Dust
“Do you have any idea why I called you into my office?” the boss asked Darryl with a stern expression.
Darryl shrugged. Lately he’d noticed Rick watching him from between the gaps in the cubicle, but he didn’t think that Rick knew what he was seeing.
Rick continued. “I don’t make it my business to keep tabs on you or anyone else, but it looks to me like you’re doing a lot of things that aren’t related to your job here at Mannon. This has been happening for a while now. You want to fill me in on what’s going on?”
Darryl considered his response. The cheerless silence of the office was broken only by the busy clatter of fingers on plastic keys in the surrounding cubicles.
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“You can tell me why every time I look into your partition, you’re doing everything but writing code. This morning, it seems you’ve taken a special interest in your computer monitor.”
“No, it’s just really dusty in here.”
The skin tightened beneath Rick’s eyes. His starched, yellow shirt suddenly seemed too tight at the neck. “What dust? No one else has complained about dust.”
Darryl wanted to tell Rick how the dust particles clinging to the monitor were distracting him, but his intuition told him that this was a bad idea.
“So, how long has this dust been bothering you?”
“Just the last few days or so.”
Rick raised his eyebrows. “The last few days?” He retrieved a slim stack of computer printouts from his desk and dropped them on the table. “I got these off the server. As far as I can tell, this is all you’ve done in the last five weeks.”
A chill coursed through Darryl as he watched Rick thumb through the printouts. “Are you sure you checked the right directory? I’m sure I’ve done more than that. I’ve done more today.”
Rick loosened his tie slightly. “You know, Darryl, we have millions of lines of code to write. Bob, Tom, and Sami are almost done with their modules. And from what I see here, you’re not even half way. You’re weeks behind. You’re going to push back the product release date.” Rick lowered his voice. “I thought we had this talk two months ago. Didn’t you say you want to succeed in this company?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I have to answer to Mr. Mannon about where your time goes. What am I going to tell him when he sees this?” Rick leaned forward on the desk. “You’re ripping this company off, aren’t you?”
The keyboard clatter from the surrounding cubicles subsided somewhat.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing. You get paid to do company business on company time, and you’re not doing it. Not only have you been wasting Mr. Mannon’s money, but you’re stealing from everyone in this company who’s working hard and doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”
“You think I’m the only one who seems to be goofing off? What about Merle?”
Rick leaned back in his leather chair and put his hands behind his head. “Don’t kid yourself, Darryl. I know everything that goes on in this department. Nothing gets by me. I know what Merle does, I know what Bob does, and I also know what you do, even if you don’t think I know.”
Darryl felt the chill again. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll be perfectly honest with you. As far as I’m concerned, this company has wasted every dollar it’s spent on you to keep your chair warm. See this?” He tapped on the thin stack of printouts. “This little bit of code you wrote has cost the company thousands of dollars. And it’s riddled with errors. You’re just cruising along, aren’t you? Just biding your time until we fire you so you can collect unemployment.”
Darryl bit his lower lip. Rick was making him sound like a criminal. He wanted to tell Rick how he really felt about the dust, but from the look Rick was giving him, he knew he’d never understand.
Rick pointed toward the front door of the narrow building. “Darryl, if you don’t like it here, there’s the door. Don’t feel I’m holding you back. There are thousands of unemployed programmers out there who’d love your job. Believe me, I’d have no trouble replacing you.”
Darryl gazed at the printouts. The thought of being fired terrified him. He wondered if Rick had already put out a want ad in anticipation of letting him go.
“Now, are you going to straighten yourself out? Or do we call it quits? Tell me right now. What do you want to do?”
“I’d prefer to stay here if I could,” Darryl replied.
“So, you’re telling me you’re going to get with it. Right? You’re not going to be distracted with dust or anything else like that.”
“Yes. I promise.”
“All right. Go back to work. I promise we won’t be having this conversation again.”
Darryl walked back to his cubicle in a cold sweat, feeling as though he were a death row inmate given clemency seconds before the switch was pulled. He decided to clean up his act before he found himself on death row again.
He took a seat in his cubicle and studied the last line of computer code he had written before Rick had called him into his office. It seemed that an hour had passed since he wrote that line. He wrote a few more. When he raised his cup of coffee to his mouth, he found the coffee was cold. Then he noticed a few pieces of lint clinging to the edge of the cup. He tried to wipe them off with the blue, lint-free cloth he kept on his desk, but the cloth had lost its moisture, and now more lint stuck to the cup where he had wiped it. He went back to the coffee machine, refilled the cup, and re-moistened the cloth. Back at the cubicle, he meticulously wiped the cup from top to bottom and, for good measure, the keyboard that it had been sitting next to.
