by Taylor Grace Flowers (2019)

It was March. The late winter’s cold had been hanging on and he hadn’t been to the store in weeks. He wanted to tell anybody who would listen that all he had left were a jar of dill pickles, two sprouted russet potatoes, a bag of carrots in that slippery pre-mold stage, and some condiments, but none of the good ones. The dry-storage room at work got him by on T.P. He was down to the last sliver of soap in the shower. He would hold it carefully in the cupped palm of his right hand as he ran it under hot water, just long enough to gather some suds to clean his body.

In April a box appeared at the apartment. His name had been printed to a compact white label and placed over the top seam. The sender hadn’t needed his address, and they hadn’t left any of their own information. There was no postage, no evidence of any mail carrier. But for LINUS Q. LOO the box was unmarked. So he came home to this box, this serious box, this box that looked to mean some kind of business. He squinted down either end of the hallway, hoping someone might be able to offer an answer, or at least something like comfort, because this box was really something, and of course there was no one. Of the intact and uncovered tube lights across the low ceiling only those above his own door had gone dark. And most of those units weren’t occupied. He knew. But Linus wanted to tell somebody about this box, ask somebody where they thought it might have come from. He didn’t order any box. He didn’t order anything or anyone. How’d they get this in here? Oversized mail went to the lobby, and they closed that desk outside weekdays-nine-to-three, and anything else would have to wait or come again. Tenants received letters at a big wall of keyed slots. He’d seen the mailman deliver once and he would open up that whole great wall of doors to expose a hundred little windows, enough room for just two or three pieces of standard mail or a thick crumpled ad flyer per slot. So what’s this?

It was heavy. He couldn’t lift the thing and all he did in the daytime – so it felt like – was lift things, move things. Someone had packed this dense and sealed it tight, used maybe three layers of tape, there. He unlocked the door and shoved the box across the frame with the heel of one booted foot, sending it sliding across the old checkerboard vinyl tile, cardboard scratching against all the cracks in the floor and grit on the ground. He’d been meaning to sweep, needed to buy a broom, but he just hadn’t gotten around to that yet. Linus followed his body on through and the door swung shut behind him, wild metallic echo stirring every corner. Dust rose and fell and he breathed in it.

“Today, we’re measuring resistance,” the instructor had told the class. He gestured to the rules on the chalkboard. “And resistance mostly depends on what something’s made of.”

Today, Linus did not have any furniture. For a year or two after his apprenticeship, he excused this as his new apartment. Now five years on, he could not answer to himself. He decided that he would just let this box be. The box would live there in the middle of the floor. Linus would leave the box alone in the dark.

Here was a strange new responsibility. Now, was there somebody he could tell?

He used the bathroom, wiped cleaned hands across his pants. He did not look in the mirror. He pulled the light on in the kitchen and swept some stray crumbs into the trash, placed an empty tuna can from the sink into the recycling. He pulled one of the two potatoes from the fridge and washed it under warm water. Carefully he cut out every eye and defect. The paring knife slipped in his wet left palm and its dull edge cut him along the inside crease of his finger. He boiled the potato, now half the size, and ate it silently over the sink right out of his hand, burning the cut hand. He dropped on the last of the low-sodium soy sauce before each bite, to save at least his mouth. He leaned around the wall that separated kitchen from living room to look: the box was still there, unmoved, brown with its little white sticker that had his name and nothing more, and there it stood alone, stood forth, in the middle of the unlit black and white floor. Nothing had happened yet.

For a while, and he could not remember how long, and maybe only since winter had started, he’d been telling himself that he ought to get a couch or something in this place, maybe first a T.V. that he would never shut off, he knew, but that this would all have to wait until the weather warmed again, because there’d be no sense in dragging home a couch through snow and mud and city only to bring it inside, sopping and rotten.

