Clutter
Rest stop employee suffers gradual mental, physical & spiritual deterioration living with hoarder parents, unable to escape
Super Station Travel Center rises up out of the sand, peeking over the horizon little by little on approach. Gaudy, immaculately clean and brightly lit like some sort of modern day temple to the Gods. Or a monument to human excess, standing tall in the southwestern desert, the only thing resembling civilization for over a hundred miles in any direction.
To say it resembles civilization constitutes both insult and flattery. SSTC is a Frankensteinian microcosm of your average small town. It’s a gas station, a restaurant, a motel, a grocery store, a rest stop, and casino all crammed into a single gargantuan building. Except whoever designed this place wanted to visually differentiate the various sections, so it’s not cohesive.
The restaurant, casino and motel are kind of their own appendages, growing out of the central monolithic metal and glass facade where the gas station and grocery store are housed. Each offshoot has its own architectural style. I think it was an attempt to make it less of a geometric, modernist eyesore. Instead it just winds up looking like a black hole somehow fused all these businesses together into the architectural equivalent of a rat king.
Eyesore might be unfair. Certainly it’s a sight for the sore eyes of weary travelers, the never-ending stream of which financially sustains the SSTC and everybody who works there, myself included. Travelers are like blood cells bringing oxygen to this remote organ that would wither and die in a hurry, if ever that flow should cease.
Road trippers look so happy when they get here. Finally able to climb out of the little car they were all packed into, stretch their legs, use the bathroom and maybe buy some beef jerky or energy drinks. I guess it’s so alien to me because I was born here, in one of the scattered double wides around the periphery of the SSTC like piglets suckling off the mama hog. They’re happy because they won’t be here but overnight at the longest.
In other words, they’re happy because they get to leave. SSTC is only a welcome oasis, seemingly a whole world unto itself, if you’re passing through. It doesn’t seem so big when you’re stuck here. When it literally is your entire world because there’s fuck all outside of it but double wides and the desert. Flat, featureless, arid wasteland extending all the way to the horizon, a perfectly straight line dividing earth from sky.
It grows even more surreal at night. The Super Station is externally illuminated by banks of floodlights to help it stand out as it’s a little ways off the interstate. Still perfectly visible from there because it’s as eye wateringly bright as the god damned sun. You can see every part of it plain as day, but nothing else around it except blackness. Like it’s the only thing that exists, floating in a void.
The garish external lighting is mainly for the benefit of road trippers who don’t know the area and can’t find their ass with both hands. Boss man says we don’t need a sign on account of the lights, and most of our business is truckers anyhow. Truckers all have us locked into their GPS since as yet, there’s no competitors out this way.
It’s a weird mix, middle class families and on-the-job truckers. Very different walks of life that don’t typically come into contact with one another anywhere else. I’ve gotten to know more truckers than I ever wanted to working here. They’re remarkable people actually. Truckers lead more interesting lives on the road than you might expect, but it’s easy to lose track of social moores when you spend most of your time alone. Little stuff like hygiene, or manners.
The motel staff hear all sorts of complaints from pearl clutching mothers who got an eyeful of some fat, hairy naked trucker using the pay showers. Not that they saw anything, with his big ‘ol gunt hanging down far enough to preserve modesty, after a fashion.
They’re not perverts. Not usually. The cleaning ladies just forget to restock the towels sometimes, it’s easy to miss the empty towel rack on your way in. Other times it’s puritanical types complaining because they spotted prostitutes climbing into the cabs of the big rigs out front. I dunno where they come from, they just get out of one truck and into another. We shrug and wait for the complainers to tire themselves out hemming and hawing, nothing ever comes of it or we’d live in a very different world.
You’d never guess how much seedy shit goes on here by the squeaky clean look of the place. That’s where all the money goes, invested back into the structure. It’s definitely not cheap, maintaining the seemingly brand new shine of the glass, metal, plastic and promotional decals against the ravages of the desert. Against constant exposure to the hot sun, frigid nights and the occasional sand storm. Our double wides keep wearing down, year on year, but somehow the Super Station remains in mint condition.
“Clocking off?” Louie asks me. I nod and slip him some jalapeno slim jims. A sizable, hirsute fellow of Italian descent, Louie mans the front desk of the motel and is one of the few coworkers I’d consider a friend. I smuggle him snacks in exchange for weed. No idea where he’s getting it from. If anybody local was selling it, I’d know.