Darryl scanned the screen for dust. Although he didn’t see any, he had the uneasy feeling that he just wasn’t looking closely enough. With nothing to wipe, he began writing code. The work went slowly, however; his mind kept alternating between his tense conversation with Rick and whether he should wipe the monitor again. He stopped to look at the last few lines he’d written and realized they were all wrong. He deleted them. The dust was not letting him think. He’d have to wipe the monitor, or he would never get any work done.
He got to his feet and pretended to stretch while scanning the room for Rick. Although he could not see him, he could hear his gravelly voice a few cubicles over, just below the clatter of keyboards and the air rushing from the air conditioner vent overhead. Good, Darryl thought, as long as I know where he is.
Quickly, he wiped down the face of the monitor. He turned it off momentarily to check his work against a black background: good. He double-checked it with his penlight: still good. Next, he ran the cloth over the keyboard, his mouse, the surface of his desk, and the coffee cup again. When he was finished, he folded the cloth neatly and put it into a drawer in his desk.
He cracked his knuckles and gazed at the screen, satisfied that it now appeared dust-free. Just as he was about to type, he felt uneasy again. Something was wrong—it was the lint-free cloth. Normally, he changed the cloth every hour, but the meeting with his boss had disrupted his schedule. Now he sat unmoving in his chair, jaw clenched, furious that he had just wiped everything with a cloth that was already covered in lint. All his work had been for nothing; it did not matter that none of the lint appeared to have transferred to the monitor.
Angrily, he whipped a new cloth from his desk and took it to the restroom, where he could moisten it thoroughly without being observed. While there, he spent the next few minutes cleaning the dust and fingerprints from the dirty mirror. When he returned to his cubicle, he began wiping down the monitor in earnest, taking special care to press the cloth into the corners where tiny pieces of lint might be hiding. He had almost finished when he heard Rick’s gravelly voice behind him.
“That will be all, Darryl.”
Darryl cursed his luck as Rick led him to the human resources office. If only Rick had decided to walk by his cubicle one more minute later, all the dust would have been removed from the monitor, he could have gotten back to work, and everything would have been fine.
Darryl had read once that when one loses a limb in an accident, the nervous system goes into shock, and the owner of the missing limb feels no pain. This is the way he felt as he drove home early from work. The world looked different to him today. The sunlight seemed to shine from an odd place in the sky. The street signs and the buildings he drove past every day looked unfamiliar. He tried not to look at the cardboard box containing his personal belongings that sat on the passenger seat. Perhaps this was a dream, and in reality he was dozing at his desk, and in a minute he would wake up and start writing code.
Something in the box rattled incessantly with the vibration of the car. He tried to visualize what it might be. It sounded as though something metallic was tapping against his ceramic coffee cup. The rattle annoyed him, but he could not bring himself to touch the hastily packed box, for doing so would acknowledge its existence, and to acknowledge its existence would be to acknowledge the painful reality it represented. He drove slower in order to minimize the noise.
On the way home, he stopped at a 7-11 to pick up a cherry Slurpee. The machine that dispensed the cherry flavor was broken, so he settled on lime. For a long while he sat in his car in the parking lot, watching the people come and go, sipping the Slurpee distractedly through the straw. He took stock of his situation. His bank account was running low, and unless he could locate a job quickly, he would find himself in dire straits. They said he would receive his final paycheck in the mail. This check would amount to no more than a week and a half’s pay, which wasn’t bad, but the rent would be due at the end of the month, and that would take a big chunk out of it.
Pulling into the driveway to his apartment, he passed a landscaping crew wearing sweat-stained baseball caps, blowing the leaves and dirt noisily around the parking lot. He almost never saw them, since his working hours overlapped with theirs. He pulled his car into his space and then carried his things up to his apartment. A thin film of dust covered the sidewalk from the blowers.
“Damned dust cost me my job!” he ranted as he ran up the stairs.
He removed his shoes at the doorway of the apartment and put them into the plastic dust-proof pail he kept there.
