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  • An Autobiography of Usefulness
  • Matthew Clark (bio)

The northeast wind blew down a hard-needled snow from the Laramie Range, closing the interstate, icing chained bicycles, and throwing the hats of the more industrious citizenry to collect in storm gutters and west-facing hedges. For two weeks, the sun had been an intermittent and faded pale disc. Doves huddled in the lee of chimneys and cats stayed inside. Wal-Mart was nearly out of eggs. Our apartment on Fourth Street abuts the major route used by Laramie’s emergency vehicles and the wailing sirens and sweeping reds seemed to be conspiring with the forces of a jetstream reversed. It was a coup. Outside, the tripod grill was on its side, turning like a slow compass, sowing ash in the snow. Inside, all the pots were out of the cupboard, collecting the drips of daytime melt seeping from our ceiling. It was April and I was flossing my teeth in the kitchen, giving wide berth to the drafts subverting windows and doors. Hastily coiled extension cords, a DeWalt circular saw, and a small Senco air-compressor sat beside toppled boots and shoes. There were as well buckets of tools that had not been put away. Work gloves. In aggregate, while also contributing to the general claustrophobia of the dim space, the disorder suggested a halfhearted plea to the bestowers of fortune and employment.

This week, for her job, my wife was in Colorado training on a chainsaw. I was 14 days between a decent carpentry hitch, and I owed the IRS more money than we had. The recycling ought to have gone out. The dishes ought to have been washed. On the counter were garlic skins and pretzels, were coffee, wine, and beet stains. I considered our modern, happy fridge, preserving bricks of cheese, jars of mayonnaise, displaying on the door stylish SAVE [End Page 127] THE DATEs and UPS tracking numbers and yoga schedules. There was a photo of me on a toy truck and one of my wife and her dad beneath a banner that read IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. On one magnet, a gift from my mother: MAINE: YOU CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE. There was also a flyer advertising cleft palate repair with the words SMILE TRAIN and an adorable photo of a disfigured baby. In the summer, my wife and I would transect deserts for a gin and tonic and across the forehead of the infant one of us had written a reminder for more citrus in green marker, LIMES.

As I dislodged a neat fragment of carrot from my teeth, it occurred to me fleetingly that crass was an insufficient condemnation of our vandalism, a symptom, I guessed, of aimlessness.

I bent to stretch my hamstrings.

Years ago, a filling had broken loose, leaving a pit in a molar and my folks, loving and zealous usurpers of procrastination, have ever since been encouraging me to get it fixed.

“Dentists are like used car dealers,” I say. “They wield Lidocaine like a new AC.”

“It’s a country of drilling and Muzak,” I say.

My father, a patient man, a doctor, may or may not endure agonies on the other end of the phone line when I suggest that cavemen never received dental work. What he does, graciously, is not say what I know he knows I know, that cavemen also lived in caves and shit in holes and got lucky when lightning made fire.

The toothpaste was a Windex-blue gel, made by Aim. On a bathroom shelf, a hard plastic lizard, pink Q-tips, and an orange-handled pair of scissors all seemed to have been arranged by an artist preoccupied with normalcy and incongruity, neither of which I possess. And neither were any of these items in our bathroom incongruous. Ask Bertrand Russell; each belonged to the set of useful objects located in the bathroom. Even the lizard was useful. Its unblinking stare and five-toed feet and long tail twisting between hotel soaps and lavender body oil was enjoyable. It served to prompt joy.

I spit, rinsed, spat.

I did not feel joyful. In a few days, with the Dow...

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