The bottles in the woods. You’ll never forget them. Unbelievably, someone had dumped a bunch of empty liquor bottles beneath an overhang at the edge of the woods, there must’ve been dozens of them, scores, you remember feeling like you’d struck it rich, that you’d hit the jackpot and then some; you looked around to make sure you had them all to yourself, and sure enough you did; afterward, you moved every single bottle a suitable distance off the mountain path and then, after a short pause, during which you took in the true scope of your treasure, you began to break them, one by one, you didn’t hold back, no, you went to town, fast and furious, you were littering and it felt great. Every bottle that broke against the rock wall sent cascades of shards, like droplets of water, spraying in all directions, a sparkling shower that fell to cover the grass and moss growing on the forest floor (it reminded you of fountains down in the city, where you regularly went wading for change), you threw a bottle, it broke, you threw a bottle, it broke, until the last bottle had been shattered, and you sunk down on the grass to rest, exhausted by your day’s exciting work.
Driftwood, empty boxes, old fishing traps, leftover building supplies, and the like, or so it seems. The men are casting long shadows across the beach as they empty out the back of their pickup truck, occasionally hauling out some old furniture, which they carry two by two, while three or four eager boys scamper back and forth carrying lighter loads, though sometimes they choose things that are a little too heavy (tree stumps with clumps of roots still attached, an old outhouse door), which they have to drag behind them, leaving dark trails in the sand. The bonfire, pyramid-shaped, will be massive; one of the boys is climbing up the side of the pile, he’s got something in his hand, you can hear an adult voice calling to him, scolding him, he hesitates, looks up, raises the arm holding the object (a cardboard box?) above his head and tosses whatever it is up to the top, where it stays put, and now you can hear the boy’s excited, shrill yelp, and then the adult voice repeating itself, louder now, and the boy hastily scrambles back down.
It’s your duty to empty out the house, though the simple fact is that some items (like stereo equipment, cooking utensils, the fridge, the TV, to name just a few) won’t burn well, or won’t burn at all, and no one, you think, can expect the impossible. But you’ll make sure most of the flammable stuff burns, because the house is chockfull of superfluous things, you think, things that’ll eventually fall to pieces or be tossed out or be burned up in any case; it’s strange to think that everything that’s here will some day be gone, it’s only a question of time, after all, and therefore all you’re doing is getting a jump on time, lending it a helping hand, and when you get right down to it, you’re absolutely blameless, because everything in the house, you reason, will eventually disappear on its own, not partially, not selectively, but completely and all inclusively disappear, and in the grand scheme of things, the exact moment doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, that is, if it happens today or a thousand years from today. It’s happening today. In the grand scheme of things, everything you’ve tossed onto the fire (so you reason) has already been thrown out, and therefore it’s already garbage, it’s nothing but garbage. Once your thoughts reach this point, they go from being private and inaudible (and therefore inreferable) to being public and audible, and so you declare in a loud voice, which borders upon a shout, Down with junk! Down with junk!
The men stop their work on the bonfire, their Babylonian blaze, their tottering, tower-high edifice destined for destruction, which will be burned up in a matter of hours, and stare in your direction; you sneer (maybe they see it, maybe they don’t) and take a drink, and say in a low, uninflected voice, You high and mighty fucks sticking your noses where they don’t belong I’ll slice off your dicks and bury them together with your yachts and summerhouses so you can rot in hell. They don’t hear you. They just turn around and pick up where they left off. A white cloud draws back and reveals the sun. You undo your laces and kick off your tennis shoes. Since your fly is the button kind, not the zipper kind, you fumble at it for a moment, but at last you manage to get your jeans and your T-shirt and your socks and your underwear off. It’s like buying a used car, you’ve got to take it for a decent test drive, you think, and that’s what you said to her, It’s like buying a used car, you’ve got to take it for a decent test drive, and she’d gotten offended or hurt or (as you like to say) pissy; by this time you’ve tried it and she’s tried it again and again, in a variety of different sets, closets, backrooms, though always in new ones, belonging to plumbers and captains, steel guitarists and army colonels, foremen and lawyers, Punches and Judys, again and again, high-class places and low-class ones, poor ones and rich ones, you tried it out and tried it out, sometimes just briefly, sometimes for a little longer, but never for all that long. It bothers you that you can’t see your own back. At least the spots are fading, though, disappearing into a fresh layer of skin, going into hibernation, lying in wait until the next outbreak. Every so often they make an appearance, and when they do, sun and swimming help; even if your skin is somehow inferior, a worthless organ, right off the junk pile, that isn’t really the problem, you think, since they strike even the fair-skinned. It looks like the sun is having a positive effect and the booze is having a negative effect, so you’re 0 for 0, none the worse for wear, they cancel each other out. You laugh.
They sail past the bend, followed by a squadron of smaller boats full of people who wave at them as they pass, and the men on the beach shade their eyes and point, probably discussing the ship, the sails, its age, and so on: an antique ship, maybe what they call a brig, with tan sails. “Age, and so on,” he’s at least fifteen years older than you, you think, which puts him at about fifty or so, a geriatric captain setting sail through sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety mediocre years, your grandmother’s about to turn ninety-three, you remember, at this point she’s half blind and deaf, her head quivers, her hands shake, she has bursts of anger, then bouts of apathy, bursts of anger, then bouts of apathy, and so on, but at least she’s always willing to lend you money, it’s not like she needs it, she doesn’t know the difference between a hundred kroner bill and a sheet of toilet paper, you think, a one-hundred-and-five-year-old geriatric captain, a skeletal helmsman on a decrepit vessel sailing through the depths of the earth with lanterns extinguished, destination unknown.
You feel strangely sober, and you suppose you should do something about that, because the liquor is top shelf and free to boot. The smell of grilling meat wafts up from the beach; the men who set up the bonfire, as well as a few women, who must be wives or girlfriends or roommates or something, seem to be preparing food. You watch them through a blue-tinted, alcohol-induced haze, which has a slight distancing effect, and they don’t look like actors in a film, but rather like bystanders in a television news report (where a CEO or a politician or a bishop or a hockey coach has a padded microphone shoved in front of his face, while random, superfluous people go about their business in the background, shoveling snow, window shopping, eating ice cream, feeding the ducks, cycling, carrying packages, slamming car doors, pushing carts, leaning on canes, kicking soccer balls, holding briefcases, and so on; it’s only children and insolent teenagers who intrude into what you might call the camera’s private space by staring into the lens, making faces, and carrying on, which diverts attention away from whatever the CEO or politician or bishop or hockey coach is saying, but still, the majority of the people in the picture are only present as so-called chance passersby (as every person’s life, when viewed from his own perspective, is filled with chance passersby), and neither the questions asked nor the answers given are of any more concern to them than a newspaper article is to the fly that just happened to land on it). You’ve got about a fourth of a bottle left. There’s plenty more where that came from.