Gerald Pim had read, somewhere, that the universe was indifferent to human suffering, and he wished very much that this were true, because indifference would have been an enormous improvement.
The universe was not indifferent. The universe, or at least the portion of it that lived in his apartment, was actively engaged. It had opinions. It had, Gerald was increasingly certain, a committee.
The evidence had been accumulating for years, in the manner of evidence, which is to say quietly and without anyone signing for it. There was the matter of the toast, which fell butter-side down with a consistency that no honest coin could match. There was the phone charger that retreated under the bed each night to confer with the dust, and the single sock that left every wash a widower. There was the corner of the coffee table, which had bitten his shin in precisely the same spot for eleven years, until that spot had developed a kind of institutional memory of its own and ached in anticipation.
A reasonable man, Gerald knew, attributed these things to chance. Gerald had been a reasonable man for forty-one years. It had gotten him a reasonable apartment, a reasonable job adjacent to insurance, and a reasonable quantity of loneliness, which he kept in the spare room with the exercise bike.
He had recently stopped being reasonable. It was, he felt, the only sensible thing to do.
The term, he discovered after a night of feverish searching, was resistentialism. A man named Paul Jennings had coined it in 1948 as a joke — the doctrine that les choses sont contre nous, things are against us — and the joke had been so accurate that everyone agreed to keep laughing at it, which is what people do with the truth when they cannot afford to believe it.
Gerald could afford to believe it. Belief was free, and he had recently come into a great deal of free time, the loneliness having grown too large for the spare room.
So he began to keep records.
The notebook was a mistake, in retrospect. Notebooks are stationery, and stationery is the most resentful class of object there is, having spent its entire existence waiting to be used and then being blamed for what is written in it. The pen ran dry on the third entry. The second pen rolled off the table, under the radiator, and into what Gerald could only assume was an early retirement. By the fifth pen he understood that he was being watched, and that the watching had a quality of professional patience to it, like a cat at a fish tank that knows the long game is on its side.
He wrote, with the sixth pen, gripping it as though it might bolt:
They know I know.
The lamp flickered. Not threateningly. Almost — and this was the part that frightened Gerald most — almost fondly.
The war, once declared, went badly.
Gerald's first campaign was logistical. He bought duplicates of everything that had ever wronged him: three corkscrews, four phone chargers, a dozen pens entombed in a single block of clear resin he kept on the desk like a hostage. The theory was sound. An object cannot betray you if its function is guaranteed by a reserve.
The objects' response was elegant. They simply went missing together. All three corkscrews vanished in a single afternoon, leaving the resin pens — useless, sealed, watching — as the only writing implements in the house. The message could not have been clearer if it had been printed: We are organized. You are not.
His second campaign was psychological. He read that you could not be ambushed by what you treated with respect, so he began to address his possessions courteously. "Good morning," he told the kettle. "Thank you," he told the door, holding it for itself. He apologized to the coffee table, sincerely, for the eleven years of mutual aggression, and the coffee table — Gerald would swear this to his dying day — did not bite him for nearly a week.
It was the longest he had gone unbitten since moving in. He wept a little, at the kitchen table, out of something he could not name, and the table held him up the whole time without complaint, which is what tables do, and which Gerald had never once thanked it for.
His third campaign was a nervous breakdown. We need not dwell on it. The neighbors were very understanding, in the way of people who have decided not to be involved.
The turning point arrived, as turning points do, disguised as a Tuesday.
Gerald was attempting to assemble a bookshelf. It had come in a flat box with a name like a Norse god having a stroke, and inside the box were eleven panels, forty-eight screws, four wooden dowels, and a single sheet of instructions printed by someone who had clearly never seen a bookshelf, a screw, or a human hand.
He had been at it for two hours. He was sweating. He had assembled the frame backward, discovered this, disassembled it, and reassembled it backward in a new and creative way. The little hex key — the cruelest object ever devised, a tool shaped like surrender — had rounded off the head of a screw, and the screw now sat in its hole with the smug permanence of a tick.
Gerald sat down on the floor among the panels and prepared to cry for the second time that month.
And then he heard it.
It was small. It was very small. It was the sound a dowel makes when it rolls, by itself, three inches across a hardwood floor — and stops. Exactly. Precisely. Helpfully. Beside the hole it was meant to go in.
Gerald looked at the dowel.
The dowel, being a dowel, said nothing. But it had moved. There was no draft. The floor was level — he had checked it obsessively, in the manner of a man who no longer trusted floors. The dowel had simply, of its own small wooden volition, gone to where it was needed.
"You're helping," Gerald whispered.
The dowel declined to confirm or deny.
But here is the thing Gerald understood, all at once, sitting on the floor with a rounded screw and a backward frame and his whole foolish war spread out around him in eleven flat panels: the dowel had always been able to do that. They all had. The toast that fell butter-side down could have fallen butter-side up. The sock that vanished could have stayed. The coffee table had spent eleven years biting his shin in the same place — and an object that can hit the same target eleven thousand times is not missing. It had never missed. It had been getting his attention. For eleven years it had been trying to tell him something, and the only language it had was the shin, and he had called it malice because malice was easier to bear than the truth, which was this:
He had never once said hello.