When he was twelve, Linus started reading the newspapers for local sales and freebies. Mostly he was scouting around for cheap boxed sets of television series that he could watch on his parents’ television. He would play shows and lie on his belly in the thick olive shag carpet, deep as but cozier than grass and mercifully no bugs, never any bugs, creepy-crawly things he would kill on sight and for anyone, though not with any malice as much as a need to keep things nice and to make everyone comfortable, and his parents were so proud of that carpet and he was too and together they deep-cleaned it every other month because that carpet had been the parents’ first big project after buying their first real adult house and so they’d known that carpet longer than they’d even known their own kid, and so really understandably they did love that carpet and well, he loved it too, and he loved it for how comfortably he could settle in for homework purposes and watching his shows before Mom and Dad got back. They had very specific viewing preferences too, and they lived on the couch when home; they’d worn their spots on the couch so well that even after days away you’d still see the impressions in the cushions where they planted their rears come dinnertime. These three were real big on T.V. They owned a set of four tin television trays that were supposed to be stored out of sight in a hutch by the kitchen, but honestly the Loos only ever moved their trays when they were expecting guests. Now Linus couldn’t remember any guests but maybe Grandma or the babysitter, whatever her name, but by twelve he’d outgrown the attention from either.

Anyway, yes, at these sales he did find plenty of tapes of his favorites and some new ones too. Americans at this time were eagerly freeing themselves of their VHS cassettes, though this family wouldn’t get a DVD player for six more years, when Dad won one in a silent auction at church. In these adventures Linus made friends. Duluth was a hotbed for the pawnshop crowd – an aging population occasioned estate sales especially – and the regulars knew each other, befriended each other, and really looked out for one another, or to the extent that such team spirit did not compromise their own business. Linus quickly fell in with them. Anomalous his age and special interest, considered no conflict, the others kept him apprised of any good finds.

Linus set out one afternoon for a yard sale on a tip from one of the Carols. She’d called his house to tell him she’d gotten word of a complete set of Dynasty at 2886 Oneida. Unbeknownst to Carol P., this nine-season set was one boy’s white whale.

He needed only to walk five blocks, convenient for a kid with short legs and too much time on his tiny hands.

Among the racks of clothes of all kinds – he saw a lot of children’s dance costumes thick with tulle and sequins and glitter and in every shade of neon, fabrics worn and pilled, and Halloween costumes, complete with masks and wigs and cheapie makeup kits that’d probably burn your skin right off or outright make you blind – and aisles of board games stacked high and precarious like Jenga blocks toward the end of a round, rows of shoes scattered and half of whose partners were missing, maybe stolen, or maybe from the closet of some one-legged man, he thought, and full-sized Fisher-Price playrooms – you know, the miniature kitchen or office or schoolhouse – there were there odds and ends of furniture – a dilapidated dresser, a coatrack, a box spring that had seen he was sure its share of bed-bug exterminations – and but no hints of television media, and so finally, he had to ask.

“I’m afraid it’s gone now, son.”

Linus trembled a little. He did not immediately respond in words. He stepped past the man through the last inches of driveway maze, hand running across the top of a retired Farfisa (to which Carol P. had dutifully tipped off Jim F.). He turned round.

And this was when he saw it, and he knew that it would be his: here was an armchair.

He had heard of moments like this, the discovery of the big-ticket item he’d never known he was looking for, and for Linus Q. Loo this moment had manifested an armchair of his very own.

“Are you interested?”

Even at twelve he could see this chair had been beautiful in its day. The pale blue upholstery was starting to sag at the corners, once taut, but well made, and with too many days in some sunroom or left around this yard, the chair had been bleached, but gently, and so how, who knows, and who cares, but he was sure this chair had started life in royal blue, a color he’d heard of but couldn’t say he knew on-sight until right then, or at least this was something very close, best guess, and at the end of either arm was a perfect circle of twelve brass rivets just in need of a good polish, and he had the right stuff at home to do it. But also the cushions appeared untouched, or unoccupied, and that was what mattered; no one’s behind had forced the stuffing to shift around. This would be the chair. This would be his chair. He haggled the ten dollars down to five on the promise that he took it away with him right then.