The apartment was a modest two-bedroom. He had made the extra bedroom into a study after his ex-girlfriend, Kathryn, had moved out. He got himself a glass of milk and retired to the smallish living room. Sitting on his imitation leather sofa, he scanned the furniture and other objects in the room. They appeared different somehow. They seemed to be looking back at him, collectively wondering what he was doing home at that time of the day. He thought that perhaps his unexpected arrival home had interrupted their quiet quality time together, the time when inanimate objects confer and relish in the company of their own kind without human interference. He felt unwelcome in his own apartment.
He meditated on the slivers of light that leaked through the blinds in the kitchen, turning over all that was said during his reprimand and exit interview. Occasionally, he felt a pang of remorse over the foolishness that got him fired. He was furious with Rick, but he realized that it was pointless to feel that way. If only he’d been cleverer about removing the dust, Rick would not have caught him. Kayla, the HR director, didn’t see things that way. Just between you and me, have you ever considered getting counseling? she had asked Darryl at the end of the exit interview. “Witch,” he muttered aloud to himself in the silent living room.
The room felt stuffy. He wanted to open the windows, but he didn’t want to risk the leaf blowers wafting any dust into the apartment. Even as it was, he spent most weekend hours cleaning the place. Only his job had kept him from doing dust patrols in the apartment twenty-four hours a day. But now his job was gone. He couldn’t remember an occasion when he’d been unemployed since he’d left college four years ago. He was terrified. He wanted to talk to someone, someone who would understand.
He picked up a phone and called his mother in Los Angeles. He rarely asked her for advice. They’d never been able to connect, and therefore he tried to distance himself from her as much as possible. She’d been cruel to him while he was growing up (at least that was his perception), and he still harbored some resentment toward her. High dosages of Prozac, years of drinking, and frequent use of pot had mellowed her ill temperament, but they had addled her in the process. He hated calling her, but she was better than the four walls. His father was traveling the country with his new wife in their new motor home and couldn’t be reached. He wasn’t much use, either. The answering machine at his mother’s place picked up, so he left a terse message asking her to call him when she got in.
Next, he called Kathryn at Microsoft, where she worked as a receptionist.
“I thought I told you not to call me anymore.”
“I got fired today,” he said.
A silence widened, then “I’m sorry.”
Darryl thought he detected a trace of sympathy in her voice.
“Why did they fire you?”
“They said I wasn’t working fast enough.”
“Assholes.”
“Yeah, I thought so myself.”
The silence came again. Darryl had stopped calling Kathryn since she moved in with some programmer she’d met there in the cafeteria, and now he was out of the habit of speaking to her. But knowing she was listening to him on the other end of the line comforted him somehow.
“So I lost my job,” he said again in an effort to drum up more sympathy.
“What do you want me to do about it? You want me to get you a job here? I can’t do it. There’s a hiring freeze in our department right now. Besides, I don’t think Tony would like it if you two ended up working in the same office.”
“I didn’t call to ask for a job.” He wiped his eyes. “I just wanted someone to talk to.”
“Why did you pick me?”
“I didn’t know who else to call.” Darryl heard voices in the background, then someone laughing.
“I’m sorry, Darryl, but I’m really busy. I have to go. Okay?”
“Wait, don’t hang up. Let’s have dinner tonight.”
“You want to have dinner? Why should we have dinner? It’s over, Darryl. I have a boyfriend now.”
“Please, Kathryn? I really need someone to talk to right now.”
Kathryn let out a long sigh. “Fuck!”
“What’s wrong?”
“I chipped my nail. I just had them done two days ago.”
“I’m sorry. Dinner? Tonight?”
“No, I can’t,” she said, sounding distracted.
“Coffee? After you get off work?”
“I have to go to aerobics after work.”
“How about after you get done with aerobics?”
She sighed again. “All right. Meet me at Pagino’s at seven. Do you know where that is?”
Feeling better after he got off the phone with Kathryn, Darryl vacuumed the house, then spent the rest of the afternoon on his hands and knees wiping the kitchen floor with a lint-free cloth while inspecting it with the flashlight he’d brought home from work. After two passes with the cloth across the kitchen floor, he started on the bathroom.
He arrived at Pagino’s at five minutes to seven and took a seat by the window. Late afternoon sunlight illuminated the restaurant, which lent it a cheerful atmosphere. While he waited for her, he arranged the silverware on the table so that each place setting matched exactly. He adjusted then readjusted the salt and pepper shakers and the napkin dispenser.