In forty-one years, Gerald Pim had owned ten thousand things and befriended none of them. He had used them. He had cursed them. He had replaced them when they wore out and thrown them away without a word, the way you would never, ever treat a friend. And the objects — patient, organized, indifferent to nothing — had been waiting the entire time for him to notice they were there.
The committee, he realized, had never been against him.
The committee had been trying to be introduced.
"Hello," said Gerald, to the dowel.
It was, he felt, eleven years overdue.
He picked the dowel up. He held it for a moment, this small smooth cylinder of birch that had crossed an ocean in a flat box to become part of a bookshelf in a lonely man's apartment, and he felt, with the dowel warming slowly in his palm, the precise shape of how badly he had been getting everything wrong.
"Thank you for showing me where you go," he said. "I'm Gerald. I'm sorry it took me so long."
He fitted the dowel into its hole. It went in like a sigh.
After that, the bookshelf assembled itself in twenty minutes, and Gerald did not believe for one second that he was doing it alone. The screws found their threads. The rounded one — the dead one, the tick — he eased out with a rubber band and a soft word, and it came free without a fight, and he set it gently aside in a dish rather than the bin, because it had tried its best in a difficult position and a friend does not get thrown away for failing under pressure.
The panel that he had assembled backward twice went on correctly the first time.
He thanked it. It seemed pleased. He could not have told you how a bookshelf panel conveys pleasure, but he had spent years learning to read malice in the smallest movements of his possessions, and it turned out the same skill, pointed the other way, read kindness just as clearly. The flicker of the lamp. The settle of a cushion. The kettle, coming to the boil a half-second before he reached for it, as if it had heard him think of tea.
It had. Of course it had. It had always heard him. He had simply never said anything worth hearing before.
What followed was the happiest year of Gerald's life, and the strangest, and he would not have traded a single day of it for all the indifference in the universe.
He learned their names — not names like Kevin, the objects had no use for that, but true names, which are simply the full attention you pay a thing until you understand exactly what it is and what it is for and what it would like. The kettle's name was the particular patience of water deciding to become steam. The coffee table's name was I have been holding things up for you this whole time, including, on at least one occasion, you. The single surviving sock turned out to have been waiting, with infinite sock-patience, for Gerald to stop blaming it and simply ask where its partner had gone — and when he did, courteously, the partner reappeared within the week, behind the dryer, having apparently been on a long and personal journey it did not care to discuss.
He stopped replacing things and started keeping them. The rounded screw lived in the dish on the desk, a respected elder. He repaired what broke, clumsily and with love, and the objects forgave the clumsiness because love is the only currency a hex key has ever wanted and almost never been paid in. His apartment, which had been a battlefield, became a kind of slow quiet conversation, conducted in the language of things that go where they are needed and stay where they are loved.
The toast, he should mention, still occasionally fell butter-side down.
But now it did it as a joke. Gerald could tell. There is a great difference between toast that falls butter-side down to ruin your morning and toast that falls butter-side down to make you laugh on a morning when you have forgotten how, and the difference is entirely in whether the toast considers you a friend. His did. So once a month or so it took the dive, purely for the bit, and Gerald would look down at the buttered floor and grin like an idiot and say "oh, very good," and the kitchen would be warm with the particular warmth of a shared joke, which is the warmest warmth there is.
The loneliness, you will have noticed, had quietly moved out of the spare room.
Gerald noticed it himself one evening, going in to use the exercise bike — which he now greeted, and which had stopped making the resentful clicking noise it had made for years, the click he now understood as the click of a machine that has been straddled a thousand times and spoken to never. The spare room was just a room. The loneliness was gone. It had not been evicted. It had simply found itself outnumbered, in a house grown crowded with friends, and had let itself out the way unwelcome things do when the welcome runs out, without fuss, without forwarding address.
In its place, on the windowsill, sat the dowel.
He had finished the bookshelf, of course, months ago. But there had been one dowel left over — there is always one dowel left over, this is the deepest law of flat-pack furniture and Gerald now suspected it was deliberate, a gift, a small wooden ambassador left behind to keep an eye on things — and he had stood it on the windowsill where the light was good, and there it lived, asking nothing, being itself, the same patient birch as the one that had rolled, that first Tuesday, to exactly where it was needed.
"Evening," said Gerald.
The dowel said nothing, in the warm and complete way of an object that has been thoroughly understood and has nothing left to prove.
Gerald sat down on the floor of the spare room, among friends, in the last of the good light, and was — for the first time in a very long time, and for no reason he could have explained to a reasonable man — entirely accompanied.
He had gone to war with the whole material world, and lost every battle, and won.
The real power, it turned out, had never been his. It had never been theirs either, not really — power was the wrong word, the way it usually is. The real power was just the small daily fact of two things, a man and a dowel, a man and a kettle, a man and a coffee table that had loved him in the only language it had for eleven faithful years — the small daily fact of two things finally, finally on the same side.
He had made friends with them along the way.
That had been the way, the whole time.
That had been the only way there ever was.
— end —