“Those things are all pig eyelids, noses, lips and sphincters you know” I commented as he peeled open the spicy cylinder of mystery meat. He ripped into it and made a show of licking his lips. “Mmm, you can really taste the eyelids. That’s quality.” I worry about Louie. His build, and what I know of his medical history, makes him a poor fit for such sedentary work.
“You ought to eat more green things Lou. We’ve got produce in the grocery section.” He closely examines the ragged end of the freshly bitten meat stick until he spots what he’s looking for. Lou points to a little green fleck amid the mushy pink reconstituted pork. “There. See? Jalapenos are a vegetable. Besides, you should worry about your own health before you worry about mine. I heard you coughing up a lung, and you don’t even smoke.” I sigh, collect the ziploc baggie from him and head back to the store.
I wish I had my own car, or that Pa would finally get around to fixing the old station wagon sitting out front. Not that either would change my situation. If that’s all it took to escape the gravitational pull of the Super Station black hole, I’d have been out of here by 18. I don’t need a car to commute, work is a five minute walk from home. I’d still like one just so I could drive out into the desert at night to look at the stars. Just to take a break from all this. To feel, for a few hours at a time, as if escape is possible.
The night air is pleasantly cool as I walk home under the blanket of stars. It’s cool enough to make the little hairs on my arms stand up, but not so much that I shiver. A far cry from the unbearable, sweltering oven it turns into during the day. The Super Station has two gigantic AC units for redundancy, probably more to prevent spoiling in the event that one fails than for employee comfort. I shudder to imagine what it’d be like if ever they both broke down at once.
As I approach the double wide I nearly trip over a jug of spoiled milk sitting outside. Next to it lies a bag full of limp, brown carrots, hopelessly rotten and swarming with flies. “Ma!” I call in the door as I work it open against the resistance of rusty hinges. “Ma! You left groceries out to spoil again!” I get a muffled, incomprehensible warble in response.
The door only barely shuts against the flattened clutter that leans against it. Old magazines, single shoes, empty packaging, wrappers, clothes and so on. It’s up to my knees just inside the door, though it’s higher in what used to be the family room and has buried the back door entirely. I step carefully into “foot holes” I dug into the clutter in strategic locations specifically so I could walk around without crawling atop the deep layer of wrappers, tissues, dirty dishes, clothes and cigarette butts.
I hear a loud crash followed by wailing. I hurry, best I can, to the bedroom. “Ma, are you okay?” I ask, breathless from running the obstacle course that is the hallway. “Ahm okay darlin, there was just an avalanche again” she chuckled as if it was a cute, funny situation. I couldn’t see the humor in it. Avalanches have grown worryingly frequent as of late.
They happen because all the counter space is covered. All the drawers and cabinets are full. There’s nowhere to put anything down, so Ma and Pa just stack stuff on top of other stuff. Gradually it builds into mighty towers, until Ma tries to grab onto something atop it in order to steady herself. Her legs just keep getting weaker because she spends all her time in the recliner, so she uses her arms to get around as much or more than her legs, grabbing hold of whatever’s handy.
Problem is, stuff sitting at the top of clutter towers isn’t attached to anything. It comes loose and she takes a spill, bruising herself in the process as well as bringing the tower down on top of her. I helped move shit off her body as she got busy digging herself out. Watching her like this always upsets me even though she seems unphased. She looks like an upside down turtle trying to right itself. Like a flesh tone waterbed with arms and legs poking out of it, covered in trash.
There was nowhere to put any of the crap we moved off her, so of course we just piled it back up into a tower again. I’m not sure why we bother, everything falls doesn’t it? In the long run, everything falls down. “Ma listen, you can’t keep leaving food outside.” She protested that it’s Pa who does that. I put my hands on my hips. “Well could you tell him that doesn’t work?” She looked suddenly sober, her eyes starting to tear up. “Now Ma, I didn’t mean nothing. I’ll go talk to Pa about it, ok?”
That’s when I heard Pa call out from the other room “Talk to me ‘bout what?” The acoustics of a mobile home full of trash aren’t great and both of my parents suffer from hearing loss. Both are also in denial about it, so neither of them wear hearing aids. I tried texting them for a while to save me from having to leave my own room, the only part of this shitheap not filled with garbage and dirty clothes, but they check their text messages maybe once a week.
