A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis

Author:L.J. Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-29T16:00:00+00:00

5

“I wish to God you'd stop harping on it,” said Lowell's wife, standing in the middle of what had been Henry's room. She had a broom in one hand, and the other was holding a crumbling shoebox filled with what appeared to be petrified human shit. She took it over to the barrel in the middle of the floor and dropped it in. The barrel was filled with all manner of things that Henry had left behind, very few of them identifiable and all of them worthless. “Old what's-his-name only lived here for a couple of months. Henry lived here longer than that.”

“Six months,” said Lowell, peeling off another huge patch of linoleum from the floor. It was more brittle and somewhat cleaner than the last layer, and he broke it into pieces before throwing it into the barrel. Lowell couldn't guess how many more layers there were, each one cleaner than the last; they seemed to go down for inches more. Henry's layer, the top one, hadn't even been a layer, properly speaking; it was a sort of jigsaw puzzle of chunks and strips and squares, usually of linoleum but almost never of the same pattern, frequently filled in with some alien substance like burlap or bathroom tile, all of it haphazardly affixed to the floor with something that appeared to be a mixture of roofing tar and vomit. Lowell had been forced to wear a handkerchief soaked in camphor over his nose as he pulled it up; he nearly suffocated, but it really cleaned out his sinuses. When he finally got the first layer pulled up, he put it in the garbage cans. The garbage men refused to take it. Next he tried to burn it in the backyard, but the stench was so horrible that he extinguished the fire even before the police and firemen arrived and served him with various summonses. It was still out there now, with a big charred pit in the middle of it where the fire had been, like some kind of squat volcano. He thought maybe he would bury it or something one of these days, but he had so many other problems that he never got around to it. He gazed at it from time to time from one of the rear windows.

“Six months,” he said. “October to March. I don't think I'm harping on it. I think it's interesting. Don't you think it's interesting?”

“No,” said his wife. “I don't.”

“Bankrupt at nineteen. A colonel at twenty-three. A part of history?”

“Who cares?” said his wife.

Lowell shrugged pleasantly and went about his work. He had a long row to hoe, but he was industriously hoeing it. His marriage was a shambles and the house was a mess beyond his wildest dreams, but the odd thing was that, though surrounded by wreckage, he felt he was actually getting somewhere for the first time in his life. Where exactly he was getting or what he would do when he got there were matters for conjecture, but there could be little doubt that he was on his way at last.

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