Moving

By Mike Gillis

It was supposed to be an easy job: Two hours, maybe three. First floor apartment. Ten boxes. Bed frame and bed. Heavy sofa. A few odds and ends. Boom, we’re out. Maybe there’s even time to grab lunch afterwards. I love jobs like this. So, you can imagine my frustration when I show up and see our guy coming to the door looking like he’d just rolled out of bed. He’s wearing a pair of gym shorts, a baggy tee shirt. His eyes are pink and puffy. The apartment in complete disarray behind him.

“Yeah, come in, come in,” he says, unlatching the latch, rubbing his eyes, apologizing as he lets me and my guy—Luis—wheel in the dolly, surveying with dismay the half-closed boxes and unpacked paintings and balled-up newspaper. Dismay, maybe is one to describe it. Annoyance is another. Pissed, is probably more accurate.

“We catch you at the wrong time?” I say, checking my scheduling sheet, although I know this wasn’t the wrong time since this is our first move of the day and I don’t forget things like that.

“Ha-ha, no,” he says, and I can’t help but think that those pink sheepish eyes of his are not from sleep. I think this especially because his voice cracks a little when he responds, and it seems like even he doesn’t believe he’s doing a good job of covering it up. 

“I’ll be ready in a second. Just a few things to gather up.”

But this place is a disaster. Truly, genuinely, one of the worst packing jobs I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some lunatics at work: Boxing away their chunk of amethyst right next to some prized bottle of Scotch. Things like that. I don’t know what’s wrong with these people. They seem to be banking on my guys being gifted sorcerers or something. Like they’re going to wave their wands and summon up an army of dancing clouds to carry their things onto our truck, unscathed and unbroken. 

And that doesn’t hold a candle to what we’ve got on display here: Just an ocean of debris, the work of an absolute madman. Figurines and carvings still sitting in their favorite spots in the window. Indian magic powders in dented tins. Lamps at odd angles that make you feel like a little kid again. It makes no sense, considering this guy is in his late thirties, maybe early forties.

So, I’m about to say something snide about how we’ll try our best, but we have other clients in the afternoon, when I notice a trickle of something glint on this guy’s cheek in the dim lamplight, and hear the catch of his breath and wonder if maybe something has gone wrong here.

Without another word, he lowers himself into the chair below the crooked lamp, sitting oddly formal in front of the rollback desk—which I notice is also scattered with unpacked pen nibs and erasers and notecards covered with washed-out writing—and I watch him squint his eyes really tight, sending this ugly wrinkle down his forehead, which he puts a hand to and leans upon, pushing back the graying hair on his bangs, and giving this sudden pained inhalation that slowly turns to a moan as he breaths out.

“Oh…” he groans to himself, just like that, in that strange way where you know he’s barely thinking of me or the other mover in there. I look over at my guy and he shrugs. He’s barely paying attention. Just scanning the bookshelves scattered with unpacked photographs and unused bubble wrap.

So I guess I take it upon myself to say something like, “You alright, man?” Or maybe I try one of those soft, kidding noises like Hey, hey, as if I’m comforting a horse. He barely looks up, though. That makes sense. Why would he? He wasn’t paying attention to me and I’m terrible at this sort of thing: Comforting the bereaved. 

At least, that’s what I’m starting to think I’m doing there. I guess it could have been a wife who divorced him that got him so sad, but then she would’ve had to be decades older than this guy, given all the antique detritus and dust-covered tomes. 

I just stand there in that awkwardness of silence, feeling like I’m posed outside a door and peeking into those terrible series of moments after some person you love disappears for good, all of that terrible shit tumbling out in slow-motion like the feathers and guts that spray when a bullet hits home in a bird hunt. And now I’m trying to grope my way toward something to say, something graceful, staring at this red-faced man who’s become a specimen in front of me in the lamp light, almost an animal in his grief, and there’s a lump in my throat.

“Was it your dad?” I ask, touching on the words like I’m tonguing a cavity, seeing if it touches a nerve, if they’re the right ones to speak to this shuddering heap of a man.

He’s quiet then. It’s the kind of unearthly silence you get when someone has gotten so broken up inside that they’ve almost exiled themselves from the ranks of normal people. You know what I mean? Usually, when you’re talking to someone, you respond right away because the words don’t matter. All that matters is responding to the person on time, so you seem like a normal person. But sometimes people are aching so much inside that they’re trapped in their own horrible little kingdom, cut off from even the normal ways people behave.

I didn’t know what else to say. I look at my guy, Luis, and he just shrugs. It’s not like we can just leave him here, but it doesn’t seem like we’re doing much good.

So, I try: “Was he your uncle?” 

And that seems to click with him, because he raises his head up from his arms and sort of rolls his eyes as he looks off to the side and whispers something I can’t really make out.

“What?” says Luis, a little too loud, after a short pause.

“My husband,” the guy says. “He was my husband.” 

He crosses his arms in front of his chest and doesn’t say anything more. I gaze around at the stacks of crumbling leather books, the astronomical charts in dark blue and autumn gold, the copper model of the earth, the cartoons of some medieval rooster in yellowed newspaper, the propped-open cigar box containing hundreds of postcards. When I look back down, the guy is leaning back and has his hands laced behind his head. He lets out another long sigh, but he doesn’t say anything, and I’m starting to think he wants us here. Maybe he needs us to stay.

“How long since he passed?” I ask. And for the first time he looks up at me, and I see the reddened white of his blue eyes.

“Two weeks,” he responds.

I just nod. Two weeks. Jesus Christ. Hearing that, something burns inside my chest, like a match put out under the faucet. Two weeks. Nothing has scabbed over at that point. Nothing has even stopped bleeding. Someone is there and then they’re gone, and two weeks later it’s like they just disappeared a minute ago. And I’m just imagining this guy awake in the darkness of early morning on the wooden floor of this house, surrounded with bubble wrap and mover’s tape in the mellow glare of the lamplight, immersed in the whole life of a vanished man, so deep into this other life that he cannot understand leaving it, could not possibly depart from this vanishing kingdom, so soon, so soon.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and then I add, “it isn’t fair.”

And he just glares back at me and says, “No, it isn’t.”

We didn’t speak much after that. I guess there wasn’t more I could say. It took most of the day to get him situated, but thankfully my manager could shift the schedule around, and Tony covered my ass on the afternoon appointments I missed. We managed to move him to his new apartment—a pretty walk-up in Hyde Park—in six hours. But we only billed him for four. He seemed grateful for that, and gave us a nice tip and then shook my hand before I left him there alone with all those boxes to unpack, which I guess is the most either of us could do.

About the Author

Mike Gillis is the head writer for The Onion. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Tricycle, ClickHole, Chicago Quarterly Review, Hobart, and PULP Literature. He is currently alive in Chicago.