Now satisfied Ma was unburied and could see herself to bed, I waded through the junk using one of many plowed paths. The kind you might plow through deep snow so you can still use the road, but indoors. Digging these channels through the clutter makes it possible to walk between the bedrooms and kitchen, though the one I dug to the front door keeps getting filled in by avalanches. As I steady myself against a pile of junk, I feel a single ant crawl over my hand. I shudder and brush it away.
I found Pa in the family room, nestled in among the clutter as if he was part of it. I called out to him, but he couldn’t hear me as the TV was at max volume. My runny nose probably didn’t help either. I wiped it on a napkin, then shouted and waved. Eventually he noticed me and muted the television. “Whaddya want?” I explained the situation with the food sitting out front. He shook his head. “I know what I’m damn well, uh….fridge is full up ever since...didn’t you know that a penny saved...outdoors is free extra fridge space, anyway.”
I pinched my nose as the family room smells the worst. I never acclimate as it’s always changing, smells like whatever they recently ate in front of the TV. Pa tends to leave his dishes out here with scraps left on them. Then they get covered up with clutter and forgotten before I can take them to the kitchen. “That only works if it’s always cold out” I patiently protested. “Have you been outside during the day lately? It was 115 degrees earlier.”
He pretended not to hear me until I pressed the matter a little too far. “IT’S MY DAMN...MAN’S HOME IS HIS CASTLE, GUL DERN IT, YOU DON’T SASS TALK ME YOU...DAMN RIGHT I’M GONNA PUT FOOD OUTSIDE IF I FEEL LIKE IT!” he shouted, flailing about as if to strike me but unable to reach from his seated position, embedded in the clutter. “BITCHING AT ME IN MY OWN...DON’T LIKE IT YOU CAN TAKE THE TENT...ANY TIME YOU WANT, GO SLEEP OUTSIDE!”
“Sass talk” is whatever I say that he doesn’t want to hear. Pointing out stuff that needs maintenance for example, warning him about his diet, or anything remotely political. It’s his way of characterizing concern or dissent as attempts to be hurtful. Useless to keep arguing with him when he gets like that. He learned a long time ago he could just fly into a rage whenever he’s challenged on anything and he’ll get his way because I’m scared of him.
Ma is no better. Whenever I ask her to stop grabbing onto clutter towers because she’ll fall, she bursts into tears. I’ve never known how to handle her when she cries like that, and she knows it. Anything I do or say which reminds her that living this way isn’t normal or healthy just sends her into one of her tearful fits, which never fails to shut me up. So long as there’s not someone complaining about our problems, like that we live in a pigsty, those problems go back to being invisible to her.
It just keeps feeding into itself. For example Pa says he needs the TV volume loud because he’s hard of hearing. But I suspect a lot of that is because he just kept turning the volume up over the years to compensate instead of wearing his hearing aid, worsening the damage to his eardrums. It’s deafening, shutting the door to my room only muffles it.
At least my room doesn’t reek. At least there’s no clutter. It reaches right up against the door. I had to reverse the hinges so the door opens inward, or all the crap just outside would pin it shut. It’s a struggle sometimes to force it shut anyways, like the clutter is constantly growing. Expanding. Trying to intrude into the one place it hasn’t yet conquered.
This is the only place where the clutter abruptly ends, except for the front door...on a good day. It lets me see a sort of cross-section of the clutter’s strata. There’s putrid, congealed sludge at the bottom I don’t even recognize. The bottom layer absorbs all the spilled drinks, humidity and whatever else trickles down from the upper layers. The layer just above that has the tattered edge of a rain coat poking out of it, stiff and discolored, that I think I last wore in grade school.
I got up in the night to make a snack and use the bathroom. Head hurts a little and feels...I don’t know. Fuzzy? I pulled on my head lamp so I could see where the paths and footholes are, heading for the kitchen first. The stove failed years ago. Pa said he’d fix it, but he never fixes anything. What he means by fixing shit is putting some kind of band-aid over the problem. In the case of the stove, he bought a portable electric cooktop and stuck it over the non-functional burners. At least if this thing breaks it’s easier to replace than the stove would be.
