by TJ Price
An excerpt from “The Collectors,” by Matt Bell.
No self without these ghosts.
No ghosts, without—
No. No ghosts, or rather:
No ghosts except in things.
They surround you, press closer, waiting for the rapidly approaching moment when you too will be just a thing, an object, a static entity slowly falling into decay.
Packrat. My maternal grandmother was what we called a “packrat,” when I was growing up—we never used the word “hoarder” to describe her until after she died. After a backyard picnic, she would direct my sister and I to gather up the used plastic utensils, to wash them at the sink before tucking them away in plastic containers. These containers themselves had once held pre-sliced deli meat, purchased at the grocery store, and had been used and reused until they went filmy like cataracts. She “saved everything,” we used to say. But that wasn’t the extent of it—she was also a collector. She would make pilgrimage to the McDonald’s on the Berlin Turnpike for the toys that came in the Happy Meals, yet would never be lucky enough to acquire the entire set of a particular run. To this day, I recall her bedroom, every nook and every cranny jammed full of boxes or bags, every drawer teeming with the luscious susurrus of plastic-wrapped plastic. “Someone might need it,” my grandmother protested thinly at any mention of her habits. “I’ll bring it to the church bazaar, or drop it off at the hospital.” Despite the fact that nobody would want any of it, she clung to it desperately. Despite the fact that she herself often forgot she had something, she wouldn’t let any of it go. It seemed to me that she was attracted more to the idea of having something rather than actually having it; drawn to the sheer mass of accumulation. She seemed to nurture it, constantly feeding it with more—I would see her duck into her room, which she kept locked and to which lock she wore on a thin piece of twine around her neck, clutching some plastic-wrapped souvenir that might have a second life. She seemed determined to throw away as little as possible, a habit which I respected and by which I felt a kind of awe. Mom always called it “junk.” Said, “your grandma’s a packrat.” I figured it had something to do with Depression-era mentality: save, save, save, for you don’t know where your next anything will come from, if it will come at all.
Instructions for My Funeral (I). On the hard drive of my computer, I have a document entitled “Instructions for My Funeral,” which addresses my husband. It begins as follows: Then I am dead, and you are what remains of our shared life. I’m sorry that I left you with the rotting half. I am ashamed of all the detritus that I collected during my living days. I imagine that all of it really only stuck together with me as the glue, and now that I am gone—dried up and flaked away—it will all collapse into a messy heap. I am sorry that you are the one who has to wade through that midden of books and notebooks and loose papers and rocks and sticks and all the other ephemera I accumulated over the years. I always did refer to you jokingly as my ‘future archivist,’ as if I’d acquire some kind of posthumous celebrity, that those stupid scribbles on long-yellowed bar napkins might be something of interest to someone, at some point.
Penny-pincher. At one point, visiting my stepfather’s mother in Sarasota, Florida—she being of a similar age to my mother’s mother—my sister and I were offered a rare treat—ice-cream cones! The elderly woman happily made her way to the freezer, retrieved the half-gallon of vanilla ice cream, and took out two sugar cones. She filled them right to the top, and no further, then handed them to us, one at a time. We couldn’t believe our eyes—was this some kind of joke? Who fills an ice-cream cone like that? Zero scoops! Later, my stepfather and mother laughed about it. He said “she’s always been a penny-pincher.” I had a distinct mental image of his mother’s shaky old fingers, pressing so hard on the tiny penny that her fingertips blanched. I saw her lips thin to a crevice with satisfaction, as if via this pressure she could even measure out the very breath she took. Her husband sat in the living room with a nasal cannula, its thin surgical tubing attached to a tank of oxygen on the back of his wheelchair. The word that comes to mind when I think of her is “severe.” She always wore a storm on her brow, which could intensify from mild confusion and disdain into outrage and disbelief in a flash. I didn’t know her that well, though she did stay with us for a little while. Maybe she was a good woman, but I never liked her. She seemed distant and hostile and alien, as if reserving her warmth for those she deemed appropriate recipients. Even then, she would only fill one chamber of their hearts, I’m sure, and with the lightest coating.
