Matthew Treon

That's a Gross Fucking Pile of Stuff

If cockroaches had built a stable habitat in Barlow Max and Charlie Stanton’s home, to scavenge and raise little scavengers in, they would’ve packed up and left months ago—the digs are too execrable even for them. Exterminators have come, sprayed, put out traps, tapes, poison, etc., but there’s no longer any need. Barlow and Charlie have rid themselves of pests by beating them at their own game.

So the two guys sit on their third-story balcony watching rain clouds roll in. They’re on the balcony because they’ve used up every room in the house —months and months of confining as much filth as possible to one room, only to have to eventually close the door on that room and move to another, and then again. And so spending days on their balcony—up to their ankles in discarded food scraps, trash, soggy cigarette butts and a filmy wetness of unnameable color—is all they have left. And, with the balcony lined in metal railing and the standing water, the electrical storm developing in the sky will soon send them inside. They will have to confront themselves.

But Barlow and Charlie are waiting it out as long as they can. Then a loud thunder clap of lightning lights up the balcony. And seconds after, crumbled pieces of the stone building fall to the ground.

“Fuck this,” they say in unison and slosh their way inside. The downpour begins and a trail of water follows them in.

Their living room has two couches and one and a half coffee tables. The one full coffee table is a cheap fake birch wood table with chipped corners that Barlow brought. The fake wood covering is warped and curling at the edges, exposing the swollen (at one time mite ridden) plywood. The other half-table is made of nice sturdy oak, has two ornate legs on one side and a jagged edge held up by half an Encyclopedia Britannica set on the other side.

The reason for the half-table is Charlie’s failed marriage to one Stephanie Lewis (formerly Stephanie Vance only eight months before the divorce papers were filed). A mutual friend had bought the young couple a complete living room furniture set as a wedding present: one leather couch, two oak end tables, one oak coffee table and (for reasons never fully understood) a full Encyclopedia Britannica collection printed over a decade before. The mutuality of Steph and Charlie’s friendship with the gift giver made the dividing of the furniture set a dicey situation. Charlie had suggested they each take an end table, then decide on who would take the couch and who the table. But Steph felt, as she cruelly emphasized during the yelling about the dicey-ness, that it would be a “sad touch of sick sentimentality” for both of them to have one of a matching pair of end tables. So, instead, she offered to take the end tables and give Charlie the couch. (The encyclopedia set was never even mentioned, although they each ended up taking half the alphabet with them.) And while Steph assumed that the coffee table would go where the end tables went—a complete set that could replace its matching couch—especially since the couch was the more expensive piece of the furniture by far, Charlie, always feeling Steph was smarter than he was, automatically assumed this meant the end tables were more valuable, better, somehow more important to have, and Charlie wouldn’t go for it. And so they argued over who would take the coffee table. “So what did I do?” Charlie had told Barlow after the divorce was finalized. “I went and got a chainsaw out the garage and just sawed the goddamned thing in half. Fuck her.”

So now Charlie sits on his greasy leather couch, staring at his half of a coffee table, trying not to imagine where the other half has gone, what house it’s sitting in now, what other guy has his feet up on it and his arm around Steph. And after Charlie tortures himself long enough thinking about not thinking about Steph, he finally focuses his eyes and finds himself looking at a pile of foulness atop the half-table that he can’t even positively identify a single independent piece of. He looks at Barlow, says, “That’s a gross fucking pile of stuff.”

“Yeah,” Barlow says. “What the hell is all that?”

Charlie leans up, looks hard at the gross accumulation of filth that has consolidated into this loathsome pile: “I have no idea.”

Another crack of lightning hits the roof of the building, more chunks of stone fall to the ground below.

The late afternoon sky has now been fully stripped of its blue, is full of dark grey, and Charlie and Barlow need more light in the living room. They’ve long been using one lightbulb in the house, moving it from room to room, but neither of them can remember what room it was last left in. So Charlie, happy to take his eyes off the half-table, goes off to find a candle.

He returns about ten minutes later with a book of matches and a metal bucket. He crouches next to the half-table, carefully slides one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica out from under the jagged side—the volume marked “A” on the side—drops it in the rusty bucket and tries to strike a match.

Barlow, feet up on his fake table, watches his friend scrape the head of a match against the rough strip on the matchbook. Barlow has always considered himself somewhat of a professional aphorist. Or better yet: an Aphoristic Scholar. He’s a watcher. A condenser of reason. Life can sometimes briefly stand still as Barlow looks at the world, combs through his thoughts, and selects the most (as he always sees it) appropriate epigrammatic statement. And so perspicacious are his insights that often he’s the only one in the room who knows exactly what he’s talking about.

