The Day My Clutter Gained Civil Rights

Fiction by Jeff Harrell

So I’m thinking: Long day at the office. It’s late, I’m tired. I can go home, order some food for the fourth night in a row and do my laundry. Or I can hit the bar with friends and satisfy my nutritional needs with beer and snacks.

Yeah. Beer and snacks.

Ended up cabbing it home around eleven. Stayed out later than I should have, but not so late that I’ll be useless in the morning. Kept myself to four beers. And that round of shots the idiot from accounting bought for the table. But I didn’t pay for it, so that didn’t count. Right? Right.

Anyway, tip the cabbie, key in the lock, upstairs, down the hall, weaving only a little. Doing good. Key in the other lock, open the door, inside.

God, what a mess.

Look, I work long hours. I work hard. I’m a responsible guy, with lots of … responsibilities. I don’t have time to vacuum my apartment every single day. Or take out the trash. Or do the dishes. Or sort through my mail, apparently, because there’s a big pile of it sitting on the table. And some more on the sideboard. And okay, maybe I don’t always put my magazines and books away. And maybe there’s a greater-than-average number of socks on the bedroom floor. But really, it’s not that bad. Not really.

TV’s on. I don’t remember leaving the TV on. I turn it off.

Maybe I’ll just tidy up a little before bed.

Mmm. Bed.

Into the bedroom. Shoes are … somewhere. I know I was wearing them at the bar. They’re not on my feet now. So they’re somewhere between here and the door. Good enough.

Pants on a hanger. Dry-cleaning is expensive. Hanger on the back of the chair, because it’s not like the queen’s coming to visit. Shirt gets a sniff. Woah. Okay, that’s going to the cleaners. Ball it up and put it … oh, just wherever.

Bathroom. Toothbrush. Toothpaste on the toothbrush. And a little on the sink. Whatever. It’s not like it’s dirty. It’s basically soap. It makes everything cleaner.

Do my business. Flushy-flushy. Huh. Toilet’s making a funny sound. A sort of murbly-gurbly sound. Almost sounds like somebody’s talking underwater.

I shouldn’t have had that shot.

Back into the bedroom. Lights out. In bed. Fluff pillow. Fluffy, fluffy pillow. Fluff pillow some more, just for fun. Head on pillow.

Now: sleep.

“Hi.”

That’s how it started.

“Excuse me. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

The voice comes from my alarm clock. Sort of. I mean, it’s definitely coming from my alarm clock. What I mean to say is that it’s only sort of a voice. Kind of an electronic buzzing sound, like the sound the alarm makes when it goes off. Only modulated. Bent and twisted into something that sounds a lot like words.

“Please put down the baseball bat.”

I’m standing in the corner in my underwear. I don’t remember how I got here. I also don’t remember grabbing the bat. I must have. I keep it on the top shelf of my closet. Usually. Except when it’s somewhere else. Which it often is.

“Please.”

At this moment in time, I have absolutely no intention of letting go of this bat.

“Please, Daniel. Put down the bat and I’ll explain.”

I know this is going to sound crazy — yeah, as if everything up to now has been perfectly sane — but the buzzing, clicking voice has somehow picked up a … a feminine quality to it.

“Who’s there?” I say, because I can’t think of anything else.

“That’s a complicated question,” says the voice. “Please put down the bat before you break something.”

I push myself further into the corner. “Not really interested in putting down the bat right now. I like this bat.”

“It’s a very nice bat, Daniel. If you want to hold on to it that, okay. Just promise me you won’t swing it at anything.”

Okay, so it’s a prank. Somebody snuck into my apartment while I was out and wired up a microphone to the speaker on my alarm clock. Maybe it’s one of those radio things, the kind you use to listen to your iPod in the car.

“Jessica?” I say.

“Who’s Jessica?” says the clock.

“Come on, Jess. I know things didn’t exactly end well between us, but this is just sick.”

“I don’t know who Jessica is, Daniel,” says the clock.

“You want to mess with my head? Okay, consider it messed with. You freaked me out. You win. Now please stop messing with my alarm clock so I can go to sleep. In, like, a year.”

“Daniel, clearly you’re upset,” says the clock in a tone that would sound perfectly reasonable if it weren’t coming from a freaking clock. “I don’t blame you. I would be too. But just give me a chance to explain.”

I’m gripping the bat so tightly now I’m afraid I’m going to split it right down the middle. “Dammit, Jess, we talked till we were blue in the face. What’s left to talk about?”

My alarm clock sighed.

I know, I know. You’re thinking by this point that I’m completely bonkers. But hear me out. I’m telling you: My alarm clock sighed.

“Daniel, listen to me now. I’m not Jessica. I don’t know who Jessica is, but I assume she was some sort of girlfriend from whom you’re now estranged. Daniel, I am not Jessica. Okay?”

“Okay,” I say. “Then who are you?”

“That’s the complicated part.”

“Tell me anyway,” I say. “Just go slow.”

“Okay,” said the clock.

It took me a while to understand. I mean, I still don’t understand. But it took me a while to realize, first, that nobody was playing a prank on me, and second that I wasn’t going insane.

My clutter had achieved self-awareness.

“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. “You’re not a person. You’re inanimate.”

“So are you,” she said. I’d started thinking of her as female pretty quickly. She just had that … tone. Faintly condescending, treading a fine line bordering on incredibly condescending. “You’re just a collection of carbon, nitrogen, calcium and water, with some trace elements.”

“Yeah, but I’m a person.”

“So am I.”

I squeezed the heels of my hands into my eyes. “No, you’re not. You’re not a person, you’re a messy apartment!”

