Achievable

Matthew was certain this arts and crafts project was a waste of his time and patience, but he’d promised the doctor. Things I want for my life, things I can work toward, things I can achieve in the coming year, he thought.

It took long hours searching the web, finding just the right images, printing them out on the color printer, and stuffing them in his backpack before anyone could see. The library wasn’t the ideal place for this, but it had to do. He wasn’t about to spend a bunch of money he didn’t have on magazines just to cut out the pictures.

The library was closing. Matthew shut down the computer he’d been working at and walked across the street to the crafts store. There he picked up a piece of poster board, a pair of scissors, and some glue. On a whim, he picked up some paper letters he could use to add “inspirational words” to his board as the doctor had said.

Backpack in place and poster board under his arm, Matthew took the bus home. He rode with the city’s outcasts to his own gutter of a neighborhood where the filth and stench threatened to choke him.

He didn’t mind the fifth-floor walk-up; a little exercise was good for the body and soul. There were plenty of things that others in the building complained about, but they didn’t bother Matthew in the least. The rats and cockroaches were just following their biological imperatives, the boiler going out on occasion didn’t matter if you always took cold showers and had extra blankets, and the water tasted bad, but that’s to be expected in the city.

What the complainers in the building ignored, what bothered Matthew most, was the never-ending miasma. It was a roiling, fuming blend of rotting garbage, the constant use of the alley as a pissoir, and the unwashed bodies that went about their business as though they didn’t reek or tried to cover it up with cloying perfumes and “deodorants.”

He took a cold shower, scrubbing the stench of the city off every inch of his person with a clean washcloth and the lye bar soap from the hardware store down the next block. He scrubbed until his entire body was pink and the only thing he could smell was the chlorinated water.

Matthew dried with a clean towel and placed it with the washcloth and his dirty clothes in the apartment-sized over-under washer dryer in the kitchen and started the load.

Dressed in a clean outfit identical to the one he’d been wearing, he spread out his materials for the “vision board.” He began cutting out the printed images; a bit from here, a bit from there, and another bit from somewhere else. As he worked, he felt the turmoil in his brain settle.

Words came to him unbidden: clean, pure, proper. He worked into the wee hours of the morning arranging the images and words until it spoke to him, moved him.

“You might be right, doc,” he said, “this does help me put things in order.” As he said it, he glued the picture of her face in the center of his collage.

He looked through the images he’d printed but hadn’t used. They interested him, sure, but not like the ones on the board. He’d discard of them in the paper recycling bin in the morning.

Matthew removed his shoes and placed them where he could get them on in a hurry if there was an emergency. Always prepared for the worst, he laid down on his bed fully dressed and pulled a blanket over himself. One would do, as the boiler was working.

He woke with the rising of the sun and began his morning routine. He folded the blanket and laid it at the foot of the bed, then laid out another set of clothes on top of the blanket. He stripped and threw the clothes in the washing machine, pulling the previous day’s wash out of the dryer. He folded the clothes and put them in his single drawer; two pairs of black jeans, two plain, black tee-shirts, two pairs of black socks, two pairs of black boxers, one black hoody. The towels and wash cloths he folded and placed neatly on the shelf in the washroom.

Matthew took his morning shower, again scrubbing himself pink until chlorine was all he could smell. The morning’s washcloth and towel went into the washer with the clothes.

He dressed in the clothes he’d laid out and grabbed the duffel bag from his closet. He had some shopping to do today, but it wouldn’t fit in his backpack. He checked the time; the hardware store didn’t open for another hour.

He sat at the small table where he’d put together his masterpiece and opened a “meal replacement” bar. It has everything I need, so why is it called a “replacement” rather than just a meal, he wondered. Matthew ate with careful bites, setting it down on the spread-out wrapper and chewing thoroughly before swallowing.

When he’d finished his regular, bland, morning meal, he folded the wrapper into a neat square and laid it atop the stack of unused images and scraps from cutting out the other images.

Matthew rolled the vision board into a tube shape, careful not to damage it, and placed it in the duffel. That done, he sat at the table in silence until it was time to leave.

He slung the duffel over his shoulder, picked up the papers for recycling, and the plastic wrapper from his meal bar. It was the only plastic to be found in his apartment. He allowed it only because it was the only way to get the one thing he could stand to eat.

Matthew made his way down to the foyer, then headed to the back door. There, in the alley, were the bins for recycling and garbage. He placed the papers in the recycling bin, then held his breath to open the garbage bin and throw away the little square of plastic.

As soon as the lid banged shut, he ran back into the foyer and didn’t exhale or take a breath until he’d gone all the way through and out the front door. Still, it seemed as though he couldn’t get away from the stench.

