CLUTTER A Thesis Presented to The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Fine Arts Michael Dull May, 2018 CLUTTER Michael Dull Thesis Approved: Accepted: _______________________________ _______________________________ Advisor Dean of Arts and Sciences Varley O’Connor Dr. John Green _______________________________ _______________________________ Faculty Reader Executive Dean of Graduate School Eric Wasserman Dr. Chand Midha _______________________________ _______________________________ Faculty Reader Date David Giffels _______________________________ Department Chair Dr. Sheldon B Wrice ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. HE’S DEAD………………………………………………………………………….....1 II. FATIGUE …………………………………………………………………………….17 III. NEW NEIGHBORS …………………………………………………………………31 IV. STANLEY AS A CHILD …………………………………………………………...53 V. RAYMOND SEES AN EXHIBIT …………………………………………………...65 VI. BREAKING UP …………………………………………………………………….77 VII. DINNER AT RAYMOND’S ………………………………………………………89 VIII. VIRGINIA’S LAST DAYS ……………………………………………………….94 IX. THE PARTY ………………………………………………………………………109 X. SPIRIT ……………………………………………………………………………..128 XI. TRYING SOMETHING NEW ……………………………………………………132 iii CHAPTER I HE’S DEAD Since it is up to me to remember, I’m afraid to admit that I’ve failed, failed because I can’t quite recall when it was that the sensations, notions, memories, facts, histories both global and personal, all came together to lead me onto pen the words I did that led to my academic disgrace and eventual “deed,” because it might have come over me while on a beach in southern Greece (a flood of black sub-Saharan faces dehydrated from Mediterranean sun), or perhaps I can think of a whiff of that old familiar feeling in Vienna when I heard the most beautiful Brahms concertos ring out from violin strings bowed by Asian hands. What I felt then, but only realize now, is that I was sensing a change in my academic obsession, my area of study, what occupied my entire adult life. The legacy of the Western World was changing, not changing, but being toppled, overthrown, right in front of me, and happening quietly, beautifully, right before everyone’s eyes, as well as my own. But, I do remember, however, the moment that I realized my own life had been moving on without me, the way water moves around a lonely boulder planted in the middle of a stream. 1 When the hospital contacted me—my name, number, affiliation, all stuffed in my father’s wallet—they explained that the most likely culprit was a heart attack. The only thought in my mind was, He’s dead. Not, My father is dead. It was the least likely way he would have wanted to go, I thought. One minute there, the next gone, off into whatever was next and no time to take anything with him. Good. The bastard never let anything go without leaving marks. After the funeral, I drove to his house, where he spent the last lonely days of his life. I was alone. I didn’t invite Billie to the funeral. It hadn’t even particularly occurred to me to tell her that my father had died. As I pulled into the driveway of the Victorian, pale-green, wood sided, single- family home with no family, the sky was cloudless, colored by a pink-purple gradient, and all around me the suburban alpenglow along the roofs of the fourplex homes glimmered. Walking up the four short steps to the front door, I realized that the last time I saw my father alive was almost two years ago. The neighborhood was quiet but not silent. All around I could feel the phantom rumbles of life being lived behind closed doors, shut up inside by dead bolts and glass panes, which flickered like stars in yellows, blues, greens, and reds from images of the evening news, a nightly movie, the summer’s biggest blockbuster, or a violent video game. When I reached the door, it swung open. From the sag of the man’s jowls I took a stab at his age, taking into account the shot-elasticity of the face like the worn out waist of a pair of sweatpants. Like a gravity thermometer, a marked curvature of the spine told the tale of Earth’s downward tug like a nursery rhyme book. The thickness of the man’s 2 spectacle’s lenses told time as well as the exposed layers of an old canyon’s rock. The fit of his shirt, and his jeans’ shaded fade were a measure of how little he cared for outward appearances and how much he cared for keeping on top of his properties. “You the son?” he said. “Sure,” I said. “Stanley Malwell, nice to meet you.” “I’m the landlord, Ken Bramuk,” he said, swinging the door open a bit further so I could see the rest of him, see the marks of his sedentary life. “I’m glad you showed up, because there’s a lot needs done around here now that he’s gone.” I hadn’t thought about this. I wasn’t sure what to make of the will except for this important fact: everything my father owned now belonged to me. Oh, the twisted luck of life. A neighbor, Joyce, served as executor. At the funeral, she explained that my father felt that leaving everything to me would be best and that I could do with it all whatever it was I wanted: sell it all, keep it, or burn every scrap in the pit out back. After the funeral, Joyce said she would meet me at the house sometime that night. “Come on in,” Bramuk said as he turned to walk back inside. What I thought I’d known, the house I had catalogued in my mind, was not the one I saw. Splayed out in front of me was everything my father felt fit to leave behind. I didn’t feel like I was visiting the home of someone I knew, let alone my own father’s. Standing in the doorway, I could hardly see into the rest of the house, an amalgam of haphazardly stacked boxes formed a wall. It wasn’t the house I grew up in; only a few objects, a lamp here, an end table there, that gave it the resemblance of the father I’d known. 3 He was always a collector of things, never one to let anything go. After my mother died, he retreated into his self-imposed hoarderdom, although I’d had no idea to what lengths he eventually went. The smell wasn’t unbearable, only faintly fecal with an occasional urine whiff. “When I got here, I took a look around,” Bramuk said. “Looked like he hadn’t flushed in a while.” “I was just thinking that,” I said. Even the certainty of the very room I stood in was called into question because of the clutter. Since the rooms of a house are defined by their difference from those around them, a living room being a living room only because it isn’t a kitchen, it’s hard to say where it was in the house I was standing. The word “foyer” is a possible match. But is it the physical space and its geographic location within the larger structure of the house, or is it the things within it that make it a foyer? I looked for a big rug to stomp my feet, or a rack filled with sets of important keys. It wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but surely somewhere there was a mirror to the left so that one might see what they looked like after encountering the outside world. When I turned to close the door behind me I felt how warm the house was inside. I looked for a coat rack, maybe one with three moth-eaten coats and a few hole-filled hats hanging limply from the top. Next to the door I found one, albeit one that was empty. When I hung my coat on the hook, the weight slowly toppled the rack and it fell over, setting off a chain reaction of clattering boxes, books, clothes, magazines, and newspapers. Everything in the house subscribed to this sort of butterfly effect; an untimely fall for a box of soap in the 4 bathroom might shift a spoon in the kitchen. The house, though empty, felt animate, like a living, breathing, moving organism: its motion observable, its breath like shit and piss, its memories as axiomatic as an electromagnetic field. “Sorry,” I said, and, as if it mattered, I hung my coat on the dilapidated coat rack now leaning up against the wall. “Don’t apologize to me,” Bramuk said. “It’s yours now.” In me I felt the sensation to turn around and run away grow, to forget about my father, his house, his possessions, to laugh at and turn tail to the idea that the living owed any sort of debt to the dead. At this moment, I thought, I can rid myself of all the trouble. At some point in each person’s life filial roles reserve, parents regress to children and vice versa. I had observed the cycle. As a child, I wished for, and garnered, nearly all of my mother’s attention. I succumbed to all of her and my father’s judgments. The cycle involved surrendering in a rigid order: physically, emotionally, and physically. The chain of authority takes an about-face, seemingly in abrupt fashion, but when I thought about it, it had been happening all along. The point of offspring is succession into the future, the assurance that one’s own collection of molecules and unique traits moved on, a way forcing someone, anyone, even a child, to bow in reverence. It is the children’s role to make the death of the parents easier for the rest of society.