Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Jack somehow found an opportunity to drop the word American into practically every conversation, his particular style of sales patter. Emil wasn’t sure he himself had his own style, even after all these years, except that it involved a great deal of sitting, of daydreaming through visits in old fashioned parlours and newly-decorated living rooms, waiting for a change in the air or the light, or the order of the universe.

  “You know, I’ve never sold anything before,” Emil said.

  “Sure you have. Like everybody else you’ve been selling all your life. The question is whether you’ve been giving the people good value.”

  Sales had been as unlikely an occupation for someone of Emil’s temperament as anything he might imagine. He’d gone on very few dates, unable to sell himself to women. He’d been passed over for the simplest jobs, because he’d been unable to sell himself to employers. Whatever friends he had acquired seemed largely accidental.

  He had no aptitude for closing the deal, shaking the hand, laughing at the obligatory jokes. It was the world’s sense of humour that had brought him into sales after graduation—you understood that sort of thing if you were a salesman.

  So it had all come down to the day he’d picked up his sample set at the warehouse, along with the brochures and studies proving how kids raised on encyclopaedias had increased IQ, appetite and stamina, and set out his first time on the road using the route map the old man had given him. Instead of the usual dots or squares to represent towns and cities, there were little drawings of houses, all of them the same size, crude yet childishly cheerful, pastel yellows and blues and pinks. When he examined those tiny houses with his magnifying glass he spied children’s faces in the windows of several, here and there a smiling mother or father out on the lawn, baby brother in a stroller, the shirtless neighbour watering his lawn. A tiny blotch of ink that might have been a dog, or a cat.

  A company-owned car was provided for his first trip out. Imagine, a company car! But he was alarmed to discover a broad scrape along the length of the passenger side, and cracks in the windows. “They want you to keep that passenger side parked away from your customers’ houses at all times,” the chief dispatcher informed him.

  The brown dashboard had enough cracks in it to fill a dried-out riverbed. The clock was missing an hour hand (if he scrunched sideways against the steering wheel he could just see that missing hand reclining in the bottom scoop of the dial). The seat and back had even more cracks, futilely repaired with a variety of tapes that caught and pulled at his neatly pressed suit.

  Out on the road he realized that major cities—New York, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Chicago—weren’t even depicted on the map. “We like to leave the big places for the veterans,” Jack had told him.

  *

  Now and then over the years he would come to a town that felt far more familiar than most. With a “B” name like Bennett or Bailey or Baxter, it would be a town with ambition: the main street in the process of restoration, new motels and restaurants at the outskirts, and at least one new mall. A construction sign just outside town limits advertises a multiplex. Overpriced town homes are being erected along the distant foothills.

  Emil has met the desk clerk at the cheapest hotel and asks about the health of his youngest daughter. The clerk does not act surprised. At the bake sale outside the post office, the woman in the bright yellow dress sells him a small bag of ginger snaps for the eighth time this year.

  In the windows of the hardware store are pictures of missing children. It is an epidemic; he wonders about the strangers who steal children out of the Baileys and Baxters and Bennetts of the world. Perhaps the kidnapper is an airline pilot, he thinks. Perhaps he is the representative of some obscure government regulatory agency. Perhaps he is a travelling salesman who is lost in the identical towns and quiet streets of America.

  It never occurs to him, that anyone might suspect him, anymore than it would occur to him to commit such a crime.

  *

  The automobile on the flickering screen is unlike any Emil has ever seen: so sleek, so modern, it appears to drive itself, passing without damage through tornadoes, mudslides, nuclear attacks. The message of the commercial is that a person could not die in such a vehicle. Death has always been the big mistake, the nasty trick, the unacceptable penalty. Emil believes if he just didn’t have to die he might someday become a successful human being.

  *

  Now, in these final days of salesmanship, Emil is on his twenty-sixth company car. He knows this from the files of paperwork in a cardboard box in the back seat. He wonders if bad driving is one of the by-products of salesmanship, this pushing through the highways and byways of the assigned route, whatever the weather or road conditions, this nervous and careless passing, this incessant hurry to get nowhere. If it all came down to driving habits, he’d have been declared the perfect salesperson a long time ago.

  But he has no talent for sales. He sometimes wonders what kind of man he must be, to spend his life dedicated to something he is so poor at. But if he has learned anything at all in his wanderings it is that life itself, for most of humanity, is this constant doing and undoing, doing poorly at what we attempt, undoing the better efforts of those who have come before us.

  Still, survival requires food for the mouth, a pillow for the head, motion of the eye and a new day’s list of prospects for the brain to process.

  In these last few days of salesmanship his lack of aptitude cannot be helped. In these last few days of salesmanship there are many more towns to investigate, hotel rooms to rent, long hours to spend waiting on the couches and good chairs in the living rooms of America, meditating through the afternoons in quiet contemplation of the people who need everything and nothing. He means no criticism in this, it is simply the life we live in these last days of sales, trying not to think too much about the small tragedies or joys.

  *

  The sound at the door is more a rubbing or a scraping than a knocking. He hesitates to open it—no one knows he is here except the clerk.