As I stand there I feel the hole in the clutter that I dug out slowly starting to close in on my ankles. Like it’s healing or something. I kick at the sides of it, widening the pit I’m standing in, worried if I let it get too close to the stove it might catch on fire. I’m amazed this whole mess didn’t go up in flames years ago. With my pot of water and dry ramen noodles heating up, I painstakingly step out of the pit in front of the stove and clamber my way towards the bathroom.
The smell sucker punches me seconds after I open the sliding door. Besides the living room, the bathroom also has a uniquely ripe odor I can’t seem to get used to, which makes my eyes water. Easy to get in, at least. Wish all the doors were sliding like this one, it’d sure beat having to constantly dig out space for the doors to swing open into.
I flip the toilet seat up and wince at the sight of the toilet mushrooms. Four new ones sprouting from around the hinges. I plucked them one by one and dumped them into the bowl, which I then pissed in, mixing together into some kind of hellish soup.
As I turned from the toilet, I stubbed my toe. Swearing and hopping on one foot, I shone my headlamp where my foot was. The camping shower. Another of Pa’s improvisations. The real shower broke just last year. Nothing got done about it right away, because Ma and Pa didn’t mind not showering and I could just use the pay showers at work.
First weeks, then months passed with no action taken. In the end, instead of fixing it or paying somebody else to, Pa just bought a portable camping shower and set it up in the bathroom. SSTC carries a lot of camping shit that’s popular with truckers. Showers, coolers, microwaves, even the cooktop he “fixed” the stove with.
It all runs on 12 volts. Works out fine for trailers that are wired for it. Ours isn’t. All the sockets are 110 volts, 15 amps so everything plugs in through adapters. When I put my hand on it, the damn thing is painfully hot to the touch. I wonder if it’s supposed to be like that. I flush the toilet, silently thanking god that at least one thing in this dump still works. I dread the prospect of what Pa would “fix” it with, should it ever quit flushing.
I want to clean this place in the worst way. Even if it took me ten years, just on principle. But none of it belongs to me. Ma and Pa say everything’s exactly where they want it, and they won’t be able to find anything if I move it. An unsolvable problem it’s no use to dwell on, all it does is arouse within me a feeble, directionless angst with no constructive outlet. Almost immediately upon retrieving my noodles from the stove, our cat Gizmo pokes her head out near my ankles and begins yowling.
We didn’t adopt Gizmo, she just kind of showed up one day and never left. This isn’t someplace pets can survive outdoors, at least not during the day. She mostly goes out during sunrise and sunset, coming in when she smells food in order to beg for what she imagines her fair share of it to be. I always wondered how she managed to sneak around this dump without being seen until I found one of the tunnels she dug through the clutter. Are cats natural burrowers?
I sat cross legged on the carpet in my room, taking turns slurping obnoxiously spicy “picante con limon” noodles into my mouth, then dangling one over her face, letting her snatch it from my hand and gobble it down. SSTC carries cat food, but none she’ll eat. Not when Ma and Pa leave half-eaten food laying around. That, and the relative dearth of opportunities for outdoor exercise, are why poor Gizmo has gotten so worryingly fat.
She finishes noisily scarfing down the last of the noodles, then headbutts me and rubs on my shins as I climb into bed. Some nights she curls up at my feet. Others, on my head like a hairy turban. Tonight, she burrows under the covers with me and plays the little spoon. It means something to me that my room is the one she always sleeps in. I’d like to think I’m her favorite.
Then again she may just prefer not to sleep under a mountain of trash. If we had the choice, a raccoon might’ve been a better fit. Gizmo drifts off and begins emitting quiet, squeaky snores. I join her in the merciful embrace of unconsciousness as the picante broth corrodes my gurgling guts. Whether sleep brings me dreams or nightmares, at least here there aren’t any toilet mushrooms.
The next morning I got out of bed somehow more exhausted than when I’d crawled into it the night before. My head throbbed, nothing new as I often wake up with a headache. I scratched at my itchy scalp. When I withdrew my hand, there were a couple of head lice smooshed under my fingernails, also nothing new. I use special shampoo and it kills ‘em alright, but they keep coming back.
Compounding my troubles, nature tries harder to kill me today than it has in some years. By noon, the thermometer read 120, but that doesn’t tell me as much as it should since it doesn’t go any higher. Heat rising off the parking lot distorts the Super Station into a wobbly funhouse mirror version of itself. Wavering, undulating, dancing, as if trying not to burn its feet on the sun-baked cement of its own foundation.