And as with every summer on Lake Superior, the hottest days seemed to bring the heaviest rain. And he did drag that armchair five blocks uphill in that rain. Kids on porches whose playtime their mothers had paused due to inclement weather abandoned their peanut-butter sandwiches and mealy watermelon and lined up to watch Linus, five feet tall and soaking-wet maybe only eighty pounds, Linus who was jealous their pubescent height and their toy wagons left in the grass that would have made this job easier, but he was proud, and he was proud to soldier on, the man in the rain with the sophisticated five-buck armchair, which was his, and this trip that might have taken a few minutes only, were he only able to run, this took him twenty or thirty or worse as the thing seemed to slide back two inches for every one inch he could make it to go forward, and he had lost track of the time, though the time did not matter, and but soon they would be home together, Linus and this chair that he now personally owned.

And at their own porch he collapsed on the chair. The rain let up. Water instead streamed from the cushion and down both his legs into his socks and light-up tennies, soaked his T-shirt and shorts, seeped through his hair. There he fell asleep until Mom arrived home from work. The engine of her Taurus woke him up shivering and goose-bumped and sore.

“Linus, no.”

The boy closed his eyes again quick. If he pretended to be sleeping still he could put off this conversation a little while longer.

“That’s not coming inside.” He heard her shoes on the wood stairs.

He breathed through the nose, made a snoring sound, as he had practiced.

Her hand on one frozen arm, “How long have you been out here? You’ll make yourself sick.” Her hand moved to the forehead. He heard her keys clank against the brass rivets of his chair.

“I don’t know,” he whispered, reluctantly opening his eyes, too cold to stick to the plan.

She took one hand, and he looked up into her face. Her hand was warm though damp from her son. Her fingernails were long and smooth and manicured blue, maybe even royal blue, though this color was changing in his mind by the hour, and he might have named any blue he liked then just the same.

Her leather workbag slipped from her shoulder to her elbow, and she pulled at him to stand. “Come on. Let’s go get clean.”

She put him in the shower. He could smell the wet fabric on his skin. The glass door’s track was broken then, he would always remember, and however hot he got that water still he would be cold all the way through, and this he’d never forget either. With his eyes closed and face under the spout it felt like he was sleeping, and slowly he soaped up everywhere, thoroughly, into his scalp and under his arms and between his fingers and toes and behind the knees and neck and back again. Linus must have used half that bar of soap that night. Mom knocked on the bathroom door twice before he heard it open. He could see her through that gap at the shower door. She knew it was there, and she covered her eyes as she entered.

“Not looking. Here’s a fresh towel on the sink. I’m taking your clothes. I’ll wash them. Take your time in there.” She was shouting though she hadn’t needed to.

He remembered that he wore his Star Wars pajama set that night he came home with the chair because when he was twelve he wore his Star Wars pajamas every night. Mom checked his forehead for fever, declared him fine, and then sent him for the mail. Someone had glued a googly eye in each of the Os of their box’s LOOS. He came up the porch steps with the pile of mail, and he stopped to look for a long time at the armchair bright under the light bulb. He knew he wouldn’t see it again.

In May he turned thirty. After work Linus walked a half-mile west to the gas station with the self-serve sub counter and bought himself a sandwich. He picked out a seeded roll and put a little heat on the ham and peppers and jalapeños in the toaster oven, then doubling back to add just about every other available topping. For ten dollars and change he’d have that nice warm sandwich, a cold Coke, and a box of cigarettes, and good night, Happy Birthday to Linus. He drank the Coke as he waited for the bus. He was home by eight o’clock. He sat on the box in the apartment and ate the sandwich and smoked half those cigarettes as he completed one Sudoku puzzle after another until the last light went. His mother vaguely infirm and trapped in her own home – after Dad died she left Duluth and took up full-time the cabin on Mille Lacs, renting rooms of the Duluth house to Chinese women studying at the university – she received the daily paper and snipped out the page-E16 puzzles for her son, knowing that he liked them or used to, and she mailed these every week with a short handwritten letter torn from some notepad. This week’s puzzles and letter (on AmericInn stationery) had come with fifteen dollars in cash, like Happy Birthday, but with no other reference to the event. That money had bought this night in. Linus fell asleep on the floor next to the box, not for the first time.

