Trash Collector
Colin Morley is a trash collector. Plastic trash, specifically. It comes to him, calls to him, and he plucks it up and out—out of the waste stream, as he says—and into the big empty cellar of that big, boxy, empty house of his on the edge of town, on the edge of a handful of green, overgrown, formerly suburban acres.
It’s an odd little no-man’s land, wedged between the crosstown expressway and the new light rail station, owned by a Korean Methodist church that never sold out to developers, engulfed by the metropolitan sprawl. Thousands—tens of thousands, surely—must pass by every day.
And Colin too. He works downtown, an office flunky in a tall building. Rides his bike most days, takes the Metro when it rains, and on particularly nice afternoons (such as this one, an unseasonably warm autumn Wednesday) he enjoys his lunch hour in the park.
He rides the elevator down—a wave to the guy at the front desk—and is through the revolving door. On his way, trotting across the street as the signal starts flashing red, Colin notices one of those poetically drifting plastic shopping bags. Wafting in an aimless spiral just out of reach, along the double yellow line between opposing lanes. An Andee Snaxx bag, for carrying boxes of little chocolate delicacies, from the Andee Snaxx Confectioners not half a block away.
“Coulda made it home at least!” he mutters, and ponders the two-second diversion required to nab the offending drift of processed petroleum byproduct. The traffic signal blinks to red—he dashes to safety. Turning back he sees the bag spin and wheel as the cars, trucks and motorcycles rush past.
He is lanced by a moment of guilt. He always gets that twinge whenever he sees a bit of trash—plastic trash—just discarded and listless in the gutter, the grass, tangled in the bushes. As if it were being pointed out to him by his dear Momma Earth. “Pick it up, lad!” he imagines her saying, shaking her head as he walks past.
How much can I do? he appeals, silently. Here he is, about to eat his lunch, the thing is smeared, soiled, filled up and emptied out of God knows what—besides, the city does employ trash collectors.
So here’s Colin, chewing a bland, rubbery sandwich and those bland, rubbery thoughts, when he feels an odd sensation, a tugging of some sort, looks down, and sees that an Andee Snaxx plastic bag has drifted up and wrapped itself around his foot.
He frowns. Another? Or the same one? He looks expectantly for some hitherto unnoticed scene of mayhem involving an enthusiastic but slow-moving Andee Snaxx patron and a speeding taxi—or perhaps a pickup truck has crashed into the storefront, sending inventory in all directions.
But no. It is just a piece of litter. And it is on his foot.
He reaches down, grasps at a corner, and handily tucks it into the open maw of one of those municipal waste bins. A few moments later his sandwich wrapper follows.
Ugly things, those bins. Big, squat, concrete, with bolted-on lids that gape stupidly. More like an odd sort of isolation chamber.
If only they were! Really keep that evil shit out of circulation.
Throughout the day the little clues keep piling up. A sliver of plastic wrap from a bottle of Pepto Bismol clings to the sleeve of his blazer—static electricity. He plucks at it, holds it over the waste basket, but the transparent little curl persists, slips around his knuckles, coyly refusing to flutter down. It takes a few more moments before he flicks the bit of kipple into the trash bin, where it dawdles and tumbles amid the coffee cups and lids, the Post-It Notes and bent thumbtacks and broken rubber bands.
After work, waiting for the #12 bus, Colin feels a slight tap-tapping against his shoe—very slight. It is a Styrofoam cup, pushed by the October wind (suddenly chill, nipping at the heels of a fleeting Indian summer) up against his tastefully black sneaker-shoe. It thuds minutely, the breeze falters and gusts, the cup nudges and falls back again. Plaintive, almost.
He stares a moment, then leans down, picks it up, carries it home on the bus, held delicately between two fingers. Along the way he also picks up—he attracts:
About seven feet of monofilament fishing line
A soda can six-pack holder
A badly scratched and abandoned CD (“Streisand: Live in Las Vegas”)
A New York Times bag, elongated and blue.
He uses the newspaper bag to carry all the other plastic trash which had become entangled with, stuck on or snagged by his shoe, shoelaces or pants cuff.
He puts it all in the cellar.
At first his wife, Anne-Marie Sieligman-Morley, doesn’t notice. Or chooses not to. And one day he mentions, casually, as they head out the door for a double date, “I’ve been picking up plastic trash around town.”