I avoided the worst of it by heading out before dawn. I don’t want to be at work any longer than my paycheck requires, but I also don’t want to be roasted alive. Even so, it’s already unbearably hot. It’s the kind of heat where it feels as if you can drink the air. Where the jet black asphalt of the parking lot softens into a sort of spongy, gummy texture. Likewise with the tires of all the cars sitting on it. If ever curiosity makes you press the tire with your finger to see if it sinks in, rest assured that’s a mistake you’ll only make once.
Natalie hands me the key ring on her way out. She makes some muffled remark about how I always show up early, like I’m a tryhard or something, rather than just dodging the heat. She’s got the night shift so our worlds don’t overlap, there’s not much opportunity to talk or hang out. Consequently, even though she’s been working here for several months, I still know almost nothing about her.
I’d sure like to. She’s a cutie pie with a heart shaped bottom that looks like a million bucks in those tight acid wash jeans that she always wears. So far she comes off as a grouch, but some of that might be because I only see her at the end of her shifts. Who am I kidding, though. I live in a trash mountain. I cringe, imagining how she’d react to the sight of it. To the smell.
I also hesitate because she’s black. Not like that, for all their faults my parents didn’t raise me to be racist. I just know there’s sensitive stuff I would need to know about that I’m currently ignorant of. Where the emotional sore spots are, the dos and don’ts. Dating white girls is already a minefield. I’d learn to navigate it if she wanted me to, but that would require me to flirt with her first.
I daydream about Natalie while I take inventory. Imagining what I’d say, what she might say in return. How soft her hand might feel in mine. But because I’m a coward, and because she can never find out how I live, it all remains purely theoretical. I’m jostled out of my self-indulgent delusions by the first customer of the shift.
He’s overweight, with a patchy beard the same consistency as pubes. He’s got one of those faces that somehow looks simultaneously four years old, and forty. He’s wearing a hoodie despite the heat, and has managed to sweat profusely enough to soak through it under his armpits. How long was he outside?
He brings a basket full of gummi candy and energy drinks up to the front. I start ringing him up but he gestures as if I should wait. “I’m going back for more”. I shrug, and tell him to go for it. While he’s gone I just keep ringing up all the concentrated liquid and gelatinous sugar products. One of the little shiny plastic pouches reveals through a transparent window that it’s full of gummi soda bottles.
Gummi fruit I understand. That’s only abstracted by one step from what the flavor is based on. But soda is, itself, just a bunch of processed sugars. You have to rewind through several more layers of abstraction before you arrive at the natural sources of cola flavoring. Still, that’s at least explicable as representing a flavor people enjoy. What about gummi worms? Who are those for? Another customer enters, points to the smokes he wants, and I ring him up.
Hoodie tubbo returns from the wall of glass-doored beverage coolers with an armload of additional energy drinks, visibly dismayed that someone else was now in front of him. He does a weird, antsy back and forth dance like he needs to pee. “These are really cold” he finally complains. I realize he means the cans currently wedged into his under-arm folds. “Like, painfully cold. Can I set them down?”
I print the other dude’s receipt, which he turns down, so I bin it. Pubic beard makes a big show of setting down the second load of tall, colorful cans bearing names like “RIPASS” and “SAWBLADE”. A few of ‘em are covered in a camouflage pattern and say “Tribute to the troops edition, cherry lime” under the logo. I’m sure the troops feel honored. Cherry lime is, after all, the most patriotic flavor combo.
As I ring up his purchases, something catches his attention. “If I’m not mistaken” he says, “that’s the ring collection sound from Sonic the Hedgehog!” I raise an eyebrow, no fuckin’ clue what he’s on about. I ring up all the bags of gummi worms by scanning one of them several times. “Yes, I’m sure of it now” he pontificates. “That’s so weird. Did they license that audio clip from Sega?” I assured him I didn’t know and just work here. It seemed to irritate more than placate.
I noticed he was breathing hard now. Did he jog here? I spotted his car outside, a compact with a vinyl anime wrap. Gotta admire people who love what they love, and aren’t ashamed to broadcast that to the world. Still, that’s what, twenty? Thirty feet, total? Thirty feet, and he’s winded. I glance up at him as I finish scanning the last of the cans. There’s some sort of tiny black bug climbing around in the fine little hairs of his unibrow.