The morning after his birthday he saw that he’d burned some of the tape on the box. He tried to smooth it with all his ten long fingers and make it better but he could not. The box was scarred. In the shower he stood for a long time before taking out his bit of soap, now the approximate size of the tip of one of his larger nut drivers, and he turned it over between his first finger and thumb, careful to avoid the unhealed cut on his hand, and he cleaned himself.

He promised himself that he would sleep on his bed tonight. He was tired of sleeping with the box. The box would wake him up hours before sunrise. His boss had gifted him, belated, an Entourage-themed Monopoly set, though Linus had never seen Entourage, and he couldn’t say he liked it, though maybe his boss liked Entourage, and also Linus didn’t play Monopoly, or so it had been many years, and the most likely answer was that this board game had been re-gifted, but a gift nonetheless, and he placed this gift in the hallway outside the bedroom. He needed all the space to move his mattress, as he would do every night before he slept on the mattress. But since the box had come to him, and until today, he’d been sleeping with the box. He would shift the mattress against a new wall. That might make his sleep better. Moving might yield better dreams, he figured, and it couldn’t do any harm. But Linus could not remember the last time he had dreamed. He tried to remember the exact date he had received the box.

How many times had he shifted the mattress to some new part of the room, before?

He thought of an analogy he’d been taught for the mean free path. Imagine a marble inside a shoebox. The marble is a molecule and it is put into motion. Every time the marble strikes a side or a corner of the shoebox: this is a moment of collision. The marble could continue colliding forever so long as it is in motion. A single collision could affect the marble’s momentum and change all its consequent collisions. The marble takes a unique path toward every collision, and every collision marks the start of one path and the end of another. The mean free path is the average of the lengths of all these total paths, however many there may be.

Tonight he pushed the mattress to the window.

“How about here?” he asked the box from the bedroom.

Linus liked his mattress over here. Still the sky offered light as the days grew longer. He touched his nose to the glass and steamed the surface, then leaned out. Vast broad lengths of cloud stretched as far as he could see and these reached way down low, flat and long and livid with sunset, and up above this stratus roved another layer, closely packed cirrocumulus, what they call a mackerel sky, illuminated deep gold and citrus and rose.

He wished then for a camera. His work-issue cellphone functioned like a walkie-talkie. They called him dozens of times each day to tell him where he was needed, but only sometimes did they tell him why.

Today, Linus had been the only electrician to take the call from the dispatcher, and she had told him, breathless and apologetic, and but so glad he was there to answer, because this was an emergency, codes D13 and J6 and J8, whatever that meant, and she had told him that he’d been fourth on their call list of electricians for the City, seeing as he’d already hit the forty-two-point-five hours and thus overtime though it was only Thursday, and tomorrow would be longer. He took the job, of course, and he bussed over to the electricians’ station, from where he took the work truck over to the City Attorney’s office, a site he’d never been called to before, and he soon saw why. He resolved some loose wiring and he protected some unprotected wiring, and he installed a new top and lock on an exposed street-level box, and this wiring made him gasp, more than once, because this was work that would have horrified even any week-one apprentice. He heard someone whisper about a kid having licked the yellow and orange electrical tape outside.

“It’s a wonder nothing ever caught fire,” he told them. “I’m glad no one got hurt.”

The attorneys did not seem concerned. The staff worked around him. Everyone seemed to ignore him when he voiced concern, and everyone seemed to disappear when he broke bad news.

The receptionist, however, followed Linus around during her lunch hour. “You know, I dated an electrician once,” she said. She fished out a bite of Caesar salad and leaned against the wall beside him. Her plastic fork scraped the plastic dish. A caper got away from the fork and bounced off his elbow, rolled around the corner.