The Pink Room. The room next to my grandmother’s bedroom was called the Pink Room. This was due to its bizarre wallpaper, which was a strange candy-stripe of peppermint pink and white, with some floral accents. Later, the Pink Room became host to my grandfather’s deathbed. He died there, amongst the peppermint and candy-white stripes, with White Jesus on the wall, beaming beatifically down on him painted in bone china blue, His rosy lips pursed in the smallest of smiles. In the living room, the relatives had gathered to discuss the expenses of his care, whether or not surgical intervention would even yield results of any beneficial nature. There was, of course, bickering. The small living room filled with it, obscuring the monotonous tock of the cuckoo clock, rising, perhaps, a bit too loudly. At a particular peak of volume, my uncle quieted the group and then got up to go check on my grandfather—to make sure he didn’t need anything, but also to inch shut the door to the Pink Room, to keep him from having to hear the argument—but this was unnecessary. Later, my mom said “it was like he heard everyone arguing about what to do and decided to make things easier for everyone by just . . . giving up.” I remember when I heard this, I was astonished: you could do that? Just . . . give up? My grandfather didn’t seem like the kind of man who would do that—he was a veteran of the Korean War; still shined his shoes with black polish on Sundays, sitting at the kitchen table in a white undershirt with his hair Brylcreemed. Now that I think of him, I don’t think I knew him all that well. He was very kind. I wish I had known him better, had thought to ask him about his life, but I didn’t, and then he was gone. Glioblastoma or astrocytoma or one of those invasive things that corrodes and dissolves the glue holding your brain together. After his death, the Pink Room became overgrown by my grandmother’s habit, too; the closet spilled out, dehiscent with clothes on hangers; the top shelf jammed with a precarity of boxes of board games.
Accumulation. After my grandfather died, she had to sleep on the couch in the living room. “Saving everything” crowded her out of her own bedroom. Slowly, like a festering, the accumulation spread from room to room. The cellar’s piles of boxes and shelves and stringy gobbets of Christmas lights and dusty, dingy bolts of fabric metastasized and became a sea, sloshing over the cardboard flaps and onto the cement floor. Jars of batteries and bottles of nails and screws had always lined the rickety wooden stairs down, motionless but vaguely threatening, but now even the stairs up to the second floor accumulated piles of shoes, coats from every season, baby clothes, fake plants, pool toys—despite not having a pool or a baby, or anyone who knew anyone who had a pool or a baby. Eventually, she aged to the point where climbing the stairs was no longer possible, and Jennifer went to go live in a group home. The windows bulged, the doors, even the floors, from below, with the sheer amount of stuff. Junk, my mom called it. But it was beyond mere “junk,” it was the rabid accumulation of someone who just could not let go. A worry so consuming that it ate her alive—paradoxically, a scarcity mentality transformed into retentive bloat—and eventually, her heart gave out.
Instructions for My Funeral (II).
You’re a person who likes to throw things away. Not very sentimental. I’m the one who saved a birthday card that everyone signed from my day job (three jobs ago!), tucked it inside a little cardboard box marked PERTINENT DOCUMENTS alongside all my old licenses and ID cards, not to mention an old Duncan yo-yo (neon orange) and a mysterious length of fraying twine which has since lost its significance, if it ever had any. I wonder if you will throw that away, too, or if it will acquire some new status simply because I happened to save it. I hope you knot it around your wrist and wear it until it frays.
Tag sale. We used to have “tag sales” on the front lawn of my grandmother’s house. It would be a summertime affair; blankets spread out on the grass and then covered with items that we had no use for any longer. The lead-up to this event would happen at home, combing through boxes of stuff in the basement or deciding which clothes to get rid of—the ones that no longer fit, etc.—and then tagging them with small orange-red stickers and a pre-determined price. Larger items, like furniture or—in one instance, a Nordic Track machine—would be priced nearer to one hundred dollars, and then slowly be reduced as the hours wore on and sunset approached. Once the dark came, most everything had been priced down to “FREE,” just because we didn’t want to have to bring it back home: a solid, often bulky reminder, of our failure to sell. Sometimes I would get to be in charge of the little metal cashbox, though I also had a small plastic jar of Smarties that I would sell for a quarter each, even if I ended up eating most of them and washing them down with sickly-sweet powdered Country Time lemonade, served—of course—in plastic Solo cups Grandma had retrieved from a barbecue one month prior. When I was very, very young, my father’s books were boxed up and put out at one of these tag sales. I was heartbroken: he’d long since been evicted from our family, and these books were really all I had left of him, despite his transgressions. They were mostly science-fiction and fantasy novels: I can still remember some of them—books like Icerigger and Flinx in Flux and Splinter of the Mind’s Eye by Alan Dean Foster; I remember novels by Fred Saberhagen and Frederic Pohl; Barbary by Vonda McIntyre, the entire Shannara series (only up to The Scions of Shannara, at that point) by Terry Brooks, and the Norby, the Mixed-Up Robot books by Isaac Asimov. There was Dragonlance and the Belgariad, Seventh Son and Xanth. All of them, consigned to the tag sale—of those books, the only one I managed to sneak away was one of the Norby books, and which I eventually lost later in my life anyhow. I remember feeling such anguish throughout the day, watching people pick through the box as the sun beat down. I remember the loathing that spiked every time someone picked one out, and the curses I launched at anyone who dared to actually buy one and take it away. Though as the sun fell, and darkness approached, a manic hope rose—there was still a good number of books left over (even though they had been marked down to ten cents each!) and I was sure I was going to be able to keep the remainder. Sadly, as we packed up and I tried to smuggle the box into the van with me—stuffing the Norby paperback under the front seat—I was told, no, that box was going to the dump, along with everything else that didn’t sell, except for one or two items they’d decided to keep after all. I was particularly distraught—it didn’t make sense to me, to throw away a book, and it still doesn’t (except for in some very extreme circumstances)—and in order to try to appease me, my grandmother said she would keep the books for me, in her house. Upstairs, in the bedroom I used, when I sometimes stayed the night. This sounded sensible to me, even as a kid—on the shelves in that room were paperback copies of Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis, and though I was still too young to really understand what Lewis was going for with those novels, I loved their covers. I thought my father’s books would go perfectly with those. But no; my mother and stepfather were adamant. My mother said “you have enough junk in your house already, Mom,” and that was that. I didn’t speak to them the whole ride home. My stepfather had no need for a bookshelf. He could just put his Whitesnake and ZZ Top cassettes in the drawer beneath his side of the waterbed.