“You know what it is? I bet that sound effect is from a public domain sound library. It must be in dozens of other games and I’ve just never noticed.” I sighed. “Well done, you cracked the case. Do you want a bag for these?” He nodded so I got busy bagging the edible rubber annelids and metal cylinders of high fructose corn syrup.
“Tip?” he mutters. I make eye contact and wait for him to clarify. “It’s asking for a tip.” He gestures to the touchscreen payment processor. “Oh uh, that’s new. You can ignore that if you want.” He scowls at me, as if I have any say in such policies, then grumbles something under his breath about how I ought to carry the bags to his car if it’s going to ask for tips. I don’t disagree, but man, I just work here.
He stops me from double bagging. Something about the environment. I warn him the bottoms are gonna rip as all those cans are pretty heavy, but he insists. "Safe travels!" I call after him, eyes peeled for what I know is about to happen.
Sure enough, about halfway to his little clown car the bottom rips out of the bags and the cans go rolling everywhere. He frantically chases after them like a Benny Hill skit, absent the yakety sax.
I don’t laugh this time. In part because this is a tiresomely frequent occurrence, and in part because very little’s funny when you work at the Super Station Travel Center. Whatever you thought was funny before you started working here, it won’t be after a year or two. With the cans all gathered up, the animobile sputters to life outside, then speeds off towards the shimmering horizon.
It’s 110 degrees by 9. 115 by 10. I put my hands on the big double glazed windows comprising the front-facing outer wall of the ground level. Not hot enough to burn my skin, but enough to make my palms sweat after a couple seconds of sustained contact. Normally I tune it out, but when I focus, the low pitched droning of the multi-ton HVAC systems on the roof fade back into the forefront of my consciousness.
On days like this, it’s hard to believe anybody would intentionally design something like the SSTC, even while I’m standing inside of it. Next customer in the door is a garden variety Kyle, remarkable only in that it’s day time. Kyles are mainly a nocturnal species, so Natalie encounters ‘em more often than I do. Your standard Kyle is a white male between the ages of twenty and forty with either spiked up hair with dyed tips, or corn rows. Facial hair can be either a goatee or soul patch.
He wears a wife beater or no shirt at all, plus flip flops and swim trunks worn as shorts even though we’re hundreds of miles from the ocean. The edges of tribal tattoos peek out from the neckline of this one’s wife beater. He’s got full length sleeve tattoos all up and down both arms. When he turns his back to me as he browses our fine selection of animal themed Chinese boner pills by the checkout, I can just barely make out the top half of “No Ragrets” tattooed across his upper back. I also see “Only God Can Judge Me” in that same spot pretty often, always in the same typeface. They must all go to the same tattoo artist.
He ultimately settles on a 5 hour energy, rainbow tinted folding knife with skeletons on the handle, and the boner pills with the rhino on the package. He asks me if there’s real rhino horn in it. I promise him there is, that we make the pills fresh every day from rhinos we farm out back. He squints at me, then tries to haggle. I’m not sure why Kyles always try to haggle. It must work sometimes or they wouldn’t keep doing it.
The kicker is, when he leaves I spot him climbing into a lifted Ford Raptor. Why did he try to bargain when he’s driving a fifty thousand dollar truck? I shudder to think where he got the money for it. Maybe he’s the king of the Kyles? Lesser Kyles usually arrive on dirtbikes, quads, sometimes bicycles with those noisy little two stroke engine kits on ‘em. I can’t imagine them crossing a hundred miles of desert highway on those things. Then again, meth is a pathway to abilities many would consider...unnatural.
It’s either that or those 5 hour energy shots they keep buying. Basically irl potions of haste you’d buy from the item shop in an RPG. I only needed to try these once to swear them off. I thought it’d make cleaning go by faster. Five hour energy really means thirty minutes of manic euphoria followed by a four and a half hour coma.
Breaks are pointless here, since everything outside the building is a sweltering oven. I don’t know what I’d even do if I smoked. Maybe try to smoke a cig through a crack in the front door or something, with the lit end poking out. I spent my twenty allotted minutes hanging out with Louie in the motel.
He’s playing Tekken 3 on one of those old mini Playstations with the flip up LCD screen, tucked out of sight behind the upper portion of the desk. “Earning your paycheck?” I quip. He panics, flipping the screen down and sliding the little console further under the overhanging portion of the desk in one swift motion, before he realizes it’s only me. He sighs with relief, pulls it out and resumes playing.
