she had gone, probably off to a better life where she could chase mice without running into a pile of trash.  Randy kind of hoped they would get another cat, though.  There was so little life left in the house and in each of its inhabitants.  A pet would be a comfort.  But an indoor one.  Not another dog who could be killed by some monster.
    He turned to look at his grandmother through the narrow hallway.  She still hadn't noticed her food and now she was talking to some invisible person beside her.  Maybe a pile of garbage looked particularly human to her decaying mind.  She was telling it a story about the Casa Fellicita Ballroom where she had danced as a teenager a lifetime ago.  Mostly when she lost herself, she talked about Casa Fellicita.  It had shut down only ten years before.  Still, however resilient it had been, it did meet its end eventually, and Randy found that pretty sad.  Sure, it had been eighty years since his grandmother enjoyed the dancing at her beloved swing club, but at least it existed.  That joy and exhilaration that grandma remembered so fondly had still persisted out there somewhere in some young woman, recreating the dance moves of yesteryear and feeling her muscles move in the same way his grandmother's had.  The same floors touched her feet, the same walls watched her dance.  This fond memory was relived every night, not by the woman herself but by someone.  Now, it was not, the ballroom was abandoned, empty.  Not torn down, but no one would be surprised if it was.  Not truly dead but already a decaying corpse of a dance hall, just as grandmother had already become a living corpse of a dancer.  The body may exist, but all remnants of happiness and movement were in the past.
    Still, at least she has the memory to dwell on.
    Barbara took her dinner to the living room and sat near her mother, plopping herself on another pile of papers on the couch.  If she leaned back, she would have to lean her head into the piles of junk looming over the back of the furniture, so she leaned forward.  
"Nobody's there, ma," she said, a little too loud.  She knew her mom was going deaf and overcompensated whenever she spoke.
  "Eat your food."
    "James Rogers asked me to dance tonight," grandma croaked in her time-worn voice.  The energy behind her words was strong as if she were still a young woman, but the gravel in her voice would fool no one but herself.  She continued in a coy whisper with the underlying giggle of a teenager "He's a marine!"
    "He's probably dead, ma," Barbara replied with indifference.  "Eat your potatoes."  Confused, grandmother looked around and eventually found the plate of food on her lap.  Her smile had faded into something else, a look of misunderstanding.  Of knowing that she was not where she had been a moment before, but not realizing that only her mind had been there.  Slowly, her hands shaking, she pinched a bit of mashed potatoes off with her fingers and put it straight into her mouth.  She had trouble with forks now, and couldn't chew meat, so it was boxed mashed potatoes as a finger food for every meal and nothing more.
    Randy grabbed his meal and debated sitting with his mother to make her happy, or retiring back to his room in his own interest.  He couldn't bear the company, and took his dinner on his own.