Minutia (A 3-Day Novel)

Lawrence and Bonnie, Part 10

Bonnie thought it was funny how quickly they were abandoned by the city, by the therapist, and even their own lawyer, as soon as they had gotten their bill for the clean up. It took them three years to pay it off, but it took less time to fill their house again.

Lawrence left his job and applied for and got disability benefits for various mental health issues. This gave him more time to roam the city at night for items from people's garbage piles. He usually left the house at midnight and returned just before dawn, and spent the rest of the day, when he was not sleeping, going through his new possessions and trying to sort them out. He did not make the mistake of leaving things out in plain view on the front lawn, but he did ultimately create a pile of things along the back of the house where no one could really see it and become offended by it. A couple of times per year he made the effort to trim hedges and the grass, but it slowly returned to its previous state, minus the appliances and lumber piles.

Bonnie cried for a few weeks, silently in her room, then started venturing out in the world, usually in the morning, to collect again. She found she just could not stop, that her life made no sense without full shelves and containers of do-dads and what-nots. It was a duller experience, though, and there was a desperation there she had not felt before. The pleasure had vanished and just the want remained. She cared less for how things were arranged and more for filling—closets, shelves, cupboards, trunks, boxes and bags. She experience a flush of happiness, or something close to happiness, every time something could hold no more, or every time a lid came down on a box for good.

And each new filled thing felt to her like another stone in her fortress, another thing between her and the world. She had remembered so well and fondly the burrow she had made in that old apartment to avoid seeing Great-Grandma Judith in the bed. It had been cozy there in the midst of the things they had accumulated. Cozy and warm and safe. So she recreated it.

She chose the room at the back, and in the farther place, between two rows of makeshift shelving, she lay down a few pillows and comforters. It was okay. She liked a firm bed anyway. She pulled things she liked close in around her and made a nest of sorts. Or maybe a womb.

It was hard to get up from it some days. Bonnie was no longer young. But once she was there, she could stay for hours, on her side, resting or sleeping or thinking or remembering. She remembered things mostly, things she had had in the apartment and other things she had had here in this house. Sometimes she could not tell them apart. A huge pair of men's underwear. When had that been? A postcard from who? Someone named Caroline? From the Grand Canyon.

Caroline, she thought. Yes, her little sister. It had been decades now; Bonnie wondered what had become of her. Caroline would be, what, 45 now? That was about right. Probably a wife and mother. Maybe even a grandmother. Had she caught the bug? Did she collect? Did she find herself entranced with the weight and feel of everything around her?

Sometimes she remembered Lawrence. She did not see him now. On occasion she heard him as he came and went. He needed to use the back door to come and go from the basement, and although there was no longer a way through from the kitchen to the back door and basement, she could hear him if she was in there at the time, often preparing to go out as he was coming in, struggling to pull new/old things into the basement. Most of the time it was like living with a critter in the house, just a noise here and there and some signs in the morning that he had been out and about.

She remembered that first night here in this house and how she had experienced ecstasies in just a touch, and how she had been unable to carry that any further.

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Lawrence lived in the basement near the furnace and the hot water heater. He had set up a cot there, an old army cot he had salvaged years earlier, and found that with the toilet and sink there he did not need much else. He ate canned food cold, washed his clothes in the sink when he absolutely needed to, gave himself baths much the same way, and grew a beard to avoid having to do anything as complicated as shaving. He did not recognize himself, or would not have recognized himself had he a mirror in which to look.