“You will not believe the day I’ve had.” I point out that it’s only noon. He winces. “Don’t remind me. We finally got rid of that homeless guy who’s been squatting in the room across from Luke’s. But when I say squatting, I mean he deliberately smeared his own shit everywhere when the cops showed up.” I laughed, despite Louie’s plain exasperation. “A case of the ‘ol grumpy dumpies, was it?” He scowled at me. “You’re only laughing because you didn’t have to clean the walls.” I only laughed harder. “...And ceiling.”
I don’t know where the hobos keep coming from either. You can’t exactly survive out here for long without AC. Hitching rides with the truckers, I assume. There might also be a railway that passes close enough to walk here from. Nothing like that shows up on Google Maps, but then, neither does the trailer park. Even according to the internet, the Super Station Travel Center is all that exists out here.
It sure looks like it. Fuckoff massive, angular affront to nature. A punch in God’s face, in the form of a building. For the homeless, a beacon drawing them in from wherever they originate. Circling closer and closer with each orbit, like so many ants caught in a death spiral. When I was a child, I’d often see them shambling around at night. Insulated from their world, safe and comfy in the backseat of Pa’s station wagon as I peered out the window.
He wouldn’t tell me the truth about them. A truth unfit for the mind of a child. So, I imagined my own. “Night people” I called them, as if they were their own species. A nocturnal mirror image of humanity. I wondered if perhaps I had a nocturnal twin too, wandering that empty, cold darkness, revealed only intermittently by the occasional street lamp, or headlights.
Lean, gaunt faces. Hollow eyes, shining like the eyes of rabbits under artificial lighting. Pale as the moon, skeletally thin, yet somehow still getting visibly thinner with each passing month. Never the same faces from year to year either, something my young mind found tantalizingly mysterious. Where did the new ones come from? Where did the missing ones disappear to?
The desert, most likely. Not eaten up by it, so much as they fed themselves willingly into its ever-hungry maw. Bones bleached by the merciless heat of the sun, picked clean by buzzards. Somehow simultaneously more mundane, and more horrible, than I was able to imagine at that age. I liked it better when I didn’t know. Another perfectly good mystery, ruined by reality.
As usual I walk home well after sundown, yet the sand is still warm. Radiating heat stored up during the day, a natural thermal battery with no particular purpose that I know of. It’s still satisfying to dig my bare feet into that sand, absorbing some of the escaping energy, savoring the sensation of all the tiny granules rushing to fill the spaces between my toes as I spread them apart.
I pass the slowly growing pile of decomposing produce and cartons of spoiled milk on my way in. I don’t mind the smell, I’m used to it now, but I can literally feel the air as I enter the front door. Ma’s cooking something in the microwave, or toaster oven. It always fills up the kitchen, living room and hallway with humid, sticky air. Fat molecules liberated from her TV dinners, makes the whole place smell like french fries and sweat.
I can feel it settling on my skin and hair as I move down the hallway. The air feels as if I’m swimming through it, my body pushing it aside, leaving a temporarily clean wake behind me on my way to my room. Inside I find Gizmo laying on my bed. She’s not asleep, but her eyes are closed, and she’s purring. Her belly looks fatter than usual.
I spy some black mold on the ceiling, creeping in through the gap above the door. Trying to intrude, as if I wouldn’t notice. I stretch, up on my tip toes, to wipe it off with a damp rag and some of Pa’s cleaner. It’s everywhere, especially the kitchen. Some of it probably gets into my food now and again, no matter how careful I am. I try not to think about that.
Out my little window, high on the wall, I can see the starry sky. It’s worse than just not having a window, contemplating all the planets that must be out there. All of them real places, none of which I will ever visit. I can’t even escape the gravity well of the SSTC, much less the Earth. Those stars may as well just be a backdrop for the desert.
After changing out of my work clothes, I toss them in the hamper, then bring the hamper to the clothes washer outside. We have one inside too, but it’s buried in junk. Rather than unbury it, Pa just bought a new one from the SSTC and put it outside on the porch. No dryer for the simple reason that we live in a desert. When I open the lid to the washer, it’s full of Ma’s giant brassieres, panties and other garments.
“Ma, I-” She immediately interrupted. “WHAT?” I tried again, but couldn’t make myself heard over the blaring television. I gestured for her to turn it down. She squinted. “WHAT IS IT?” she asked. Eventually she realized of her own accord that she should turn the TV volume down. Pa protested that he was going to miss whatever show it was. Ma tried to explain to him that I wanted to tell her something. “WHAT?” he replied, also struggling to understand, ear drums still suffering residual vibration.
“Ma, I need to do the laundry.” She explained that she was in the middle of doing a load. “Yeah, since yesterday.” She looked wounded, then irritated. “It takes tahm to do laundry!” But not multiple days, I repeated. She somehow manages to stretch out chores that should last an hour or two so that they take two, three, even four days. Just doing them little by little instead of all at once.
“You can’t leave wet laundry in the machine” I pleaded, pausing to cough up some phlegm. “...It’ll get moldy. It will grow mushrooms.” She snapped that it only happened two times, and I never shut up about it. I tried a softer tone. “Ma, I’m sorry. But I need my work clothes clean for tomorrow.” She teared up. Oh lord, not again. Not now, I’m so tired. Then again, I’m always tired.
“Ya don’t know how hard it is!” she blubbered. “I do everythang around here!” Not so far as I’ve ever been able to tell, unless she meant in slow motion. “You want everythang fast, fast, fast! Now, now, now! Just hold ya hawses, it will be done by tomarrah!” I again reminded her that I needed my work clothes washed by tonight so they could be dry by morning. She burst into tears.
“Ma, cut it out. This isn’t a big deal.” She immediately stopped crying and her tone abruptly shifted back to snark. “If ya need it done right away so badly, go empty out the washer yaself.” She dug into the clutter, fished around and pried loose a warped plastic laundry basket. I sighed. That’s her game, in a nutshell.
It’s an unspoken principle. She knows that if she leaves chores undone long enough, eventually I’ll do them. Let the trash pile up until I can’t stand it anymore, and I’ll take it out, even if it’s not my turn. Leave clothing in the washer long enough and I’ll hang it up to dry, just because I need to use the damn machine.
Still, I didn’t have the energy to challenge her on it. Instead I took the basket and headed outside, carefully stepping over piles of crap, making use of the foot holes dug into it. Sort of awkwardly crab-walking back to the front door, then forcing it open against the internal pressure of the clutter piled against it, and slipping through the gap.
I complained about the front door on my way out, but all I got back was “It’s no problem for you, you’re so skinny.” I’m not really, except by comparison. Another one of those things I can’t point out unless I want to deal with more of Ma’s defensive crocodile tears. In her mind, I’m this infinitely small, thin, fast thing. Maybe just because her mental model of my proportions and capabilities hasn’t updated since I was a child. Back then she and Pa would send me under the mobile home to fetch stuff they lost down there.
Crawling in darkness, getting spiderwebs in my hair, fumbling around fiberglass insulation and rat droppings. Or they’d have me crawl into the space under the sink to hold the flashlight while Pa worked on the pipes. Or having me crawl from the front seat of the station wagon into the back, while in motion, to fetch the map...like their little helper monkey.
Or when they would push the dinner table away so they could fit themselves into their seats without the edge digging into their bellies, making less room for me. Then reassuring me when I complained that I could still slip into my seat even as the edge of the table pinned me against the wall, because “you’re so skinny, you hardly take up any room at all”.
I got big as the years passed, but they got way bigger. Only, they don’t see themselves that way, I don’t think. In denial of how they ballooned up, they still act as if they’re a normal healthy size, like me. So relative to them, I must still seem like a small and impossibly, frightfully skinny creature. A funhouse mirror distorted homunculus, perceptually warped by fat logic.
The air is finally comfortably cool when I emerge into the desert night. I turned my back to the SSTC, glowing blindingly in the distance like a second moon, and got busy hanging up Ma’s underthings on the clothesline. It’s stained here and there by “cleaner”.
Cleaner is a special blend of borax and powdered detergent Pa came up with to solve the problem of Ma’s wet clothes getting moldy when she leaves them sitting in the washer for a couple days at a time. It’s also become something of a general purpose scrub, back when either of them used to clean the kitchen or bathroom, which is probably as toxic to us as it hopefully is to the ants. I still frequently wake up with ant bites on my legs, even though I never actually see any in my room. I suspect they must’ve nested in the clutter.