Leonora reached down and gently patted the thing in her pouch. She felt its reassuring heat warming her belly and connecting her to something she had never known before. It was funny, as in strange. She felt different, but no different, the same but not the same, as if she'd changed without changing, grown without growing. I'm an idiot, she told herself with a smile, and she knew the change had begun the moment she had taken the thing out of its package and held it in her hand. It spoke without making a sound. She knew what it wanted, or thought that she did. To go home. Please.
"Don't you worry, little guy,” she'd told it out loud, "I'm going to take you home. Everything is going to be all right, just you wait and see." She had placed the gadget in her overalls pouch and there it remained the rest of the day and into the night. After closing up the warehouse she walked back to her apartment and had a feeling she was lighter than air. The whole afternoon she had felt like she was waking up inside of a dream. The building seemed roomier, vast, as if she had shrunk like an Alice in Wonderland. How had she never noticed how the shelving loomed like skyscrapers to the roof, how the stacks of boxes barely held each other together to keep them all from toppling? It was no accident those cardboard towers held their ground. They helped each other with invisible bonds. She had never considered the inner life of a package before, how it sailed across the planet without need of wind or navigation. Millions of them in transit, scurrying about, arriving and departing, opening their lids, recycling. Recipients happy to see them unless they were merely going about their business making sure the boxes would get where they needed to go. Those people were servants to the objects riding inside of their vehicles, like ancient tribal queens in hand-borne carriages.
Identified, marked and stamped, each according to its individual priority, destinations all known, the procession continued around the clock, "twenty four seven" as they liked to say in those days. Sitting there at her desk by the door and the dock, Leonora had stared around in wonder, knowing on the one hand, yeah, she was stoned off her ass, and on the other hand, warming up like she was simmering on a stove. Junior and Rolando had never seen her so quiet, and agreed she must have been smoking some heavy shit, and it was just like her to be holding it back. They tried dropping some hints but she wasn't picking up on it. She offered them some of the usual stuff and they took it, but muttered darkly about people hoarding the goods and the bad karma that came from doing like that. She heard it, but like everything else that anybody said during that day, it went in one ear and got lost inside there.
She had never thought much about Junior and Rolando. They were guys she worked with. She'd worked with lots of guys. Most of the time they talked their crazy secret language, proving to themselves and to each other that they'd been around and knew a thing or two. They had their set of facts, their religious beliefs about players and teams and the magic formulas predicting the outcomes of rituals and events. With Junior it was all about what he called 'the key statistic'. Regarding football, it was "third down conversions.” You could pretty much guarantee any game result based upon that fact. With baseball it was something he called O.B.P.. Rolando's skeleton keys to life were based on entirely different premises. He sought out inner clues. He'd collected a host of superstitions revolving around such arcane occurrences as the number of times you'd seen a tiger-striped cat between Sunday dawn and Thursday noon. He had known a man who'd ferreted out the secret of defying gravity and was able to become weightless at will. He also had a list of uncommon things to be afraid of such as yellow bottle caps, flat stones, and wind-borne rust. He didn't call it "fear,” though. It was "reasonable precautions.”
That afternoon and into the evening, Leonora began to understand these things for the first time, or at least had the feeling she could. Maybe it wasn't just the random babblings of a couple of morons, as she'd previously thought. If she opened her mind just a little, the possibilities could be entertaining. She was getting the idea that if you lined up a series of facts, any facts, you could find a pattern among them. She wasn't used to thinking this way. It almost hurt. A few times she had to stop and rub her eyes and scratch her head. She even wondered, what was in that dope? But she knew it was the same old shit she'd been getting from her buddy Drea. It couldn't be that. Was it that carnitas burrito? But she didn't feel sick. She felt good. Real good. She even bounced up the steps to her apartment, imagining weightlessness. She was smiling when she opened the door and felt the first shock of being a stranger in her own mind.
"This place is a fucking pigsty,” she blurted out.
"So what?" she thought. "It's home.”
"So what?" she asked herself again. "So what? Are you a person or an animal?"
"Whatever,” she replied in her brain. "A person IS an animal. What'd you think you were? A rock? A sack of gas?"
"Clean it up,” was the response in her mind. "Clean it the fuck up now. This is no way to live,” and before she knew it, she was in the kitchen, hauling some trash bags out of a drawer and throwing things into them; all the wrappings, all the scraps, loose paper, bits of plastic, pull tabs, empty beer cans. She was opening the windows. She was sweeping the floor. She was pulling the blankets off the floor, and she was working harder at all this than she ever remembered working at anything before. Somehow it was suddenly imperative that the place should be spotless, as if some very important person was coming over any minute now and would judge her eternal damnation based on the state of the rooms.
She forgot to light up as she usually did first thing on getting home after work. It didn't even occur to her. Those days were gone. That was the old Leonora. She was not that person anymore. After straightening and neatening and hauling the garbage down to the incinerator chute, she had stepped out to the Pay'n'Pay and bought some cleaning supplies, then hurried home to continue her chores. She scrubbed out the bathtub and the sinks, mopped up the floors, wiped down the table and the chairs, dusted and swept, and cleaned everything twice, then again. It took her all night, but somehow she didn't need to eat or even sleep. She was buzzing. She did a load of laundry at the corner laundromat. She threw away her cigarettes and dumped her booze down the toilet, all the time thinking, this is no way to start, this is no way to go. In order to get it straight, you have to start out straight. You can't make a plan when you're all loaded down. Clean it up. Clean it up, and then we'll find out where we are.
She could have sub-let the place by morning for twice what she was paying in rent. That's how clean the apartment became. At five o'clock she came to a stop and looking around, was finally satisfied. Now I can plan, she said to herself, and to plan, to plan right, you have to start from the end. This was where she got stuck for a while. All she could think of was the need to have a plan. She didn't know what for, or why it was important, just that she needed to have one. Any would do. It could be a plan for a meal, or a plan for a fate. Either one seemed equally as sensible, a plan for the day, or a plan for the rest of her life. She thought there was really no difference. You're only alive now, after all. Today is the day that you are, so if your plan for the moment is aligned with the life that you want then the one is the same as the other.
She sat and she thought, and she thought and she sat. It's Friday, she said to herself. I'm due in the warehouse by eight. Then I work until five. And then I come home. I usually smoke three or four joints and a half a pack of Camels. I'll have a few beers, some nachos, a slim jim or two. I'll hang out with Drea or maybe with Bobby and Alice down at The Stick. Is this really my plan? Is this really my life? I could go somewhere else, she realized. Fuck, if a package can do it, then why can't a person? I could stick some old label on my ass and ship myself off to wherever. She smiled. I was supposed to be going to San Francisco, she said to herself, and it didn't seem strange, though she'd never once thought it before in her life. Yeah, Frisco, why not? And then she remembered that Green Bay was better than San Francisco. And so that, in the end, was the plan, and here she was now, on a bus, heading north, and feeling that comforting warmth spreading out from her belly to beyond.