He doesn’t quite say he has been attracting plastic trash like a magnet attracts iron filings. But the implication, he hopes, is there. She gazes at him as he folds a used take-out bag and tucks it into his jacket pocket.
“It’s to carry the trash home,” he explains. “It just sort of finds me. I want to take it out of the waste stream. They just dump this stuff in the ocean. There’s a swath of floating plastic in the Pacific twice the size of Texas, I read the other day.”
“I read that too.” She pauses. “Good for you.”
“I’ve been putting it in the basement.”
“I saw, yeah. We can take it all to get recycled.”
“Yeah,” he says vaguely. “They do recycle Styrofoam?”
“Somewhere, I’m sure.” She swings into her jacket. “Ready, steady?”
Along the way he accumulates three coffee cup lids and a plastic straw, one broken child-proof aspirin bottle cap that had somehow leapt up into his pants cuff, and a dispirited, low-floating helium balloon, the ribbon of which brushes his shoulder as they walk along the edge of the park.
The bag is almost full by the time they’re walking home.
“You see?”
She frowns. “It just doesn’t make any—”
“I know.”
“—sense.” She breathes. “And it’s all going . . .?”
“In the basement.”
She nods, lips pursed.
They head up the stairs. On the way he trips on the next day’s newspaper—a heavy Sunday edition, double-bagged in plastic.
*
And there are high- and low-volume days. His friends actually change some of their habits to reduce the accumulation of plastic that would tuck itself into his sleeve, or snag his hair (when he wore it long, anyway).
They cut out the plastic water bottles—mostly—and use matchbooks instead of disposable lighters. Carry reusable coffee mugs (a combination of plastic and some weird alloy) with lids that mostly didn’t leak while driving to work or riding the commuter train. No more of those little bagged fruit juices, Capri Sun and shit. And no more buying chips at snack time. That’s a tough one. But they do it, mostly. And overall, it helps stem the tide, a bit.
But still, he is constantly assaulted by bottled-water bottles. They roll up when the bus makes an abrupt stop. They are waiting for him, abandoned, in the cup holders in movie theater seats, and on those little counters at the bank where he fills out his deposit slips. At work, due to an inventory snafu, each desk in his department gets a six-pack of carbonated spring water in PET bottles.
He winds up with “Hint of Lime”—his favorite.
Eventually he gives in, and even plays along, asking for plastic bags all the time at the corner store, carrying back heavy one-gallon plastic milk jugs, and loaves of sliced bread in two-ply swaths of shrink-wrap and brand-name baggage.
The idea is to take it all out of circulation preemptively, before it can become litter.
All of it goes into the basement. That huge, roomy, multichambered basement. They used to play all sorts of games down there. Flinging superballs by the handful. Hide ’n’ seek. They’d made love in each room, and on top of the washer and dryer.
Now it is full of crap. One room practically overflows with grocery bags, white stupid grocery bags that cause whole villages in the Third World to be washed away, when there are cyclones, and floods caused by deforestation, and one fucking impenetrable goddamn white plastic grocery bag blocks a street drain—
“Why can’t we just take them to the recycling center?”
She is practically in tears.
“They’ll just ship it all to China,” he snaps, dismissive.
“Then they’ll fucking be recycled in goddamn China!”
He looks down. “Okay.”
The next day they go downstairs and stuff the bags into the bags. They load as many of the beachball-sized wads of plastic as they can into the wagon. It is far less than they expected. But it is progress. They take it all to the supermarket recycling center, only they have too much. Way more bags than the place can handle.
They have to visit two other Safeways and an Albertson’s before they unload the lot.
“We put a dent in it, I reckon,” he says, gazing at the drab strip-mall scenery spooling past. Multiplex cinemas, Burger Palaces, and Chix Fixes everywhere. He ponders the combined output of plastic waste each generates every day, and shudders.
She honks the horn, mutters under her breath, and brakes to a halt as the light turns red.
She looks at him. “There’s a ton more,” she says.
He sighs. “Yeah.”
They arrive home. It is twilight and chilly. Almost two years to the day when he first started, you know, collecting trash.
The house is dark, and they stride in, bristling, uncertain.
“One more run?”
He shrugs. “They’re open till nine. I gotta pee.”
Halfway into it he hears Anne-Marie gasp, then: “Oh my God!”
“Annie!”
