Behind us, on the left, are cartons of clutter forgotten by visitors or patients. Separate containers are dedicated to mobile devices, spectacles, dentures, jewellery, logoed false nails, sweaters and keys. These are the things that the living leave behind as carelessly as hair on a pillow.
The boxes on the right, each labelled with a photo of the deceased and name, if known, are different. Really, these articles are not lost, it’s their owners who are lost, who were left behind. They died without a brand tribe, and relatives can’t be found. There’s seldom anyone who comes to claim these last bodily possessions, which are boxed anyway, just in case. Generally, they hold the same clutter as the other cartons – the same personalia that form the repeating pattern on the wallpaper of human life. Only now the human face, the oil painting that hung for so long in front of the identical drops, has been removed, and the motifs behind it of watch, wallet, hairpiece and jacket appear unnaturally vivid as they profile a negative space alive with absence.
You are compelled by the collection on the left with its artefacts that narrate a soap opera of brands getting in bed with one another, designs undergoing facelifts and flirtations with bright new things. As You like to remind me, ‘Our lives are really product stories.’ I want to tell You that You’re wrong just because it’s You. But I can’t deny that it’s the objects we carry with us that define whether we are rich, desirable and beautiful. And who would I be without the stack of books that I carry like an invisible totem pole in my head? Or the way that I taste objects?
I’ve heard rumours about personal history videos screened at CEOs’ and copywriters’ funerals. A series of shots depict a still life in which the deceased’s various mobile phones, smart devices and status purchases are successively faded in. These artfully directed videos of branded goods in their various iterations – the deceased’s significant others – can move mourners to uncontrollable weeping.
There were no such elaborate solemnities for Dad, not even a memorial service. Mother didn’t want his ‘final bra-burning moments’ advertised. One bleed is a glorious revolution; two is anarchy. I think of Dad a lot here in my cubicle because not much happens. And while it’s not the book repository, it is an archive of sorts. The cardboard of the boxed compendiums is plastic coated, and seeing it on the shelves always makes me think, they just had to do that to the pages and we could’ve still had books. Unless the point was not to have books. Or at least none of the ones from before.
For me, it’s the repository on the right that tugs at my sleeve. I imagine that the best cartons can teach me to listen for the nail-clipper noise of beetle jaws, the gnawing destruction at work beneath the triumphant clamour of the marching brands. Insects can fry sophisticated circuitry, paralyse organisational structures and topple our empires of worldly goods. I’m sure the only way to beat LipService is by scurrying along the skirting of corporatised society. The box owners were mostly as outdated as the clothes they wore and the paraphernalia they carried. And the old go unnoticed, as You derisively put it: ‘It’s planned obsolescence. Leaky creakies are cop-out consumers. We only want the young, the new, the now, the next.’ But it’s possible that some of them might even have remembered when the LipService code conventions were still being ironed out. If anyone can point me to the bugs in LipService, it must be them. That and the quiet is why I’ve stayed with this job.
Their things are all around me. I just need to learn to read the correspondences between the objects in a box when I lay them out like a spread of tarot cards on a table. But this personal baggage is cryptic. Take the labels inside the clothes. I sometimes wonder whether they are even brands. In a box with no name for the deceased, there’s a jacket with a label at the neck that reads ‘Thackwell’s, 24 Church Street’. That sounds more like the return address, should Mr Thackwell’s jacket go astray. I like to tell myself that this was a custom in an era when a jacket merely ‘became’ you, unlike now when you become the jacket – slipping on its brand personality with the sleeves. And there’s the heavy tweed cloth, worn at the elbows, that isn’t used much any more. I let the pink tongue of my finger rasp at the coarse wool streams of warp and weft, drinking in peat smoke and malted alcohol. There’s a sense of the man in the flavour of his garments. In the pocket is an old matchbox with a small dead iridescent beetle inside.
The first time I lifted the lid of such a carton, hearing the sound of cardboard clearing its throat before opening wide, was when I took out Dad’s shirt and spread it on my bed. There it lay, sunk into itself, withdrawn behind an agitation of creases. I wanted it to be at peace so I folded the arms, right over left across the chest like a dead Egyptian pharaoh, but the cloth only bunched more. Smoothing the worn corduroy pants in long licks of stewed guava, I skidded over pips in the pockets and withdrew a pair of earplugs. On the duvet, the earplugs spooned with a pair of white cotton manuscript gloves that I’d found in the other pocket. I moved his scratched horn-rimmed reading glasses and a small surgical face mask next to them. This collocation of objects portrayed my father as I’d never seen him before – a man who muffled his senses, who closed out the sensual excitement of the material world. Maybe I had misunderstood ‘touch dwells in lonely caves’. Maybe he didn’t have tastures, or spurned their advances. But having tried to repress them myself, I couldn’t believe it was even possible. My father lived between the lines and between the linings of his pockets.
The boxes don’t like having their sleep disturbed. When I bump up against the stacks, reaching for one high up, bells jangle in alarm. Each box contains a string of chimes that was hung off the limbs of the corpse for twelve hours in case the person revived. Brand champions and corporate chieftains get ‘jingle bells’ – electronic chimes with motion sensors that play the brand jingle to soothe the fright of awaking in a mortuary and alert staff to the reawakened.
Really, it’s the living who are afraid. Few families get to bury a body. Corpses are almost always awarded to medical science for further research or instruction – ‘as the best method to leverage human resources in repayment of debts to society’ (so goes the catechism) – especially after a second haemorrhage like Dad had. The bereaved murmur that if it’s doctors who are so eager to claim our raw materials, should we trust them to decide whether or not someone has truly died? Those declared dead simply vanish as completely as a fire breather’s exhalation, leaving nothing, not even ashes. The only remains are a tinkling string and box of folded clothes and oddments.
The tradition is to remove the chimes’ tongues – to hush them. With Dad’s bells it should’ve been Mother who com-muted the clappers, but she’d had her nails freshly manicured and logoed so she turned them over to me. I twisted and snapped, my mettle fatigued. Eventually it occurred to me that my mechanical movements were no different from the repetitive stresses of self-censorship. I left the last bell intact, the last tongue tinging.
More boxes arrive for storage. I always have to look inside, even if I face your jeers at my pursuit of cast-offs and hand-me-downs. Sometimes the collection inside is so unremittingly ordinary, I doubt if it even belonged to an individual and not a buyer persona. This brings on the playground chant of ‘poor, obscure, no allure’ from You. But the contents of one of the new arrivals is a curious miscegenation. Although barely worn – I catch that never-been-washed, new-fabric smell – the clothes are clearly by brands with virtually no share of mind. And yet, unfranchised consumers would never hack out labels as had been done here, leaving a hole in the fabric at the neck of the hoodie. All other identification is also missing. There’s no wallet, no bank or credit cards, only a cheap billfold with a couple of grubby notes. The box label says: ‘Male, age approx 37, cause of death: impact by tram.’