“Is that right?”

“Yes. I found the experience shocking.” She grinned and showed him all her teeth.

After Linus was satisfied with the building (and the immediate safety of all its occupants) he posted up in one of their conference rooms and inventoried all the extant dangers. He told himself that he was thankful for his obligation to report these hazards back to the City.

Sure, a certain amount of drudgery would always be required. And because when Linus fixed or fixed to do something, anything, he would anticipate this, like he would anticipate a certain amount of boredom-cum-dread, so he promised himself that he would never ever be disappointed, or that he should never be disappointed, and disappointment was unacceptable and childish and weak, and because he never initiated any new project or promise or path without adhering to this ramshackle Code of Linus, which code essentially begged for something like grown-up-type responsibility and a self-interested longing for respect, and also for self-respect, Linus would never ever be without something to do. He could and should be satisfied with a gas-station sandwich for his birthday. He could fix the noise that rattled something awful from the back of his mother’s fridge. And here he did these things happily. This work let him stand up straight even when he couldn’t fall asleep on his back. Because he might do anything he liked, and because he needed to do things that would let him like himself, and because his expectations for any new task were so deliberately stunted, Linus told himself that he might make himself happy with anything, and he told himself that he liked to do these things.

This Code of Linus, about that, if this Code of Linus might have been called as much, and he supposed then that it might, well, this had been in the works for a very long while. So long in fact that Linus, when he thought about it really seriously, well again, he could not in any way adequately pinpoint its true beginning. He figured everybody might have had this sort of lifelong headache whose pounds and pangs and arrests colored every ordinary interaction and angle of feeling with something like unease, or unrest, or fear. He figured everybody might have known what it was like to hate the sound of your own voice. He thought, then, that life must have always operated like this, for him as anyone, everyone, and that the whole wide world was white-knuckling their way through every minute of the day, as he did.

But about this, of course, he was wrong. Were those tough parameters meticulously self-circumscribed actually applied to anyone else, anyone else might have found themselves out to be very unhappy indeed, because that was no way to live, truly, and there’d have been a little or a lot of hemming and hawing about these codes they had decided, and then undecided, because who could ever agree, and who wanted to choose, and who should have to, and because really who would like to sink their standards to this horribly base and debased level but only the most terminally unhappy, and of course and what’s worst is that it’s only these types who can’t even see the forest for the trees. And plain enough: that is what it is like to be sad. As after you get your first pair of eyeglasses: the world had so slowly become blurred and even your mother’s face a smudge of features, you’d forgotten that anyone could see it all properly, that all things held definition inside of their edges, and but maybe you’ve even forgotten what it was like, before.

Later that May he bought a T.V. He found it at a yard sale for thirty dollars. The picture would never line up right, everything slanted maybe twenty degrees to the left no matter how much you slapped or shook the thing, so these news anchors and actors looked kind of proud with all their noses tilted up into space, as if they knew something that he did not, and their surroundings seemed about to fall in on them, or they themselves seemed about to fall over, heads and toes where they did not belong, and maybe they did know something he didn’t. The seller had told him that this was the situation with the T.V. The seller had picked up a beautiful massive flat screen from the Best Buy the week before the yard sale and now (and he scratched at his temple with one arthritic hand as he told this to Linus) he just could not for the life of him imagine ever going back. His wife (and here he gestured with the hand toward a woman in a paisley dress at a card table with a grey metal box and a great ceramic platter of walnut brownies, presumably the cashier) had tried to sneak the set out to the curb a number of times before they’d both just had it (with the television, and also with each other, but about the television, only, so the seller insisted). Linus thanked him for the warning. He thanked Linus for buying the T.V., wished him well with it, and gave him a homemade brownie free with purchase. When he took it home via no easy bus ride (three transfers) he moved it straightaway into the bedroom, though that was never any question; the box needed a room of its own. For weeks then he let the T.V. play out its sideways entertainment at all hours and he absolutely loved it.