“Jesus Christ, Colin!”
“Hang on!” Shaking dry, teeth gritted. He rushes down the hallway. Anne-Marie is at the top of the basement stairs, staring down.
He looks. There, on the topmost step, is a dead bird. A seabird of some sort. He can tell it is a seabird because it has webbed feet. And the briny smell.
It is strangely, ignominiously tangled in plastic six-pack rings. Legs and wings and neck constricted intricately. It seems to have struggled mightily, and was killed recently.
“Is this a fucking joke?” he demands.
“You tell me! If this is Joe or Sam—”
“It is not. No way. Not Joe, anyway, but—”
“I’m calling the police.”
But there is no perp to be found, no levered windows or jimmied locks. And the officers are impressed—surprised—by the great assemblage of plastic waste.
“You sure it’s not a health code kind of thing?” one asks the other.
Her colleague shrugs. They collect the evidence, leaving disposable plastic gloves and their packaging in the bathroom waste basket—leering, repellent.
*
Their sleep is fitful. They make love, but somehow they are both stressed, even as they lie sighing in their consummation. Some small nagging whisper of consternation . . .
He dreams of serpents and fire, and eruptions of toxic gas.
The continents are heaving, sliding, half-molten slabs of rock and ore. All about and among them, monstrous, coiling, smoldering, is a Dragon, lord and king of the primordial Earth.
And there is a battle, vast and abstract: A war of eons, played out across a billion years. Colin dreams of sheens and washes, of floods and algae, of great blue tides and cool green slopes and the—the Mother—She strikes down the Dragon, smites it and brings it to ruin, and deep below the Earth She buries its ghastly, stinking leavings, tarry-black and noxious, viscous, inimical to the very breath of life.
She buries it all far beneath Her mantle of soil and rock. But it is seething and full of spite, and ever it strives to escape again to the surface, and smother all that’s blue and green.
He moans and weeps then, in his bed.
“The cat!”
Something grabs his thigh: Annie. He lurches awake, up out of the well of dreams.
“What!”
“Where’s the cat?” She stares at him. “Fungus always sleeps with us, right here.”
And it’s true. No Fungus. He can feel the cat’s absence, the afterimage of its purring warmth.
They creep out into the hall in their robes and slippers. The house is silent, except . . .
They pad downstairs. The basement door is ajar.
“Did you hear that?” Her eyes are wide.
He nods.
They fling the door open and switch on the lights. There had been a brief sort of miaow, then only a faint rustling.
Baseball bat in his hand, kitchen knife in hers, they stomp heavily down the stairs. The sound is coming from the bag room, somewhere beyond the hollowed-out arc they had dug into it earlier.
Annie wades in, and pushes against the mass.
“Fungus? Ki-ttee! C’mere, Fungi. Li’l Fungee. For crissake.”
She kneels down and begins tunneling industriously in, up to her shoulders, and then emits the beginning of a shriek or gasp.
Startled, Colin shifts his weight to his other heel, slips on a plastic water bottle that somehow has lodged itself underfoot, and topples backwards, slamming his head into a water main. It is dark for a few moments. He sees stars, and grids. He is dazed with pain, writhes about till at last his vision clears.
There’s Annie—or her feet, anyway, and her legs, which are kicking about in an agitated fashion. He struggles to sit up, but realizes that his wrists have somehow gotten entangled with a great span of monofilament. It is surprisingly tight and grows more so as he wriggles. It is looped peculiarly, also, around his knees, and as he wrestles, his face becomes wrapped up in a white plastic grocery bag. One handle catches his ear, and as he shakes his head to dislodge it, the other handle snags a button on his nightshirt. He tries to shrug it off; the bag settles gradually, inexorably, over his nose and mouth.
There are new sounds around him. He catches a glimpse of a webbed foot sticking out of the landscape of plastic, then sees another feathery, torpedo-shaped body, twitching minutely, enlaced in plastic six-pack rings. There is a roaring sound in his ears, and he realizes the monofilament is full of hooks, big and barbed, which begin to bite into him as he rolls and winds himself up, ever more snug.
Long, sleek bodies are thrashing next to him, powerful, damp. Fins of some sort press against his abdomen; he hears a high-pitched sound, a churring and chittering, like from a nature documentary, but desperate. Plaintive.
A single coherent thought (his last) bobs up through the tide of panic—Dolphins?