Content warning: suicide.
In order to become trash, you must first believe that you are completely and utterly worthless. These days, it’s not hard to do. You start a YouTube channel which will only ever have three subscribers. You send your manuscript to fifteen editors and hear back from none. You read about the Olympic medalists two years younger than you, the elementary schoolers playing Paganini with the New York Philharmonic. Only a lucky few of us ever really matter, you learn. Learning that is the first step to becoming trash.
Before trash reaches the trash can, it’s still more than trash: it’s a task, it’s something to take care of, it’s a nuisance which will rot on your counter if you don’t deal with it soon. So the second step to becoming trash is finding yourself a trash can. Luckily for Willard, he liked trash cans. Sitting by a trash can, he would watch the world go by and know it wasn’t watching him—people tended to avert their gazes from the discarded and the unpleasant. It was unclear to him whether it was out of guilt or a fear that they, too, might become trash.
As with anything one spends all their free time doing, he soon became quite good at throwing himself away. If he made himself as small as possible and pressed himself into the great blue marble below and looked up at the marbled blue ceiling above for even five minutes, he could make himself disappear. This humiliating invisibility spell let him walk the town unseen ’til the sun rose the next morning, at which point he’d curl up and do it all again. This, step three, is the fun part of becoming trash: this time in limbo where, discarded by the world, you do not exist to them.
This is not to say you will be invisible. You’ll still be caught on cameras and by uninterested eyes. But they’ll heed you as they would a drifting takeout bag (“Thank you / Thank you / Thank you” tumbling across the parking lot in grateful perpetuity until the words mean nothing to a watcher). They’ll watch you, as they watch much of the rest of the world, with forgetful indifference. That’s the thing about those who know their actions mean something: they spend so much more time doing and so much less perceiving.
He, in his imperceptibility, saw everything. He learned over time that the boy sat next to him in class would glance furtively around the classroom during reading time, then raise a trembling finger to his arm and pick at scabbed-over bug bites. Press a finger to the wound, smearing loopy signatures around the perimeter of his desk. Put the finger in his mouth absentmindedly, licking away the iron-flavored evidence.
He would watch the girl two desks over collect her neighbor’s eraser shavings, kneading them into a small, grimy ball with which she would make hazy portraits of her unknowing benefactor.
He would twist his fingers through his own long, uncut, and unkempt hair as he watched his teacher braid and unbraid and rebraid her hair.
This was before he realized he didn’t have to go to school at all. His teacher, he learned, had stopped bothering to look for him when she took attendance. If she thought back hard enough, she’d always get the vague sense that she had seen him (or someone like him, at least) walk through the door. She let that suffice. His parents forgot to expect him for dinner, or even breakfast the next day, so he would spend some nights under the stars.
The other discarded people joined him sometimes: the man from the subway tunnels who was teaching his dog to balance treats on its nose, the woman who sat under the bridge and crooned ’60s songs about remembrance and redemption. They had yet to throw themselves away, and so they drew the attention of police and passersby, whose gazes would linger on the tents in the park a moment too long, then harden and turn determinedly up toward a streetlight or the sidewalk ahead.
The dumpster divers, too, would avert their eyes as he lay balled up on the pavement during his daily invisibility ritual, favoring the bin behind him. To his perplexity, they had a penchant for finding things they still deemed worthy in the fly-swarmed bins: a rusted sign which read “Children at Play,” a bottle of some fluorescent soda with a water-logged label and condensation obscuring the top half, a golf-ball-sized Rubik’s cube which caught on itself and threatened to disintegrate with every turn. It was in this way that he learned some trash could earn back its value, if only for a fleeting moment.
Though he had plenty at home, he relished in taking from stores—a five pound bag of apples from Whole Foods, a pair of women’s flats from Kohl’s, someone’s order waiting on the counter at the deli. He would take his spoils to the subway, to the spot under the bridge, to the park (“Thank you / Thank you / Thank you” tumbling from lips in grateful perpetuity until the words meant nothing). Sometimes, the people on his delivery route would try to pay in kind with conversation.
“Where are your parents?” they would ask. “What are you doing out here?”
“Dunno,” he would shrug. The answer didn’t matter to them anyways.
In worthlessness, the rest of the world mattered to him all the more. Knees scraped and arms sore, he would vault his way from the dumpsters flanking his school (or, in later years, more ambitious and greater-storied buildings like the town hall) up onto its roof. With his eyes to the cosmos, he would trace constellations obscured by the park’s trees until the pebbles of the concrete beneath him all but fused with his back. Rolling over to face the twinkling lights below, he’d watch the matchbox cars rev their engines in futile attempts to make themselves known. Then, longing for his bed for once, he would make a rare stop at home to sleep the night and maybe change his clothes.
But he, like all trash, had to end up somewhere. You can’t float across the parking lot forever, and trash doesn’t just accumulate in the trash bin either. It goes to dumpsters, then landfills, then gets buried or cremated. This is step four of becoming trash: whatever comes after. And that, thought Willard, King of the Trash Bins,
as he balled himself up and threw himself away for good,
is up to the garbage collector.
Be First to Comment