  A small old lady of grey flesh peers up at him beyond the dire weight of her glasses. “I just wanted to thank you for that new Bible you sold me,” she tells him, and lifts her head to kiss him on the cheek, exposing the ragged hole in her throat.

  He tries to close the door on her, but she shoves the shiny red leather Bible between the door and the jamb. He turns to escape and trips over his sample case. She drapes herself over him, whispering, I just want you to sell me again, and he is appalled to discover the erection growing like an impending purchase beneath his belt.

  *

  Remember that there’s a pit waiting for you in self pity, so put that I in try and get back on your feet and run!

  The cheers, the applause, the feet stampings are so loud Emil is compelled to fiddle with the volume control. It takes some time for him to figure out that the dark-haired man on the screen is not a preacher, but a salesman like himself. Or not like himself, for this man is wildly successful the world over.

  The man sells tapes and books, and a correspondence course of some sort, but even more clever than that, Emil suddenly realizes, the man is selling people back to themselves. An incredible idea—an endless supply of product with so little overhead.

  There is a sadness about it all, he thinks, but who is he to say? Who is he to even have an opinion on such matters?

  That A in ambition is as high as any mountain, but climb it anyway! Don’t eat the pear in despair. Remember there’s no hope in dope! Take that H out of whining and you’ll be winning!

  *

  Emil cannot understand why the company has never fired him. In all his years on the road he has never once met his quota. And yet he has been allowed to continue making contacts, meeting prospects, conversing for long, leisurely days in the living rooms and on the front porches of America.

  Periodically the home office sends out trainers (usually men) whose job is to sharpen the skills of the sales force. He isn’t sure w
hat their real job is—half the time they make no pretense of training.

  Just as he suspects, their courtships of his customers are for the most part rewarded. It is amazing, sometimes frightening, to watch as the salesman nods, and the customers nod in return, as smile echoes smile, and laughter echoes laughter, as the customers slowly transform into salesman doppelgängers, and a good time is had by all, except for Emil, who stands by the door and attempts to shake off his anxiety.

  Many of the salesmen appear to achieve their success by means of sheer animal dominance. These are the alpha males, and although the herd of customers may mimic the salesman’s gestures to the point of slavishness, they can never hope to match the salesman in strength or confidence.

  Other salesmen at first glance appear to be no more impressive than Emil, but they are persistent almost to the point of their, and Emil’s, humiliation. He spends one appalling afternoon camped out on a front porch, the fox-like salesman with the wired eyes refusing to leave until the elderly couple has purchased something. The husband gives in with shaking hands and cornered eyes.

  A few of the men the company sends are interrogators, and they grill many of his prospects as to their needs and dreams, why they were at all hesitant to buy such a fine product. They use the customers’ own hesitations and rationalizations against them.

  And there are those for whom Emil can think of no better word than crazed, the ones who affect a certain delirium—dancing a jig, forcing facial spasms, singing spontaneously and inappropriately—that so troubles the customers they buy what they can in order to get rid of them.

  Emil, of course, is unlike any of these salespeople. There is no good reason for the company to retain him, and yet he remains year after year, hoping for the blessed dismissal which will free him, which he cannot ask for himself, and which never comes.

  *

  And here he is again, the wife on the couch making polite conversation, the husband puttering around in the next room, pretending to make repairs, but whose real business is to listen in on the wife’s dealings and make sure she does not spend too much of their rapidly disappearing funds. The wife has no real desire to buy except out of politeness or pity. Her real need is to have someone to talk to about the children, share her memories of the sister’s dead baby, her own medical troubles, her thinly disguised fears that her world is a precarious thing about to end, and her husband will not listen, has not really listened in years.

  Outside it is a kind of Kansas, although they are miles and years from that state: sun burning the distant edges of crops, the horse moving slowly across the hill, the small boy on his bicycle struggling through mud ruts deep enough to swallow his wheels.

  Soon the wife will offer her final apologies, so many unexpected expenses of late, folks hereabouts having pretty hard times, such a good product it’s really too bad we don’t have the money to spare, I’m afraid we can’t see our way and it’s not your fault at all …

  And he will happily be free once again to step outside and stride to his car, relieved that he will not have to fill out all the paperwork that an actual sale entails.

  “So my husband agrees we should take one, at that discount rate you said you were offering today, one time only and not to be repeated and who could pass up such a bargain, I mean, really.”

  Emil stares at the young wife as if she has suddenly gone crazy, as if she’s been spitting and drooling and speaking in tongues. But in fact she is an older woman, greying at the temples and wearing an old fashioned housecoat fading into transparency around the hem. He cannot understand—it is as if he’s nodded off with the unending familiarity of his own sales spiel, and the woman’s mother has replaced her in the chair. He gazes around the vaguely familiar room and sees her elderly husband slumped forward in his overstuffed chair, sleeping or dead.

