List: A Novel

Then What?

THEN WHAT? 25 For the living room, the man needs a nail or screw that will hold the weight of print AND frame, so he checks the basement. He tries the toolbox, and then the plastic box past it, and then the little paper sacks in the cupboard, and nada. But he can always check the garage, where there’s another toolbox and more bags of screws. More shelves. More cupboards. And in one place or the other he’ll find a hammer and level, and a drill to sink an anchor, if he needs one. Or the hammer might be in the dining room drawer stuffed with batteries and pliers and a screwdriver or two or six on top of disposable cameras and several small lengths of wire and string. Some rubber bands. A mouth harp. A pedometer. Tea candles. Long, decorative matches. A Swiss Army knife. A label-maker. It doesn’t want to open, the drawer, at least all the way, not without some tugging. He worries about getting it closed. 26 The disposable cameras—he notices they’ve all been used, wound round to the end, and someone should have taken them to be developed long ago. Who knows what’s on their film or from when? Who knows if they’re still salvageable? Is there an expiration date on film? They’re probably filled with shots of feet and foreheads and the bricks of a building that will forever go unnamed, because only the kids ever use throwaway cameras, and these are the things they see. Just get them developed, he thinks. DO IT NOW, even if everyone asks why he didn’t do this before? Or at least leave them out of the drawer, for after the task at hand, which will itself have to wait till he’s found the plunger to pump clear the basement drain, which his beautiful wife says is sitting in a pool of water, again. It’s just water, he hopes, and asks after the aforementioned plunger, which nobody’s seen, it seems. It seems they’ve never ever seen it. Even the idea of such a tool appears to strike them as an abstraction. Plunger, his son asks, pausing, wondering at what some people will invent and others then buy. Plunger, his wife asks, as if there are implements she should never have to consider. Plunger, his daughter asks. What’s a plunger? And he’d give up, if he could, instead of narrowing down the number of places he might have left a long-handled rubber ended staff for unsticking toilets. How long could such a list be? Because a plunger can’t be in the bedrooms, or the living room. Not the dining room or the den. Who would leave it in a closet? And it’s not in the bathrooms, because that would make too much sense. At least it wasn’t there when last he needed it. So, maybe it’s under the kitchen sink? In the garage? In the laundry 27 room?! The utility closet. No. It’ll be in the basement, by the drain in question, from the last time he needed to plunge, right? Right, and it is, and so it goes. And he still has no screw for hanging that print. But he’s downstairs, and the metal shelf with toolbox and tools and screws and nails is right damn there, so he sets aside the wet plunger, fixing its location in his mind, for next time, and he starts digging, wondering why he would ever have piled tools on a box with a lid that opens up. But that’s neither here nor there, he thinks, setting the tools in a pile on top of other tools on top of a cardboard box he’ll someday also need to open. He can’t just dump them on the floor. That would be beyond the pale. After all, he has a drain that backs up a milky soup. In the toolbox’s top shelf: screws, and nails, and anchors, and a hammer, of all things. He runs his fingers through the metal, ignoring pinches from sharp tips, because he has hit the motherload , and all will be well. Only, now he’s nagged by the $19.99 he spent on a picturehanging tool complete with double levels and a punch for setting holes (which came with a...