Kathryn’s metallic blue Acura pulled into the parking lot at a quarter after. From the window, he watched her stride briskly toward the restaurant. She wore a pair of sea green sweatpants and an indigo leotard top that flattened, but didn’t erase her breasts that had once welcomed his kisses. She wore her long, straight black hair pulled back into a ponytail.
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She plopped onto the seat across from him with a sigh, dropping her purse on the floor.
“You been here long?” she asked, chewing her gum.
He looked at his watch, although he knew exactly how late she was.
She snapped her gum. “So here I am. Traffic is shitty. Did you order yet?”
He handed her the menu. “No, I was waiting for you.”
She took the menu and stared at it casually while fiddling with her shiny gold necklace, a gift from Tony for her birthday last month. “What are you getting?” she asked without looking up.
“I’m not sure,” he said, suddenly aware that he didn’t have any cash on him. He wondered if the restaurant took checks.
Just as he began looking for the Special of the Day, she closed the menu and put it on the table.
“You’ve already decided?” he asked her.
“I think I’ll just have a salad. I’m not that hungry.”
“That sounds good. I think I’ll have the same.”
“So you lost your job. What are you going to do now?” she asked while scrutinizing the couple that sat next to them. “They go to my gym,” she added.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll file for unemployment. I still can’t believe they fired me.”
A blond waiter, a man in his early twenties, came to the table. “Are you two ready to order?”
“Two dinner salads,” Darryl said.
“That’s all you want? Two dinner salads?”
“Yes.”
“Anything to drink?”
“I just want water,” Kathryn said.
“Same.”
After they gave their preference of dressing, the waiter left the table. Kathryn popped her gum while she gazed out the window. “Damn sun hurts my eyes,” she said finally.
“We can move.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“So how are you and Tony doing?”
“Fine.”
“Are you?”
“Yeah,” she said with a faraway look. Then her eyes widened. “Oh, you want to see my kitties?”
“Your kitties? You have cats?” He liked cats. He would have owned one, but they shed dander and hundreds of hairs every day, and their litter box created an intolerable amount of dust. He recalled, with no small amount of guilt, how he had resisted Kathryn’s pleas for a cat the whole two years they lived together.
She pulled an envelope of pictures out of her purse. He noticed a carton of cigarettes and a romance novel tucked inside.
She showed him the pictures. “The black one is Midnight. The white one is Snowball. Aren’t they cute? I love my kitties.”
“Nice cats,” he said.
“Tony and me got them at the shelter. A matched set,” she smiled, popping her gum loudly. “You should get a cat.”
“I sure do miss you, Kathryn.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You miss me? Well, you had your chance,” she said with an edge in her voice. “I just couldn’t take your bullshit and you criticizing me all the time.”
“Maybe I couldn’t show it, but I loved you then, and I’ll always love you.”
“Oh, brother,” she said as she stuffed the pictures back into her purse. “Is this what you wanted to meet me for?” She flipped the strap onto her shoulder and stood up.
“Wait—why are you leaving?”
“It seems pretty obvious to me.”
“No, no!” He grasped her arm across the table. “Please stay a while longer. Please. I promise I won’t say that again.”
She hesitated and then slowly lowered herself to the edge of the chair, leaving the purse strap over her shoulder. “So why did you lose your job? Was it fingerprints? Were you driving your boss nuts the way you did me by wiping fingerprints off of everything?”
“Dust.”
“Dust?” Kathryn laughed. “Dust? You got fired over dust? Stupid, Darryl. Really stupid. What were you doing? Wiping up the dust when you were supposed to be working? Are you satisfied?”
“What do you mean by satisfied? How could I be satisfied?”
“I mean, did you get a lot of satisfaction from wiping up the dust?”
“No, but I can’t help doing it anyway.”
“I always say, if you’re going to get fired, you might as well get fired for doing something that gives you satisfaction, like stealing or punching out the boss. He was an asshole anyway, wasn’t he? You told me lots of times you hated that job. Maybe you should consider it a blessing that they fired you. You really do need help, Darryl.”
“I don’t need help. I can handle this.”
“Sure. Your obsessions chased away your ex-wife, they chased me away, and now you lost your job. You were getting worse even while we were together. Yeah, sure, you can handle it. You sound just like an alcoholic.”
“Why were you so cold to me all the time?”