Hidden objects. What I collect: books. Clothes. Pieces of paper. Innumerable strange objects. Rocks. Specific silverware. Bowls. In one drawer, I have a small oblong black cardboard box. Inside of it, there is another box, slightly smaller. Inside this box is another box, and within that, still another, and inside that is a very small jewelry box, which clicks open with a tight little snap and is lined with a pearlescent, soft sateen. On the sateen is a fortune cookie fortune, which reads: Keep your plans secret for now. Another box in a different drawer is filled with wood shavings, and nestled in those shavings is a small piece of basswood, out of which is whittled a small, totemic head. The shavings are what is left of the block the head was whittled from. Will anyone keep these things? Have they acquired a kind of patina of importance, a veneer of value, now that I have mentioned them here? These are only two of the many strange objects I refuse to part with, at least, for now. Death will eventually sever me from everything physical, as it does us all.
Moving. In my twenties, I was possessed of a need to become upwardly mobile. I resisted collecting books, as I’d lost most of the ones I’d had, anyhow, or else they had been taken from me. I wanted to be ready to uproot myself at a moment’s notice and be immediately elsewhere, with nothing holding me down or back, nothing to impede my desire for freedom. I’m in my forties now, and the last time I moved, I needed about twenty Banker’s Boxes just to move my books. When next we move, we will need to hire people to help us, probably. Now we have a sectional, a recliner. Bookshelves. When I arrived in New York City for the first time, back in 2017, one of my husband’s friends grunted in surprise at how heavy one of my boxes was. “What do you have in here, anyway, rocks?” She joked, as she climbed the stairs to our third floor walk-up. She was correct: it was full of large, smooth, strangely-shaped stones I’d collected from the shore of an island in Casco Bay. Despite not all fragments from the same larger rock, they fit together—in my mind—seamlessly. I’d even had thoughts of affixing them to one another somehow, perhaps in the style of an Andy Goldsworthy sculpture. (Currently, they are still in pieces.) The last time we moved, in 2022, we tried to ship everything via a freight truck. When it arrived a week later, most of our belongings had shifted, fallen over, or been disrupted in some way, despite our having wrapped most things tightly in plastic. Some large things were broken to the point of being unusable, and yet I still hesitated before hauling those off to the Dumpster. Surely there’s some way to salvage this, I thought, despite there being no evidence to support that. I had no sentiment for the splintery particle-board of a destroyed IKEA desk—it just felt like a waste. Could it have been avoided? Maybe. Was it built to be thrown away? We did, in the end, so maybe it was. But so too are we, and neither can that be avoided. Sometimes I wonder what my body collects—what it keeps, what it throws away—and how much it knows about that selection process. How much we accumulate, simply moving through life. It builds up inside of us, too.
Instructions for My Funeral (III).
Will you keep my remains? I don’t think you would. I don’t know if you’d know where to put them. Maybe you’d want to keep the urn on your desk, but we both know how things there end up spilled or strewn around. It wouldn’t do to have you suddenly screaming in the middle of a work call because you’d accidentally knocked over your late husband’s ashes, though it’d make for a funny story, later, after the re-awakened pain subsides.