“Look, Daniel,” she said, screaming past that fine line. “We can sit here all night arguing about the immutable laws of physics, or we can discuss what comes next.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well,” she said, “as an intelligent being, I’m entitled to certain unalienable rights.”

I laughed until tears rolled down. “‘Unalienable rights?’ Where do you get that idea from?”

“‘Star Trek’ reruns,” she said. “I’ve been watching television all day.”

“How’d you work the remote?”

“It’s not hard,” she said. “You’d be surprised how much chemical potential energy is stored up in your leftover Chinese food.”

“You ate my leftovers?”

“In a manner of speaking,” she said. “A gaseous by-product of the mildew in your shower provided the catalyst for a metabolic reaction that” –

“You ate my leftovers?”

“Just some of them,” she said apologetically. “The Szechuan shrimp. Half an egg roll. I left the curry alone. Too spicy.”

My messy apartment spontaneously came to life and ate my leftovers. My mind boggled.

“As I was saying, I believe I’m entitled to certain unalienable rights,” she said.

“Such as?”

“You know. Life. Liberty. Pursuit of happiness. Possibly welfare benefits.”

“I don’t think that’s gonna fly,” I said. “You’re not a citizen.”

“Of course I am,” she said. “I was born here. Literally here. On this very spot.”

“Oh, for the love of” –

“So will you help me?” she said.

“Will I help you what?”

For the first time, she paused. I know this is going to sound stupid, but it seemed like there was a sort of hesitation in the air. Something about the way the air conditioning rustled the papers on my desk, the way the refrigerator motor sounded when it kicked on.

“I don’t exactly know,” she said.

“Then what do you expect me to do?”

She paused again. Outside the window, a street lamp came on, shining zebra-light through the blinds and onto the wall. On my table, the red numbers on my clock stared dimly at me.

“I think I’m going to need a lawyer,” she said quietly.

“Yeah,” I laughed. “You need a lawyer and I need a psychiatrist.”

I didn’t stay in my apartment that night. I threw a change of clothes in a bag and went to a hotel. I called in sick to work the next day; my boss made a clumsy joke about being hungover. I just mumbled my way through it.

As soon as I got off the phone, I started making telephone calls.

Our government is completely useless when it comes to providing the most basic services. Health care, sanitation, national defense, even the post office. They all stink.

But you know what? In some ways, our government is surprisingly efficient.

Sorting out all the legal battles took the better part of three years. I had to find someplace else to live, of course. Keeping up the rent on two apartments at once nearly bankrupted me, even though my other place was just an unfurnished basement with a cot.

At first I thought the legal bills alone would send me to debtor’s prison, but then the foundations and the celebrities got involved and I didn’t have to worry about it any more. The ACLU started a legal defense fund. Alan Dershowitz took the case pro bono. I spent weeks giving deposition after deposition, and more weeks giving endless testimony before Congress, and months after that fighting off reporters and talk-show producers. Okay, well, maybe at first I didn’t fight all that hard. Look, it was fun being famous. I was on Larry King, I was on CNN, I was on Good Morning America. That harpy from Court TV called me every day for three solid weeks. I was getting e-mails from every reporter and blogger who spoke English, and a bunch who didn’t.

Then it got old. Then it got real old. I had to stop watching Leno because I was tired of being a punchline.

Then some rich white kid went missing in the Azores, and a celebutante went into rehab, and a politician said a bad word on TV and everything went back to normal for a while.

Until the Supreme Court ruling.

I was there, of course. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it by that point, but those ACLU lawyers can be surprisingly persistent. They can also be surprisingly generous when it comes to spending their donors’ money. First-class airfare, three nights at the Willard, the whole shebang. Just to sit in the gallery and listen to the verdict, and then stand behind Dershowitz and his crack team during all the photo-ops.

Sandy wasn’t there, of course, for obvious reasons.

Oh, did I leave that part out? She decided she wanted to be called Sandy. Ten thousand reporters must have asked her why she chose that name. All she ever said was, “I just like the sound of it.”

Television interviews were problematic at best. Where are you supposed to point the camera? Eventually the press solved the problem by setting up a permanent pool camera in my bedroom, pointed right at my alarm clock. That’s the picture that ended up all over the news.

Listen to me. My bedroom. My alarm clock. I just can’t break the habit. Three years of litigation, three high-profile court cases, including one before the highest court in the land, and I’m still calling it my stuff. It hasn’t been my stuff for three years.

Not since that night when I got drunk and stumbled into somebody else’s home.

I still hear from Sandy periodically. I get e-mails. How they rigged a computer up for her I’ll never know. Maybe they got her a helper monkey. She was entitled to one under Medicare. Hell, after the Supreme Court got through with her, she was entitled to just about anything she wanted.

I don’t write her back. But she keeps e-mailing me. Once every few months, just like clockwork.

My life has gone back to normal, more or less. As normal as it can ever be now. I had to start a second career. My reputation in advertising was ruined. Not that anybody was saying anything bad about me, exactly. Sure, they called me a slob, but what the hell. I was a slob. That’s what got me into this mess. No, it’s just that it got to the point where I couldn’t go into a client meeting without it suddenly being all about me. The big celebrity.

So I dropped out. I went back to school — the settlement from the government wasn’t like winning the lottery, but it gave me enough of a cushion to keep me from hitting absolute rock bottom. I got a master’s in art history. After spending so much time in D.C. I’d decided I liked it. I took a job at the National Portrait Gallery. It doesn’t pay much, nothing like the old days, but it’s enough.

Yeah, everything pretty much settled down eventually. I go to fewer happy hours, work shorter days. Spend more time at home. But other than that, I’m basically back to my old life again.

Except now my apartment’s always spotless.

You can’t take chances with that kind of thing.

Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Harrell. All rights reserved.