“I wasn’t always that way. I loved you once. Remember? You made me this way.”
“Sure, I did. And I’ve noticed that you’ve started smoking again.”
She scowled. “So? I can smoke if I want to. You don’t control me.”
“But it’s bad for you.”
The waiter placed their salads on the table, each in a clear glass bowl. He held up a wood pepper grinder. “Would you like a little ground pepper for your salad?” he asked them.
Kathryn ignored the waiter and his pepper grinder. “You know, I don’t need this. I have to go.” She stood up again.
“Wait! Aren’t you going to eat your salad?”
She looked down at the salad as if she had just noticed it was there. “No, I’m not hungry. Besides, Tony is waiting for me.”
She flipped a few dollar bills onto the table and walked out of the restaurant. Darryl felt the eyes of everyone in the restaurant upon him, including the eyes of the couple that Kathryn said she’d seen at the health club. Darryl felt the vacuum of her presence: the empty chair where she had been sitting, the untouched salad with a cherry tomato and ranch dressing, the pastel green napkin that she had been holding. He watched her walk toward her car in the parking lot.
“Would you like some ground pepper on your salad?” the waiter asked him.
Darryl drove aimlessly on the freeway for a few hours to sort out his thoughts. On the way home, he stopped at the grocery store to pick up some cleaning materials: two packs of six blue sponges, two toilet bowl brushes, two packages of vacuum cleaner bags, four bottles of Lysol disinfectant, two boxes of SOS pads, a bottle of generic drain cleaner, a one-gallon refill of liquid antibacterial soap, a Hershey chocolate bar, and a six-pack of alkaline penlight cells for the flashlight he used to detect dust. Darryl was vexed that they didn’t have any of the lint-free cloths he normally used.
The cashier was a pregnant woman with a black scab on her lower lip and a few nasty-looking bruises on her forearm the size of silver dollars. She had a skinny wedding ring on her finger.
“You look so glum,” she said in a friendly voice as she rang him up. “It can’t be all that bad.”
“You have no idea,” he said.
When Darryl walked through the door of his apartment, he saw the red message light blinking on the answering machine. After flipping the entry hall light switch on and off four times, he checked the message. It was his mother. He wiped the fingerprints off the phone, slipped on a pair of latex gloves, and dialed her number. She picked up the phone on the fourth ring. Hours later, in the middle of the night, while he scrubbed down the bathroom, their conversation played over and over in his head:
“Mom, I need help.”
“Why do you need help?” came her voice, raspy and slightly slurred.
“I can’t stop doing things.”
“Like what?”
“Dust. And now fingerprints. I can’t stop cleaning them up.”
“Why should fingerprints bother you? Are you allergic?”
“No.” He heard the clink of ice cubes in a glass.
“I don’t know what to tell you. You just hafta pull yourself together. Put on a smiling face. You know what they say: ‘When you smile, the whole world smiles with you.’”
“I don’t know why I do this, Mom.”
“You’re doing it to yourself, Darryl. You just hafta pull yourself together. Oh—hold on a second.” She spoke to someone on the other side of the line. “Honey? Can you get me my smokes?”
“What can I do? I’m scared of myself.”
“I don’t know. Are you eating okay?”
“I had half a salad tonight. That was all. I was too upset to eat anymore.”
“That’s a bunch of shit. You need to eat. Go out and get yourself a chicken sandwich. McDonald’s has chicken sandwiches. They’re really good.”
“I’m not hungry.” Darryl heard her blow smoke into the receiver.
“Well, you gotta eat.”
“Yeah, I should eat.”
“You want me to come over? I’ll come over. I’ll fly up there tonight. You want me to come over?”
“No. Don’t come.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you. You just hafta pull yourself together.”
Darryl awoke the next morning thinking of the nightmare that had taken place the day before. He looked at the clock by the bedside: 12:22. It was not often that he slept in on a Thursday morning. His feet began to itch. This reminded him of dust mites. They were everywhere, living in the fabric of sheets and mattresses, eating dead skin cells. He pictured them crawling over his skin on their crab-like legs, burrowing into his pores. The mites belonged to the army of dust that had cost him his job. But now that he was unemployed, he had nearly limitless time to make war on the dust.
He turned himself out of bed, took a quick shower, and headed over to the hardware store, where he purchased 1000 square feet of thick plastic sheeting and a dozen rolls of duct tape. He began covering every square inch of his apartment with the plastic. He worked slowly and methodically, cutting the plastic to precise dimensions and covering every square inch of the floor and the furniture, one room at a time.