And so he watches Charlie striking the match. The match head finally sparks and engulfs itself in flames, and Charlie lowers it into the bucket, holds it to the corner of the A-volume of the encyclopedia. The flame reflects in the metal bucket and illuminates the sad downward curling of Charlie’s face. The book catches fire and the burning pages curl at their glowing edges, further illuminating just how sad the curling of Charlie’s face is.

Another bolt of lightning strikes the outside of their building and the world pauses for clarity: three hundred and fourteen raindrops can be counted suspended in the air; seventeen fragments of stone from the building are on their way to the ground; and one white bird—barely missed by the bolt of lightning—is inches away from, and about to be hit by, one of those stone fragments (but has already died instantly from a heart attack induced by the crack of lightning). Then Barlow finds his thought and says, “Curl and curl all you want, you’re never going to get all the toothpaste out of the tube.” And now we’re spinning again. The stone fragment hits the white bird as if to make sure its life is over, and the rain continues to fall to the ground along with the bird and the stones.

Charlie just figures Barlow’s talking about the burning pages curling up, and lights another match anyway.

With the half-table now a few degrees off from level because of the removed A-volume, the gross pile of stuff on top slowly slides a few inches toward the bucket, and Barlow and Charlie continue contemplating its contents.

“Is that... what is that growing out of?” Charlie.

“Is that food or fertilizer?” Barlow.

“Whatever it is seems to have sprouted roots in the table.”

“Maybe the oak tree this table was carved from still had a pulse when the carving began.”

“Maybe this is a good thing. It looks as though it might be.”

“Most people see what they want to see regardless of what they’re looking at.” Barlow says.

The heavy debris from the burned pages of the book begins to suffocate the fire in the bucket and it’s now putting off less light. Charlie pulls another volume out from under the jagged side of the table, drops it in the bucket. After a few seconds the half-table is illuminated again and the pile slides a few more inches to the side.

Charlie can’t help but think about Steph. “I always thought if we tried hard enough it would be enough,” he says. “Enough to keep her trying too. I tried my best. But I think she grew tired of me asking her to do better.”

“Only the mediocre are always at their best,” Barlow says.

“Meaty oak?” Charlie says.

“What?” Barlow.

“Yeah, I guess this table and this pile could be described as meat-like, unfortunately.” Charlie.

“No, ‘mediocre,’ not ‘meaty oak.’”

“Oh.”

“And if you expect an angel of a girl,” Barlow continues, “she will appear to you a beast. But if you expect a girl at best, she will appear to you an angel.”

Another book, another bit of light, another few inches the pile slides.

“Okay, that’s definitely a cockroach carcass,” Charlie says, the damaged remains of an exoskeleton long emptied of any substance on the inside clearly visible. “This gross fucking pile looks like it was cockroach heaven. Maybe that’s why it died. The cockroach that is. Maybe it wanted to. If you find yourself in heaven, why continue on earth, right?”

Another bolt of lightning strikes their building. More stone falls away to the ground.

“No matter what you do with your life, the last thing you want to do is die,” Barlow says.

“I thought she was heaven,” Charlie says. “But I was meaty oak at best. And none of it even mattered once she was gone. None of the arguments. The disagreements. None of it mattered once I was without her. Not one of the times I got my way did me any good once I was alone. You know?”

“Mediocris,” Barlow says. “Latin for ‘rugged mountain of middle height.’ Imagine how sad a mountain of middle height must be. He cannot grow of his own accord without the earth violently striking itself under his feet. Nor can he climb himself to stand on his own peak and reach higher in the sky than he ever has, the way a man can climb the face of that very mountain and stand taller than ever. The poor mountain can only wait while millions of years of weathering tear it down to sea level, and the sea comes in to wash it away, wipe it off the map.”

Another book, another bit of light, another few inches. Another bolt of lightning. More stone to the ground.

The world never pauses for Charlie when he thinks. Clarity doesn’t come easy. But he’ll get there. He looks at the half-table and its sad contents for some time before he finally condenses his thoughts. “But when the man standing taller than ever runs out of new mountain to climb up and stand on,” Charlie says, “he is still alone, and must again face himself.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Barlow says.

Then Charlie tosses the last book in the bucket, and the pile slides the last few inches to the bottom of the slanted table, to the jagged edge, and extinguishes the fire.