Treasures. The movie Labyrinth (1986) comes to mind. At one point, Sarah, the heroine, is betrayed by one of her companions, who has given her a wormy peach. Once eaten, this worm magically transports Sarah in a hallucinatory trip to the ballroom of the Goblin King, but when Sarah resists the spell, she ends up dropped into what resembles her bedroom from the beginning of the film. She spends a few wonderstruck moments gazing at all of her possessions, stuffed animals in their niches on the hutch, all her books, the canopied bed. A little girl’s room, still. “It was just a dream!” she exclaims, relieved that her journey to this point has all been just a fantasy. Suddenly, however, she is disabused of this by the sudden incursion of the Junk Hag—a goblin that speaks in a sick-sounding warble, tuned to pathetic faux-sympathy. The Junk Hag is laden like a pack mule, carrying all of her belongings strapped to her body, and it seems almost to be growing from of her, fused to her organically like an outsized tumor. As Sarah begins to try to leave the room, and the massive, apocalyptic junkyard beyond it, the Hag continues to try to ply her into staying, with more and more relics from Sarah’s childhood. “Oh, dearie,” she exults, shoving yet another thing into Sarah’s arms. “Here’s a treasure. You’ll want that, won’t you, my dear?” The effects of the worm are still hazing Sarah’s memory. “I was looking for something…” she murmurs to herself, yet is distracted again and again by the things the Junk Hag shoves on her, stumbling under the inability to carry everything. Her Betsy Boo, her teddy, her Flopsy. The “panda slippers” that she “never wanted thrown away.” When finally Sarah reclaims her purpose, she startles, waking from the ensorcelment of nostalgia, and sheds the treasures she’s been carrying. “It’s all JUNK!” she cries—the original script adds the dummy note of (joyous) to her awakening—and flees the scene, arriving back with her friends, but changed. This is a classic moment of death and rebirth, signifying Sarah’s ultimate rejection of her childish self (as represented by the temptations of the Junk Hag) and maturing toward adulthood. She is restrained no longer by the physical bonds of her past.
The Broken Thing. The god of Need is always hungry. It sends out its little minions to devil you with whispers like someday, you’ll need this, and if you throw it away now, you won’t have it when the time comes. With my grandmother serving as the exemplar of scarcity mentality, I have attempted my entire life to resist this impulse, but now, we live in a disposable world. We don’t try to fix things, we just get rid of them. We throw things away. Attempts to salvage will only cause the fragility of the broken thing to compound, serving to frustrate further, exacerbating the time one spends without that fully-functioning thing. Why not ditch the effort of the in-between, and just replace the broken thing? Here, too, are demons, but those serving the god of Waste. Throw it away! they hiss. Make it disappear! But there is no disappearance, only relocation. It will pile up somewhere. Bedeviled on either side by these emissaries of Need and Waste, I cannot choose! To make matters worse: I have such sympathy for the broken thing. There is something about the effort one puts into fixing something—or at least, I convince myself that’s the case—and yet, there are so many broken things and more things breaking all the time, all around us, and no god has enough hands to mend against such a perilous pile of shards.
Kintsugi. My husband, two Christmases ago, gave me a very thoughtful gift: two ceramic bowls, beautifully painted with repeated patterns in a rich, deep cerulean. However, a few weeks ago, after scooping in some ice cream for a dessert, my husband dropped his bowl, which hit the corner of the counter and shattered on the floor. We stood there in gaping shock for a second before he started to berate himself for being so clumsy, tears springing to his eyes. I surprised myself with my equanimity, and assured him that it was OK, things happen, and we slowly went about collecting what we could salvage from the shards. He said he would throw it out, but as I looked at the jumble of jagged ceramic, I thought that I would like to refashion it. Repurpose it. I got out the roll of painter’s tape from the bin of adhesives, and painstakingly set to re-constructing the bowl. Because of the pattern, it was easier than I’d expected, and—barring a few gaps where the ceramic had turned to dust—it regained its structure. Still, mummified in its blue cerements, it sits on the table in our living room. I thought maybe I could make something of it, maybe employ some form of kintsugi. I have since purchased some epoxy that is meant for ceramics repair, and I will attempt to fit it all back together, maybe even paint over the filled cracks once it cures. I doubt it will ever be used again for its initial purpose, but I cannot deny it the chance of having a second.
A second excerpt from “The Collectors,” by Matt Bell, a story about the Collyer brothers.
I have left everything for the historians and garbage men to do with what they will. The workers want to throw you away, but the historians that follow will want something else altogether. They will gather you into inventories, into feature articles and well-researched biographies. They will annotate and organize. They will hoard the facts, organizing them into timelines and tight paragraphs of passive prose, then publish their theories in journals and books before reciting them on television shows and packed lecture halls. They will collect more of you . . . than anyone should need or want, and then they will collect some more, never satisfied with what they have, always greedy for more facts and theories.
Instructions for My Funeral (IV). The document remains unfinished.
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