As he covered the computer desk in the study, he thought of Kathryn. She had purchased the desk as a kit at a local department store as a Valentine’s Day gift for him. She even assembled it for him. It took her hours to complete the job. When finished, she called him into the room. It was a wonderful desk with a black Formica top, cubbyholes, and slots to store all of his disks. He’d placed a ceramic lamp on the desk while he put his things in it. Before he put the monitor in its cubby, to get more room, he had slid the lamp across the top, accidentally putting a deep gouge in the Formica. The scratch in the Formica might as well have been a scratch in his heart; the desk had been a gift, and through carelessness, he had damaged it within fifteen minutes of having it in his possession. The sight of the long tan scratch on the otherwise pristine black surface had filled him with remorse. So, instead of joining Kathryn for a glass of wine after she finished the desk, he spent hours trying to buff the scratch away with every cleaning tool in the house. She went to bed after pausing to give him a long, lonely stare at the doorway as he wearily scraped at the scratch with his fingernail.
After he had covered all of the furniture with the plastic, he taped the seams with duct tape and then wiped every square inch of the plastic with his spray cleaner and his new blue lint-free cloths. When all was done, he collapsed in the bathroom from exhaustion, his hands swollen and irritated by the cleaner. He slept on the bathroom floor that night. When he awoke, he was ravenously hungry. But not wanting to put any more fingerprints (or toe prints) on the plastic, he drank a few glasses of water to quench his hunger and forestall leaving the bathroom. He thought of all the dust that lay beneath the plastic in the living room. Perhaps the apartment would not be dust-free until he removed all the furniture. He considered selling the furniture through an ad in the paper. He would need the money anyway when the rent was due.
Around the time he made this decision, there came a knock on his door. He kept quiet, not wanting to leave the bathroom. The knock came again. “Probably just some Jehovah’s Witnesses,” he said to himself. Then his ears picked up the rattle of a key in the front door. He heard the front door open. Damn! He quickly fetched his clothes from the plastic bag and threw them on. When he opened the door to the bathroom, a stranger was standing in the hall—a man in his thirties with a sunburned face, wearing a khaki shirt and pants. He was carrying a blue plastic toolbox. Sewn over his left shirt pocket was the name Mike. All that Darryl could think about was the dust that had entered the apartment from the outdoors when Mike had let himself in.
The man seemed to sense Darryl’s irritation. He stuffed his hand into his trouser pocket and looked around uneasily, avoiding eye contact with Darryl. “I’m from apartment maintenance. I have a work order that says your fireplace pipe is leaking rust.”
Darryl had filed the work request two months ago, and only now they were getting around to fixing it. This perturbed him, but his mind returned to the dust in the entry hall tracked in by the unwanted visitor. It would take him at least an hour to clean it up.
“You were supposed to be here two months ago.”
“Well, I’m here now.”
Mike gave Darryl a queer look then moved through the plastic-covered kitchen and into the living room, where the conical freestanding fireplace sat in a corner. The room was silent except for the plastic crinkling beneath their feet.
“What’s all this plastic?” Mike asked. “You doing some painting in here? You need to get management approval before you paint.”
“It’s to keep the dust down.”
“Yeah?” Mike stared up at the pipe. “Looks like you covered up the spot with duct tape. I’ll need to remove the tape to see how bad the rust is.”
Darryl envisioned all the dust from the pipe landing on his plastic. “I’d prefer you didn’t.”
“Why not? It ain’t gonna cost you nothing.”
“I’d just prefer you didn’t. Not today. It’s just not a good time.”
Mike tightened his lips. He gave Darryl that queer look again. “I’m pretty busy. I don’t know when I can be back to look at it.”
Darryl didn’t reply.
Mike looked up again at the pipe. “But I will need to look at it today to see how bad it is.”
He left the apartment and came back with a ladder. He tore off the tape that Darryl had so carefully placed over the rusty spot. Mike examined the black pipe with a flashlight from his toolbox. He pounded it with his fist to check its integrity. Flecks of rust cascaded to the plastic floor. Darryl felt his face flush. He glanced at the hammer in Mike’s toolbox. He wanted to pulverize the man’s skull for tormenting him—but what a mess it would make!
“Yep, the metal’s rusted out,” Mike remarked.
He pounded on the pipe a few more times. Darryl winced each time his fist struck the metal. Finally, Mike climbed down.
“I’ll go ahead and order you another pipe,” he said as he put the flashlight back into his toolbox. “These stoves are nothing but trouble. We’re removing a lot of them from the apartments.”
Darryl wasn’t listening; he was thinking of the black flecks of rust and soot that coated the plastic. After Mike had gone, he began cleaning up the rust by the fireplace, and then he started on the dust in the entry hall. Several hours later, he had cleaned up the mess to his satisfaction.
Around sunset, Darryl, feeling weak with hunger, went out to a local burger place. Once there, however, his appetite deserted him, so he ended up ordering only a chocolate shake. As he sipped it in his car, he thought proudly of his work with the plastic in the apartment. He should have done that long ago. Although not being able to sleep in his bed any longer bothered him, the idea of starving the dust mites overrode this concern. On his way home, he became uncomfortable with the thought of reentering the apartment. He hadn’t had a shower that day, and no doubt skin flakes would be sloughing off. This threatened to contaminate his great work.
On the way home, he stopped off at the grocery store and picked up several rolls of Cellophane wrap and a package of disposable razors. The pregnant woman was working at the checkout stand again. She rang up his purchase in silence. Darryl noticed that in addition to the bruise on her arm and scab on her lower lip, she now had a black eye. As she handed him his receipt, he wondered sullenly if everyone was secretly as miserable as he was.
Once at home, he closed the door to the bathroom and took a shower. Afterward, he shaved all the hair from his body and then wrapped himself from head to toe with the plastic wrap, securing it with duct tape.
It was well past midnight when he finished this task. He gazed at the result in the mirror and was quite pleased. Now he could walk around the house with impunity, although there wasn’t anything to do because the furniture was completely covered.
Darryl was about to look away from the mirror when he thought he saw movement on the floor by the toilet bowl. When he turned to look, he saw nothing there but one of the yellow, lint-free cloths he had purchased a few days before. Convinced that he had seen movement, he scanned the area for a spider or some other insect that had somehow wandered into the bathroom. He lifted the cloth with his latex-gloved hand and shook it. Nothing fell out. Puzzled, he put the cloth back on top of the bowl. Then he got down on his hands and knees and thoroughly examined the wall and floor around the bowl for any crack where an insect could get in. Satisfied there was none, he retired to the edge of the tub. The plastic felt uncomfortably tight around his abdomen when he tried to sit down. He stood and adjusted the duct tape.
When he sat down again, the yellow cloth he had placed on the bowl was back on the floor again. He wondered how it had gotten there; he hadn’t gone near it. Just as he reached for the cloth, it suddenly quivered on its own. Then it arched upward and began crawling toward Darryl like some misshapen yellow caterpillar. He backed away and fell into the bathtub.
Quickly, he closed the curtain and climbed onto the wall-side of the tub. He listened, terrified. He heard a faint sighing sound—the sound of cloth on linoleum. Darryl imagined the cloth slithering toward the bathtub. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” He expected it to crawl over the edge of the tub at any moment. Then the sighing sound abruptly stopped. Darryl waited, scarcely breathing.
Slowly, he lowered himself into the tub. He peeked out from behind the shower curtain. The cloth was on top of the toilet bowl, where he had left it.
“My mind is playing tricks on me,” he said aloud in an attempt to calm himself.
He peeked at the cloth a few more times from behind the curtain. It remained where it was. He couldn’t convince himself that what he had seen was entirely an illusion, so he stayed within the relative safety of the tub.
Darryl felt hot and sweaty beneath the plastic. He felt dirty. Without leaving the tub, he removed the plastic and filled the tub with water.
He settled into the water and let it cover him up to his nose, lips, and part of his cheeks. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the warmth filling his bones. It pleased him to know that no dust mites could crawl on his skin, and no lint could alight on him while his body was covered with the water. He wondered if he could devise a way to breathe through tubes so that he could remain submerged indefinitely.
Kathryn, I’ve been hiding this bathroom for thirty-eight hours now. I know every crack in the tiles, every flaw in the linoleum. The pattern of the artificial wood grain on the vanity is burned into my mind. The phone keeps ringing, but I know it isn’t you. It’s 5:48 here in the bathroom, and it’s 5:48 in your apartment. I’m thinking of you now, trying to get to you—through the pipes in the floor, through the electrical wiring within the walls, and even through the radio waves, though your telephone might be turned off. A white cat sits on your lap, licking its paw. You are reading a romance novel, whispering to yourself those passages that touch you. The Mexican family that lives below you is playing polkas again. Their music bumps softly through the floor. The scent of flour tortillas and spiced meat wafts by your nose. Sunlight shines through the blinds, projecting a horizontal-striped pattern on the wall next to your chair.
You turn the page.
A bag of groceries sits on your kitchen counter. Your Dove bars are melting, and the string beans are defrosting, but it will be hours before you notice. I want to speak to you, tell you about all the cracks and crevices in this apartment where dust likes to hide, about the dust mites in the sheets, about how the lint clings to the mirror, and so many other things so unbearable for me that lie below your level of awareness. I’ve been in here twenty-eight hours, Kathryn. Twenty-eight hours, and I do believe I’m losing my mind.
The stillness of the bathroom remained unbroken except for an occasional drop of water from the faucet. Darryl lay in the water with his eyes tightly shut. The warm water became tepid. He shivered slightly. Then the light dimmed beyond his closed eyelids as though a shadow had appeared over him. The shadow moved. He opened his eyes and saw Kathryn sitting on the edge of the tub gazing down at him.
“Kathryn! What are you doing here?”
“I tried calling, but you never answered,” she said sadly.
“I don’t pick up the phone anymore.”
“You ought to. I worry about you.”
“Do you really worry, Kathryn? Why do you worry?”
“Because I love you.”
Darryl shook his head. “No, you can’t be Kathryn. The Kathryn that loves me doesn’t exist anymore.”
“Then you must need me very badly, or else I wouldn’t be here.”
Although Kathryn’s abrupt appearance made him uneasy, he could not resist baring his soul to her. “I miss you, Kathryn. I really do.”
He expected her to get up and walk away, but she only smiled at him. Comforted by her reaction, he closed his eyes again and settled deeper into the water.
“I was just thinking of that desk you built for me. Remember that?”
“Yes. I bought it to make you happy, but it made you sad.”
“You know I never did anything worthwhile on that desk except cruise the Internet looking for pictures of dust mites. But that scratch! Kathryn, if I don’t have bad luck, I create it myself. And look at me now.”
“You just hafta to pull yourself together,” a raspy voice said.
Darryl opened his eyes. Instead of Kathryn, his mother was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, cigarette in one hand, Bloody Mary in the other.
“You just hafta to pull yourself together,” she repeated, releasing her smoke into the steam.
“Get away from me!” He splashed water at her. Now the curtain was drawn, and he was alone.
He gazed up at the grid of tile above the faucet. “This thing is going to kill me,” he said aloud, his voice echoing weirdly against the tiled walls. Why doesn’t dust bother anyone else? And what about fingerprints? They are everywhere. There are millions, perhaps billions of them all over the planet, some of them in hidden places. Yet, they don’t seem to bother anyone but me. He wondered what faulty tangle of neurons in his brain made him think the way he did, what demon possessed him. Why couldn’t he simply coexist with the dust, as did everyone else? After all, dust was just dust; it was harmless, just as fingerprints were.
He pictured himself boldly leaving the bathroom, tearing away all the plastic in the apartment, and then shaking the stovepipe until the entire apartment was coated with fine black soot. He could prove to himself that dust no longer had a hold on him and that everything was going to be all right. And when that happened, locked doors would open. He would finally be free to find another to fill the emptiness that Kathryn once filled. And the next time around, things would be different. He would love her the way she should be loved. He would accept her imperfections and not criticize her all the time. He would be kind and affectionate. He would not neglect spending quality time with her because of his obsessions. He would also find work again, win the respect of his superiors, and finally advance his career. All he would have to do is tolerate a little dust—just a little harmless dust. It was all so simple!
A surge of self-empowerment flowed through him, accompanied by a sudden, incredible lightness of spirit. He leaped out of the bathtub, threw on his bathrobe, and ran into the living room. With the fury of a madman, he tore off the blinds and flung open all the windows. Dust and sunlight flooded into the apartment.
He dropped to his knees with outstretched arms in the glorious white light, tears of happiness streaming down his cheeks. “I am reborn!” he proclaimed, even though the black particles of rust at the base of the stovepipe were already starting to bother him.