Fantastic Metropolis

Matt thought back constantly, in those first Ellie-less days, to an old conundrum from his college years, a variation on the Schrodinger’s Cat theory: if a chair falls over in an empty house, does it still make a noise? Science and the laws of nature say that it does, of course, but nobody can prove it, for to prove it would require some kind of experimental observations and that would remove the primary criterion for the experiment. Perhaps, without any audience, the chair topples silently onto the wooden floor.

And perhaps, too, so long as he did not look to her favorite chair or to the door jamb leading into the kitchen where Ellie liked to lean when she was speaking on the telephone, Matt could trick the ways of the world and make it so that his wife was not dead. Not really. Not if he did not accept it.

That’s when he decided that he had to clear the place if he were to remain sane. He had to lance it as though it were a boil, remove the poison… because, though they were only memories, the things Ellie had left behind were just as poisonous: they caused him pain and they made him want to talk to her, ask her how she was. Matt had heard someone say once that losing someone wouldn’t be so bad if you could just call them up once in a while on the telephone. He now knew that to be true. The separation caused a type of madness, an incarceration of a sort, even though the freedom of the person left behind was not in any way hampered. A fine madness, if ever there was one. It was bad enough creaking along towards the big Six-Oh, hair thinning, teeth grinding down, arthritis playing up, breath shortening, memory failing… without losing your marbles into the bargain.

At first it was just a few things, the little incidentals, with the vast bulk of stuff he sorted through being placed lovingly and gently onto a ‘keep’ pile… until, at the end of one so-called ‘clearing’ session, the ‘keep’ pile looked pretty much exactly the same as the ‘to sort through’ pile he’d started out with. That was when Ellie’s clothes started appearing on the ‘throw’ pile… neatly folded sweaters, dresses, the blouse he’d bought her when they went down to New Orleans for their 25th anniversary, the shoes they’d bought in London on their one visit to England for Ellie’s 50th birthday… every single item seemed to have been purchased or saved simply to commemorate something. That was why it had to go. All of it. Every single thing. At the end of that one afternoon session, Matt was exhausted. He felt as though he could not cry another tear, his throat hoarse from endless outpourings of grief… endless questions as to why it had happened. Why her? Why him? Matt went to bed at 5 PM and slept until the following dawn, opening his eyes when the city opened its own eyes, the two of them facing another day with a marked lack of enthusiasm, like clocking onto a shift.

But, with breakfast, came an improvement. Matt suddenly felt better, though everything—including feelings—had to be taken on a strictly comparative and relative basis. Looking down at the black bags of trash in the yard, their tied edges blowing in the wind, Matt felt it had been a job well done… though, as the coffeepot put-putted on the counter beside him, he was amazed and fearful at the relatively small amount of stuff that accounted for a lifetime spent with another person.

So what were you expecting? the coffeepot put-putted, breathing life-restoring fumes into the apartment. A town dump?

But the exercise had been a success, Matt convinced himself as he sipped his first coffee of the day, a catharsis, albeit a qualified one. As he looked around the apartment he was both relieved and a little disappointed to see how thorough he had been: there seemed to be no trace of his wife. It were as though his apartment was a bachelor hideaway, had always been a bachelor hideaway.

There were photographs in small frames dotted around—on the breakfast bar in the kitchen, by his bed, by the telephone—but those tell-tale signs of another person, the ones you never notice until the person isn’t there any more, all of those were gone. He would never again go into the bathroom and find the toilet seat left down… little things like that.

Matt glanced out of the window at the backyard again, saw the black bags sitting by the trash, and wondered if he had gone maybe a little too far a little too quickly. Wondered if maybe he should have kept something, a keepsake, some kind of totem that he could touch, that would bring back the memory of Ellie… make her real again.

Then, almost a full month since his wife’s death and two weeks following the departure of Richard and Sandra, there came the day when Matt realized there was one thing he wanted to keep, one thing that he could keep, one thing that would bring him closer to his wife than anything else he could think of. It wasn’t clothing and it wasn’t jewellery; it wasn’t a favorite photograph or picture; it wasn’t a long-loved song or the heady scent of a perfume. In fact, Matt didn’t even think of it himself… it was a telephone call that started it off. A simple conversation that was to set in motion everything else that was to make up the rest of his life.