He walked the nine minutes to the hardware store and stood in front of the door for four minutes until they opened. The cashier that opened up knew that he wasn’t a talkative sort, and she gave him a short nod which he returned.

He pushed a cart through the parts of the store he knew well first. Another bar of lye soap, a box of plain laundry detergent, a box of powdered bleach, and it was finally time to buy the gloves he’d looked at on every visit.

Matthew avoided the aisle with plastic bags and went to the tools section. He picked up the other items on his mental list, making sure they met his criteria of being comfortable to use and containing no plastic.

The items he wanted in the cart, there was one more aisle to peruse; the one he hated most. He took a deep breath and pushed the cart down the aisle of plastic bags. They ranged in size from “sandwich” to 33-gallon “leaf” bags. It was insane. As if there wasn’t enough plastic in the wild already, he saw single-use bags for a single serving of food, large ones to collect the small bags, and even larger ones to collect the large bags.

It was a roll of bags not stuffed into a box that caught his eye. The tag said they were compostable. Matthew knew the locations of at least fifty compostable garbage collection bins around the city, perhaps those would do.

He paid for his purchases with cash, and put them in his duffel, being careful not to damage his artwork. Outside the hardware store was one of the few remaining pay phones that still worked. He called the doctor at her home number to make sure she was there and let her know that this couldn’t wait.

He took the bus into the heart of the city and walked the six blocks to the doctor’s home. He walked around the building first, gathering his nerve to show her his artwork. In the alley, the smell of garbage and urine and unwashed bodies brought him back into the moment. It may be a more expensive gutter, but it’s still a gutter all the same. At least this alley had compost bins.

He walked through the foyer and headed for the stairs. Others may rely on an elevator to get them up and down, but he was one to not put himself where he could be trapped.

Eleven floors was a long way to go, but not so long as to tire him out. He walked through the quiet, carpeted hallway to her door, 11-G. Rather than ring the bell, he knocked. The fewer intermediaries between two people trying to communicate, the better.

She opened the door. “Come in, Matthew. I’m glad you called when you needed to talk, that’s something new. You should be proud of yourself.”

He entered and set the duffel down on the soft carpet. He opened the top and pulled out his rolled-up vision board. “You had to be the first to see this,” he said, “and you were right; it helped me organize my thoughts.”

“That’s excellent news, Matthew.”

“It took a lot of searching to find the right images,” he said, “especially ones where they weren’t blurry or whatever.”

“Why don’t you open it up for me and explain it?”

Matthew looked at the floor and cleared his throat. “I—uh—I’d rather that you open it up and look at it yourself, first. It’s the art piece I want to make.”

“Sure, Matthew. Why don’t you take a seat while I do that?”

She unrolled the poster board and gasped. “No, I—”

Matthew cut her off by grabbing her and throwing her to the floor. The thick carpets muffled the noise, and the walls blocked out her panicked screams.

It was harder to tie her hands and feet together with the rough hemp rope than he’d expected, but at least it wasn’t made with plastic like all the soft ropes. He stuffed her mouth with a rag he grabbed from the kitchen and tied it in place with another piece of rope. He cut off her clothes and removed his own. He’d expected her to have a washing machine, but she didn’t have one.

Instead, he tied her to an exposed beam in the living room and washed her clothes and his own in her tub and hung them to dry while she sobbed in the improvised gag. Her painfully annoying perfume washed out of the clothes, at least, but it permeated the apartment, seeming to even come from the carpet.

The clothes hung to dry, he untied her from the beam and dragged her to the bath where he scrubbed both of them pink with a washcloth and the lye soap until the smell of her perfume was gone. He felt clean for the first time since he’d opened the garbage can in the morning.

He stepped out of the tub and dried himself. She looked up at him, her hands and feet bound, her eyes pleading, and begged through the gag.

“Just hang on,” he said, “I’m going to put on those gloves and clean this nasty place until all the smells are gone and then complete the achievable goal on my vision board…today.”

He returned with the vision board and his other purchases from the hardware store; the natural rubber gloves, the bleach, a ball peen hammer — just in case —, a boning knife, and the roll of compostable bags. He left the board leaning against the wall with everything except the gloves and the bleach.

While he cleaned, scrubbing the apartment from ceiling to floor, the clothes dried, and the doctor’s cries weakened. When the only smell left in the apartment was that of chlorine, he returned to the bathroom.

“I’ll clean this room after I complete my art project. I mean, it’ll probably get pretty messy.”

He looked at the poster board and admired the collage of crime scene photos, each showing a different severed body part. Finding an image of every piece had taken him hours, while finding fourteen compost bins would be a breeze.

He pointed to the image of a left foot, severed at the ankle. “I want to start with this one. Start with the small goals first, right?”