  “Just a minute,” he finally manages to say through a rising panic, “Just a goddamn minute!” Has he really cursed a customer? “I’ve got my order book here somewhere. We’ll get you fixed right up. Yes, indeed, you won’t be sorry about this purchase, nomaam! It’s the gift that keeps on giving, the key to a lifetime of success, the satisfaction of knowing you’re doing … you’re doing, well, what you’re doing, it’s the cap … on the toothpaste, the bridge …”

  Emil’s hand flops about in the worn out leather satchel like a broken sparrow. He’s not sure what he’s seeking, in fact cannot remember the last time he’d reached into his sales valise, when his fingers seize the tattered edges of the sales book and retrieve it carefully as if it were some moth losing wing scales in frightening amounts. He spreads it open on his lap, carefully positioning the disintegrating slip of carbon paper, writes “1” as the quantity, then stops.

  What is he selling this woman? He looks up at her expectantly. “You wanted one …” His dry tongue adheres to his bottom lip.

  She smiles so broadly he thinks her mind is, in fact, gone, and he will not have to complete the order form after all. But then she nods slowly, happily, as if perfectly aware that she is doing the right thing for herself and the generations to come.

  For the briefest of seconds he is unable to pull his tongue from his lip, and when finally he does it is so painful he feels a tear balanced dangerously in the corner of one eye. “One …” he repeats, and looks around for the sample he has been showing her, but it is nowhere to be seen.

  “Deluxe edition,” she finally replies, so he knows it isn’t the Sports Weathervane, or the Speedo pocket groomer, or five of the twelve handy household helpers he sells, or used to sell. If he could only remember what it was he was selling this trip out, what he had put into his sample case, but there is nothing there, and nothing anywhere to be seen but this giant book bound in red leather she grasps so lovingly in her two, trembling hands.

  “I only wish our son Johnny would read this with us. So long he has been away from the Lord …”

  “One Deluxe Bible, Red Leather, with the special painted map inserts tracing Jesus’ path through our mortal world,” Emil says confidently, writing 1 RB onto the pad.

  He settles back, calmed, as the elderly woman (but he recognizes her now, remembering how he had stopped here when she was a young bride, and realizes how much she must regret not having bought that Bible the first time he came by, when her baby was still a magical creature of hope and possibility) drones on about the sorry affairs of her son, the all too familiar litany of failures and small betrayals.

  Gazing out the window Emil sees a small blond boy on a backyard swing, perhaps this woman’s grandchild, or impossibly, her son at a better age, conjured up by her sad monologue. Emil rises from the chair—the woman does not seem to care, or notice, while the husband continues his uninterrupted rehearsal for death—and climbs out the window, strides across the bright lawn bordered in corn and sits in the child’s other swing, the one reserved for playmates yet to arrive.

  “It’s too nice a day to be indoors,” he says, both an explanation and an introduction.

  “Who are you?” the little boy asks, staring up at Emil’s face.

  Emil gazes out over the endless and precisely aligned rows of corn. The sun glazes the leaves a green-gold, and he feels a smile travel unbidden across his face. “I’m nobody, really,” he finally replies. “Just a salesman, calling on your parents with my promises and offers, my bag full of hope and secrets.”

  Suddenly stern, the boy says in an old man’s querulous voice, “Are you going to try and sell me something?”

  Emil is startled. He has been asked the question before, and it never fails to upset him. “No, no,” the salesman in him lies. “I’m not selling anything today.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I’m spending time here in this swing. I’m the customer this afternoon, buying myself a piece of this beautiful day.”

  The boy stares intently over the corn as if seeing a body hanging from the line of the horizon. When he looks back at Emil, his expression is eager. “So you’ve bee
n to a lot of different places, not just here?”

  “More places than I can count, son. I hope you don’t mind the familiar.”

  “And the people in these places, they’re all different in these places?”

  “Well, you know it’s funny that you should ask that, young man. It’s been my experience that people are the same the world over, subject to the same wants and needs, accessible by the same techniques.”

  “No, you’re lying!” the boy shouts. “Tell me that they’re different! They have to be different from here!”

  “Well …” Emil scrambles for the right words that will calm the boy, that will sell him some peaceful behavior. “We wouldn’t understand each other too well, now would we, if we were all that different from each other.”

  “Get off my swing!” Alarmed, Emil trips getting out of the swing and sprawls on the ground. He heads back toward the open window, dusting off his pants as he goes. Behind him the boy sobs, but Emil will not let himself turn around. Customers don’t like it when you watch them cry.

  He climbs back through the window and slips into the chair. Spying a strand of burry weed stuck to one dress sock, he leans forward to remove it. The woman continues narrating her list of sadnesses. But it is not the same woman. This woman is younger, a brunette, and although the room is of the same style as the previous one, there are differences.

  This husband is livelier than the other one. He rushes back and forth, a gun in his hand. “You hear that?”

  After some delay Emil realizes the question is addressed to him. And then he does hear something coming from outside: gunshots and shouting, the alarmed cries of animals.

  “What …”

  “It’s that Wilkins boy—Johnny! He shot his ma and pa, and now he’s killing all the livestock in sight!”

  Emil can hear a rumbling engine between the shotgun blasts. “But he’s just a boy …”