He rode the 7 to and from work each day. This trip should have taken forty minutes in either direction with an average of eight stops for other passengers. He made up a game for himself where he would look out at the houses and try to guess which parts were additions to the original structures. He would imagine their renovated insides. He would imagine behind the fences their backyards in bloom. He would imagine the fantastic networks of wiring that ran from one room to the next and how this might have been carefully reworked over the years. As he travelled each day, Linus would lean his long shoulders over the rigid seat and tilt his head to the side and he could feel however briefly as if again he was at home and again he was watching his T.V.

“Superior and 1st,” the bus would tell him in the morning.

“45th and Dodge,” the bus would tell him in the evening.

“Thank you,” he would say.

“Fix it already,” the box said, not for the first time.

Come June he decided to do something. The box had been laying the pressure on and thick. Not that Linus was too bothered, but now he really had to do something. And he figured he ought to know a thing or two about repairing a T.V. set. All day long he was fixing up intercoms and telephones and circuit breakers and transformers and otherwise. But never a television, and could you believe it.

He walked past the box. The T.V. was still on from when he’d left that morning.

“Where is everybody?” asked a man in the screen.

Linus held down the power button. The television was warm, and he felt the heat in the cut of his hand that had never fully healed. He healed slower than he used to, even in his mouth. The man faded from the screen. Linus made the right connections for how the machine was supposed to be, and he set its machinations to the right speed, and he was doing something right.

Linus peered around the corner of the bedroom. “I fixed it,” he bragged.

The box did not immediately respond in words.

Linus turned the T.V. back on and left the room. He showered, and he was sure now that he was down to the last quick of the soap. He would have to start over again, and soon. June would bring summer, and soon, and he had visited the store so many times since the box had entered his life, and he had touched every bar of soap in every store, and still he had not bought more.

He opened up the old film canister he used these days to keep his soap dry and safe from deterioration. He held it in the one uncut palm and pushed the piece, now as small and thin as a single soft contact lens, into all the lines of his hand. The water ran so hot it burned his back. Linus watched himself take up the soap between index finger and thumb, and without warning, and no thanks, but he could not be stopped, he was moving the soap into his eye.

Of course that hurt. His hands fought the senses of his face and the calm mechanics of the hands at his eyes were working very hard to keep him burning, and soon, he was crying soap, and the lye was eating at his cut and his eye both, and were he to try to save either now he would have still been in pain.

Ballistic conduction can occur when certain freely moving charged particles transport within a medium. The particle’s mean free path must be greater than the channel. The movement must be unimpeded.

He shut off the water. Already June had brought time. He would open the box. He had to. He stuck his whole head and both hands into the grey towel hung over the shower curtain. He stood for several minutes just like this.

“Could you say that again louder, please?” he asked.

Linus emerged from the towel and cautiously stepped out onto the tile. With either foot in a square black or white, he wrapped himself in the towel, and everything stung, and he could hardly see with his right eye then, but he would be fine. He would recover by the morning at worst, he was sure. He unfastened the hook of the medicine cabinet, hidden behind the mirror over the sink, and he watched his arms do the work now, reaching for the scissors. They’d come with the first-aid kit from Mom as a moving-out gift, years back. He really ought to visit her. The antibacterial wipes and the Band-Aids and the ibuprofen and the gauze were all long gone. These scissors were embarrassingly small. He forced his fingers through the two rings. He closed the cabinet door, and he looked at his face in the mirror, nodded, and then turned.

“I’m here,” he told the box.

“I’m listening,” the box said.

Linus knelt down in the towel against the cold checkerboard floor. Water began to gather in the dark around him. He closed his eyes and let the air conditioning complete its loud cycle.

“Welcome back,” called the anchorman.

Linus stuck the scissors into his name. He cut through the white label, the layers of tape. He tore at the edges of the cardboard and broke open the tape where he hadn’t pulled the blade through. Still on his knees Linus lifted the box, empty, high overhead, and he was ready to say: