head first, so to speak

a short story

If we were to ask him why he is so manically going through these boxes left by the dumpster, he would find it hard to explain. He would perhaps begin by saying that he’s been looking for a woman. But then he would have gotten tongue tied, because the story did not make any sense. And if the hypothetical inquirer would press for more, and ask, If you can’t explain it, why are you dumpster diving, he would take issue with the expression. It’s not accurate to call it that, he never checks whatever is in the dumpster itself, only what’s left by its side. In his mind, the act of taking something to the trash but refusing to actually put it there, inside the bin, to take that last step, means the person or persons considered the item or items to be potentially valuable for someone else, even if they had lost their value for the one throwing them away. Whatever they are, they are not garbage.

This all sounds very reasonable, and we could end the inquiry here, that is if we weren’t watching him now put the boxes aside having gone through every single item found in each one of them, and now, for what we can surmise from what has already been said is the first time, he is approaching the garbage bin, one of those large army green ones, and he is opening the lid, and now he is awkwardly going in. And this time, were we to ask why he is doing what he just said he never did, and that one would be safe in assuming never would do, we would find no hesitation in his answer, he would have said it as if it was the most reasonable thing in the world, as if it followed naturally from the premise, as if it required no other qualifications and it could be expected to put the matter to rest once and for all, I’m dumpster diving because I am in love.

Since love is never very far from madness, it might help explain at least why he is doing this on a weekday at eleven am. Not that it mattered much. His work was unimportant, with no chance of or desire for progression, and he was nearing retirement anyway. Any normal week he would have been in the office, but he had called in sick so he could dive into dumpsters instead. If someone were to tell him this a week ago, he would have laughed. Now, look at him, knee deep in garbage, and truth be told some of the bags are leaking with god knows what. For a moment, perhaps from the intensity of the stink, he had a glimpse of his insanity, how it all started, how it progressed so quickly.

Scavenging, that’s what he called it. If we were to be overly precious we could say it went back to his childhood, days spent picking rocks and acorns from the forest floor in the winter, or shells and bits of glass made smooth by the ocean in the summer. But really every child is like this, or should be. No, the hobby of going through what people left by the trash, and collecting whatever looked interesting, was a much more recent affair, and it had a very definite, but also very simple trigger. One day as he was walking back home from work, he saw next to the garbage bins a beautiful rocking chair, obviously very old. He stood for a moment considering if he should cross the street to look at it more closely, and then without deciding himself, his legs took him there, and this was dangerous, because legs do not care about traffic lights, and he only noticed he was crossing rather than merely thinking about doing so, because of the incessant blaring horns coming from all sources of traffic. The chair was even more beautifully ornate from up close. The wood it was made from was dark and rich, and other than needing some varnish, it was immaculate.

Is it legal to take it, was one of his first thoughts. He didn’t know, but he could see no reason why it wouldn’t be. Still he was uneasy about picking it up. We can’t tell how long he stood there trying to decide, but eventually the garbagemen arrived, and when they asked him if he was going to keep the chair, he said no out of embarrassment, What, me, take something from the trash, no way, never, that is quite disgusting, please take it, take it away forever, and they threw it into the back of the truck, along with the rest of the garbage. But seeing thrown so carelessly and without any appreciation for its beauty hurt him in some places he didn’t know he could be hurt, and he decided then and there that, should the opportunity appear to save something beautiful, whatever it might end up being, he would.

Who knew if it was simply the case that his decision made him more attentive, or if it really was the case that people were leaving more and more things by the side of the dumpsters around his neighborhood, but soon he was finding items worth saving every single day or almost, and just as he promised to himself, he was saving them. Within a couple of months, the situation was untenable. His small apartment had been filled to the brim with trinkets and curiosities, books of all sizes and shapes, vinyl records and cds, antique furniture and vintage photographs and posters, mineral and fossil collections, traditional embroideries, tapestries and rugs, porcelain, glassware, frames, office supplies, puzzle sets and much, much more.

One day returning from work, with a large canvas he had just found, he couldn’t get the door to the apartment all the way open, but rather had to narrowly slide through, only to find his entrance looking like the storage room of a thrift store, but the one where they don’t let you go in, because the things in it have not been sorted or tagged or even considered. If only he’d had a wife, or close friends, they would have said something way before it got to this point. He was too old now to find either, but his age also provided some wisdom, so from then on he decided that he would save everything he thought worth saving, but only keep what he really liked, and the rest he would donate to the charity thrift store. Once he had gotten rid of most of his finds, and his apartment was again liveable, things settled into some kind of rhythm, and finding and saving things from the side of the trash just became what he did. But he wasn’t the only one.

Eventually, as he roamed the dormitory neighborhood with his little canvas shopping cart, not looking but acting a bit like a hobo, he came to find other people doing the same. Some he considered cheaters. Another name he uttered in disgust was professionals. By this he meant those who would do their rounds driving an automobile, and collect absolutely everything, to sift it later, and see what they could sell. It was not the selling that he was against, it was the driving, the ease of it, no sacrifice, no calloused feet, no aching arms at the end of the day, it was a disrespect to the craft, if there was a guild they would be expelled, but there wasn’t. The hobos, on the other hand, pushing their own carts around back and forth and up and down, he respected, and had made acquaintance with. One in particular proposed a deal to him once, Look, you care about things I really have no use for, and vice versa, how about we help each other out, I save stuff you might like, and you save stuff I might like, and then we exchange.

This seemed perfectly logical and advantageous at the time, yet now that he was inside the dumpster, with his pants already covered in so many different types of awful, each with its particular bad sort of scent, he had to regret making this deal. But who could have predicted it. When the hobo told him he’d found something he thought he’d like there was no reason to suspect something life changing. Nor was there any reason for suspicion when he saw it was a wooden box, and that within it was a bunch of postcards with erotic pictures of ladies from the beginning of the twentieth century, nor when he untied the green velvet lace that kept them together, nor when he read what was written on the back of the first, a love letter of some sort. Interesting, yes, I’ll keep it, thank you, I got something for you too. It was an old blender. Then he went home without thinking too much about the postcards, and he had dinner, and only afterward did he sit on the couch and look at them carefully.

First he looked at the pictures. The ladies were pretty, and most of them were naked, or close to it, but this did not hold his attention. Quickly he turned the cards around to read the messages. He was going to start with the first one of the bunch, but then noticed there were dates, not complete, only the day and the month. So he took all of them to the dining table, and started to arrange them. There were three januaries, one february, two marches, four aprils, four mays, four junes, three julys, six augusts, seven septembers, and no less than nine octobers, but no novembers, and a single postcard from december. It immediately hit him that there was no way to prove from the sorting alone that they were written in the same year, but he would at least start with that assumption, and begin with the earliest letter, january thirteenth, which started with, Happy birthday, Laura, and ended with, Your eternal lover, David.

Even before reading any other postcard he was sure the order was not as simple as it appeared at first. The one sent on january thirteen mentioned another sent in october, and specifically talked about how the woman in the photograph resembled her, especially the way her hair was pinned imperfectly in a bun, leaving wild strands of hair to accentuate the exquisiteness of her jaw, and how he kept thinking of her and of it, and how it still hurt him to look at her picture, and that this was why he was sending it back, and writing no more.

Searching through the postcards dated from october he found the one mentioned. He had looked at it once and didn’t look twice, but now he stared, carefully. The woman was beautiful, her breasts and thighs were exposed, and she was looking right at the camera, and through the camera, at him, and then he imagined how beautiful the woman who had received the postcard must have been, and how he wished her picture had also been saved along with the postcards, and then he decided he needed to know more. He read every postcard several times until he could be reasonably assured of the right order, piecing the story together into a coherent narrative, and after reading all of them a few more times, he had a good idea of the sequence of events.

They met on her seventeenth birthday and quickly fell in love. They spent the summer together, and then he had to leave. The reasons were not specified. Then the correspondence began, in october. By march next year she had stopped replying, yet he kept writing, repeating how much he loved her, and why, how much he missed her, how much the time they spent together meant to him, how he wished he could be with her, or that she could come to meet him, and how every time he closed his eyes he saw her face, and how it was driving him mad, and how he knew now that they would never be together, and why he had to stop writing to her, and thinking about her, and why he was sending back her picture and ending all of it once and for all.

Perhaps it was because he found himself in his living room at three am after having read and reread the love letters so many times, but he decided then that he would look for this woman, he would have to know her side of the story. He didn’t try to justify it then, only later did he utter the words out loud, absurd as they sounded as he looked himself in the eye through the mirror and spoke in the second person, You’re in love with her. And then even more absurd, the mirror replied, No, you’re in love with her.

He went back to the first postcard he read, the last one sent, and how could he have missed it all those times, there were two postcards rather than one. They had been glued together long enough ago that it was easy and harmless to tear them apart. As he did, a small picture fell from within. On the back it was written, Laura on her eighteenth birthday, and then the year. This let him know that she was three years younger than him, and that she was indeed beautiful, or had been. The back of the unread postcard simply said, I will always love you, David, also dated january thirteen. Unable to let go with only one postcard, the heartbroken lover had sent two, one last testament of his love, together with the picture. It probably never would have been a fitting end, no matter how many times he said goodbye.

He didn’t sleep that night. Not that there was much of the night left when he finally went to bed, only because he wanted to rest his back, his mind was full of plans. The next step was obvious, to go to the address to which the postcards had been sent, nothing more elementary. He would not suffer through a whole day at the office, but rather call in sick. He would take a shower, change into better clothes, and then walk to her building, carrying the box with the postcards in it. When he got to the door he saw that it was open, and there were boxes everywhere, and a young woman opening them. She noticed the well dressed middle aged man standing by the door with a box under his arm and got up, How can I help you. The man explained, and the woman said she had just moved in, and didn’t know the people who were there before, Well, can you do me a favor and try to find out, it’s really important, but she politely refused, and he understood, it was a rather strange request.

He then went to the neighbors, and the neighbors did not remember anyone by the description. Fortunately one asked to look at the postcards and the picture, and noticed he was at the wrong address, because the building numbers had changed a couple of years back. As he approached the right building there were men carrying boxes and trash bags full of stuff, and because the dumpsters were empty they threw the bags right in. He quickened his pace, instinctively wanting to ask them to leave the bags by the side, as someone would perhaps find things of value in them, but he knew this would be a waste of time, and rather he should talk to them about the woman. They had been hired by a real estate agent, not the owners, to clear the house, Can I talk to your boss, He is coming by in an hour or so, if you want to wait, Yes, I’ll wait, also, please, can you leave the bags and boxes by the side of the dumpster instead of throwing them in, there might be things there people want.

He waited, and within an hour or so there was a man in a slick suit and sunglasses coming up the street, and soon approaching the movers now finishing their job. He got up from the bench he was sitting in and said loudly, Excuse me, and then told the man the story. The real estate agent wasted no time, and didn’t even begin by saying he was sorry, but instead declared without any particular intonation, The woman who used to live here is dead.

He dragged himself back to the bench and sat down, watching the man in the suit go into the building, and then some minutes later back out. Then he watched the movers being paid and driving away. And then the street was deserted, he was left alone, just him and the boxes by the side of the dumpster. This of course was not true, it was the middle of the day and there was traffic, and car horns, and ambulance sirens, and dogs barking, and everything else one would expect to find in a busy neighborhood of a modern metropolis. But he felt alone all the same.

Why did it hurt so much. Why was he in love with a phantom. Laura. Laura. Not even saying the name a third time before he was jumping up from the bench and going through the boxes, frantically, manically, and unable to find what he was looking for. And then he saw at the end of the street, beginning its daily round, the garbage truck. It wouldn’t be long until they got to where he was, and disposed of the last remnants of this woman’s life. All he wanted was one picture, to see her not as the girl that another once loved, but as she had been before she died. And so he did what only love could make one do, and dove into the dumpster head first, so to speak.